If you believed that you weren't going along with any "mob," you were out there all by yourself.
The fact is, however, that the Iraqis had had honest national elections, and the possibility of a stable government existed. Indeed by 2012 Obama took credit for Iraq being a peaceful, stable emerging democracy. Then he pulled out the troops that were our insurance policy. ISIS was the result of the power vacuum being filled, the vacuum Obama needlessly created.
that’s not exactly the way I recall it. I seem to recall the Sunnis and being a very very angry and oppressed and left out of the new government and a civil war was simmering. Perhaps leaving the troops behind would have delayed the inevitable, or if it wasnt inevitable it would have taken about 20 or 30 years. We all keep thinking in terms of rational civilized people in a developed country. and perhaps if graft wasn’t so incredibly rampant and we had built a great infrastructure and kept the army intact things would be very different right now. and I don’t remember a time when there weren’t a thousand deaths a month from terrorist attacks. with or without our troops there.