What’s the opposite of a gift that keeps on giving? A mistake that keeps metastasizing.
Which pretty much sums up the US role in the Middle East. Beginning with the CIA’s 1953 overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected president and continuing through the multiple regime changes and invasions of recent years, various American governments have behaved like they both understood that region and had the power to mold it into a docile client that produced oil, suppressed dissent and otherwise caused no trouble.
Instead, each intervention turned up the heat on an already-boiling pot of corruption, sectarian rivalry and geopolitical anger that has finally erupted into regional civil war. The whole world, at long last, understands that the situation is beyond both US understanding and control.
And that’s the good news.
The really scary part of the story is that Russia has jumped —…
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