What many forget was the simple fact that there was an ongoing Salafist insurgency already in progress being bitterly fought between them and the ISS.
Yes we broke it as we literally walked into the middle of this insurgency totally not knowing about it which if left alone would have eventually led to Saddam being overthrown by his own not an outside force.
That Salafist insurgency bridged across both the Shia and Sunni sides and did not include AQI.
We don't know if those insurgents would have won. At the time the prevailing belief was that there was little imminent domestic threat to Saddam. Many of the prevailing beliefs of that time were of course later proven wrong.Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
It's always best if a dictator falls to an internal force, because if there's an internal force that's strong enough to topple the dictator, there's an internal force that has enough strength and credibility to at least try to rule. National liberation movements often rule badly, but at least there isn't a total power vacuum.
If a dictator is toppled by an outside force that does not intend to rule, it leaves a power vacuum. Various parties then contend to fill that vacuum. The contention is not generally very polite. If the outside force that toppled the dictator keeps forces around, the contention may be fairly muted for a while, but that's not going to last forever. Sooner or later the foreign force goes home and the contending parties duke it out for control of whatever they can grab, helped by whatever sponsors they can line up. I don't see how any of this is a surprise.
Last edited by Dayuhan; 08-08-2014 at 09:48 AM.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”
H.L. Mencken
I think Obama's instinct is that people should be left alone to take care of their own ####. But as president he still has to get into various half baked interventions (sort of worst of both worlds, because it was not well thought out, objectives are distorted by humanitarian posturing, planners are blind sided by genuine misconceptions about the nature of power and social organization... Or motivated by greed or other personal interests). Ideally the US should either understand it's worldcop /imperialist power role and execute it with clarity or it should butt out and let others sort things out without ham handed American interventions and payoffs to distort the playing field... Something like that
Last edited by omarali50; 08-08-2014 at 03:41 PM.
That could work if everyone followed that line of thinking. Obama is not smart enough to realise that applying this unilaterally a vacuum is created and the laws of physics apply.
Further to this comment...
In discussions in the Syria thread those who warned of spill-over into the region were shouted down by the usual crowd of 'smart-guys' who post here.
Now the spill-over is evident and serious they continue to post here as if nothing has changed and nothing has happened. Just like US foreign policy where cock-up after cock-up is made the Administration and Department of State carry on as if nothing has happened and that they are still the smartest guys in the room.
It is surely time for America to he humble... it is surely time for the US to take stock of where, how and why things have gone so badly wrong... and fix it.
IMHO the first in the order of business is to deal with intellectually arrogant people blunder on and refuse to take responsibility for the consequences of the trail of disaster they have left in their wake.
What we read here in SWC is just a mirror reflection of the greater US problem of indescribable arrogance.
I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone that said it wouldn't spread throughout the region, it is part of the larger Shia-Sunni conflict that at least rages from Pakistan to Lebanon. What several have asserted is there was little the U.S. could do "fix it." We lost our humility when we went into Iraq in a hubristic manner, and now that we have regained our humility you're arguing we should regain our hubris so we can fix a problem that has it roots running back over 600 years ago, and then further exasperated by the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916 where France and England drew some arbitrary lines on a map that were not sustainable.
If Sunnis and Shia want to kill each other, then let them, then maybe like the Christians did they'll tire of their religious war in time. I do agree we should help the minorities that desire help, which we're doing now a day late and a dollar short.
You're very quick to think America can fix all the world's problems. While we don't seem like it at times, I think we're humble enough to realize we can't. I can't recall the title of GEN Zinni's book, but after dealing with multiple problems worldwide, to include finishing his career has the commander of CENTCOM, he believes it is best to let certain fights continue to their end and then help pick up the pieces. We have rarely been successful when we step in the middle to two warring parties, much less step in the middle of several hundred warring groups as there are in Syria.
Last edited by Bill Moore; 08-09-2014 at 02:37 AM.
Bill:
The IS goes beyond a dispute among Muslims. Way beyond. This is an ideology that has designs on the world. We underestimate them at our peril. I keep bringing up the Bolsheviks from 100 years ago as a parallel. If that is right, we will regret not taking action, at least to the extent of shipping money and weapons to the Kurds. We won't even do that.
"We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again." Gen. Nathanael Greene
The Bolsheviks were a mix of a lot of thugs, some thinkers, and some sadists. IS appears to be made up of some thugs and lots of sadists.
I get the impression that they’re as vicious as the Khmer Rouge and not as smart. YMMV, but I don’t see how that mix could bode well for their long term fortunes.
If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed. – Mark Twain (attributed)
Carl,
I have written similar comments and still agree with myself, but that still doesn't mean the best way to fight them is to get in the middle of them fighting each other. In my opinion you're damn right they're a global threat, and most importantly to us they're a threat to our nation and our interests. There is no daylight between us on that aspect.
Where we tend to diverge is how to deal with the threat, do we gain strategic advantage by getting bogged down in a quagmire in Syria? I don't think we do, and since there are already many countries providing support to the various separatist groups and Assad we won't bring much to the table to begin with, and we sure as heck IMO don't want to own the Syrian problem if Assad does fall. That plays into the AQ strategy of weakening our economy through prolonged asymmetric warfare. I also suspect we're providing covert support, and covert means you shouldn't be aware of it, but we can still suspect it. Again comments that we're not doing anything may not be accurate. This is one reason low visibility and covert operations are a difficult policy tool for democracies, since voters want to see action, or politicians risk getting tossed out. In many cases, again IMO, covert action would be the most intelligent approach, but political pressure often denies the President that option. The commis on Fox News beat the drums that it all the President's fault, while the commis on CNN want to have a hug fest with Hamas and wonder why Israel actually needs to kill people to defend themselves, but I digress.
For Iraq, I think the situation is presenting us with an opportunity to strike AQ while maintain legitimacy. The President may prove to be right in his decision to postpone striking to let the situation evolve and put pressure on the Iraqi government to reform or die, and also to remind the people just how bad AQ is, so they'll be willing to rise up against them when the time is right. As a nation we don't have strategic patience, but these would seem good approaches to me to decisively defeat them in Iraq. I don't know what his calculus is, so while frustrated like most, I'm not passing judgment on his strategy until I understand it.
The best thing that can happen in this fight is that the Iraqi people rise up (with supporting fires from the U.S. and others) and crush ISIS. That would be both a physical and psychological victory that could compel other entities to do the same.
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