A couple of new books on the Middle East are informative and, of course, a little scary. The first, and most scary, is Unintended Consequences: How War In Iraq Strengthened America’s Enemies by Peter W. Galbraith. A harsh critic of the Iraq war, Galbraith — a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia and currently a senior diplomatic fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation — argues here in great detail about how the Bush administration planned and executed a poor strategy to bring democracy to the Middle East. Among the administration’s many faults, he claims Bush handed Iran its “greatest strategic triumph in four centuries,” that it now supports an Islamic regime in Iraq as bad as the one in Iran, and that both North Korea and Iran amassed weapons while the Bush Administration concentrated on Iraq. Depressing.

On a comparatively lighter note — but heavy by almost every other standard — Robert Baer offers The Devil We Know: Dealing With The New Iranian Superpower. Baer, who also wrote Sleeping With The Devil, has some dire predictions of his own, including a belief that Russia will be pushed to be allies with Iran over the flap involving the invasion of Georgia. He says we will have to ally with one or the other country, because we cannot beat both at once. He also predicts that the Iraqi civil war will continue.

Actually, now that I’ve written that, it’s just about as depressing as the first book, isn’t it?