"...all of the immense costs of that ill-fated expedition—the thousands of lost American lives, the greater numbers of broken bodies, the trillions in long-term monetary costs, and all the rest—are sunk costs. There is no way to get them back. There is thus no basis for investing still more in Iraq in a feckless effort somehow to gain redemption for one of the biggest and costliest mistakes in American history. Launching the Iraq War was a blunder; accept that and get over it. The psychological urge is strong to double down on losses with the idea that those who died shall not have died in vain. But psychological urges do not make good policy."
Okay, okay. But, ..is that true? I feel like he just stuffed that in the last paragraph and ran off. Given his prior statement that the decreased violence at the start of occupation was not a cause of the invasion but a cause of local shock at the pre-evolved ISIS, that implies the terrors of the ISIS were already in development regardless of American intervention.The last observation is that ISIS is a direct result of the U.S. launching of the Iraq War.
He addresses it to an extent early on: Basically:
Pre-invasion, Hussein's regime was comprised almost wholly of Sunni Baathists at the exclusion of the regional Shiite majority, who were viciously suppressed. In come the Americans, smash the Hussein machine into little tiny bits. Say to Iraq: "you're free. Now do the whole democracy thing." Only Iraq has only ever really been a loose confederation of fractious ethnic subgroups, held together by the glue of total oppression. The Sunnis don't trust the Shiites for associations real and imagined to their Iranian counterparts, Shiites don't trust the Sunnis because, you know, the last forty-ish years of rule, nobody likes the Kurds, who to the best of my ken are the red-headed stepchild of the region, and who've spent the last however long fighting for an autonomous state. Anyhow. Amidst all this, Iraq is supposed to pick themselves up after decades of autocracy, re-form a working bureaucracy without input from the deposed Baathists, and make a stab at any sort of representative democracy while ignoring the reality of a highly disproportionate distribution of sectarian groups who are very much at odds with each other. Then Maliki climbs to the top of the power vacuum (our involvement in this is disputed... by Maliki), establishes a government that swings wildly into the direction of Shiite empowerment at the expense of the Sunni minority (a minority highly unused to not enjoying representatives with their hands on the reigns of government), and cracks down with increasing brazenness and violence on any voices of dissent, peaceful or otherwise. Given that the state's monopoly on power is still tenuous, and that weapons are all but falling out of the sky, and that the whole of Iraq has been battle-hardened after eight years of chaos, and that the region has become both a beacon and a breeding ground for extremist militants... how was ISIS NOT going to happen? So in this way, yes, ISIS is a direct result of the U.S. launching the Iraq war. No war, no immediate disintegration of Sunni influence. No disintegration of Sunni influence, no Sunni discontent. No anything else that happened in the last decade- normalization of violence, influx of instruments of warfare, power-grab from Shiite warlord bent on suppressing the Sunni minority, political situation that restricts all options for either power-sharing or legitimate dissent- and that Sunni discontent doesn't ever blossom into asymmetrical guerrilla warfare fueled by sectarian rage. Also- don't think he was saying that there was decreased violence at the start of the occupation. Think he was saying that there was decreased violence around the time of the troop surge, i.e. towards the end of our occupation.The current rise of ISIS has been made possible by the exclusionary practices and increasingly authoritarian tendencies of the Maliki government in Baghdad. Maliki's regime is a narrowly based Shiite regime, and most Sunni Arabs do not see a future for themselves in an Iraq led by Maliki. In such a situation, the extremist message has appeal. The political situation in Iraq is in this respect an unsurprising consequence of the political culture that was left when the Baathist regime was deposed.
Makes sense, thanks for clarifying. It just seemed like the way he made the claim was a hit-and-run like i said, but I hadn't read that deep into the rest of the article.
It's kind of a wonky publication- the author seems to be operating under the assumption that his audience already has a firm background on the Iraq situation, which means that the points are less than developed at times. In any event, I seem to remember from my high school English classes that in expository writing you're NEVER supposed to assume that your audience knows as much about anything as you do, and you're supposed to clarify everything. So it's kinda his bad.