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A good book on why the middle east is the way it is, is A Peace to end all Peace by David Fromkin. There certainly isn’t just one mistake that caused all the trouble.

A friend of mine recommended A Peace to End All Peace, but I haven't read it yet.

https://www.amazon.com/Peace-End-All-Ottoman-Creation/dp/080...

Your idle curiosity has already yielded an important insight: the situation is complex. I think if everyone only knew one thing about the middle east, it should be that.

You might want to check the book by Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace (1989)

"America has much more "questionable democratic credentials" than Russia."

This is simply prima facie false. I understand not understanding the context to "invading countries" but really?

There's a really nice book - "A Peace to End All Peace" and it should explain some of what you may object to. Before this round of festivities, the US was unsteady on its feet as the domain of the Cold Warriors.

The 2003 fun was as much about the U.N. process breaking down as anything else.

ISIS is anything but an ephemeral problem.

If you'll read "A Peace to End All Peace" it should become obvious that it was a near-inevitability. Most or many of the nations of the former Ottoman Empire were made up out of whole cloth by colonial powers in the region. These were often fronted by a "he might be a bastard but he's our bastard" strongman.

Now that those regimes have been either bombed out of existence, by invasion or have collapsed under their own weight ( or both ), there's a power vacuum.

There is a documentary I can't quite place now about the case of Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki. It involves someone who who lives in ... Canada? who does deprogramming of foreign-born Jihadis. This is analogous to deprogramming cult members.

IMO, this is a worthy effort.

We seem to have two impulses:
- Hold up a higher standard to nations and feel somehow entitled/obligated to "enforce" it.
- Attribute such deviations from those standards to "culture".

I'm not sure which is worse. Nation-states sort of don't judge other nation-states in that way. The US has been ... innovative in that, and it's been no end of trouble. Why Pearl Harbor? Because the US embargoed Japan after the Rape of Nanking. And that ended well...

Maybe its changed since '73 but the "access to the kingdom's oil reserves" seems hollow, since my understanding is that there is a small army of engineers and workers who rotate in and out of Saudi to maintain the fields and other infrastructure. Second, there is that Dilbert cartoon about the meaning of "fungible" w.r.t oil.

The '73 embargo was at least in part a reaction to the Six-Day War in '67 so it seems typically Kissingerian to pursue a balance of power rapprochement with one of the the seats of opposition to our friendly relations with Israel.

The US also ... sort of "inherited" the British Empire after WWII, and Saudi was very much a part of the actions of those within the Empire. Again, I can't recommend "A Peace To End All Peace" enoughly.

I suspect the 1979 hostage event still dominates opinion of Iran. It's a mostly unhealed wound. Even if you take 1953 into account, it stings.

Having someone stand up to Israel will more than likely galvanize the politics of Israel towards at least more militarism. The Iranian opposition to Israel looks suspiciously like Eliminationism - a catchall term designed by Daniel Goldhagen to describe a specific political technology.

The Frontline show on ISIS describes ISIS quite clearly as Sunni officers and such being cast out of Iraq as another Eliminaitonist tactic to gain political support for the al-Maliki government.

Saudi Arabia is sort of fictional; it was created out of the rubble in the region around the time of the First World War. It's an artifact of what was left when the British Empire began to decline in the region. But it is more or less an honest broker; the others in the area are less known. It really does go back to Lawrence and all that. The book "A Peace to End All Peace" describes this process in excruciating detail. Lawrence does not fare well in the book. He's practically a (military) fillibuster.

Saudi Arabia being the site of both Mecca and Medina is highly constrained in what it can appear to do. This makes it stable. But is cannot appear to keep the Haj from political "enemies" witout inspiring ... fury.

Un-peace in the Middle East comes as much from (IMO, inevitable) mismanagement by the British Empire ( and later the US ) as anything. Of course, the primary thing is the failure of the Ottoman Empire, with the death-blow by the Kemalists in 1920-1922.

There's literally a book - "A Peace To End All Peace" ( ISBN-13: 978-0805088090 )dedicated to numbing your brain with a thousand blows to show this.

Technology seems to be at odds with many people's sense of what is human and with human identity. It's a story as old as that of Captain Ned Ludd. I saw this very closely in my most recent gig. I put a (very crude) machine learning element into the flagship product and the reaction was a lot fear. Geez, I was just trying to keep operators from breaking (expensive) things. Again, though, the incentives were not with that. But the perception was "they're takin' 'er jerbs."

I guess that it is a matter of counterfactual history whether the Armenian genocide, or something like it, would have occurred if it were not for the disruption of the war.

And the seeds for the recent and ongoing trouble in the Middle East were sown in the division of the former Ottoman Empire immediately after the war, as described in David Fromkin's book, "A Peace to end all Peace." (best history-book title ever!)

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/a-peace-to-end-all-peace-creat...