All things Middle East related

[That Guy]

all these armchair generals, the answer to everything is to go send other folks to die for you in another foreign war without any idea of what that actually entails.

we put troops in syria then what? topple assad's regime and get into a conventional war with russia? stay there forever? cause after assad or isis goes, someone has to fill that vacuum. right now we've shown we can't nation build effectively, and we don't have the patience to run a proper counter insurgency (which can take over 20 years).

the problem with iraq wasn't pulling american troops, it was the horribly mismanaged peace process and a series of very bad decisions about who to leave in charge and how to proceed with a bunch of very piecemeal and sometimes misguided rebuilding projects/goals. the violence in iraq went down when we put 100,000+ militia men on the payroll, and it surged back up when the iraqi government decided they didn't want to be giving money to sunni militias and stopped paying them.