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Originally Posted by Torplexed
Forget Iraq. As an artificial nation state held together by Baathist barbed wire, it lasted a long time, but I think it's broken beyond salvage. Same goes for Syria at this point. All the king's horse and all the king's men can't put the Sykes-Picot map lines back together again.
If the West truly wants to help the Middle East get out of it's perpetual funk, it might be wise to start embracing fragmentation to the point of recognizing new sustainable states out of the old ones. I think putting increasing numbers of US troops there to keep the fiction of Iraq going, just likely means watching the rise of the Sons of Isis when we go weary and leave, or being on attritional garrison duty there forever.
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I think a big re-evaluation needs to be done of who we're allied with there and why we are. There's a big power struggle going on between Iran and Saudi Arabia in which Yemen and to a not-unreasonable extent Iraq, is the battlefield. Israel is a big complication thrown into the mix and that's only going to add petrol to the fire.
In a way, I suppose it's like trying to figure out where to stand in the middle of a city of fragile skyscrapers during a 9.0 earthquake...