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 pumped 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 -- decisively
-- into this vacuum and is building a coalition to take over the Middle East.
In partnership with Iran and China it's propping up Syria's dictator and bombing
both ISIS and US-trained rebels back beyond the stone age. The next step will
presumably be to bring Saudi Arabia into line and thus dominate the region's
oil reserves. Israel, in this scenario, has no good options.
Unless, of course, the US pushes back, which will mean escalating from Russian
and US proxies shooting at each other to actual Russian and US soldiers going
at it, with China and Iran helping the former and Saudi Arabia the latter.
This is a nightmare scenario on every level, and it's closer than most people
seem to think. Here's a sampling of headlines from just the past couple of
days:
Syria conflict: Nato
warns Russia on air strikes
Syria conflict: Turkish
jets intercept Russian plane
Syrian
insurgents vow to attack Russian forces as Moscow hints at ground role
U.S.
sees Russia readying ground campaign in Syria
Syria's
'moderates' have disappeared... and there are no good guys
Russia's
airstrikes in Syria are playing well at home
A tale of
two strategies: Russia destroys ISIS command, US hits Afghan hospital
Obama
up against growing support for a no-fly zone in Syria
Just as there was a chance in the 1990s to get developed-world entitlement
programs under control and we blew it, there was once a chance to let the Islamic
world work out its differences, have its Reformation,
and emerge as a more-or-less stable, comprehensible power. But we blew that
monumentally as well.
Now the US is financially and politically exhausted, with neither the money
nor the will to expend trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives
to impose "peace" in a place where the word can't even be defined. Yet, as
the last headline says, support for a Syrian "no-fly zone" is growing -- in
air space that includes Russian jets.
In some ways today's situation is reminiscent of the late 1930s, when the
last thing anyone outside of Germany wanted was another big war, but that's
exactly what they got.
