Patrick Cockburn is a Middle East correspondent for the Independent of London and the author of five books on the Middle East, the latest of which is Chaos and Caliphate: Jihadis and the West in the Struggle for the Middle East (OR Books).
On the tenth anniversary of the US invasion, the country is mired in a permanent crisis of sectarian violence, pervasive corruption and broken infrastructure.
What are the new rules of the political game in the Middle East? Nobody knows, but Marc Lynch’s The Arab Uprising is a useful guide.