The Middle East is idealism’s graveyard. The last three presidents focused to a large degree on reforming and remaking the region, and each came to grief in his own way. Bill Clinton’s attempt at a grand bargain between Israel and Palestine dissolved into the Second Intifada; George Bush’s freedom agenda met the blood-red streets of Fallujah and Tal Afar and an insurgency overcome only by the military offensives of the surge and Maliki’s iron-fisted rule; and Barack Obama arrived in the presidency believing in the power of his own personality but now faces a chaotic Middle East under ever-greater Muslim Brotherhood and Iranian influence. Enough with the idealism.  [Read more...]