Atlantis wrote:The Iranians have shown who is the adult in the room, and that isn't Trump.
Most of the people presently holding power within the Iranian government are hardly the cooler heads in any scenario, certainly not here....they're scared. More accurately they are most likely terrified, and with good reason. That drone strike didn't just kill two senior Iranian military officials, it sent a message to Iran that could not be missed as this escalates. That being that the United States government can kill who they want, when they want within that region short of people going completely off-grid. The merits of using the bully pulpit in that fashion are certainly up for debate, that what is occurring is the byproduct of cooler heads prevailing in Iran really isn't. They're scared.
The US will be kicked out off Iraq and Syria anyways. Better for them to leave voluntarily now than to suffer a major humiliation.
There is a real likelihood that, should a Democrat win the White House in 2020, U.S. forces will leave those areas. At this stage, again for better or worse, there isn't a foreign force on Earth that can seriously hope to compel the United States to pull forces from a region by force. Even Vietnam and the 'loss' of that war was best described as a lack of will on behalf of the U.S. government and the American people rather than an actual defeat. So yes, the possibility that the U.S. will give up on occupation in those areas is very real, but then that is what it is best described as. There isn't a great deal of fortitude to see things through within many portions of the United States over the last fifty years or so.
There is now nothing to hold Iraq together. I'm happy for the Kurds to finally get their independent state. But dividing up a country is always a dangerous game that has geopolitical consequences. On the plus side, an independent Kurdistan will piss off Erdogan in a big way.
As long as the legacy of Sykes-Picot is with us that region is almost certain to remain a quagmire no matter what any outside force does. The Kurds need their own state, the Turks need to be reigned in with regard to both the Kurds and their Armenian neighbors, the Shi'a and Sunni population should have separate Arab states with Iran remaining an independent Persian state, the Palestinian issue needs to be resolved and not simply by redrawing Israeli borders in a fashion that is wholly impractical (Arab states will need to give a little here too, particularly Jordan), and both the United States and Russia need to tread more lightly within the region. And that is just a primer.
This is the consequence of the US's illegal war in Iraq. The US/UK are solely to blame. Once the Yanks are gone, the Shia militias will be the only effective fighting forces in the country. The Shias and Kurds will divide the country among themselves and the Sunnis will get screwed. That's what happens when all you can do in life is terrorism.
I think the war definitely slanted the board, but it seems that all we're doing is tilting the odds in favor of which group gets to abuse the other. Because, sans the Kurds who really seem to want to just have their own digs and to be left alone, the majority of Shi'a and Sunni in the region only seem to object to oppression when they are the oppressed rather than the oppressor or at least tolerate that behavior from others within their community. If the U.S. was going to invade Iraq then they should have divided the country into three states splitting the land between the Sunni, the Shi'a and the Kurds. I firmly believe that the U.S. government was aware of this but feared 1: pissing off Erdogan (like that's a bad thing) and 2: that Iran would simply coopt Shi'a Iraq for itself which is a very real fear. Even if that occurred, imo, it would still be better than what that region is evolving into now.