“Just when I thought I was out,” Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone says in The Godfather Part III, “they pull me back in.” For the United States and the Middle East, it’s a familiar feeling. The U.S. once again finds itself at war in a part of the world that some historians have called a “labyrinth.” 

On Feb. 28, the U.S. and Israel carried out military strikes, code-named Operation Epic Fury, against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Americans are no strangers to warfare in the Middle East. Indeed, it has been the chief theater of U.S. military operations for much of the U.S.’s post-Cold War existence.