To be totally honest Poirot I know and agree with you in that post.
I can for hours write about Britain's part, long before Americas rise, in that destabilization.
Any part of this world that has English footprints from Colonialism days is the same.
BUT I too can not get away from the truth.
These folk, the worst of them, take blame back *century,s* to the Crusades.
It in my view *is the dysfunctional nature* of SOME preachers of their religion that drives the troubles.
I am sure we both do not want it, but we are touching only the sides of a tragic event that can turn in to a massive death toll at any time.
Today followers of an elected government, one that seems to have a single objective, are proposing war.
Watch this space, that war if it comes has its roots in religion.

Dear Poirot,

Unfortunately I have a namesake, one James Steele, whose fingerprints are all over the death squad killings in Iraq that Belly and others are so quick to solely blame as Muslim on Muslim violence without Western involvement.

“Colonel James Steele is a US veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America, during which he trained counter-insurgency commandos who carried out extreme abuses of human rights. Steele is also a veteran of the Vietnam war. From 1984 to 1986, during the Salvadoran Civil War, Steele operated as a counterinsurgency specialist and was a member of a group of United States special forces advisers to theSalvadoran Army. In 1986 he was implicated in the Iran contra affair. In 2004, early in the Iraq War, Steele was sent by Donald Rumsfeld to serve as a civilian adviser to Iraqi paramilitary Special Police Commando sknown as the Wolf Brigade.”
Wikipedia

Liveleaks reports;

“Ret. Col James Steele. Steele, whose title in Baghdad was Counselor for Iraqi Security Forces supervised the selection and training of members of the Badr Organization and Mehdi Army, the two largest Shi’ite militias in Iraq, in order to target the leadership and support networks of a primarily Sunni resistance. Planned or not, these death squads promptly spiralled out of control to become the leading cause of death in Iraq.”

“Intentional or not, the scores of tortured, mutilated bodies which turn up on the streets of Baghdad each day are generated by the death squads whose impetus was John Negroponte. And it is this U.S.-backed sectarian violence which largely led to the hell-disaster that Iraq is today.”

When a New York Times reporter was sent to speak Colonel Steele at the library that the notorious Wolf Brigade had turned into a detention centre the interview was “interrupted by the terrified screams of a prisoner outside”.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=70d_1357410021

There is deep Western involvement here and while the blame can not be totally laid at their feet a good part of it needs to be. People need to pull their collective heads out of their backsides and acknowledge that fact.

csteele,

I believe that the US invasion of Iraq was a war crime, and I did at the time. It is a pity that Bush et al. cannot be brought to trial for the invasion and for deceiving the American people and the people in allied nations. Nevertheless, most of the killing has been of Iraqis by Iraqis, generally along sectarian or ethnic lines. Such killings have been going on at least since the Neolithic, and probably long before. The archaeologist Prof. Lawrence Keely (University of Chicago) has grisly accounts of prehistoric massacres, some in Europe and some in other places, often long before the evil white man came on the scene. (See his book "War Before Civilization".) Your views come very close to denying the Iraqis moral agency. The Japanese and Germans didn't start killing each other on a grand scale when they were invaded at the end of World War II.

Divergence,

How dare they react the chaos and the widespread devastation of their basic and advanced infrastructure, the millions killed, maimed or scattered to neighbouring countries as refugees, the long long road back from decade-long sanctions, the power vacuum left in the wake of the invasion.....the patronising occupation.

But it's their fault that their society has trouble assimilating its circumstances.

Their moral agency is found wanting?

Sheeeesh!

It would be a very silly person who could not talk at length without lying about faults western country,s HAVE INFLICTED on the middle east and other parts of the world.
I am aware of them all, including csteeles reference, but unsure it ,while it exists, is true.

How hard would it be for my detractors to see that part of the world as it is?
And how hard to question why it is still so?
Are you folk saying those murdering each other are driven by history recent and long gone?
Then is there an intellectual difference in the average person there.
MANY country,s have been victimized in all history, England invaded and its beaten natives marginalized.
Poland and Hungry fought Russia! mice against Tiger.
Why run on auto killing each other still in the middle east?
I know why, others refuse to.
Enslaved to a religion that demands death.
The middle east is fast becoming a failed state, and is dragging us all in to a place not one of us wants to go.

Poirot,

<<How dare they react the chaos and the widespread devastation of their basic and advanced infrastructure, the millions killed, maimed or scattered to neighbouring countries as refugees, the long long road back from decade-long sanctions, the power vacuum left in the wake of the invasion.....the patronising occupation.>>

<<But it's their fault that their society has trouble assimilating its circumstances.>>

The German and Japanese people had exactly the same problems after World War II, but they didn't massacre each other.

In my statement about denying the Iraqis moral agency, I meant that you and csteele are effectively regarding the Iraqis as children, not as responsible adults who have to take responsibility for their decisions. If a child does something terrible, we blame the parents, but we in the West are not responsible if Shiites decide to kill Sunnis or vice versa.

Belly is right about this.