Middle East Cesspool
Let's face it: the Middle East is an unending disaster that should be fled from as quickly as possible.
Is there any other place on Earth that is a festering wound of religious fanaticism and constant violence as the Middle East? Three of the world's most torturously insane religions come from that region. There have been nothing but endless wars, coups, mass killings, more wars, and madness than possibly any other locale on the planet. The place has brought nothing but misery, terrorism, misunderstanding and reactionary politics to the rest of the world.
Look: the "Arab Spring" has been pretty much a failure. Except maybe in Tunis, and even that's not sure. In Egypt, the revolution brought one person to power, who was then deposed and has been replaced by the military but instability remains what with mass arrests and civil unrest. Syria? Oh, man, what does one say about that place? Three years of civil war, millions of displaced people and no end in sight. And now there's the added threat of the so-called "Islamic State," whose butchery seems to be unrivaled in parts of the country and wide swaths of Iraq.
Ah yes, Iraq. What was supposed to be the crown jewel of the American nation-building project with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein has been an unmitigated disaster. And not just because of the myriad problems the American invasion and occupation created: the Iraqis have shown themselves to be absolutely pathetic. Americans have spent billions of dollars and just as many man-hours to fashion a functioning army, only to see that hard work evaporate with astonishing rapidity against ISIS. I can't even begin to fathom the disappointment for military personnel to see their work collapse so easily. The Iraqi government is a corrupt joke that managed to piss off the Sunnis who couldn't wait to flock to something like ISIS. Only know most of them probably have buyer's remorse since these animals are having such fun slicing off peoples' heads and butchering anyone who gets in their way.
Failure, failure, there's nothing but failure in the Middle East. The Arabs are hopelessly reactionary and retrograde, inexorably drawn towards extremism and religious factionalism like the proverbial moth to a flame. With or without American intervention, it does not take much for groups of men to blow up other groups of men, involve themselves in revenge killings or any other general carnage.
Look at Pakistan: carved out of India in 1948 (did you think Palestine was the only territory partitioned that year?) to create a specifically Muslim state, oh yes, here's the return on investment. It's the center of radical Islamic terrorism, a poor state that veers between not so bad and pretty bad on any given day. Plus, it's a country that created the Taliban and has nuclear weapons, the program chief of which sold this technology to any and all buyers, including North Korea. And this Muslim state has gone to war with India five times. So much for solving India's "Muslim question" at the dawn of independence by creating their own country for them.
And no tour through the cesspool that is the Middle East would be complete without mention of the region's biggest losers: the Palestinians. With a stack of over 2,000 dead bodies, nothing substantial has been gained with Hamas' latest go-around with Israel. Nothing. No sea port, no money to pay people, no lifting of the alleged siege, nothing. And yet Palestinian support for the world's worst managers has actually risen, a product of now two generations of warped thinking that finds success in failure. Every time I start to feel sympathetic to the Palestinians, almost as if on cue, there's another round of violence and strutting support for Hamas or Islamic Jihad that makes me realize how pointless all of this is. And I'm supposed to believe that a Palestinian state is going to stop the violence, stop the terrorism, stop the unending vitriol? Hey, if creating Pakistan can't make a good neighbor, why the hell should thinking sharing the same land is going to be a peaceful endeavor?
We have international terrorism because of the Middle East, oil embargoes because of the Middle East, a bigger threat of nuclear confrontation because of the Middle East, and a host of radicalized Muslims that can't wait to get to Europe. Britain, France, America: they've all blundered terribly in the region, and yet keep trying to make things right, but just proving the old adage about insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome. There is nothing but misery and death in the Middle East, a black hole of money, manpower and lives.
Stay far away.