I am wondering, IvanNT101, who exactly you mean by “these people.” Kurds? Arabs? Persians? Christians? Yazadis? Muslims? Alawites?

Arghh!! A total whitewashing of the US’s responsibility for this disaster. Let us not forget that, although life was not good under Hussein and Assad, it was politically stable. A more thoughtful policy, informed by actual facts on the ground rather than wishful thinking, might have nudged those regimes in a positive direction with little additional bloodshed. But thoughtful, informed foreign policy has almost never been practiced by the US. The US is the bull in the china shop who now places blame on the china not being less fragile.

With all due respect to Mr. Michael C. Williams what is happening in Iraq and Syria can not be compared to other locations in the article, not even to former Yegoslavia. It is not correct that the Sykes-Picot agreement itself paid little regard to ethnic or religious communities. The situation in Iraq and Syria is a miror of all Arabs and Muslim states torned between religiuos sectors, tribal loyalty and economic/dignity frastration, all built up since the collepse of the Ottoman Empire. The Arab Spring was just a triger that let all this break loose. like a cork off a champagne bottle. If someone believes it will not nove to Lebanon, Jordan, Libya, even Turkey (that the writer forgat to mention its 20 % Kurdish population) is not “secure”.

Not only Syria and Iraq, but ALL Arab countries are, one way or another, failed states. There’s not a single one that can be hailed as a beacon of prosperous economy AND thriving civic society.
The ones that were blessed (or maybe rather cursed) by oil riches may on the surface look prosperous, but in fact are nothing more than a small ruling minority squandering these riches and sometimes throwing a few bones from the feast table to the rest of population to chew on. But all oil wells have one not-so-beneficial feature: sooner or later they get exhausted. And when oil runs out, these countries will be in the position of their oil-less brethren.
Without oil, they are either kept together by an iron-fisted regime, like Jordan, or stumble from one crisis to another, sometimes culminating in coup or civil war. And even the ones having stability are in fact in quite precarious balance.
As for democracy, it clearly doesn’t work there. Wherever there were truly free elections, they resulted in Islamist groups grabbing the power, be that Algeria of 1990s, or Palestine territories that voted in terrorists of Hamas, or Egypt voting for Muslim Brotherhood. Sometimes the military steps forward to correct the situation, like in Algeria or Egypt, but even the military can’t be counted on forever; after all, the officers are Arab and Muslim, and they may at one point subscribe to the idea of “Islam is solution”.
And what sort of solution is Islam, is evident from what ISIS is.

There is to much at stake there thus the West involvement, if left alone tge Islamic State will have by now reached the Mediterranean and kicked the Kurds out of Irbil, next they will have set an Oil company which will no deal with West nor trade in west currencies nor deal with the West banks thus, bankers, weapon runners and oil barons send in the troops to have control and use all means to convince the World that they are doing the right thing, including CNN,FOX,CNBC,BBC

In 1985 I was driving through now Croatia. I spied a car with a broken section of drain pipe tied on its roof. The occupants looked to be having a great time that Saturday having found a new ‘part’ for their house. Yugoslavia had may fine houses that were built with money from working abroad. Built over many years, the owners rented a room or two to the tourist. Staying in their houses was a great window into the lives of locals. The problem with this tale is I was in a farming valley that was a Serbian enclave in Croatia. The war saw these people pack their belongings on trailers pulled by their tractors to Serbia leaving behind the life they had built over the generations.
Saying they will always fight each other, let them solve their own problems, ignores the individual stories of humanity: the families that are lost to the dominance of the machines of war. The Syrian Iraq conflict shows us a brutal side of international diplomacy that may invoke a strong approach avoidance feelings.

Also worth noting that the S-P agreement was devastating to the Arab-English alliance formed with the moderate Sunni Arabs via TE Lawrence. Lawrence of Arabia’s Arab friends and allies, because of the betrayal, lost leadership of the Arabian Peninsula to the Wahabbist Saudi family sheiks and were relegated to the minor kingdom of Jordan. Absent Sykes-Picot it is likely or at least possible that a greater Sunni kingdom under the moderates who were sidelined by it.

Nice article, I’d be just as sick of Westerners as these people are, the instability is a result of broken dysfunctional colonialism.

This is just about the most conventional article and thinking imaginable.

Arab history 1 (not even 101) teaches that there were TWO (not one) major Arab caliphates. Without getting hypertechnical, the first long-lasting caliphate (from about a generation after the death of Mohammed) was ruled from Damascus and was therefore centered in Syria. After a century, it was replaced by the a much long-ruling caliphate dynasty in Baghdad. After that, the Arab world was ruled the Turks for many centuries up until a hundred years ago, and all of the Arab “countries” were simply provinces of the Turkish empire. There were some minor exceptions, but this is overwhelmingly the big picture. Thus Syria and Iraq have always been core units of the Arab world and always considered distinct,regardless of how many different peoples lived in those two regions under common rule.

European “colonialism” was never more than a negligible factor — the 25 years between the two world war, with never more than a tiny military presence, more like police than army. Sure, the Europeans hoped to rule, but their own wars and weakness made it impossible, and they had to split after 1945 in a hurry because they had no money or will for the task.(Hell, Britain had to leave INDIA at that time, which was really a British colony for over a century.) But the Arabs and the Persians love to claim that they were victims of Western imperialism, in part because it’s a distraction from their centuries-long humiliation by the Turks — a humiliation that the France and Britain actually ended for them. So what if a couple of diplomats drew a line in the mostly empty desert between Syria and Mesopotamia! The desert had always been the border between Mesopotamia (Iraq) and the Levant (Syria, Palestine, etc.) for thousands of years. No one cared much about the exact line while the whole thing was part of the Turkish empire.

Bottom line, “we” did nothing to these people except make their leaders rich by developing the petroleum reserves they still live off today and allowing their upper classes to become educated in the States and live in London. Of course, we supported the Shah in Iran, but believe it or not, a whole lot of Persians also supported him and would have done anything to avoid the clerical rule by ayatollahs they have today. And we used our military power to keep the old Soviet Union from rolling in and taking over all the oil production.

For goodness sake why is the US still trying to maintain the old UK/French border lines. It’s not worth an ounce of American blood (or anyone else’s) to keep trying to force the Kurds back under the control of Baghdad. We need some leadership here. Where is it??