With this latest round of our retaliation, for their retaliation, against our ships, in response to the war, in a completely different country, that resulted from the terrorist action, that arose from pre-existing treatment, that is the residual of long-standing conflict … I’m just having a hard time keeping the basic details straight.
I guess what finally set me off is that I have no clue who the Houthis are, why they hate us, and so on. And after reading up on it, and honestly trying to grasp what the deal was, all I could think was, it just doesn’t matter. You could basically do the entire Middle East as a Mad Libs, and it would make just as much sense. And, apparently, even serious scholars sometimes despair that US Middle East policy is just one big, long Mad Libs (e.g., reference).
The current situation is unexceptional. It’s just the way the world works.
Source: Vox, 600 Year of War and Peace, by Zack Beauchamp. Note that deaths is on a log scale on this chart, which flattens the peaks quite a bit.
Source: Our World in Data, War and Peace, by Bastian Herre, Lucas Rodés-Guirao, Max Roser, Joe Hasell and Bobbie Macdonald
Source: Our World in Data.
