Changed the title from "militants" to ISIS, I think it's appropriate.
What a mess. What is the right thing to do here? The United States does seem to bear some responsibility for the current state of Iraq, not to mention that we helped fund and arm some of the Syrian rebels, and that our allies are allegedly helping to fund ISIS. I've read that the Kurds are perhaps more friendly to our interests. If we help defend the Kurdish north and they spit off from the rest of Iraq, I'm not sure Turkey would like that. I think they fear the Kurdish parts of their territory attempting to join an independent Kurdish state. I know these borders are arbitrary products of a bygone era; is the best course to allow the people who live there to draw their own borders along sectarian lines, or will that just destabilize the region even more? Mr. Askeri accused the Obama administration of being interested only in “protecting the Kurdish regional government and Christians, not the rest of Iraq.”
Why the hell is this an accusation? Seems like rational action to me. (Some flippancy but not a whole lot.) It's what they're moving toward on their own, and it's what should have been done in the late 19th/early 20th century. But since Britain and France interfered, it's going to be a messier process if it ever happens. But I've long been an advocate of as far as possible ignoring the region for 50 years and then revisiting it to see what's changed.Mr. Askeri accused the Obama administration of being interested only in “protecting the Kurdish regional government and Christians, not the rest of Iraq.”
is the best course to allow the people who live there to draw their own borders along sectarian lines, or will that just destabilize the region even more?
Yeah, it seems rational to me too, however I suppose the Iraqis see it differently. Considering that I would describe myself as a pacifist, I find isolationist foreign policy to be appealing, but I'm not sure it's always necessarily the best choice; although in the case of Iraq, I think more people would have been better off if Hussein has remained in power. I feel like we are much more willing to take a hand-off approach when it comes to other regions, like Africa. I guess all the oil and gas makes the area irresistible for foreign powers? Geographically, the middle-east is kind of everyone's neighbor (Asia, Europe, and Africa) further complicating things. It will be interesting to see what the borders will look like 50 years.
So I just finished this book, and it sort of opened up a fresh perspective for me on the matter of that war... Though I don't agree with it, the viewpoint at the time wasn't "let's get back at them there", but rather, "let's not let them hit us here again". Afghanistan was the first and foremost target of that mentality, but when people started thinking: "hey, that Hussein guy might have weapons" and "hey, that Hussein guy seems a bit friendly to the organization we're trying to wipe out," the fight quickly came to his doorstep. Coupled with that, Bush didn't like Hussein as a dictator (Blame it on the dad? Maybe...) and believed that he would lie to the US and the UN to get a WMD program running. If you listen to the Cheney rhetoric over the years, it was (and still is) centered around protecting the US against another 9/11. You can call that paranoid or obsessive, but that was the governing viewpoint around the years of the invasion. Africa (afaik, not versed in its history/politics) has never had such a threat, and consequently any invasions there would be purely humanitarian-focused. From one perspective, that is "spreading our freedom", from another, it's stopping genocide. The only thing, I think, that makes Iraq different is now it's sort of our child that we don't want, but feel obligated to care for. A-cynically, that's one line of reasoning, cynically, oil. Other hubski peeps should correct me if I'm faulty here, but wanted to share the thought, since the book sort of changed my perspective on the Iraq war. And that's coming from a person who shares your pacifist viewpoint.
Cheney was in the Senate for Gulf War I in which it was revealed that the CIA didn't have a fucking clue about all the shit the Iraqis had going on. When the CIA told him that Iraq was no threat, he took his experiences in the senate into account. Combine that with the fact that the PNAC firmly argued for an American toehold in the Middle East in order to secure American enterprise through 2100 and you have a war goin'.
Hehe, you've made this same point in another comment before, which prompted me to read this and subsequently this, since I liked the author so much. I was going to cite your comment if the discussion went that way, but figured not to drop too much information, since on the whole I don't normally know what I'm talking about on these things. PNAC would fall under that category of topics that I don't know the half bit about. Not sure if Baker didn't mention it, or if I just wasn't paying attention when he did...
You like the FBI book? My position on the PNAC has softened somewhat. Back when the neocons were ruling the roost it struck me as straight-up Doctor Evil stuff but with a little more immersion into political history, I see it as nothing more than a continuation of The Great Game. If you presume that geopolitics is a zero-sum game, conquest of the Middle East to secure what oil is left and prevent it from aiding China, Europe or Russia makes a lot of sense. The problem is in presuming that geopolitics is a zero-sum game.
It's not a particularly moral reason why, but I enjoyed the CIA book more because of how over the top ridiculously unprofessional our officials were in it. It at least gave more stories, even if those ended in dictators in power and hundreds of thousands dead. Enemies is much more focused on J. Edgar Hoover and is almost completely a biography of him, since he ran the FBI for so many (48!!!) years. He's worth the read, imo, but other than him, it's primarily government appointees doing government appointee tasks mostly within the boundaries of the law. Past that, it has history on where it came from, the thinking behind spying on Americans (I think it was the FBI that went through pushes and pulls with the DOJ over spying, but it's late and my memory of the two books has blurred together), and times when the FBI tried pulling strings abroad. Other than that, there's some interesting tidbits, like the FBI subverting the KKK, but really the TL;DR is: "Came for the FBI, stayed for the Hoover" Given the trillions of dollars wars cost, I can't help but wonder how much more effective it is to just invest in more expensive forms of energy closer to home. That's a lot of tar sands, deep water rigs, and green initiatives...You like the FBI book?
If you presume that geopolitics is a zero-sum game, conquest of the Middle East to secure what oil is left and prevent it from aiding China, Europe or Russia makes a lot of sense. The problem is in presuming that geopolitics is a zero-sum game.
Yeah, you're thinking about economics the wrong way, though. - You get money for mining the copper and nickel, and money for formulating the smokeless. - You get money for manufacturing the bullets and putting them in boxes, and for shipping them to the armory. - You get money for transporting the troops and their bullets across the ocean, and money for feeding them when they're there. - You get money for shooting the brown people and razing their homes. Now repeat with the bulldozers to demolish, the construction equipment to rebuild, the lumber and drywall and Romex and roofing tile, the asphalt on the street... “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world, is either a madman or an economist.” - Kenneth Boulding
I would arm the fuck out of the Kurds while also snuggling up to Turkey with all my might. Stephen Kinzer makes a pretty compelling argument that if the United States had any sense, we'd sort our shit out with Iran and double down on those two countries. You make friendly with that region and you have an oil-rich swath of arable land between Saudi Arabia and the Russian near abroad.