The Forever War

That was a book title of a Sci-Fi novel by Joe Haldeman.  The plot was a war against aliens which drags on and on with the antagonists finally forgetting what caused the war and continuing to fight for the sake of fighting.  That seems to be the modus for our latest installment of the forever Mideast war.  This war has its origins in the CIA coup which replaced a fledgling democracy in Iran with a client monarch.  The Shah was deposed and US complicity in his rise sparked the Iranian hostage crisis.   Next came the  proxy war against the Soviets in the 1980s in Afghanistan under Reagan, continued under the first Bush with the first Iraqi war.   There was a brief pause during Clinton's two terms and then the Shrub involved us in the gratuitous war to prove he could accomplish what his father failed to do, namely get rid of Saddam.  By this time the Muslim world had equated the US with the great Satan.  Now, a new generation of jihadists is continuing a pointless war of attrition and we are seemingly powerless to avoid it.  As climate change accelerates and we eventually move away from fossil fuels perhaps we can finally say goodbye to the middle east and let them settle their differences among themselves.  In the meantime  we will spend more blood and treasure chasing a chimera.