As some of the writers have suggested, the complexities and intricacies of Middle East politics cannot be childishly reduced to a black-and-white struggle between Muslims on one hand and US-Israel on the other as many Islamist conspiracy theorists usually do.

There are many other important factors shaping the Middle East political landscape, including intra-Muslim power politics, inter-Arab state geopolitics, ethno-nationalisms and their lingering historical animosities, border disputes among Middle Eastern countries and an identity crisis among Muslims in the Middle East.

For example, although Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Iran all call themselves Muslims and are seen by others from afar as a united bloc of Muslims, they have many differences in values and interests that have sometimes led to wars between them.

Among Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Iran alone, there are differences in languages, dialects and pre-Islamic ethnic cultures and racial origins. The Turks, for example, were originated from the Central Asian and ethnically closer to Mongolians than the Arabs or Iranians (former known as Persians).

Iranians themselves are still proud of their pre-Islamic Persian language and culture as well as their Shiite understanding of Islam which most of the Sunni Arabs oppose. In this regard, it is the same with the Egyptians who still cherish their pre-Islamic cultural traditions which date back to 5,000 years ago or 3,000 years before the birth of Islam in Saudi Arabia.

Nominally, although Saudi Arabia attempts to be the paramount leader of the Muslim world, its brand of medieval and extremist Sunni Islam, namely Wahhabism, is rightly not welcome by even other denominations of the Sunni schools of thoughts, let alone the Shiites (which predominated in Iraq and Iran) and the Sufis (which is influential in Central Asia).

Besides, there are the universal divisions between the social classes as well as the elite-mass dichotomy among all Muslim-majority societies in the Middle East. Class differences certainly influence political outlook and mentality.

In fact, if one is familiar with objective and scholarly Middle East studies like the books written by, for example, Professor Bernard Lewis, Peter Mansfield, Albert Hourani and Daniel Pipes, one can surely see Machiavellian politics in the politics of Muslim-majority Middle East nations and even among Arab states themselves.

The Machiavellian politics in the Middle East is more pronounced than that in other free societies because it is conducted in close societies where there is no freedom of speech and the media. Also, Machiavellianism is covered by stage-managed religious piety among the ruling elites.

For example, even in the 2003 Iraq War, Jordan and Saudi Arabia discreetly allow US Special Forces to stage their covert actions while the rulers of these two countries publicly opposed the US-led war. There are cloak-and-dagger maneuvers as well as back-stabbing games among the Middle Eastern Muslim elites.

Propaganda churned out and covert intelligence operations conducted by Middle Eastern states or by rival political groups within a state to secretly undermine one another also contributes to the difficulties in understanding Middle East politics even in the Middle East itself, let alone from Malaysia.

So, things are usually not what they are seen to be from here afar in Malaysia. In the politics of closed societies, the discrepancy between appearance and reality is usually vast and it becomes ever vaster as geographical distance increases.

It is best we Malaysians do not get too emotional simply by reading or watching foreign news and commentaries on Middle East politics from afar. This wastes our time and saps our mental energy that could have been more productively used to understand our own Malaysian society and to take action to fight for our own rights in our own homeland.