"The civil war in Syria may well be the last act in the story of the disintegration of the Middle East as we know it," Condoleezza Rice, who was US secretary of state under George W Bush, writes in an article for the Washington Post.

Considering that when Rice was in charge of the State Department she advocated "creative chaos" as the way forward for the region and famously hailed Israel's pointless bombing of Lebanon in 2006 as "the birth pangs of a new Middle East", she might be expected to welcome the end of "the Middle East as we know it". But apparently not.

Judging by the article, though, it's not so much the chaos that bothers Rice as the fact that the US is not more heavily involved in shaping it. The US, she says, is "leaving this to regional powers, whose interests are not identical to ours" and – horror of horrors – there's a risk that "Iran will win". Iran, she says (evoking memories of the Cold War), is the new Karl Marx calling on the workers of the world – or, in this case, the Shia of the world – to unite across national boundaries. 

Rice's article is a rather confused mish-mash but, if I've understood her argument correctly, she claims that almost all the Arab states are fragile and that Iran is bent on reshaping them – "destroying the integrity of Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Lebanon" – using Syria as "the bridge".

She points out, correctly, that most of the Arab states are modern constructs, "created by the British and the French ... often without regard for ethnic and sectarian differences". They have been "held together for decades by monarchs and dictators", she says, and the danger now is that these "artificial states could fly apart".

There are certainly internal challenges of religion and ethnicity but Arab states are not unique in that respect. States, by definition, are human creations and in a sense they are all "artificial". There are also very few states, anywhere in the world (including the US), that can be considered ethnically and religiously homogenous – and most of them get by without the need for monarchs and dictators to hold them together.

Rice notes that the region's Kurds are "tempted by the hope of independent nationhood" and that these national aspirations could affect the territorial integrity of Turkey and Syria. She omits to mention that Iran also has a significant Kurdish population, and fails to explain why Iran – if the Kurds achieved statehood – would not be affected in a similar way. But maybe that would spoil her argument.

Rice's scaremongering about Iran is of course deeply ironic. In recent years, nobody did more to enhance Iran's influence in the region than the Bush administration (accidentally) through its invasion of Iraq in 2003. Ditto ethnic and sectarian tensions. But she brushes all that off by saying:

"In Iraq, after overthrowing Saddam Hussein, the United States hoped that a fledging multi-ethnic, multi-confessional democracy could do what authoritarians could not: give all of these groups a stake in a common future. To an extent it has, with elections repeatedly producing inclusive governments."

Never mind the years of sectarian bloodshed unleashed by the United States upon Iraq; according to Rice we should now be worried about the effect Syria is having on it. Iraq's "young and fragile" institutions are "groaning under the weight of the region’s broader sectarian explosion". 

"The conflict in Syria is pushing Iraq and others to the breaking point," she says.