Fawaz Turki, disinherited@yahoo.com

The surrealism of the Chaos Theory is embodied in the idea of the so-called “butterfly effect,” where our human condition is said to be so much interconnected by a wide web of relations that a butterfly fluttering its wings in one part of the world could potentially cause a thunderstorm in another.

The elegance of the argument about how the overlapping of events in a faraway corner on our planet could change the course of global history was postulated less esoterically by Stephen Kinzer, veteran New York Times correspondent, in his book “All The Shah’s Men,” about the US-engineered coup in Iran in 1953, known as Operation Ajax, that overthrew the duly elected government of Mohammed Mosaddeq and returned to power the tyrannical regime of the Shah, thus earning Americans the abiding enmity of the Iranian people. “It is not farfetched to draw a line from Operation Ajax,” Kinzer wrote, “through the Shah’s repressive regime and the Islamic revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York.”

The current administration’s officials, not noted for nuances, had their attention drawn to a portentous one last week by UN envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, who told reporters that there was a link between Israeli actions in the occupied territories and the recent upsurge of insurgency violence. He claimed that the alienation of ordinary Iraqis from the US is exacerbated by the Israeli entity’s policies in Palestine. He said his job was made more difficult by that entity’s “violent and repressive security policy” and its “determination to occupy more and more Palestinian territory.”

His conclusion, in effect, is that the perception of the “injustice” of Israeli practices, compounded by the “thoughtless support” of Washington for these practices, is driving not only Iraqis, but ordinary citizens all over the Middle East, including those who once cautiously supported the US-led effort to rebuild Iraq, to pull back in large numbers and hedge their bets. “There are lots of other people on this planet,” Brahimi said simply. “They [American officials] should learn to live with them.”

Needless to say, this didn’t go down well with Washington, or for that matter at UN headquarters in New York, where the secretary-general’s spokesman, Fred Eckhard, said it was “unacceptable” for a senior official of the international body to “make such comments.”

Unacceptable or not in diplomatic life, in real life Brahimi’s unusual candor was right on the money. Leaders of the Israeli entity cannot, among other outrages they commit daily, go on unleashing missiles from helicopter gunships to kill prominent Palestinians who had not been sentenced to death by any court or caught on a battlefield. The practice is a form of state gangsterism, the kind that the United Nations Commission on Human Rights recently voted 31-2 to condemn, with only the United States and Australia opposing it.

There has been a coarsening of sensibilities in our region — the sensibilities of victimizer and victim alike. We know that an Israeli soldier can get home in the evening, hug his child, read his holy book and listen to Schubert, and go to his day’s work in Gaza in the morning to throw up checkpoints, kill stone-throwing children, uproot centuries-old olive trees and blow up homes. And Palestinians have become so dehumanized by their condition that it has become facile for them to exchange life for death.

I’m suggesting here that when a major event occurs in one part of the world, its energies and instigations are diffused to the entire Arab world, and then carry over to the rest of the world, animating new modes of perception and articulation of mood.

Consider this: Ariel Sharon decides to grab half the territory in the West Bank and hem in Gazans even further in “the world’s biggest prison.” President Bush endorses the plan. Three days later, a Jordanian UN policeman, one Sgt. Maj. Ahmad Ibrahim Ali, kills three American corrections officers in a gun battle in a Kosovo prison. Parents, wives, children, brothers, sisters and friends of these victims in small Midwestern towns suffer grievous pain.

The butterfly effect? Call it what you wish, but there’s a worldwide web of relations stretching, in this case, from the Mideast to the Midwest.