More on Middle Eastern TurmoilBy Thomas E. BrewtonLiberal-Progressive-socialism caused today's mess, not matter how far  back into history we go.Commenting on Mr. Slater Bakhtavar's essay:  www.thomasbrewton.com/index.php/weblog/ iraq_the_historical_background/ ), Mr. James Veverka states,  "Nonsense. Carter was a fool regarding several things but the primary  cause of the deep problems of the middle east is the effects of  colonialism and the partitions after WW1."Mr. Veverka neglects to state that this is merely another way of  laying the problems of the Middle East at the doorstep of liberalism.Before World War I, most of the Middle East was controlled by the  Islamic Ottoman Empire, not by Western colonial powers.He also neglects to state that the partition of the old Ottoman  Empire after World War I was largely at the impetus of President  Woodrow Wilson, an iconic liberal-Progressive, along with Georges  Clemenceau, the leader of socialist France.This partitioning was a typical liberal-Progressive-socialist  project, a conception of the liberal mind that believes abstract  reason, in an ivory-tower vacuum, is always superior to the wisdom of  past ages.  Liberal policy wonks, from Wilson to Jimmy Carter and  Bill Clinton, have always been cockily confident that they have  special knowledge and abilities that can transform human societies  into perfection.  Liberals specialize in seeing all that is wrong  with political societies and prescribing radical surgery that leaves  the patient uncured, but permanently crippled.In the case of the Middle East, we had an early example of the  political destructiveness that today is taught as multiculturalism.   The false and corrosive idea is that social, ethnic, and economic  groups, not individuals, are the proper units of government.Rejected is the original foundation of our Constitution upon  individual citizens, the conception that every individual is created  equal before the law and that the task of our educational and  political institutions is to integrate all immigrant cultures into  ours, persuading them that our original constitutionalism affords  history's greatest personal freedom and individual prosperity.For more than 5,000 years the Middle Eastern peoples had been ruled  by one empire after another, always by autocratic, if not despotic,  Pharaohs, kings, and sultans.  Never in history had those peoples  experienced self-government.Undeterred by this, and heeding arch-liberal John Dewey's dictum that  history is not a proper subject for progressive school curricula,  liberal-Progressive-socialists split the Middle East into a  hodgepodge of protectorates administered by France, England, et al.,  creating artificial "nations" that existed only on maps.  The cause  du jour was "self-determination," which in the Middle East was an  overture to anarchic tribal warfare.In the same way, today's liberal-Progressive-socialists, both on the  Republican and the Democratic sides, believe that splitting our  nation into warring cultural camps, using the tools of  multiculturalism and affirmative action, is more desirable than  educating our youth to revere the Constitution and the individual  liberties of life, private property, and political action.Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc.  The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of  writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.