Obama was elected to get us out of Iraq

He learned that wasn't possible

If HW had done that in 1991 he would have lost the coalition that made what we were there for legal

There also was no planning for what to do with an occupied Iraq and the time

Wouldn't we have ended up with the same mess, just 12 years earlier?

The Shia/Sunni/Kurd mess would have erupted the same way unless we'd somehow decided to install another Sunni secularist strongman and propped him up like we did Saddam.

Whose interests are even served by maintaining Iraq as one nation when it is in fact 3?

The destruction of the Iraqi military during their retreat from Kuwait should have been completed, and that should've been the end of coalition use of force. No 'no fly zone'.

Westerners quailed at the visuals from "The Highway of Death" but **that's what victory looks like**

Just about every national border drawn in the Middle East and Africa during the 20th Century is fake, you know.

Coalition forces should not have been called off and the highway of death should've continued all the way to Baghdad or until there was nothing left to kill. Whatever comes first.

Once that was complete, we leave.

Western nations don't know how to win wars anymore.

Atkins, that would have handed Iraq to civil war and the mess we have now

That's essentially what we did in 2003

I don't care if Iraqis kill other Iraqis.

Iraq should've been partitioned in 2003.

So long as they keep their bullshit within their borders, I do not care what they do.

But it leaks over to Syria and we get ISIS which creates a breeding ground for terrorists that then get funded by Gulf dollars

When their bullshit leaves their borders, that's when we have to care.

I blame wahabism

That's why we need to stop obscene amounts of money flowing in to the region

I generally agree, critter

The ISIS leakage into Syria was orchestrated because somebody wanted to route a pipeline to Europe around the Russosphere.

Devpav, the problem with partition is that the oil would have gone to the Shites in the south and the mid-country Sunnis would have had none

In the end, Iran was the inevitable winner when we took out Saddam

They can either sort out resource claims in a partition deal or they can just kill each other like Atkins said.

I really couldn't care less if everyone in the Middle East killed each other. The rest of humanity would only benefit.

But civil war results in what we have now. A breeding ground for terror which the gulf states then bankroll.

It's Islam that breeds the global terror, not civil war.

But civil war certainly provides a breed ground for it. A call to jihad and training camp.

ISIS

The call to jihad is in Islam itself.

But a flashpoint provides for it to become a Thing

If states or non-state actors engage in terrorism outside their borders, then we find them and destroy them. If they keep their conflicts inside their borders, we ignore them.

I agree, there's a sane zero-tolerance yet non-interventionist approach to Islamic terrorism.

For example, the war in Afghanistan should have been purely about killing the entire Taliban. No rebuilding. Just destruction of our enemies. No stopping at the Pakistan border if so required.

We always lose because of political constraints.

Trying to occupy these places is madness.

If we don't then new actors who hate us just come to fill the vacuum

Then we kill them too.