LogFAQs > #886793970

josifrees posted...

Tell me if I'm wrong in assuming that the situation in the Middle East would have been far better if the US would not have left Iraq and Afghanistan so quickly. if the US wanted to do it right they would have kept their occupation, keeping a close eye on terrorism, building democracy and an identity, and the tools to compete economically. All those things are so much much cheaper than warfare and the lives lost in war are not thrown in the trash.

@josifrees I think withdrawing from Iraq was a blunder. Unfortunately it's a blunder the people voted for. I proudly voted for Barack Obama, but it was a misstep of his presidency.

The Iraq War should never have occurred, especially not under the false pretenses of weapons of mass destruction. It was mishandled, and mishandled badly, and I'm afraid the United States has learned all the wrong lessons from that saga.

It isn't America's place to topple every dictatorship by military force and create power vacuums that work to the advantage of Jihadists. But where there is grassroots support for revolution, where conflicts are frozen and ethnic cleansing is underway -- where power vacuums already exist, as in Libya circa 2011, and in Syria circa 2017 -- then there's a good case to be made for intervention via international coalition.

The costs of not doing anything are higher than doing nothing. The human cost paid by the people of Syria, the refugee crisis, the terrorist campaign being waged in Europe, all can be traced back to Syria. Moreover the Islamic State was able to sweep across northern Iraq like wildfire by taking advantage of what? Not the religious extremism of the populace, but the Sunni populace's dissatisfaction with the Shiite-led government in Baghdad under al-Maliki, which had long excluded and repressed them. All of that is a consequence of the mismanagement of the Iraq War from the beginning.