Dear Middle Earth

Ah, the Middle East.  It's been positively ages since I wrote a word about you.  This is most likely because you haven't blown up any of our people, embassies, nightclubs or world trade centres for some time now.  I know that it certainly isn't from a lack of trying - you'll never change - but rather it is because the west have institutions that are smarter than you.  Actually, I think we have cheeseburgers that are smarter than you.

Your lack of success at annihilating the west probably also has more to do with the practical reason that you have recently lost one of the few terrorists who had a clue how to mastermind and terrorise to effect.  It is probably also because the United States have you on a permanent good behaviour bond, and a very tight leash, which gets a huge, red tick of approval from me.

But it seems we do have something in common, Middle Earth, because I would also very much approve of annihilating you and starting from scratch - seeing as all your people who are not trying to kill our troops are immigrating to the west anyway - but apparently that is a terribly racist and warmongering attitude. Personally I think getting rid of non-democratic countries and regions is just efficient global management.  But what do I know; I'm just a voter. 

Well we wouldn't need to have this conversation, Middle Earth, if your nation states stopped behaving like themselves and started democratising a little bit.  Your insurgents are slippery little suckers, aren't they?  But, lucky for you, you have the best cheer squad in the world - the west's own apologist leftist human rights campaigners, and much of our media - so anything we do to you is deemed racist, but anything you do to us is our own fault.

Yes, that would be an own goal; it is certainly a mystery to me why those who benefit from all the freedoms of democracy need to denigrate it.  Who the hell knows why leftists think like they do. 

And then we have our Green Movement, who also hate the west a lot, even though they too fully benefit from all the freedoms a libertarian nation has to offer, like being able to sit under the eucalypts with a tofu burger without the pesky worry of someone in their vicinity blowing everyone to smithereens with a C4 belt. 

It's another great mystery why the Greens and all the other leftists harangued George W, because he bothered to try and democratise Middle Earth's most insane nation states, yet they kick and scream and whinge and whine when freedom-loving countries like Australia don't accept refugees willy-nilly.  From a point of logic and reason, isn't it better to overthrow the bad guys in the bad countries and let their citizens just be, in their own country?  Ah, sorry, I hate it when my brain gets all practical.

I have been watching the goings-on in Syria over the past few months with (relatively little) interest; goings-on being the more pleasant way of referring to what I really think about Syria and other cookie-cutter, dodgy, decrepid little countries.  While Syria may not be Middle Earth, it's just like Middle Earth, in that it would totally suck to live there.  I don't really care about Syria, or Middle Earth, but I care when civil warfare spills out of these primitive little cocoons, which it almost always invariably does with these friggin' countries, and then it affects me, and then I care.

I will eat my pom-pommed beanie if Syria ever becomes anything vaguely resembling a free nation state in the next few hundred years, but if they do, they'll probably need a Prime Minister to start their long and winding road to democracy, so they should feel free to permanently borrow Australia's own Red Queen.