Did the US pulling out troops pave the way for ISIS?

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The sectarian lines in Iraq have always been obvious, all that held it together was an iron fisted strongman like Saddam and even he wasn't able to control the entirety of his country. We need to stop pretending that Iraq is one country, blame the French and British for this mess they created with Sykes-Picot. Biden was right, we would of been better off splitting the country 3 ways between the Shia, Sunnis, and Kurds. The problem is the rest of the Middle East has similar sectarian divides and precedence is expected. We're still feeling the fallout of the creation of the Albanian Kosovar state.

I say we should blame the ottomans

I don't know if you were being sarcastic; but the ottoman's very long rule of the region adopted an extremely centralized development-wise policy, meaning they hindered the development of the former civilizations they conquered for centuries- all main resources were basically used to feed the empire's homeland - aka Turkey today. The Ottomans (the Turks) invested very very little in their conquered areas - they just collected taxes from the populations.

To give you a tangible example of the ottoman's negligence - their language, wasn't spread at all among the populations they ruled, Lebanon for instance stayed under Ottoman rule for about 400 years yet the Turkish language was never adopted as second spoken official language; obviously the Ottomans didn't build schools here.
Surely some words went into our dialect but we don't understand Turkish today at all.

The French ruled Lebanon for about 2 decades and yet the French is the second spoken language to this day.

Even the few European countries that were under their rule suffered later of being behind other European countries, like Romania and Greece for instance.

Last edited by The_Face_of_Boo on 07 Jul 2015, 3:32 pm, edited 3 times in total.

I was half joking.

The immediate cause was the needless iraq invasion and bungled aftermath, regardless of how righteous the goals of that invasion may have been.

But if we want to pass the buck backward through time, the ottoman empire does have a good portion of blame.

The french were as*holes in all of their colonies but some of their former colonies eventually worked things out.

Vietnam has done ok for a few decades, for example.

No invader was ever nice in human history - but you can have as*holes and you can very as*holes - the ottomans were of the worst.

The Ottoman "empire" didn't really developed as an empire - it was like a vampire entity - sucking dry their forced subordinates.
Weren't much different than the Tatars and Mongols....their grandfathers.

I understand that christians were unclean / not allowed under the ottomans but hebrews were sort of a manager / messenger class that could pass freely and handle business that the ottomans didn't want to deal with outside the empire.

The reason why Christians were strictly distrusted and managed was due to the 4 crusades and the constant uprising against the Ottomans and Arabs, because they didn't want to be under their rule.
The Christian population was never subdued and revolted each chance they had cause they wanted to liberate the holy lands from the non Christians.

The Zionist Jews started migrating in mass in the early 1900s, illegally into Palestine with some help from the Western Powers.
The Zionist Jews hated established Jews, who lived in peace with the other peoples in Palestine because they were seen as traitors to Jewish religion and culture.
The Zionists Jews took their lands and discriminated against them too forcing many of them out of Palestine.

Ottoman Empire allowed for most people to carry on as if they were still under the Byzantine Empire.
All that changed was the administrators and the taxation.
Though if you decided to rebel, you were punished harshly.

The Ottoman Empire allowed for varying degrees of local rule and was better for most people who previously under Byzantine, Persian, Roman and Greek Rule.

In the end the Ottoman Empire was too uneven in development, culture, and demographic wise.
When it came to reforming it, it came too late and WWI accelerated it's break up into nation states.
The only reason why Turkey wasn't annexed by the British and French was due to the Ataturk and his army not wiling to lay down their arms.
The Turkish public was willing to fight to the death and the allies didn't think they could afford to conquer Turkey (the U.S. wasn't willing to help).
The rest of the states were annexed and both the British and French did whatever possible to quell the populations in the former Ottoman territories.
They also enacted harsher terms and laws under the guise of the International Mandate they were given to punish those territories for supporting the Ottomans in war.


Newly declassified documents showed that if Germany kept the WWI going, forcing the allies to cross the Rhine into Germany, they would have forced a stalemate if not defeat of the allies.
The allies had a huge fear of invading Germany and thought it would lead to a huge bloodbath possibly breaking allied armies, since the German population was willing to fight to the death to stop an invasion of the homeland.

Germany should have forced a fight to the death in WWI.

I echo the comments mentioned about the Iraq war.

I will also add there has been 13 centuries of in-fighting in the region. You can stir sectarian tensions, but there has to be sectarian tensions to stir up in the first place.

The crusades were aprox 200 years, aprox 200 year of colonialism after the decline of the ottoman empire. So there is 900 years that can't just be blamed on the west.

We are slow learners through, and we need a counter narrative.

ISIS ideology is based on the idea of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab.

AND the Laz-E-boy stores that sell them!

Kinda

The Sunni groups (which IS is formed by) ended up waiting out the US forces on the ground (a sound strategy).

So, as soon as the US left en masse, IS (Sunni/Baathist groups) were free to attack the new Shia central government.

The Ottomans had the same sectarian issues to mange though. Arguably they were better administrators, although could be quite brutal at times.