I remember clearly when all of this came to me, in the run-up to Desert Storm, when I learned that the US had actually backed and trained Hussein. At the time, like so many, I just fell into the “they’ve been killing each other for thousands of years” trap, and started to adopt the spin that the US had just blundered, once again, by naively backing someone sho would later tirn on them.

But it just didn’t stack up. In the forst place, it was too much of a pattern - it just didn’t make sense to me that professionals would make that same blunder over and over and over again. And in the second place, looked at closely, it wasn’t so much that Hussein had turned on the US as that the US had turned on Hussein.

And then it suddenly just clicked - if the Middle East was stable, with their wealth, they could compete on a more or less equal footing with the west, instead of wasting so much time and energy and resources squabbling. So what if the Middle East’s instability wasn’t incidental, but deliberately engineered?

And suddenly everything just fell into place, all the way back to the overthrow of Mossadegh. And everything since has just slotted neatly into place, up to and including the Palestinian genocide and the western governments’ otherwise inexplicable determined support of it.

The only thing I remain unclear on is Israel’s specific role, which seems to be some odd mix of proxy snd provocateur. There’s a degree to which the west is using Israel but there’s also a degree to which Israel is using the west, and I can’t quite sort out how much of each it is.

Though it works out to the same thing either way…