| Abstrakt: |
For the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), including for its largest and most consequential area, namely THE ARABS, one of the main legacies of the just concluded "fateful Century" 1918-2018, implicitly the relay to be passed to the coming new time of uncertainties, is that of a particular "Centennial Portraying" of the region, one that incorporates so many "colors" and other constitutive signs proper to the military, in various guises. In other words, the military tapestry has become a landmark for the whole MENA region. In its binary expression -- conceptually and pragmatically -- this phrase has become a syntagma whose meaning goes far beyond the function of a mere metaphor. It is indicative that this very domain has not ceased to be a major, if not the main, actor in today's MENA & Arabs drama. And that with a panoply of consequential actions on the ground, from instilling an ever-stronger overdosing of authoritarianism in a society already marked by a contained space for the rule of law and freedom of expression, to what one can witness as openly violent and destructive conflicts, themselves in different manifestations, from intrastate civil wars, to ethnic cleansings or to inter-state wars, direct or proxy or hybrid. The paradigm is further complicated by outside forces jockeying for geopolitical influence and resources control in the MENA region, especially in the Arab realm: the external unrestrained involvement in the area's problems, directly or by proxy too, essentially military in nature and intrinsically interwoven with the national and local army dimensions, mostly with no less an unfortunate impact on the host territories and populations. Dealing now just with the "Arab sector" Cluster/ Constellation of MENA's contemporary Military Tapestry, from a general perspective (PART I) and from a national/ country perspective (PART II), the present paper has a dual purpose, first, to provide a structural taxonomy of the basic conceptual and pragmatic ways guiding in-roads into such a subject-matter of extreme ramification, so that to reach a perception as holistic as possible, from a 'civilian deck' and inherently personal, not ignoring the military dimensions of the involvement in MENA's affairs by those outside powers having strong interests in the region -- United States, Russia, Turkey, China, as well as the new military dimension of the region and the competing one with the 'official' Military, namely the non-state armed actors, second, to deal more circumstantially with the Arabs' armies, as peculiar contributors to the military tapestry of today's MENA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
