Muddle-East

Let me see if I have this right. We are close to an agreement with Iran and thLat is good but Israel, our staunch ally, says that’s bad because they support Hezbollah and Hamas, while King Salman of Saudi Arabia, who is a good-bad guy, is bombing those bad Iran-backed rebels in Yemen but we need those other Iranian good-guys in Iraq and Syria to fight Issis who are trying to overthrow Assad, the not-so-bad guy anymore, who used to be bad but now is getting to be more good because he is less bad than the fundamentalist Sunnis but the Saudis are Sunnis and we really prefer the Shiites, the good bad-guys, particularly the secular ones like Sadam Hussein whom we killed because he got too uppity and Rouhani who rules our new best friends, Iran, except for the Ayatollah who is fundamentally a fundamentalist and then there are the Kurds who everybody likes, except the Turks, because we haven’t any idea what they believe in and there is Egypt who overthrew Mubarak, another good bad-guy, who used to be good enough but then we help depose in order to have open elections which elected a bad good-guy we didn’t like so we now support General Sisi, yet another good bad-guy, who is more authoritarian than Mubarak but not for long, says he, only until order is restored which can take a few decades during which time Yemen can become the new Afghanistan and Lebanon the new Iraq unless we just bring the legions home, send the combatants to temper-management class and have a nice day since we no longer need their black stuff under the sand and then our Bible-thumping evangelical fundamentalists can meet their Koran-thumping, Wahhabi-Issis fundamentalist cousins and they could agree at least about Abraham and what’s good and what’s bad for the rest of us and probably never know they are all irrelevant.