Eli5: how did America actually destabilize the Middle East in the Iraq war? What was done specifically that caused all of the chaos in the countries we were involved in?
In: 185
The entire Middle East was part of the Ottoman Empire from the 1200s (maybe earlier) until World War I when the Ottoman Empire fell apart after the war.
After WWI Britain and France drew lines on the map in an attempt to stabilize the region, this is the same period when Israel was first introduced as a real thing. The empire was hardly perfect, but over the ages they had largely found ways to bring stability to the region and a sort of live-and-let-live peace was able to sustain itself. When the central power (the empire) fell apart and lines were drawn randomly you suddenly had some groups split who wanted to be together, and some put together who had previously been able to ignore each other so far as it was possible to do so. In short, the groups in this region lost the semi-autonomy they had held for 600-odd years was interrupted.
Powers came and went, but long story short – the root of the problem was drawing straight lines on a map and trying to enforce them without bothering to learn much about how the ethnicities, languages, cultures, and polities of the region understood and divided themselves. This led to a lot of conflict between groups in the region trying to organize the political fallout from the fall of the empire peacefully, those trying to do it democratically, and those trying to take the strong-man approach. It doesn’t help that vast deposits of oil were discovered in the area. The Israel mandate didn’t help the situation, either. Nor both Britain and France wanting to seize the Suez Canal and the US and USSR arguing it should go to a regional government (Egypt controls it today).
It would be wrong to say that things were peaceful by the time we got to the 1990s, but they were stable because all the strong-men who had risen to the top of their specific areas were in a detente. That is, they all had militaries, militants, and various “shadow” forces that were similar to each other in total force capacity. Things were not peaceful, but they were in a standoff that was stable.
By removing Saddam Hussein, we created a power vacuum not only within the country but in the region. Now militants in Syria, Iran, Pakistan, other regional nations, and non-state nations (like Kurdistan) began the long process of re-aligning their power plays that often have to play out across international borders…but international borders are those straight lines that were drawn after WWI with no mind to the nuance of local culture or politics. Some are after power believing it is their religious right, others are in it for oil money, some for familial or tribal allegiances that they feel are inadequately recognized/respected in the region, and so on and so forth. While the major powers (Iraq, Iran, etc) had been in military parity it was a risky thing for these non-state actors to do much more than talk amongst themselves and maybe skirmish way out in the middle of nowhere. Once that power vacuum opened up they all enjoined their squabbles and power struggles full-force.
That Wagner group and other Russian parties have played both ends to the middle doesn’t help the situation, and whatever you think of Israel their presence in the region being backed by superpowers like the US makes the region a hotbed for proxy wars, which is a lot of what we are seeing at the moment in the form of these various power struggles and ages-old blood feuds.
There were and are a LOT of people groups in the area, to get you started I’ll point you at Kurdistan, a ‘stateless nation’ created by the random lines on the map. They are one example, but there are others as well. The whole sub-continent has similar stories, this one is just an “easy to find” example that perhaps has more available information about it than some: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurdistan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurdistan)
Simon Whistler did a video about it on his Warographics channel if you prefer a video format: [https://youtu.be/jWYslKbs01A?si=-MvoFoTsF4IVABYM](https://youtu.be/jWYslKbs01A?si=-MvoFoTsF4IVABYM)
You might also look at the Scramble for Africa, which was a very similar process done by the colonial powers on that continent earlier in the same era, in fact you could say the Middle East was the end of that era (done in the same way), an action that still drives regional and global politics today despite being “solved” some 125 years ago. [Spoiler alert: it’s not solved] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa)
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