Tf I can't. You don't enter a fish in a tree climbing competition. That the civilian leadership doesn't know jack**** about the reality of the military isn't my issue. Nation building is on the people and they were trying to set up some human-rights western-loving democracy in a region that mostly doesn't understand it.
You cannot and I will show you why. It defies our history:
- After WWII, the U.S. military managed a significant share of the Marshal Plan. The military was involved with not only local security, but building local police force and various other type response agencies. It also dealt with foreign diplomats while focusing on civil engineer programs. In Japan, the military was instrumental to the creation of political parties and the promotion of their new capitalist system.
- In Vietnam, the military was the main force for the creation of security and the maintenance of government political stability. Diplomats routinely defaulted to military/CIA guidance and served mostly as eyes and ears to the White House and Congressional committees.
- But in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War there was no need. Kuwait simply picked up where Hussein disrupted them and the military retired to desert bases to play games with Hussein for a decade.
So, nation building has always involved the people, local and foreign civil experts, the occupying military, and our civilian diplomats. When you read from opinionated articles about it is "not the military's job to nation build," you are experiencing undefined frustration. The fact is that the military was not the entity that dropped the ball. Since the end of the Cold War our Presidents and diplomats have exponentially defaulted to the military to fix all problems. When it came to Iraq, the military was not given what it declared it needed in 2002 and 2003, the diplomats largely remained absent, the civil experts turned into an orgy for bloated foreign contracts, and our Presidents (Bush, but especially Obama) made policy decisions based on American domestic popularity polls. This is why when a tool like Trump comes along and declares that the military couldn't even win Afghanistan, it pisses me off.
* Democracy in the Middle East has long existed. This too is another false assumption. Iran was a democracy in 1953 before we re-installed the Shah. As far as the Arab world, democratic systems were in play when Europeans disrupted those systems and created monarchs and autocrats. The religion itself promotes democracy, which is the entire purpose of a
shura.
Shura is the Arabic word for "consultation"; and the Quran, with Muhammad himself prescribing, encourages Muslims to decide their affairs in consultation with those who will be affected by that decision. THAT is democracy and THAT is what the Islamic Modernists of the late nineteenth century built a philosophy around when pushing back on colonial masters. So, they certainly do understand it. Their problem is that enduring European occupation and later American maintenance served to create Islamists in the early twentieth century.
Of course that happened. It's tribalism and sectarianism. It takes an iron fist to keep the factions from just straight up killing each other in many of those areas. There is a reason that ISIS was able to gain so much ground an it wasn't nearly based on their fighting capability. The Kurds were our best allies, with the nearest chance at setting up something that would be stable and viable. We should've backed them to get their own homeland, if we were going to back anyone.
Their was no "iron fist" in 2010 when the Sunni leadership and the Shia leadership were agreeing about unity. They understood that the instability that their sectarian crap had caused created opportunity for IS. Malaki, an individual that proves that we learned nothing from Diem, was reluctantly allowing a unified government. This all came to a halt the moment what little military we had in the country was abruptly yanked out. With the military, as the diplomat, gone, Malaki defaulted to sectarian grudges and found plenty of bed mates. They sent Iraq backwards. But it was the Obama White House (namely Biden) that was instrumental with this.
** And the Kurds remained our allies until Trump made an irresponsible and senseless unilateral decision, that defied all rational sense and American interest. It would have been entirely impossible to help the Kurds create their own nation in 2003. That time passed some eighty years ago when the Kurds, along with the Jews in Palestine, got screwed out of the deal they made with allies during WWI. To make a countr for the Kurds today would involve carving out some of Turkey, some of Syria, some of Iraq, and some of Iran. The UN did this to create Israel after WWII. Good luck getting any of them to play ball with the Kurds.
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