I hate to say it, but I happen to like this blunt, frank, assessment of the middle east.  It is the best one that I have seen in a very long time.

Quoting Ralph Peters in The New York Post:

The Arab Spring has unleashed the Arab Collapse. Everybody still standing in the region is picking the flesh of the helpless. The Islamist cancer proved more virulent than Arabs themselves expected, while dying regimes behave with unrestrained ruthlessness.

And our diplomats still think everyone can be cajoled into harmony.

We’re witnessing a titanic event, the crack-up of a long-tottering civilization. Arab societies grew so corrupt and stagnant that violent upheaval became inevitable. That’s what we’re seeing in Syria and Iraq — two names, one struggle — and will find elsewhere tomorrow.

The next country to go: Rescuers working at the site of a car bomb in Kirkuk, Iraq, last week. Violence is rising rapidly across the country.

We can’t stop it, we can’t fix it, and we don’t understand it. But we can stay out of it.

[….]

The Saudi position is always “You and him fight!” As long ago as Desert Storm, Saudis joked about renting the American army and our bumpkin gullibility. (Try to find one US officer who’s worked with the Saudis and doesn’t hate their guts. . .) Now they want Washington to spend our blood and treasure to open the mosques of Damascus to their Wahhabi cult.

[….]

Iraq was carved out for British interests, while Syria was France’s consolation prize. Now Syria’s collapsing in a too-many-factions-to-count civil war. And Iraq’s in the early stages of its own dissolution; even a would-be dictator — another of our one-time “friends,” Nouri al-Maliki — can’t keep the “country” together.

We don’t even know how many new states will emerge from the old order’s wreckage. But the Scramble for the Sand is on, with Iran, Turkey, treacherous Arab oil sheikdoms and terrorists Sunni and Shia alike all determined to dictate the future, no matter the cost in other people’s blood.

We had our chance to extend the peace and keep both Iran and Wahhabi crazies at bay after we defeated Iraq’s insurgencies. But a new American president, elevating politics over strategy, walked away from Baghdad, handing Iraq to Iran. Now it’s too late. If George W. Bush helped trigger the Arab Spring, Barack Obama made this Arab Winter inevitable.

We must not be lured into the current fighting — centered, for now, on Syria — by cries of humanitarian necessity. The local powers could step in to stop the killing. But they won’t. Once again, they want us to pay the bill. (It’s time for the Saudis, especially, to give their own blood.)

We’ve paid enough. Rhetoric and red lines notwithstanding, we need to back off from Syria, if for no other reason than a strategist’s golden rule: If you don’t understand what a fight’s about, stay out.

I can tell you that if back in during the heyday of the Bush Administration someone had written something like this about the middle east and Iraq; they would have been ran out of Murdoch’s owned company on a rail!  This shows me, that the chickenhawk right has become a very small minority now and is being replaced by people who simply want common sense in foreign policy on the right.  This is a very positive step in the right direction.

Honestly, this really sounds like something from the American Conservative and, as far as this writer is concerned, Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul; and the rest those who said Iraq was a bad idea —- were very much right.

Others: VodkaPundit