What You Mean, "They", White Man?

"They've been at war over there for hundreds of years". You hear that often enough, as an excuse for not taking a position on the present condition of the Middle East. Sometimes it's even "thousands of years".

Now it's certainly true that since its founding, Israel has seen five wars and sixty years of intermittent terrorism, and that before that Jewish immigrants to Palestine suffered (and engaged in) further decades of violence. And of course it's true that the modern borders of the Middle East were drawn in the aftermath of a vast and terrible war that had seen the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, in ways that seem almost calculated to cause further wars.

But is it really fair to describe the Middle East as some sort of cesspool of perpetual warfare? Has the region been at war for more years out of the past hundred, or five hundred, or five thousand, than, say, Germany, or Central America? I don't think history shows any such thing, and I think that to say so is simply to counsel despair.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "What is said a thousand times may still be false."\\