BAGHDAD — With the attacks in Paris and the downing of a Russian passenger plane, the Islamic State has declared war on the wider world, galvanizing new calls for an intensified global effort to defeat the emerging threat. It may already be too late and too difficult, however, for any swift or easy solution to the tangled mess the Middle East has become in the four years since the Arab Spring plunged the region into turmoil. What Jordan's King Abdullah II referred to as a "third world war against humanity" has, more accurately, become a jumble of overlapping wars driven by conflicting agendas in which defeating the Islamic State is just one of a number of competing and often...
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