Max Fisher: …the idea that Middle East conflicts “date back millennia” is straight-up factually wrong. The Middle East’s conflicts almost all date to within the past century, and many have their roots within Obama’s own lifetime.
For example, most scholars date the start of today’s Sunni-Shia sectarian conflict not to the seventh century but rather to various events from 1979 onward. Islamist extremism is mostly a modern revisionist phenomenon that is a reaction to specific modern-day events such as the Arab-Israeli conflicts and the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And so on. But Obama’s line was worse than incorrect. It risked perpetuating the widespread “ancient hatreds” myth that feeds two dangerous and mistaken beliefs about the Middle East:
1) that these people just hate each other because that’s how they are “over there,” and
2) that the problems run so deep that they can’t be solved and we shouldn’t bother trying. It’s reductive and cynical because it paints a picture of the Middle East as perpetually at war because people there are just different. More here.