and I'm saying it's not really worse than it was before the US got further involved post Cold War. Iraq vs Iran lasted a decade, the amount of terrorism in the 70s is shocking...really, the only time the ME has ever been at "peace" was when the Ottomans had an authoritarian stranglehold on everything or when two regional powers were at peace but that only lasts until one of them thinks they can do something to change things.
The US/West haven't been particularly helpful in brining peace post Cold War and no, the Middle East isn't special in regards to being in near constant war for 4000 years, it's true of nearly every place humans have lived in any numbers. I'm just saying the Middle East isn't any more screwed up post Gulf War I than they were before. Different kind of screwed up, sure. Certainly not "much much worse".
I think that's fundamentally untrue. Iraq in the 70s and 80s was certainly no paradise between Saddam's regime and the Iran-Iraq war, but the sheer chaos that Iraq has been thrown into by the United States since 1991 has killed hundreds of thousands of people and kept the country in a state of perpetual conflict for almost thirty years now. There's essentially no hope for a stable Iraq at this point, not for the next few generations. The country's infrastructure, which at one time was considered excellent for the region, shows no real signs of ever really recovering.
Syria has had issues with Islamic fundamentalists causing low-levels of unrest going back to the 70s, but nothing on the scale or rapaciousness of ISIS. Hafez Al-Assad's brutal handling of the Muslim Brotherhood's revolts in the 70s and 80s were fairly effective in keeping the conflict from turning into an all out civil war. Damascus and the major cities of Syria (outside of Hama) were kept relatively safe and intact. But the Arab Spring and the United States' arming of supposedly "moderate rebels" against his son in 2011 proved to be more difficult to control. I personally don't foresee a Syrian Civil War on the scale and with the human toll we know it without American meddling.
The way that the Gaddafi regime was removed in Libya has been absolutely disastrous for the country. The United States and the rest of NATO were very efficient in helping local dissenters remove Gaddafi, but essentially turned a blind eye while disparate armed factions carved the country up and turned it into a war zone. The conflict has absolutely destroyed the infrastructure of Libya, emboldened Islamic fundamentalist groups, displaced thousands of people and kept the country in a state of civil war for ten years now. Say what you will about Gaddafi, he absolutely sucked, but the slave markets we see popping up in Libya are a very new development.
