You are right, but the big difference was that Bush started the whole thing and Obama inherited Iraq after it was already a giant mess. We can't be expected to stay there forever, and Bush never planed for any exit strategy or thought any of this out in advance. He didn't think about the negative effects of disbanding the Iraqi army, which is one of the big factors that destabilized the country and turned it into the insurgency. It was pretty much damned if you do, damned if you don't for Obama. One of Obama's big campaign promises was to withdrawal troops from Iraq. If he didn't do this, he would have been very heavily criticized and called a hypocrite by the opposition. There is no way to win that situation. Either we pull out and cut our losses, or we stay there for another 10-20 years with a giant bulleye on our backs. Unfortunately that region is so unstable now, and countries like Iran have become more powerful because Iraq no longer has any influence in the region. Essentially we created a bigger threat in that region by taking out a regime that was barely a threat in the first place. Huge mistake, and huge waste of money, resources and American lives.
Once you've utterly destroyed all of the institutions necessary for a civil society to operate, you really can't just throw your hands in the air and tell the newly vulnerable populace to "try building something."
They never had "civil institutions." We don't target places of prayer, if a mosque was destroyed it was by accident. We trained and built police forces for them. We equipped them with 21st century military technology. We helped them through at least 2 democratic style elections. I'm sure we gave billions in funding to support the birth of their new government. We sent our top military and diplomatic aids and advisers to help. We gave them freedom from Saddam monarch. We killed a shit ton of terrorist. Before we left the country was somewhat "stable". After we left, they gave up all the military equipment with out even a attempt to defend and fight. Obviously, their leadership and govt is completely corrupted. And we are suppose to go back now and help them rid themselves of Isis, why? Send funding so some other asshole Islamic extremist props up It's not humanitarian crisis, it's constant call for aid/funding and empty threats from shit heads like the Saul of Saudi of imminent attacks if we don't help.
None of this is inaccurate, JV, but its really besides the point. We effectively terminated all effective organs of governance in Iraq. Because they were essentially dominated by Baathists who may have had loyalties to Saddam. The military, the judiciary, the civil service, the whole fucking shooting match. Whether or not that was a wise thing to do is very questionable in any circumstance in my opinion, but once we did it, we assumed some obligation for the resulting chaos. Kill all the grass in your yard and you have to expect weeds to grow up in their place. If you are going to remove all the institutions necessary for a functioning society and purport to rebuild them from ground zero, you need to be committed to going whole hog and being in for the long haul. We never were and still aren't. I'm as frustrated as you about the whole goddamn mess, believe me. I just feel as an American I'm responsible for the damage my country inflicts elsewhere.
America is wounded from Iraq, two fronts and about every other world interest we engage ourselves with (the entire pacific, Russia, Mexico and S. America obvsiously Afghan and Iraq, Syria, Israel and Isis). I feel as an American there is a point at which you must weigh how much more you can help someone against further hurting yourself. I don't feel as responsible as you do for Iraqs problems. At some point the nation has to address it for themselves. I'm done with Iraq, we spent enough young blood and money. Help from above in the skies, test new technology, protect our embassy, and stop sending weapons and aid to fictitious "friends". To be great, we cannot lead on every front.
Its not worth going back, Iraq is practically unfixable. The only solution would be to deprogram every brainwashed citizen in Iraq which is virtually impossible, and would take generations to do so.
I'm with you on this. There's no reason to be burning money on something that nets us absolutely nothing. We destroyed much of their semblance of civility but it's not like it was all that civil and run effectively anyway. We didn't do this to a first world country lime England where everything was fine and then we ruined it. And I'm not defending anything we did there as it's stupid to be even bother with any of these countries. The fact of the matter is if we were to actually be serious about reforming this country we'd have to send some ridiculous amount of troops 50,000-100k and stay there for the next decade. They wouldn't like that and it'd be a waste of our man power and lives we would lose from terrorist attacks within the country itself. Keeping 5,000 troops just leaves us available for a bunch of them to die while they're virtually fighting for nothing. It's time to cut our losses with the middle east in general. Let them try to cut us off from oil and watch their entire economy crumble until there's even more civil war all over the region. I really can't understand our concern with trying to fix middle easter states that hate us while 1 in 6 Americans are going hungry and millions live in poverty. But yeah let's dump hundreds of millions of dollars into Iraq so they can hate us in 15 years when we point the finger at them for having weapons and George Bush III wants to avenge his father AND grandfather.
You know and I know, USA will never leave the Middle East. We should, but we won't. There's fundamentally something wrong with that region of the world. There's no growth there, and there never will be. I can't/won't blame USA for that.
The Middle East is a gigantic desert with oil underneath it. That's why things are as crazy as they are. Two and a half millennia of 2-20x as many people as the environment naturally supports will do that to a region. It wasn't always like that. It was one of the first areas where a major human population explosion occurred and there were no real rules for preserving the environment 2,500 years ago. Kings did what Kings will do and milked the land for what it was worth. The common people got herded into ever smaller areas, becoming a filthy, ragged swarm of humanity in the process. Cities are great for the powerful but until recently they were death traps for everybody else and the Middle East specialized in cities at a time when most people elsewhere lived in small nomadic bands or villages situated near enough water and food to maintain the population. Scarcity and overpopulation always creates extreme conflict.
Corruption in the USA is a joke compared to the corruption in the Middle East. So much funding goes to evil; the ppl there can't/won't think for themselves. I believe a lot of good Americans have gone over there to help. There are just too many fronts. How do we lead on every front?
Give us 2300 more years and we will make the current Middle East look like a paradise. It's just entropy in human culture that is at work in the Middle East right now. Where are things more screwed up than the Middle East? Central Africa, which is the only place that has had large human populations struggling over scarce resources for longer.
Dennis Rodman Leaves US To Talk With Leaders Of ISIS Los Angeles, CA — With only a handful of reporters present on Monday at the Los Angeles International Airport, Dennis Rodman announced his intentions to leave the United States to speak with leaders of ISIS face to face. “I know a lot of people won’t understand what I’m doing, but it’s my decision,” Rodman told reporters. “I think if I could just talk with the leaders of ISIS they would see the errors of their ways.” http://nationalreport.net/dennis-rodman-isis/ yikes!!!! this is going to end very badly
so now we're going to arm and train syrian rebels to fight them. isn't this exactly what created this shit to begin with?
Not to mention the Syrian rebels are the ones helping ISIS get these Westerners. They have also fired on UN Peacekeepers. It's Assad's people helping the UN Peacekeepers.
All the better to use the armed rebels as an excuse to invade Syria 10 years from now when they discover new natural gas sources.
We have choices to make here. 1. We can support Iran's proxy in Iraq. This will strengthen Iran and weaken everybody else in the region. Of course we set these guys up in the first place so picking option 1 would at least be consistent. 2. We can support Russia's client in Syria. This will maintain Russia's influence in the region while weakening our own. We're still going to be more influential than the Russians but everybody in the middle East is going to be snickering behind their hands if we choose this option because the US obviously does not understand that the enemy of my enemy is my friend but he will surely cut my throat if I turn my back on him for even a split-second. 3. We can support the anti-Assad rebels in Syria who often appear to be indistinguishable from ISIS or Al-Qaida when you really drill down and look at things. It's true that there are many rebel groups that are not related to ISIS or Al-Qaida, however those groups are all weak and ineffective, which is why ISIS has become the powerhouse it is. This is how the US founded Al-Qaida so many years ago although historians will argue that we had no intentions of doing this while everybody in the Middle East snickers behind their hands because the US obviously does not understand that the enemy of my enemy is my friend but he will surely cut my throat if I turn my back on him for even a split-second. 4. We can realign and support the Sunni tribes in Iraq who were so effective for us during the surge. These guys are almost all ISIS-related at this point because they hate the guys in 1 above. On the other hand they're effective and they dumped Al-Qaida for us once when we helped them take their home provinces back under their control. This will have everybody in the Middle East snickering behind their hands because the Sunni tribes obviously do not understand the principle of fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. Oh and they'll be double-snickering because the US obviously does not understand that the enemy of my enemy is my friend but he will surely cut my throat if I turn my back on him for even a split-second. 5. We can basically throw up our hands and do nothing. While this is both the wisest and likely most effective way of engaging in Middle Eastern warfare the Republicans will use the opportunity to savage the administration and try to make political hay out of it. This effort to politicize foreign policy is probably the least effective thing the Republicans have done from a national perspective since they tried so hard to keep us out of WWII. Nonetheless they're still doing it for some reason. They'll do it again. 6. We can start back-channeling communications between the Saudis and the Iranians, both of whom stand to lose big time if ISIS really succeeds at whatever they're trying to build in the Syrian desert. We can let them know that we're not going to be able to effectively fight ISIS this time around because the 2016 election will result in anybody supporting US troop involvement in the conflict losing by a landslide. We can suggest to them that the enemy of my enemy is my friend and ISIS is clearly the enemy of both regimes. This is an extremely dangerous course to take because if the Saudis and Iranians are ever on the same page on anything Israel is the likely next target of their agreement. However this is the one scenario where we would get to snicker behind our hand because the Saudis and the Iranians obviously do not understand that the enemy of my enemy is my friend but he will surely cut my throat if I turn my back on him for even a split-second. I'd go for option 5. But I'm betting we do all of 1 to 4 and god help us.
