From Ivan Eland, at antiwar.org:
Oftentimes when the U.S. superpower intervenes in the business of other nations, after US troops withdraw, the American people lose interest and the country disappears from the consciousness of the public. For example, after the Vietnam War in the 1970s, the exhausted and disgruntled American public no longer cared what happened to the poor, faraway land. That same phenomenon initially occurred with Iraq after Barack Obama withdrew US forces at the end of 2011 from the long American occupation on a schedule set by George W. Bush. However, on the fifth anniversary of Obama’s announcement that the American combat mission had ended, Iraq is still in the news because the brutal group Islamic State (or ISIS) took over about one-third of Iraq – areas where the Sunni Arab Muslim minority live. Not coincidentally, those were the same areas that most violently opposed the US occupation from 2003 to 2011.
The reason the Sunnis fought so hard against the Americans was that for decades they had used central governmental power to control and oppress the other two main groups in the artificial country – the minority Kurdish population in northern Iraq and the majority Shi’ite Arab population in the southern part of the country – and the American invasion had thrown the Sunnis out of power and installed a Shi’ite dominated government that returned the favor. George W. Bush and Barack Obama have been criticized for propping up the chauvinistic and Shi’ite government of Nouri al-Maliki, as he predictably failed to deliver on promises to reintegrate Sunnis into the new army and give them positions in the Iraqi government’s civil service.
Al Qaeda in Iraq, an even more radical affiliate of the main al Qaeda group in Pakistan, which was created to oppose the ill-conceived US invasion, went to Syria and morphed into the even worse ISIS. When the group stormed back into Iraq in 2014 and took over the Sunni third of the country, it found not-so-surprising support from Sunnis, who preferred even the vicious group’s rule to the oppression of Maliki’s Shi’ite dominated government.
To continue reading: Recognize That Iraq Is History
