We should have taken out Saddam, and left. This nation building crap was wrongheaded from the git-go.
“Letting the Shias take over was a Paul Bremer/ George W Bush decision.”
Every conservative was signing the “let freedom riiiiing” tune back then. Questioning nation building was a pure heresy, especially in FR. Bush could not be questioned. Only MoveOn questioned Bush. No need to blame Bush for this. His country supported his actions.
We should have left Saddam in power. He was a dick, to be sure, and not our friend. But he kept a lid on the radical jihadis. Just like Khadafi, Mubarak, and Assad.
Nothing wrong with nation-building. Letting the locals run the show was a mistake, though. Uncle Sam ruled the American sector of Germany, Italy and Japan for years, via various proconsuls aka US Army generals. The generals' word was law. In Iraq we paid the bills, but Iraqis made the rules. That was a mistake. Bottom line is that Bush was incompetent. He couldn't even do public relations over Katrina, so it's pretty clear that he was simply overwhelmed by the challenge of Iraq. Our amply-funded military machine bailed him out. If we had the budget of the French military, we'd have been handed an embarrassing military defeat*.
* Unless we went Mongol and whacked the entire Iraqi population.
“Letting the Shias take over was a Paul Bremer/ George W Bush decision.”
Bremer should have never been there. But the fact is that the Shiites are a majority there. I don’t like letting them “take over”. But at least 60% of the country is Shiite and two of the holiest places in Shiite islam are there.
It would be odd to tell them “sorry, you need to remain forever under the thumb of the Sunnis”.
Zarqawi and his sunnis bombed the Golden dome mosque in 2006 and set the Iraq civil war into high gear.
The fact is that secular Ahole guys like Saddam, Kaddafy, and Assad are the only way that artificially constructed nations with 3 to 5 different minorities can be held together.
Bush was an idiot to think American freedom was about to sweep the middle east.
The only idea I ever agreed with Joe Biden on was that Iraq should have been divide up into 3 countries. Sunni, Shiite and Kurds.
BTW, isn’t it funny that a major islamic denomination is spelled so closely to what we use a a profane curse word for crap?