The hatred that exists between Sunni and Shi’ite factions will consume the entire region for generations more. It took brutal secularist leadership under Saddam Hussein and the Assads to keep this from boiling over, but now that they are either gone or weakened, there will be no stopping it, and the forces are roughly equal on a large scale. They are also equally counter-balanced by external support from Saudi Arabia and Iran. If there were no oil involved, it would be best to quarantine the region and allow them all to fight to the slow death. That process would become steady-state and would keep the forces of global Islam concentrated inward rather than outward. It’s oil that complicates everything, and forces us to try to mediate or take sides. We should have stuck with what was working.
Yup. Brutal as he was, he kept the lid on. And he actually protected Christians. From 2008:
“Iraq: Worse for Christians Now Than under Saddam Hussein”
Hindsight is always 20-20