The question of whether the current chaos in the Arab world can be captured in a single journalistic piece is thus answered: it can. Scott Anderson does it brilliantly. This is the most insightful, powerful, and human explanation of what has happened in the region that you will ever read. Sometimes the course of human history flows slowly, and sometimes it moves very quickly. This sentence was articulated by Muammar al-Gaddafi to Scott Anderson in 2002. Indeed, history in the Middle East has been tumultuous since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003: the Arab Spring in 2011 sparked hopes, but soon countries like Syria and Iraq descended into chaos, from which the Islamic State benefited. Millions of people fled Syria to neighboring countries and to Europe.