Looking for the Mahdi by N Lee Wood

Author:N Lee Wood [Wood, N Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction. Middle East, Androids, Artificial Intelligence, AI
ISBN: 0441004504
Publisher: Ace
Published: 1997-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

I wouldn’t have put any money down on it. Too many other well-meaning dictators have invented their own forms of “democracy,” some of them even honestly progressive and beneficial, only to screw it all up when it came down to the last inning. Somerton knew the history here as well as I did. The Janus nature of saviors and tyrants, the alternating recognition and disapproval from the rich Western powers who often helped them in and out of power with the frequency of a woman trying on shoes.

Ibn Saud had ridden the Wahabi wind of fanaticism and the promise of purified Islam to power, then crushed all of his rebellious Wahabis into obedience, breaking the thorns they’d become in his side. The austere Saud legacy declined into an orgy of looting and bribery and exploitative tyranny lasting generations.

One bellicose Egyptian after another proclaimed himself the latest incarnation of the divine Mahdi and fought the British, the French, the Turks, each other. All they attained was a wealth of popular uprisings, rebellions, massacres, dead martyrs, burnt farmland and a glut of purple Victorian epic poetry. Nasser secularized his country, then alienated the West and lost the Sinai. He played the Americans and the Russians off each other like divorced parents while squandering vast sums of money on the disastrous Aswan High Dam as his own pharaonic pyramid, drowning an immense wealth of archaeological wonders and ruining acres of arable land with salt and pollutants.

Habib Bourguiba’s moderate campaign for Tunisian self-rule landed him under house arrest, but once he’d been proclaimed his country’s “Supreme Guide,” he didn’t hesitate to waste Tunisian tax money on building himself dozens of state palaces where he too could hold court in grand style like any other indolent desert prince.

The British secretly helped to overthrow the despot Mozaffar al-Din, replacing him with the popular Pahlavis. When they in turn became too tyrannical, the West changed its mind and helped bring yet another leader to power they believed they could control. The Ayatollah swept away the shell of the Pahlavi Shah’s modem reformations in the storm of his Iranian revolution, to the horrified disbelief of the West, and ultimately the exhaustion of his people.

Frightened by a democratically elected party of Islamic fundamentalists, Algeria reacted with a military coup, plunging their country into decades of murder and terrorism, assassinating doctors, intellectuals, journalists, unveiled women, and anyone driving the wrong color car along with any Westerners stupid enough to remain, the bloodshed spilling out from time to time onto European soil.

The royal family in Kuwait repaid the West’s liberation of their country by renewed martial law, nepotism, assassination and repression, locked in a bitter struggle with their own citizens who are themselves still having trouble figuring out how to run a country properly after they’d kicked out or murdered their wage-slave work force of Yemenese and Palestinians. It had only taken one egomaniac to annihilate the Ba’ath party’s considerable achievements along with the whole of Iraq. Only one madman was needed to destroy the Behjars, replaced in turn by a series of repressive Islamic fundamentalists.

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