Quote Originally Posted by Dayuhan View Post
I agree... but I have to point out, again, that our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan were not initiated in order to support a government, legitimate or otherwise, against insurgency. They were initiated to remove governments we found distasteful. Having succeeded in that, we then faced a situation where there was no government at all. That's a very difficult position to be in: a government installed by an occupying power is going to be perceived as illegitimate and not recognized as a government, but if the occupying power leaves without putting together some kind of government the probable result is a takeover by whatever armed force is left after the intervention. If armed force is distributed the likely outcome is civil war, with intervention by all manner of self-interested actors.

Compounding the problem is the tendency of the intervening power in these cases to pursue legitimacy in the eyes of its own constituents in its own country, rather than in the eyes of the occupied populaces. In order to justify intervention and make it appear legitimate the US government promised to pursue transitions to an electoral democracy along American lines, which may have been what the American populace wanted to hear but may not have been a very practical approach to the problem at hand. Of course the American people also wanted an intervention of limited duration, ideally with a fast withdrawal, and nobody seemed willing to tell them that these objectives were mutually exclusive.

If there's any lesson to be learned from all this it is that people who contemplate future regime change efforts need to put a lot more effort into realistic assessments of the challenges implicit in a post regime change environment. It's easy to say we made mistakes, and by any criteria we did, but I'm not convinced that any alternative course of action would have provided a quick magical transition to a functional government that was perceived as legitimate by all of the competing populaces in the picture. The task parameters were just not realistic from the start.

I believe that if there was a better understanding of the concept of Causation for insurgency in the U.S.; then we would have taken very different courses from what we instead embarked upon. I won't second guess the guys who made the decisions; but I think if they had been a bit more informed as to the nature of what they were attempting to manipulate through force of arms; they would have made better choices.

Fact is though, at that time you had Ph.D.'s ranting about Isalmism and the Caliphate; Intel guys looking hard for a state-based threat and pinning the WMD tail on our favorite Donkey Saddam; No one in DC second guessing the validity of our own post-cold war policy and how it might be contributing to the growing violence being directed back at the US; and EVERYONE wanting to exact a healthy dose of American-style revenge on someone; and to return our lives here at home back to normal.

That was then, this is now. The question is, what do we do now?

There are still plenty clinging to concepts and policies that have dug us an 8-year deep hole, be it out of loyalty, stubborness, or just what must be very rose colored lens perspectives. I think a clear order has been given to turn the ship around; I just don't know that we've picked a new heading yet.