The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant Megathread

[Valmy]

I don't even know what a long term solution looks like.

[DGuller]

The idea of toppling Saddam and trying to setup a functioning representative state in its place was worth trying. The tragedy is that it was worth trying well, and instead was tried poorly.

Of course, now we cannot know if the overall failure was a result of a bad idea from the start, or whether it could have worked better had it been executed competently.

I think one of the lessons out of this should be that it's definitely not worth trying.  The reason we thought it was worth trying was that we didn't understand how nations apart from our own work.  To us it's self-evident that freedom trumps other values, but that's not at all self-evident in cultures much different from ours, and in countries where tribalism is strong enough to make national politics a civil war by other means.

[DGuller]

I don't even know what a long term solution looks like.

Re-drawing borders.

And some homogeneity improvement campaigns after that's done.

[CountDeMoney]

The reason we thought it was worth trying was that we didn't understand how nations apart from our own work.

There were people who completely understood, they were just ignored.

[Darth Wagtaros]

The reason we thought it was worth trying was that we didn't understand how nations apart from our own work.

There were people who completely understood, they were just ignored.

Or worse, called terrorist sympathizers.

[Berkut]

That is bullshit though - no matter what policy decision is under debate, there is some group out there who say they understand all this and it is a bad idea.

I am sure there were people arguing that the Marshall Plan cold never work because Germans just don't understand our government, or the Japanese. Or that helping South Korea is doomed to failure because Asians are incapable of self governance or whatever.

They were not "ignored" - there was a debate and discussion and those who made different arguments won out. It is trite to just sit here now and say "See, told you so!" when in fact we all know that there were a thousand viewpoints covering every possible supposed outcome, so yeah, someone was "right" in hindsight, but that doesn't mean they actually knew anything special or had some clear insight that everyone should have known at that time.

And like I said to begin with - it is impossible to even know if the effort was doomed base don intractable principles, or if it was not doomed, but had a shitty outcome because it was executed so badly. The one thing everyone DOES agree on is that the execution was terribly bad.

[Eddie Teach]

People mainly agree that it was executed badly because it didn't work.

[Berkut]

No, I think people were saying it was being executed badly pretty much right from the start - at least, that was being said almost immediately after the actual military campaign wrapped up.

[Eddie Teach]

Naturally, we're a society of back-seat drivers and armchair quarterbacks. 

But the reason that became a consensus view is that it failed. I don't believe we ever reached a consensus on what in particular should have been done differently. I for one am not convinced the "more troops earlier" strategy would have made a tangible difference. (Mentioning that one cause I think Languish folks were bemoaning that the "Surge" came too late.)

[Berkut]

Naturally, we're a society of back-seat drivers and armchair quarterbacks. 

But the reason that became a consensus view is that it failed. I don't believe we ever reached a consensus on what in particular should have been done differently. I for one am not convinced the "more troops earlier" strategy would have made a tangible difference. (Mentioning that one cause I think Languish folks were bemoaning that the "Surge" came too late.)

I think the consensus was that the fundamental error was thinking that once we "won" the war, we would not need a significant and pervasive military presence throughout the country for the next year or two to provide security to develop a politically sound Iraqi security environment.

In hindsight, I think you can make a good argument that the lack of security in Iraq was not a matter of opportunity, and hence the idea that surge level of troops maintained consistently would not really have mattered, and at best would simply delay the inevitable reckoning to come. That Iraq itself is a essentially fake construct incapable of coherence absent overt oppression by some strongman. In that case, all this is just inevitable, and the only thing one can do is delay it. However, that argument concludes that even absent the war, what we are seeing now would happen eventually anyway. Saddam cannot stay in power forever, and if Iraq is fundamentally a failed state due to problems not solvable then the war was mis-guided, but ultimately that only hurt the US and our allies - the Iraqis were fucked one way or the other not matter what.

[Valmy]

The reason we thought it was worth trying was that we didn't understand how nations apart from our own work.

There were people who completely understood, they were just ignored.

Almost every expert I heard thought it was crazy.  I just hoped that the government knew something they didn't.  They failed for precisely the reasons the experts said: the tribal and ethnic situation was not conducive.

[Valmy]

[The Brain]

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[Syt]

[frunk]

quote author=The Brain link=topic=11579.msg781397#msg781397

quote author=Peter Wiggin link=topic=11579.msg781401#msg781401