The Middle East in context for Dummies

I cannot lay claim to this insight, but as it was passed on to me I thought it worth sharing as it puts the conflict in (at least part of) the Middle East nicely into perspective..

This clarifies what's been confusing us about the current situation in the Middle East.

·         We in the US support the Iraqi government in the fight against ISIS.

·         We don't like ISIS, but ISIS is supported by Saudi Arabia, who we do like.

·         We don't like Assad in Syria. We support the fight against him, but ISIS is also fighting against him.

·         We don't like Iran, but Iran supports the Iraqi government in its fight against ISIS.

·         So some of our friends support our enemies, some enemies are now our friends, and some of our enemies are fighting against our other enemies, who we want to lose, but we don't want our enemies who are fighting our enemies to win.

·         If the people we want to defeat are defeated, they could be replaced by people we like even less.

·         And all this was started by our invading a country to drive out terrorists who were not actually there until we went in to drive them out.

It's all quite simple, really.