Too unbelievable for Hollywood?
Imagine if you wrote the current Middle East crisis up as a Hollywood movie treatment and tried to sell it to a studio.
The director would surely show you the door and tell you to produce something less outlandish. Here is the pitch. Take a seat. Listen. It will only take a few minutes:
“There is truly dreadful amateur film that cost a whopping five million dollars to make but looks more like a home video on a 500 dollar budget taking advantage of a free fake beard hand out at Walmart after Halloween.
That movie is made by a guy called Sam Bacile –
“did you say “Imbecile”?” the director, who is already getting impatient, interjects.
Mr. Bacile is either Jewish Californian or Coptic Christian Egyptian.
We don’t really know and nor, it seems, does he. The film he has made is indeed deeply offensive to Muslims but if the offended region could only see it, as opposed to hear about it, they would realize that the flick is above all laughably bad.
But the film goes viral on the internet.
It is watched by more people than the big blockbuster released by Paramount that weekend.
At this point the director gets a bit nervous. He is wondering about his own studio’s financial future. The plot thickens horribly.
There are riots in four Middle Eastern cities. American embassies are stormed.
Four US diplomats are killed, including an ambassador who loves the Arab world, speaks its language, feels its pain and even helped to bring about the end of one of the nastiest regimes in the region.
The dead ambassador was a hero in the country where he was posted. Now he is collateral. It is a tragedy.
Two US destroyers are dispatched to hover menacingly off the coast of Libya.
The president reaches for his well worn copies of Thomas Aquinas and St.Augustine on Just War.
He is a thoughtful lawyer by vocation. But he also commands the world’s mightiest military and he is afraid that America will come across as weak if it doesn’t do something muscular.
He wants to add a few more names to his now infamous kill list of terrorist targets.
He repeatedly vows to bring the killers to justice. Meanwhile the crisis enters the toxic bloodstream of a presidential election campaign.
The man hoping to replace the president blunders by trying to make political hay out of a national tragedy.
The president fires back by saying that his opponent is prone to shoot first and then take aim. Instead of putting his rhetorical tommygun down, the opponent reloads.
The president then goes on to do very presidential things like talk about God, American exceptionalism and power. Some schooled observers think he sounds uncannily like the man he replaced George W Bush.
What started off as a headache for the administration suddenly becomes an opportunity.
The president can easily score on foreign and security policy, his strongest issue and his opponent’s weakest.
The crisis is a distraction from the talking points that could sink him –the plunging economy.
The campaign pollsters are egging him on while praying that the crisis doesn’t get even more out of hand.
Someone in the Oval Office is heard muttering: “This would never have happened if Hosni and Muammar were still in charge.” There is an embarrassed silence.
Someone else reminds the President that America still gives $1.5bn to Egypt every year in aid even though an Egyptian mob is baying at the US embassy gates in Cairo and the country’s newly elected president from a party called the Muslim Brotherhood has issued only a lily-livered condemnation of the violence.
It’s all terribly messy. The director shakes his head. “This movie will never fly. It’s too confusing. Just listening to this gives me a headache. Too many plot lines all colliding. Go. NOW!”
You pluck up some courage and say in a gingerly way, half way out of the chair: “But it’s reality.”
It’s also deadly serious and it shows that neither the president nor the man hoping to replace him have figured out how to manage the Middle East a year and a half after the Arab Spring.
Follow @mattfrei on Twitter.