ummmm............ not sure that's right, roachboy. Not to pull the old man shit here, but I do recall that for pretty much my entire life there has been intractable strife in that section of the world that that has been impervious to all efforts at resolution on any terms except 100% what the locals want. When that happens you tend to see violence. The sheer volume of Middle Eastern warfare has been staggering: in my lifetime alone (I'm 48), and leaving out the Israeli issue and leaving out Western country interventions, so that we have only locals fighting each other, there have been wars involving Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia/Eritrea, Somalia - and that's just off the top of my head. Some of those countries have been involved in more than one war and some more than two. Mix in the conflicts at the edges of the Muslim world, with non-Muslims, and the number increases by an order of magnitude.
No, it's not satire, sadly. His prescriptions might be fatuous but his identification of an intractably pathology-wracked region is spot on.
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