I think we are all in shock about the crisis in the Middle East. I will be totally honest and say I don’t have enough knowledge about it to provide my own analysis. I know a lot about North Carolina, and US politics, but not the Middle East.
I’m going to share links to writing and interviews with people whose analysis I have respected a lot over a long time. I may not agree with them 100%, but then they know a lot more about this ongoing conflict than I do. So, judge for yourself. As you can see I grativatate to historians.
I think it is important to read with an open mind, AND at the same time realize there is a lot of disinformation flying around, especially in the cesspool now knows as X/Twitter. Please seek out solid sources. These are people I trust:
David Rothkopf of the Deep State Radio network; guest interview on The Daily Beans Monday 10/9 (his interview starts around 28 minutes into the show ), recorded after he published his 10/7 piece in The Daily Beast, “Hapless Netanyahu Was Totally Unprepared for Attack.”
Historian Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny: “Terror and Counter-Terror.”
Historian Anne Applebaum, author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism: “There Are No Rules” and her Twitter feed.
Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present: Lucid post from August 8, 2023, “Israel at a Crossroads: Where Will Netanyahu's Autocratic Aggression Lead the Country?”
The political framing of war tends to oversimplify everything, such as George W. Bush declaring war on a noun (https://medium.com/@chuckwest/john-green-war-and-nouns-709f0e6d7cff). But the actual details of war are as varied and as random as anything that can be imagined. The very concept of "the Middle East" teaches nothing about the stakes, let alone the consequences of war. And yet, Putin can use this to advantage, causing all parties--Hamas, Israel, Iran, Turkey, the EU, the US, everybody, to engage in self-harm. Which brings them down to his level (where he himself has committed extraordinary self-harm by invading Ukraine). The dysfunction of Israel's corrupt government and the corruption of America's dysfunctional government have provided the ideal opening for Putin to literally unleash the Kraken and make everybody pay a terrible price for 50 years of bad governance, bad international policies, and the reckless development of military capabilities rather than economic cooperation, environmental care, social justice, and the prioritization of peace.
It is a terrible mess and we all suffer the recurrence of these cancers ravaging our decrepit body politic.