Good stuff Paul... as usual, more objective and entertaining than the editorial pages in my state's newspapers.
I would however beg to differ on the assessment that the first gulf war was a 'success '. (Saddam Hussein still in power, no-fly zones etc.). More like a 12 year rain delay with the U.S./coalition ahead by several runs at the break, followed by a limited victory which devolved in to a tragic quagmire.
JMO of course.
One major area missing is India Pakistan. Both a big countries with territorial claim a inn the other. Both have a large young population and although democratic, demagoguery is not far off.
I'll deal with both of you in this post as I see them similar in kind though not in detail, well in the same category anyway.
The whole Israel, Iraq, Syria, Palestine and India-Pakistan I see as similar. Those disputes are primarily territorial like W & C Europe used to be. Indeed C Africa is similar. You had the arbitrary carve up of land by folks with maps, rulers and pens regardless of any proto-national aspirations of the inhabitants. By proto-nation I mean any group within a roughly contiguous area that have one or many things in common, like ethnicity, language(s), religion, economic basics (eg pastoralist vs sedentary agriculture), anyway enough that those people feel some solid and workable kinship, it doesn't need to correspond to a state. W & C Europe had that problem too prior to '45, Germans in Poland, Poles in current Belarus, etc. In many, possibly most for all I know, of those post-colonial states, there might not be any one proto-nation in the majority, just a collection of small proto-nations, a third of this, a quarter of that, a quarter of the other and the rest a mix of everything and anything.
Both India and Pakistan while far from homogeneous themselves were more homogeneous than many ex-colonial states, Their clash is mainly over Kashmir which had a pro-India ruler over a pro-Pa population and he initially considered an independent state but eventually went for In. The whole India partition was quite bloody and Kashmir was no exception. Pa irregulars backed by Pa managed to grab about 1/3, China a 1/5 (mostly uninhabited) and In the rest. Personally I don't like Pa as a state but feel that In shafted Pa despite the wishes of the Kashmiris. India has pursued a policy of slow Indianisation in Kashmir to consolidate it's control. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmir_conflict which is much better than my simplification.
I see In-Pa as being like when Turkey relinquished effective control over Bosnia in 1878. The Austro-Hungarian Empire grabbed that to stymie/limit Slavic nationalism. As the AHE had large numbers of Western Slavs (Poles, Czechs, Slovaks), Eastern Slavs (Ukrainians) and Southern Slavs (Croats) under its thumb a strong Southern Slav (=Yugoslav) Serbia could be the focus of Pan-Slavism and thus a threat. In both cases the the issues are inhabitants and their land with resources trailing.
The old Ottoman ME got divided between England and France and they either accepted the outcomes of local struggles and the victorious strongmen as independent states (like Saudi Arabia) or semi-independent protectorates (eg Trans-Jordan, Iraq). While Saudi Arabia might at that time have had some sense of national identity the limits of such states were as far as a particular leader could conquer while not stepping upon English or French toes. The only common thing they all had is that they were not Turkish. Identities were tribal, religious and personal to leaders, not national in the European sense.
After '45 there was the hope that those states would become nations, I suppose on the basis of "this is it, get on with each other and learn to like it". The secular Arab Nationalism of the '50s-'70s did offer some hope but was not yet deep rooted enough to succeed. The anti-monarchial coups ended up devolving from at least semi-democratic governments to cabals to nasty dictatorships. Political ideologies are like religious ideologies, they take a long time to really take root, reversions to prior ideologies occur. The English took centuries to develop into a mass based parliamentary system, the French had a century of swinging back and forth between limited democracy, monarchy, imperial systems and finally mass democracy. So no surprise that many ex-colonies have had similar advances and reversions.
Iraq is a state that has not evolved into a nation. Unlike Europe in the 1900s, it had limited alliances (mainly anti-Israel) with its neighbours. So when it went against Iran and later Kuwait there was little risk of it dragging others in. So the 1st Iraq war could and indeed did limit its aim in restoring the former borders and limiting Iraq's military. That it did do, quite well. It was not only sufficient for the West, it avoided destabilising Iraq itself. The West at the time had the sense to realise that the main glue in Iraq was Saddam. He was an evil bastard, absolutely no doubt about that, but the Western leaders of the time recognised that the breakup of Iraq would unleash hell in the region. Subsequent events proved them dead right. They put the beast back in his cage and made sure the cage stayed intact. That is why I regard 1st Iraq as a success. Post 1st Iraq is where mistakes were made. The West had a choice between keeping Iraq as one country and letting Saddam deal with all internal issues or break up Iraq into a Kurdish north and divide the rest between Sunni and Shia. Instead it tried to limit Saddam's internal control and that required keeping forces in neighbouring countries which in turn built up resentment in people who formed Al-Qaeda and similar. Half measures! I suppose a bit like hiring a plumber, who never leaves. 9/11. 2nd Iraq not only killed the beast but broke the cage and unleashed the plague rats that were fairly contained under the beast's feet. It was not only a military quagmire but a political disaster.
So I see the ME and In-Pa as similar in that the involvement of additional parties is quite limited and mainly local and involve land and population acquisitions as their goal, quite like pre-'45 Europe. Post '45 Europe potential war was defensive in origin on both sides. Both sides were quite happy to maintain the '45 division and saw the other starting it. In-Pa has a similar technical problem to NATO-WP though in that the presence of nuclear weapons means that decision time can be reduced to minutes and the consequences of mistakes can be utterly catastrophic.
Now all the above is generalised and utterly simplified but that's my take on things, just my take.