THE Middle East has seldom been more confusing. Not only is the region more politically turbulent than in decades, with old certainties everywhere challenged by unexpected twists and shifting alliances. The volume of news has swollen, too. New media and new freedoms generate more and more information and a wider range of views, yet this is filtered through ever more kaleidoscopic prisms of cant, wishful thinking, prejudice, deliberate disinformation and propaganda. If only the picture could be clearer and more simple, sigh the region's people. If only there were some overarching narrative to explain the one big, pressing question: why are we in such a mess? According to many in Egypt, there is. The story goes something like this. Western powers, led by America, are realising their long-held aim of dividing and weakening the Arab and Muslim worlds.

The first phase of this plan—so the theory goes—unfolded in Iraq, where the Americans achieved a double purpose. They destroyed a powerful Arab army and ignited a civil war, driving a wedge between Sunnis and Shias that has sent fissures streaking across the region. Western meddling also broke Sudan in half, detaching a freshly hatched and hostile new state in the south from the Arab and Muslim north.

Phase two came with Western funding of revolutionary movements made up of internet activists, NGOs and human rights agitators, whose seditious scheming helped spawn the Arab spring. As Arab regimes toppled helter-skelter, Western powers swept in to magnify the disorder.

In Libya, NATO bombs obliterated another Arab army, even as Western arms fed the competing militias which have carved up what was left of the Libyan state.

The plan for Syria was different, but equally devastating. Western powers encouraged its people to revolt, but instead of promoting victory over the regime they have drip-fed the opposition with just enough ammunition to sustain a ghastly civil war. The result has been the destruction of yet another Arab army, the creation of a crippling humanitarian disaster, the deepening of sectarian schisms and the evisceration of another Arab country.

The ultimate target of this plot, so the conspiracy theorists explain, is Egypt itself, the Arabs' most populous, strategic and culturally influential Arab state. Having achieved the fall of Hosni Mubarak in the revolution of 2011, Western agents fomented strife between Muslims and Christians. Secretly, America formed an alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood in the hope that once in power, the Brothers would subdue Egypt's army. Indeed, the Americans planned to use the Brothers as a spearhead across the region, undermining governments and curtailing intellectual, scientific and economic progress everywhere.

But in June of this year the Egyptian people rose up to fend off this plot by overthrowing President Muhammad Morsi and his cabal of Brotherhood plotters. Now, under army leadership and with the backing of wealthy Arab allies in the Gulf, Egypt will lead a revival of Arab power.

Among subscribers to this vast conspiracy theory, views vary, particularly regarding Western motives. For some it is obviously all about Israel, with its Western allies simply picking off its potential Arab challengers, one by one. But some see America itself as the prime conspirator, whose objective is to control the world.

This may all sound preposterous to most Westerners. Yet the very simplicity of the story makes it oddly appealing to people living amid wrenching political upheaval. In conversations with this correspondent, the gist or the whole of this unified theory of Middle Eastern conspiracies has been related credulously by a broad range of Egyptians, from the apocryphal taxi driver to highly paid financial risk consultants, from university students to tourism executives and government officials. Moreover, to judge by articles in Egyptian newspapers that are known to carry plants by security agencies or to derive from interviews with retired intelligence officers, conspiratorial views appear to permeate Egypt's state-security apparatus.

One irony among many is that, with the odd change in detail, this theory of an evil grand Western design is eerily familiar. It is nearly identical to the narrative of victimhood long purveyed by those now being hounded by those same police and intelligence officers—the Muslim Brothers and their Islamist fellow-travellers.