How I spawned an alt-left conspiracy theory about crazy Islamists

Any yet here we are. According to Lazare, the publication of "Two Cheers" was a watershed moment. "This kind of self-centered moral calculus would not have mattered had Gambill only spoken for himself," he writes. "But he didn't. Rather, he was expressing the viewpoint of Official Washington in general, which is why the ultra-respectable FP ran his piece in the first place." Why Foreign Policy invited me to write on Syria during the early years of the civil war is indeed mystifying, but it certainly wasn't because I spoke for anyone.

While acknowledging that I "didn't distort the facts or make stuff up in any obvious way," Lazare claims that my "disastrous thinking" led the Obama administration - that's right - to secretly wage a brutal "sectarian offensive" against Iranian-backed forces in Syria, at the height of its delicate negotiations with Tehran over the fate of its nuclear arsenal, in which some 400,000 are believed to have died.

"[I]nstead of advancing U.S. policy goals, Gambill helped do the opposite," Lazare concludes. "The Middle East is more explosive than ever while U.S. influence has fallen to sub-basement levels. Iranian influence now extends from the Arabian Sea to the Mediterranean."

Fortunately, the alt-left claim that I broke the Middle East seems pretty harmless. While a series of articles accusing me of conspiring against jihadists would have scared the daylights out of me (they've murdered plenty of Westerners accused of far less), I'm pretty confident that Assad regime assassins aren't going to whack me without first verifying that I'm not, you know, just some guy who wrote an article.