You forgot the weird Turkey vs the Kurds almost war thing. And the weirder thing of the Israelis almost protecting ISIS forces from Assard/Hezbollah. Or the bizarre Iraqi Mosal campaign where Iraqi backed Iranian militias almost had (or sometimes did have?) US Airforce backing.
Anything is possible in this war.
The Turkish state seems to have only a problem with the militant Kurds in Turkey and Syria but not the ones in Iraq as it seems that they get along very well and the Kurds in Iraq even allow Turkish forces to launch airstrikes in the region of Iraqi Kurdistan and for their troops to hunt down PKK members over there with the help of Peshmerga, the de facto Kurdish armed forces in Northern Iraq.
So, saying that the Turks are at complete odds with Kurdish militias all over the region is not entirely correct.
The are multiple Kurdish factions on all sides of all borders. The don't always get along, either with each other or with Turkey. I also believe that there is a multitude of views towards the Assad regime.
AFAIK they all fight ISIS though.
The talk was in NPR, you can search "Henry Barky NPR Kurds".
There's always been tension between Kurdish nationalist factions and they even had a brief civil war[1] between Iraqi Kurds in the 90s (Talabani vs Barzani) and there's rivalry between the Peshmerga and the PKK esp. in the area where the Peshmerga deems its territories in Iraq where some PKK members challenge their authority there but despite all of this, some Kurdish nationalist love to portray the conflict between Turkey and the Kurds as an ethnic and not a political one as it garners more support and sympathy for their cause and make Turkey look like the bad guy in this conflict.
That's one aspect I find very confusing - Turkish attitudes towards ISIS aren't exactly hardline (eg frequent reports of ISIS supply routes over the Turkish border), and so it isn't clear to me what terror attacks by ISIS in Turkey would gain.
Except terror of course - that's always a thing. And I also understand that ISIS command and control isn't exactly centralised, so it could be random people somewhat aligned.
Another alternative is that they are more tactical in nature - maybe Turkey closes a border route, so ISIS bombs Ankara? I don't know enough to know if this makes sense.
Either way.. confusing.
For goodness sake, we'd been trying to topple Gaddafi and the Syrian regime for half a century and getting exactly nowhere, then as you say one Tunisian street vendor makes a desperate gesture and in the chain reaction from that the whole region falls into chaos. That's history for you.
As for IS, the reason they're such a nuisance isn't so much due to the invasion of Iraq, it's due to the power vacuum in north western Iraq caused by the withdrawal of US forces in 2011. The fact is the surge worked, but all of that was willingly thrown away.
"A bit of air support" is a strange characterization for destroying the Libyan government's entire tank fleet in the middle of an Islamist uprising. "Mainly keeping out of it" is a strange characterization for supporting a coup in Egypt that toppled a democratically elected government. Also, we never, ever, ever, ever talk about Bahrain, where the US supplied arms through Saudi Arabia against the uprisings and: >By 2014, 5,000 Saudi and Emirati forces and almost 7000 American forces were positioned "less than 10 miles from the Pearl Roundabout, the center of the country’s protest movement."
We have surrounded the middle east with armies for more than a generation and armed the worst governments in the area. "Mainly keeping out of it" is a gross mischaracterization of what we do there.
I don't recall any major role for the US in the Tahrir Square uprising in Egypt except just saving their interests whether in the Presidency or the military but saying that the West orchestrated the whole thing is just blatantly false and totally dismisses the sweat and blood we Egyptians scarified to get rid of dictatorship and take all the credit for themselves.
Now to ISIS, we could argue that ISIS was a byproduct of the Iraq invasion in 2003. ISIS was born out of the Iraqi Insurgency and the Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia under the leadership of Abu Mosab Azzarqawi.
So yeah the US invasion of Iraq contributed indirectly to the rise of ISIS in Iraq first and then to expand in the neighboring Syria and eclipsing Al-Qaeda as the "hottest" Islamic terrorist organization in the world.
"The Syrian civil war is a proxy conflict between the (Sunni) Gulf States and (Shia) Iranians with the Russians alongside the latter."
Would be appropriated to say "with the Americans alongside the Sunni"? Is this, then, a kind of proxy-proxy war?
Because it seems to me that we always heard how bad are the Iranians but very little about how bad are the Saudis and company.
And the purpose of this article seems to be to demonstrate that the Americans don't have any clue which side they are on.
The Iranian government has literally been chanting "Death to America" every week since 1979. Our relationship with Saudi is much, much more complex.
Fuck that. If anything had happened in Iran before Mosaddegh was overthrown by USA that would constitute a defensible justification for that action, I'm sure you would have told us already. Instead, here's some innuendo. Gosh that chanting is bad.
Also, implicit in your criticism, such as it is, is the notion that the chanting is representational of the Iranian population. It is not; most of the country has lived for long enough under the 'revolutionary' rule of the IRGC that they are actually more disposed towards the West than you might think.
Regardless, you asked why the U.S. was tilted towards Saudi in its conflict with Iran, and I was trying to provide a summary: that is an outgrowth of regional balance-of-power politics as much as anything else.
I wasn't the one who initially asked why USA traditionally favors Saudi over the Ayatollahs, but frankly your response to that query is an exercise in question-begging. They wouldn't chant "death to America" if that chant weren't rhetorically useful. It wouldn't be rhetorically useful if USA hadn't intervened to remove an elected Prime Minister.
There is a tendency for Westerners to overstate their own importance in the Middle East, which are also informed by inter-state, intra-state and extra-regional groups and actors that are neither European nor American.
The real regional meta-story that is playing out right now, in my opinion, is the inevitable collapse of the post-imperial order. It was caused not by any grand state actors (or by Twitter) but by a single Tunisian street vendor. He upended the unsustainable patterns of rule that have characterized the region since the withdrawal of the European powers after World War II. Nobody knows what comes next, and there is no good model, yet, of American statecraft to inform a regional posture.
The story made me shake my head, but not because of anything to do with of any sinister implications that it raised about the military-industrial complex, but because it looks like Keystone Kops. The Syrian civil war is a proxy conflict between the (Sunni) Gulf States and (Shia) Iranians with the Russians alongside the latter. It takes the form of members of ISIS killing Quds Force commanders, and it ignited without much help from the West. Which side would you pick?