Why Is The Middle East So Volatile?

How did we get here? Why is there so much strife in the Middle East? Why are there so many deadly competing cultural, national, political and economic interests there? What is the history behind it all? How can we understand it all without spending years and years becoming becoming scholars of Comparative Religion or Historians?

There is no easy way of course, but the following two 90 second animated Flash maps, courtesy of Maps Of War, can help to give us a good nutshell summary of answers to questions that have perplexed and caused untold misery and death for centuries.

It helps to visualize all that history from an "80,000 foot view" to understand what happened without getting buried by the details of years of history study.

Hint: Hover your mouse pointer over the dates above and below the yellow bar in the first one. There are pop up descriptive balloons.