The US + gang have been in wars in the Middle East the last 17 years. WHY?

Check out the chart below to see which country has been bombed the most often the last seven years (and maybe even from earlier  on pretext of going after terrorists fleeing Iraq and into Syria), whether directly from above its skies or from Iraq or other neighbouring countries, and you will surmise that the powers-that-be have been doing nothing but going intensely after ISRAEL's arch enemy, SYRIA.  Go to link below for the whole gory tale.  One would have thought that the last 17 years of US+gang's wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, most of their WMDs would have polluted the grounds of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya .... but you would have guessed wrong.  The country they have been poisoning the most is Syria.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J S Davies
Bring the Troops Home But also Stop the Bombing
 
As our nation debates the merits of President Donald Trump’s call for withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan, absent from the debate is the more pernicious aspect of US military involvement overseas: its air wars. Trump’s announcement and General James Mattis’ resignation should unleash a national discussion about US involvement in overseas conflicts, but no evaluation can be meaningful without a clear understanding of the violence that US air wars have unleashed on the rest of the world for the past 17 years.
By our calculations, in this “war on terror,” the US and its allies have dropped a staggering 291,880 bombs and missiles on other countries – and that is just a minimum number of confirmed strikes.
As we contemplate that overwhelming number, let’s keep in mind that these strikes represent lives snuffed out, people maimed for life, families torn apart, homes and infrastructure demolished, taxpayer money squandered, and resentment that only engenders more violence.
After the horrific crimes of September 11, 2001, Congress was quick to pass a sweeping Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). While three presidents have claimed that the 2001 AUMF legally justifies these endless wars as a response to the crimes of 9/11, no serious reading of the authorization could interpret it that way. What it actually says is:
That the president is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.
As former Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz told NPR a week after 9/11: “It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done… We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don’t believe in what has happened, who don’t approve of what has happened.”
And yet here we are, 17 years later, mired in wars in which we are bombing ever more “nations, organizations, (and) persons” who had absolutely nothing to do with the crimes committed on September 11. We don’t have a single real or lasting success we can point to in 17 years of war in 7 countries and “counterinsurgency” operations in a dozen more. Every country the US has attacked or invaded remains trapped in intractable violence and chaos.
Please look at this chart, and take a few moments to reflect on the mass destruction it represents: