rebpublican middle east mess

Iraq never has been viable as a national entity, not when the British Colonial Office cobbled it together out of former Ottoman provinces in 1921, nor when Saddam Hussein ruled it by terror, and surely not under the present American occupation. As the US Senate has had the belated wisdom to recognize, it will break up. The Ottoman Empire never was viable - at its peak half of its population was Christian - and its Anatolian rump, namely modern Turkey, may break up as well. Iran, the mini-empire of the Persians who comprise only half the population, may not hold together, nor may Syria, a witches’ cauldron of ethnicities ruled by the brutal hand of the Alawite minority.

America is not responsible for chaos in the Middle East. The Middle East has known nothing but chaos for most of its history. The colonial policy of the European powers after World War I left inherently unstable structures in place that must, one day, meet their reckoning.

But America’s obsession with the surgical implant of democracy in the region forces it into a murderous game of whack-a-mole with a welter of armed ethnicities.