Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Peter Van Buren
“If a time traveler from 2024 landed in the Middle East of say 40 years ago, with the intent of revealing the future, he might not be believed. He’d tell how the stalwart regimes of Qaddafi, Saddam, and the Assad dynasty were gone, their former countries now embroiled in some gradation of security chaos, state failure, or chronic political dysfunction. Egypt survives as a sort of U.S. client state, saved by American do-nothingism from the democratic possibilities of the Arab Spring. When asked how all this could have happened, he’d explain that much of it had to do with the United States and its invasion of Iraq in 2003 — the destruction of a comparatively stable (but ‘evil;’ they’re all evil) regime that turned out to be the linchpin holding most of the whole Sykes-Picot world together.” (12/12/24)