So you're still saying that Saddam was the West's fault? Most of the problems in the Mid East (ultimately stemming from bad governance, IMO) are the West's fault?
I think there's still some important stuff to be extracted from all this. After the weekend, perhaps.
Not entirely so of course. And the blame game is a slippery one to play with the contingent nature of history as it evolves across centuries. But Iran can be put firmly at the feet of America, surely? To fix the problem of democracy in a time of soviet expansion (and the nationalisation of UK controlled oil technology) they install the Shah, eventually to be overthrown by a theocratic dictatorship? There are many elements in play here, but the significant role of meddling cannot be entirely disavowed even by you Vim.
Even without total blame, it is clear that short-term cack-handed interventions (economic, diplomatic, regime change and full scale military) lead over time to only a radicalisation of anti-Western forces at work in the developing world, and at present a tendency to merge liberation struggle with the most regressive strains of political Islamism. Subtracting any bias for or against, merely at the level of self interest for the UK and USA they have to learn from these errors, see how the forces they set in motion work out. Also see South America- the rise of left wing indigenous socialism therein is clearly traceable back to a reaction against the American led economic interventions of the 70s onwards. So
from the western governmental perspective lessons need to be learnt, surely?
The role of the 3rd world individual as political subject is important, and it is a valid point that you raise in emphasising their own agency, and the possibility of falling into a Westernocentric racist viewpoint of identifying them only as primitive deterministic puppets of more sophisticated and advanced nations. But the exocentric pressures put onto previously extant situations as rupture in the nature of their original indigenous political situation cannot merely be brushed aside. Indeed what is clear is that such interventions are the product of states with a naive sense of their own power, and that in the face of the realities of the complexities of the societies they shatter open with such attempts such a superiority complex is endlessly challenged.