Just a snip from Goldberg's essay:
...After the 2006 congressional elections, the main concern of the White
House was to make Iraq look like a success. That meant placating Iran on
one hand, and putting the rancorous Sunnis on the American payroll on
the other. The Petraeus surge created the Sunni insurgency in its
present form. In 2010 I warned of “Gen. Petraeus’ Thirty Years War“;”
now ISIS is commanded by Sunni leaders that Petraeus trained through
the Sons of Iraq movement. It was America’s misguided effort to force
majority rule upon Iraq that left the region in a perpetual state of
instability. That is the thesis of Lt. Gen. Daniel Bolger (ret.) in his
compelling book Why We Lost...
What you see in Iraq is parallel to the Big Gummint myth played out here in the US every day: the D.C. brain-trust knows best.
Uh-huh.
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Well, sort of. ISIS is the direct descendant of the people we were killing in 2007 who called themselves "the Islamic State of Iraq." And the al-Nusra front is directly descended from the group that used to call themselves "al Qaeda in Iraq," of whom we also killed very many.
It was working out in 2009. Then we walked away, turned loose the ones we had in jail -- ISIS's leadership seems to have met in American detention -- and they found themselves with a second chance.
Even that might not have mattered, except that Maliki decided to break every agreement we'd negotiated between his government and the Sunni tribes. So they no longer have a reason to prefer the central government.
What we need to do, if you ask me, is back the tribes themselves. The Dulaimi are running an independent operation in western Iraq. That's where the money is.
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