Overthrowing oppressive regimes by military force

[Minimalist]

In his conclusion of "And Then All Hell Broke Loose" NBC correspondent Richard Engel, after cataloging the catastrophes which have led us to the point we are at, writes:

I can only guess what will happen next. I suspect that over the next several years, we’ll see strongmen back in power in all or most Middle East countries. Out of the chaos, new dictators will offer themselves as an alternative to the horrors of ISIS, the Sunni-Shia bloodshed, Turkish-Kurdish enmity, and Arab-Persian proxy wars. Once in power, the new dictators—the ones to establish a new status quo—will likely be worse than the old strongmen because they’ll be able to use new technologies to identify and hunt down their enemies by their digital fingerprints. They will have the ability to point to the ugliness of recent history as a justification for taking their citizens’ rights. “Give me your freedoms unless you want to return to the way things were,” they might say.

But these would-be strongmen face a difficult path ahead. Many dictators will try to assert themselves. Not all will survive. The chaos that has been unleashed by the breaking of the old status quo won’t easily be contained. ISIS supporters will fight to the death to retain the foothold they’ve taken for themselves. A lot of killing remains to be done before leaders of stature emerge—and before the fires of chaos are tamped down once again.

We'll see how long it takes...and how many have to die...before we get back to the only status quo which has a chance of working in that shithole.  Too bad Bush didn't stop to think.