We sit back and watch. We removed ourselves from the equation, and we cannot easily insert ourselves again. We have very few options at this point. Either the Iraqis will pull it together or they won't. If they don't then we will either watch in real timea general regional war erupt actoss sectarian lines, or we will see the reestablishment of the caliphate, and the beginning of the global war to follow. Or both. Understand that elements of the jihadists' message are very seductive to many islamic ears. Kill the Jews, kill the Americans, spread the faith by whatever means necessary... Islam is a religion of conquest, and these are its bravest warriors who put their lives forwards to propel the faith. That is a VERY attractive message to many young muslims around the world. I'd expect the Iranians to move into Iraq at some point if this continues. While the overall push is islamic the ISIL / ISIS movement threatens their power. They have a different revolution in mind - one with Persian rulers at the top, not a bunch of stinking Arabs (from their view). If we're very lucky the Iraqis will stamp this out. If we're slightly less lucky the Iranian will stamp it out. If we're not that lucky... This has the potential to get really bad over the next few years, and it has a high potential to draw us back in on the ground at some point with a far larger and more costly commitment than we experienced between 2003-2011. So. How do you grade your foreign policy if your best hopes for success lie in backing the Iraqis and/or Iranians? Oops, double post... Forgive me for making you read it once or twice. This is probably what is going to happen.
Pretty analogous: both countries were ****ed before we got there; we got involved, ****ed 'em up some more; then the people left were extra special ****ed after we vacated
We were doomed in Afghanistan the moment we invaded Iraq. We could have done Afghanistan right and it could have been our shining palace on the proverbial hill, but Bush had to get him some Saddam. The entire clusterf*&^ is Bush's making, nobody else's.
More than a decade BEFORE we invaded was the last time he used chemical weapons (supplied by the US, lest you forget) and the weapons inspectors were set to give Iraq a clean chit (as they say in India) until Bush pulled them out and invaded. You really have swallowed that load, haven't you?
FYI, when he says that Saddam used WMD on his own people, he's talking about chemical weapons used on the Kurds more than a decade before we invaded, in 1988. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_chemical_attack
Afghanistan was doomed from the start too. No one one has controlled than region in 2000 years. If the Russians couldn't do it what makes you think the US could?
That is absolute nonsense. Afghanistan was done for the moment we decided we wouldn't invade Pakistan to win there. You can't win in Afghanistan as long as the Taliban can just slink across the border every time it loses a fight to lick its wounds. As long as they are safe on the Pak side of the border all they have to do is wait us out. I say we just pull out since we are not willing to do what is necessary to win. Set up some basing agreements with neighboring countries and drone whoever causes us problems in the future.
This ain't good... http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/mosul-seiz...make-isis-worlds-richest-terror-force-1452190 They looted the Mosul central bank and now have about $429m to play with along with weapons we provided to the Iraqi's. Holy $hit
Because we weren't trying to take it over as an adjunct territory, we were trying to help them set up a democratic government, which I believe could have been done and could have been done well, were it not for the diversion of attention and resources to Iraq. It is easy to say Afghanistan was "doomed from the start," but THAT was our moment to provide a shining beacon of democracy to the Middle East and we blew it by invading Iraq.
Again, nonsense. Pakistan has zero way of delivering a nuke to CONUS (or Hawaii or Alaska for that matter) - their IRBMs are designed to hit India, not us. We could have easily swept through the tribal areas - where Pakistan has no writ - and gone after the Taliban in their safe havens without retribution from Pakistan. There's nothing they could have done to stop us. And we could have gone in and seized their nuke stockpile - we even had plans on the books (and still do) to do exactly that in case of emergency. Invading the tribal areas would have been costly n terms of men and materiel, though, and it would have made an already complicated situation even more so. It might have destabilized the Pak government to the point it was overthrown, and we probably wouldn't have liked what came next. There were no good options. Sometimes there just aren't.
Agreed, but I still think it was the right thing to go in and take out the Taliban. Though Pak wouldn't have been able to hit us territory, they could easily have hit a base or two in Afghanistan and deal massive amounts of pain to our troops. This would have caused a massive retaliation from the US, resulting in a much worse conflict than we already had. Again, we couldn't invade Pakistan, MAD.
All of these comparisons to Germany and Japan are very off base when you consider how fundamentally different those countries and the situations where to Iraq. The only issue that is similar is that we defeated those countries beyond that the comparison falls apart. One can argue that maybe we have a moral responsibility to rebuild Iraq but all of that has to be weighed with the cost of what it would take to do so. We also have to consider that the US had more than 9 years do to so and in that time probably made things worse. Further how the US was going to build Iraq into a prosperous country has to be considered. With US technical aid and a military shield the Gulf States are prosperous yet that hasn't won the US any good will from much of the Arab and Islamic world. Under the Shah Iran, outwardly was prosperous and modern, and we saw what happened there. The fundamental problems with staying in Iraq indefinitely weren't just about US will to see through the process but whether the process could've actually worked. Maintaining an indefinite peace the point of American guns wasn't going to be a long term winner and was unsustainable both from the Iraqi or the American POV.
We could've gone in and invaded Pakistan and seized their nukes but again at what costs? How long would then should the US stay in not just Iraq, Afghanistan and then Pakistan? Further do you think the PRC and Russia would sit by while the US went in and seized Pakistan's WMD? Even besides that would the rest of the world think if the US invaded and disarmed a country that technically is an ally of the US?
But don't you think Pakistan would've used those nukes to target India, one of the US' allies in the region, and a NATO alliance member. An attack on India would trigger article 5 of the Washington Treaty (an attack on one nato member, is an attack on all)... like another poster pointed out M.A.D... Mutually Assured Destruction.
I agree with the latter part, although for probably different reasons. I think American foreign policy is heading more towards limited war, containment, and propping up puppet governments as opposed to traditional, all out war. It's about time too, because to completely pacify and stabilize the Middle East, we'd have to devote pretty much all of our resource and domestic political capital, and stay there for a very, very long time. I don't know if any of you are familiar with Charles Tilly or Jeffrey Herbst? The two of them are political scientists - and if you've ever taken a 1001 level political science class, you've probably read something by them before. Anyway, what Tilly initially argues that war is necessary for state building for a number of reasons (gives the government a sense of legitimacy, unifies the population against a common enemy, creates a demand for taxes and for the state to build infrastructure etc.). Herbst expands Tilly's argument saying that the reason Africa is such a mess is because, like the Middle East, there were arbitrary borders which created artificial states and that the absence of war is why many states in Africa have failed (Herbst doesn't mention it, but you could apply the same argument to the Middle East as well). I think what we're witnessing in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon (etc.) is the same thing that we saw in Yugoslavia in the 1990s - in that we're seeing more cohesive, organic, and defined states being formed out of these artificial ones, through warfare- similar to what was happening in Europe centuries ago. Within the next few years, the whole map of the Middle East will probably be dramatically different- and a lot of these cobbled together countries will probably be replaced with little, ethnic countries. What that means for us, I don't quite know. A Kurdish state would probably be extremely pro-American, the Shi'ite states would almost certainly be pro-Iranian. Whether or not the Saudi monarchy is still in power will impact how much or how little influence we'd have in the region. But, short of invading every country in the Middle East and holding it for centuries, I don't see any alternative. And that's something beyond the control of any President, Republican or Democrat.
I probably should have read before I posted and just quoted this. This is pretty much what I've been trying to say.
