

Fucking hell, Iran and Iraq were working together and not even really against anyone we dislike and we got mad at that too…
Why can’t we just treat the middle east better‽ Things would likely improve for their citizens if we treated them well. And they wouldn’t hate us if we didn’t keep fucking killing them, especially if we did shit like helping.


It’s weird to me as well. A base understanding of their history shows that while they’ve been having a really bad time since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, for most of history they’ve been one of the major cultural, financial, and generally civilizational hubs of the Eastern Hemisphere. Discounting them is like discounting China or India.
A common claim is that they’ve been at war with each other for thousands of years. This is really funny coming from Europeans and their descendants, considering we were the savage backwater hell bent on killing the shit out of every neighbor we saw and also them for the entire middle ages, meanwhile they spent the period with some armed conflict against each other, but far more focused on peaceful trading.