CANBERRA –

Looking at Iraq, Libya and Syria together, it seems safe to conclude that Saddam Hussein, Moammar Gadhafi and Hafez Assad were, and Bashar Assad is, the lids on their respective pots of sectarian tensions that boil over into large-scale violence, killings and displacement if the lid is removed. The uprisings of 2011 by the end of 2015 had produced more autocracy in some Gulf states, a return to military dictatorship in Egypt, anarchy in Libya and a brutal civil war in Syria. Velvet revolutions they were not. The "Arab Spring" darkened into the Islamist Winter and then the restoration of the authoritarian state as it failed to make the transition from the politics of street protests to the politics of democratic good governance.

These perverse mutations are on top of the catastrophic consequences of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The desperate majorities that had fervently prayed for and welcomed the end of Saddam and Gadhafi grew equally disenchanted with the corrupt, sectarian and dysfunctional governments that followed, without the capacity to provide order, ensure public safety, deliver social services, keep Islamist extremism and sectarian hatreds in check and protect minorities.

Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya have stopped functioning as sovereign states. The entire region is consumed by Sunni-Shiite rivalry, jihadist movements fighting by all means necessary to overthrow existing political structures, internal conflicts in every country between fractured religious and tribal groups that starkly highlight the artificiality of "national" borders drawn to imperial convenience during the colonial era, and the accumulating pathologies of bad governance. As noted by Henry Kissinger in a Wall Street Journal article on Oct. 17, the mutually reinforcing trends to instability are compounded by the U.S. retreat from the region producing a "geopolitical shambles" of the Middle East order underwritten by the U.S. since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.