In the early-to-mid 2010s, a very strange debate broke out within the American left, the left-left, the supposedly anti-imperialist left. The debate was about Syria.
During the broad and vague period colloquially referred to as the Arab Spring, a revolt broke out against the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Assad had long been one of the world’s crueler autocrats, although as is the case of almost all non-denominational dictators, there was a period in which the Assad regime was convenient for the United States and its intelligence community. But as part of a sweeping regional freedom movement that ultimately resulted in little additional freedom, the Syrian establishment government was subject to a serious internal armed resistance that quickly gained ground and seriously threatened to take power. This got a lot of “liberal interventionist” types hard; Samantha Power, who has more blood on her hands than Vlad the Impaler, was a prominent (and shameless) proponent of using American power to topple the Syrian regime. Unfortunately for the neo-neocons, the situation in Syria was irreducibly complex, with the relative size of “the good guys” - that is, good little Westernized forces that were fundamentally motivated by f-f-freedom - compared to other factions a matter of constant debate. And this was an important debate! Because the non-freedom-loving rebels were mostly motivated by the exact flavor of Islamic fundamentalist jihadism that the United States had spent so much blood and treasure fighting after 9/11. This was awkward, and also the Kurds got involved, which ensured that Turkey did too, and the Turks are among the most capable and ambitious shapers of the entire Greater Middle East…. What a mess.
The American experience in the Middle East, in my lifetime, has been a matter of a lot of big-idea types trying to impress their big ideas onto the region, and finding that what they thought was simple was not. Like the fundamental cludgy nature of the concept of the Arab Spring itself - a Western idea of freedom imposed on a set of intensely local internal resistance movements in a region notorious for the immense complexity of its preexisting sectarian conflicts.