One Great Big War - NYTimes.com: "What’s the biggest threat to world peace right now? Despite the horror, it’s not chemical weapons in Syria. It’s not even, for the moment, an Iranian nuclear weapon. Instead, it’s the possibility of a wave of sectarian strife building across the Middle East."
David Brooks hits the nail on the head. While most of the talking heads and commentators in the popular media seem to talk and bloviate about the problems in the Middle East as political with political solutions, it's patently clear that this is first and foremost an Islamist sectarian conflict that is based in their religious splintering.
Political boundaries of these Islamist countries mean little in this conflagration. The battles are about religious ideologies, not borders and about religious belief and practice, not about economics or politics.
The West has precious few options, as Mr. Brooks points out. I believe TeamObama has made a mess of it by believing naively that the revolutionary forces at work would produce democracies, when many of the rabid rebel forces prefer theocracies or caliphates.
Perhaps if we became energy independent, the U.S. could avoid being the policeman in that area, but what of the other Western nations that depend on the region's oil? And Israel?
