Was the current conflict between the West and militant Islamic extremists inevitable?

[iiandyiiii]

@Chihuahua

Okay… Time for a fact check…

I was in Tikrit in 2009-2010. At the time, violence was at an all time low. The infantry company I was with spent the better part of a year without ever firing a shot in anger. The Army was at the point where they were telling us to stop targeting militants because it wasn’t worth our effort… The Iraqi Army and Police were doing an increasingly credible job. We had even stopped taking enemy prisoners because the Iraqi justice system was doing so well. Every indicator was that Iraq was doing better and would continue to improve. This was NOT a case of us fleeing Iraq like it was the freaking Titanic. There were plans in place to stay until the Iraqi government (which, at the time, was also credible) decided they didn’t need us anymore and couldn’t meet our terms for a SOFA. The withdrawal timetable was set by the Bush Administration, and it had NOTHING to do with Obama wanting to cut and run. Obama executed a timeline Bush created.

I’m utterly baffled at how many people keep blaming Bush but so few people blame Assad. The collapse of the Assad government was a huge win for AQI because it allowed the survivors of the Iraq War (who were getting their asses kicked at the time) a place to flee and re-group. The Syrian civil war had absolutely nothing to do with America or the West. Also, the Maliki government didn’t start reneging on its relationship with Sunni leadership until after the American forces were already gone. Hell, even if Saddam was still in power the Syrian Civil War would have still created space for AQI to set up shop.

So please don’t put 100% of the blame on Bush. Assad played a role by treating his own people with heinous brutality, Maliki played a role by alienating previously cooperative Sunnis, and Iran played a role by encouraging sectarian violence. And as I mentioned in my other post, not one single person FORCED these people to be jihadists… They made that decision all on their own.

I don’t think this significantly conflicts with what I’ve been saying – I don’t think Bush has all of the blame for ISIS, but he does have all of the blame for getting us into a war of choice that wasted billions of dollars and thousands of American lives (and many more non-American lives) for nothing. There’s plenty of blame for ISIS to go around – the power vacuum created by the stupid war (so Bush and Cheney and co), Assad, the local assholes like Maliki who did such a bad job in the vacuum, the assholes who lead and joined ISIS, Iran, and many more, I’m sure.

But if we had stayed out of Iraq in the first place, we wouldn’t have any of the blame at all for ISIS (if it had arisen at all without the vacuum in Iraq, of which I’m skeptical).

[drachillix]

@Quartz

I do not believe that is correct. The Sultan of Brunei just banned Christmas, for instance, and non-Muslims are definitely third-class citizens (Brunei women being second-class). Suppression of women’s rights is rife in parts of Pakistan. There’s anti-Christian violence in Malaysia. And so on.

The phillipines also have ongoing issues with muslim groups on southern areas of country up to and including skirmishes between those groups and the local millitary.

[DagNation]

This started out as such a nice thread. Then !!BLAMO!! Hijacked through time by 8 years, for more than 50 posts… Come back, nice thread, come back!!

I was really interested in the alternate historical possibilities.

If there had been no 9/11 attacks, and Bush/Cheney were not in the white house to create an illegal war, where was the ME heading?

Circa 2000-2001, Saddam Hussein was still in Iraq with no fly zones and such, Iran and Iraq were saber rattling (and that is partly why Hussein was acting like he had weapons), Afghanistan was ruled by the Taliban, Libya and Syria had dictator caused problems, there are always issues with Israel, etc… What were other trends in the ME at the time? Without the US invasion, what was likely to happen?

It seems to me that a lot of the simmering problems would have continued. I think the power vacuum in Iraq helped the extremists to go from spread-out groups like AQ that lived in caves, to a (wanna-be) nation-state like Daesh(ISIS/ISIL). Without the US invasion all the other pieces would get moved around a bit, and Clearly the US and other powers would be involved in the ME, but how would it have been different?

One thing I am fairly certain of, is that a large percentage of people who support the anti-west extremists in the real timeline would not be there without the US invasion in 2003.

[septimus]

@DagNation

I was really interested in the alternate historical possibilities.

If there had been no 9/11 attacks, and Bush/Cheney were not in the white house to create an illegal war, where was the ME heading?
…
One thing I am fairly certain of, is that a large percentage of people who support the anti-west extremists in the real timeline would not be there without the US invasion in 2003.

I know no reason to think Gore’s election would have averted 9/11. It would have averted the senseless invasion of Iraq and some of the unfortunate “Arab Spring” phenomenon. One might still expect Arab revolution and turmoil eventually, but without the catastrophes in Iraq and associated scandals like Abu Ghraib torturing the jihadist recruitment and fervent anti-Westernism we see today would have been more muted.

IOW, we cannot guess the alternate history, but it would surely have been much different with Gore instead of GWB, probably much for the better.

@magellan01

Undeniably, we’d be much, much better off if we never went into Iraq.

Are you contradicting yourself? Weren’t you arguing that something similar to today’s Daesh was inevitable?

I’m too ignorant to be sure what the effect would be if Obama kept more troops in Iraq. Wasn’t the alternative to withdrawal just to keep several more battalions in the Green Zone? Any objective analysis of what effect this would have had on the Iraq insurgency? My impression is that stupid political decisions by the Cheney Administration and both Iraq Shia and Sunni are mostly to blame for the insurgency.

[Ramira]

@drachillix

The phillipines also have ongoing issues with muslim groups on southern areas of country up to and including skirmishes between those groups and the local millitary.

this is a great example of the ignorant confusion of muslim with islamic extremism, for the simple reason of being muslims and a centuries old difference from the north. Of course the southern ethnic groups, who were never under the real control of the Spanish and found themselves “given” to the Americans - and that both the americans and the Spanish followed sectarian policies, siezing land from muslims to give to more favored catholics, etc. - why it must be Muslim extremism…
The wikpedia

The Moros have a history of resisting the Spanish, American and Japanese rule for 400 years. The violent armed struggle against the Japanese, Filipinos, Spanish and Americans is considered by current Moro Muslim leaders as part of the four centuries long “national liberation movement” of the Bangsamoro (Moro Nation).[3] The 400-year-long resistance against the Japanese, Americans, and Spanish by the Moro Muslims persisted and morphed into their current war for independence against the Philippine state.[4] A “culture of jihad” emerged among the Moros due to the centuries long war against the Spanish invaders.[5]

The United States claimed the territories of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. The ethnic Moro Muslim population of the southern Philippines resisted both Spanish and United States colonization. The Spaniards were restricted to a handful of coastal garrisons or Forts and they made occasional punitive expeditions into the vast interior regions. After a series of unsuccessful attempts during the centuries of Spanish rule in the Philippines, Spanish forces occupied the abandoned city of Jolo, Sulu, the seat of the Sultan of Sulu, in 1876. The Spaniards and the Sultan of Sulu signed the Spanish Treaty of Peace on July 22, 1878. Control of the Sulu archipelago outside of the Spanish garrisons was handed to the Sultan. The treaty had translation errors: According to the Spanish-language version, Spain had complete sovereignty over the Sulu archipelago, while the Tausug version described a protectorate instead of an outright dependency.[6] Despite the very nominal claim to the Moro territories, Spain ceded them to the United States in the Treaty of Paris which signaled the end of the Spanish-American War.

Following the American occupation of the Northern Philippines during 1899, Spanish forces in the Southern Philippines were abolished, and they retreated to the garrisons at Zamboanga and Jolo. American forces took control over the Spanish government in Jolo on May 18, 1899, and at Zamboanga in December 1899.[7]

The Moros resisted the new American colonizers like they did the Spanish.[8] The Spanish, American, and Philippine governments have all been fought against by the Muslims of Sulu and Mindanao.[9]
…
Cause of the war[edit]
According to an essay written by Madge Kho, after the American government informed the Moros that they would continue the old protectorate relationship that they had with Spain, the Moro Sulu Sultan rejected this and demanded that a new treaty be negotiated. The United States signed the Bates Treaty with the Moro Sulu Sultanate which guaranteed the Sultanate’s autonomy in its internal affairs and governance while America dealt with its foreign relations, in order to keep the Moros out of the Philippine American War. Once the Americans subdued the Filipinos, the Americans unilaterally violated the Bates Treaty with the Moros and invaded Moroland.[19]

After the war in 1915, the Americans imposed the Carpenter Treaty on Sulu.[20]

For space I omit the section discussing the peace seeking intervention of the Ottoman Caliph.
The idea of the eternal or the inevitable conflcit depends on great ignorance of history.

[DagNation]

@septimus

I know no reason to think Gore’s election would have averted 9/11.

In my post, and I believe in the OP, it is stated that these 2 separate things change for the alternate history question - and are not dependent on each other.

So, with that clarified again:smack:… IF there had been no 9/11 and no bush white house…

[DagNation]

@septimus

I’m too ignorant to be sure what the effect would be if Obama kept more troops in Iraq.

Regardless of when US troops were pulled out of Iraq, it was going to create problems. If one were to look back to this board in 2003, it would be found that the many of the anti-invasion people were clearly concerned that there were no exit plans. Anyone who was pro-invasion at the time has absolutely no case for pointing at anyone but themselves for the disaster that occurred after the US pulled out. It would have happened if the US pulled out in summer of 03, in Bush’s second term, or if we had waited until ten years from now. If we were still there in 2026, the US leaving Iraq then would leave a power vacuum. The problem was created at the time of the invasion. any blame about the aftermath heaped on anyone who was not involved in the invasion is pure, garden grade, BS.

[septimus]

@DagNation

Regardless of when US troops were pulled out of Iraq, it was going to create problems. If one were to look back to this board in 2003, it would be found that the many of the anti-invasion people were clearly concerned that there were no exit plans. Anyone who was pro-invasion at the time has absolutely no case for pointing at anyone but themselves for the disaster that occurred after the US pulled out. It would have happened if the US pulled out in summer of 03, in Bush’s second term, or if we had waited until ten years from now. If we were still there in 2026, the US leaving Iraq then would leave a power vacuum. The problem was created at the time of the invasion. any blame about the aftermath heaped on anyone who was not involved in the invasion is pure, garden grade, BS.

I certainly agree that the decision to invade Iraq and the foolish bungling of the invasion’s aftermath were two of the very biggest mistakes ever, dwarfing any other blame that might be assigned. I wasn’t a member of SDMB in 2003 but I was pointing out the stupidity in other foru. And, as Bremmer’s J-curve explains, a point of danger may have been inevitable before Iraq could hope to be an open and peaceful democratic state.

But this still leaves my question unanswered. How many U.S. troops “should” have been left in Iraq, and what effect would that have had on Daesh?