Robert Malley sums up the Middle East on Fresh Air

NPR's Fresh Air recently aired a highly informative interview with Robert Malley, the program director for the Middle East and North Africa with the International Crisis Group, who gave an excellent overview of the current state of affiars in the Middle East.

Basically, the entire region is a mess, and the US is throughly tangled up in it.

Here's a sample:

The United States government is very close to the Iraqi government. The Iraqi government is aligned with Iran, and also is helping the regime in Syria, which we are hoping to topple.

We are in the same trenches, if you will, as Saudi Arabia and Qatar in trying to support the opposition against the Syrian regime, even though they're supporting the Salafists (or some of them are supporting the Salafists) who are killing Americans elsewhere.

We're also in the same trenches as Qatar [and] as Turkey, who are backing Hamas, who is at war with Israel, who we're supporting.

You have an organization like Hezbollah, the Shiite organization in Lebanon, which is backing the regime in Syria, even though its former ally in this 'Axis of Resistance' against Israel, Hamas, is opposing the regime.

So I think the fault lines have become slightly clearer, although they're not fault lines between democrats and non-democrats, although many Syrians are rising up because they want to change the nature of the regime. The fault line is very much Sunni against Shiite, it's Persian-Iranian against Arabs.

The region has become really a smorgasbord in terms of its alliances, and there's something that seems very unnatural, and [...] something this unnatural just can't end well, becasue these alliances are not clear-cut, they don't make sense in terms of the political logic.

They are temporary alliances, they are alliances of convenience, and in the case of Syria, it has transformed what really was at the beginning an uprising similar to what we've seen elsewhere (based on social, political, economic issues) but it has hijacked it to some degree and turned it into a proxy war between Iran and its allies on the one hand, Saudi Arabia and its allies on the other, and then of course [...] there's also a cold war that's superimposed upon it, with the Russians on one side, the side of the regime, and us United States on the other side, the side of the opposition.

You can listen to the entire interview on NPR's website.