...but, then, Institutional Memory at the Pentagon and DoD in general, comes and goes, depending on who is in charge at the moment.

And sometimes they do.

Khouri is right, local folks resent foreign intervention.

But what's the point of writing an article offering no alternative?

Is letting ISIS create a State an option?

So not making it worse is the other option. And that would suggest avoiding military occupations, the way I read it. We would have to rely on "soft power" of various kinds. The upside is that for a couple trillion dollars you can buy quite a lot of soft power, even at todays inflated prices.

No one is in the market for soft power in the ME.

It's a free for all, sunni vs chia, 'moderates' vs islamists,..

The West can't just wait it out, I fear.

Awesome.

I wouldn't be sure of that,

especially in the light of the crumbling down of the Iraqi and Syrian regimes.

+ there is no consensus against ISIS since local regimes prefer to focus on shia/sunni infighting.

Just because it didn't work before is no indication, probably just a coincidence. A run of bad luck.

• Afghanistan: debatable, especially since it was tainted by ->
• Iraq:a debacle

But Iraq was a debacle because there was no clear objective.
(and because it would have made more sense to crack down on Pakistani Talibans)

But let Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Daesh fester into jihadi hotbeds,
and I'm pretty sure it won't be long before people start wringing their hands,
asking why nobody did anything.

The OP argues, to paraphrase, that military occupations naturally lead to indigenous resistance movements, such as al Qaeda/ISIS/Taliban etc. There is much in history, world history and US history, to substantiate this point. Humans are quite obviously territorial animals, we like to have our own turf and we will defend it when we do. There is a reason colonial regimes so often become genocidal, the natives never stop resisting. So when you attempt an occupation by force of a foreign people, you had better expect them to fight back, because they will. And when you are on their turf, they will make their resistance felt.

Over my past few posts, I tried to say that (and here I clarify, with infinitesimal US boots in the vincinity) it would make sense to help give a push to the least bad in the region.

But let a few jihadi states raise taxes and start toying with suitcase nukes, and sci-fi movies will start looking more realistic by the day.

Nobody is calling for a military occupation anyway, that's the author putting up a straw man, while being preciously short on recommendations.

Now the qustion is: do you let them grow, or do you help regional forces nip them at the bud?

As did the Talibans?

Are you aware Pakistan is about to turn islamist? Whose fault?

The US or Zia ul Haq?

General Wyle E Coyote is now going to break bad on ISIS by employing the same strategy that worked so well in Vietnam...

But hey, "training" is a buzzword in more than one field.

-- Mal

But I know what you mean.

Why we are being sold this again and expected to believe it ...is the question. Who benefits from a failed policy that keeps being tried over and over again and not only fails...but, causes more death, destruction and dislocation of people who are now in "Endless War," according to Kerry and his advisers, who are pushing for that very situation in the New AUMF.

We can't afford to pay for this and the blood of what we've wrought is on our hands and there will be continuous Blowback!

Sunday, Dec 14, 2014 03:00 PM EST
The chilling rise of American militarism
Chuck Hagel's ouster signals a shift in foreign policy. Welcome to the new Washington, where peace is a dirty word
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch.com


4. A Failed Experiment in War: Above all, it’s a wonder that all those journalists and commentators writing about Hagel expressed neither amazement nor befuddlement when it came to accepted thinking in Washington about war, American-style. The nation’s capital has been conducting an experiment in war-making for more than 13 years now: there have been full-scale invasions and occupations, counterinsurgency struggles that lasted years, special ops raids of every sort, the application of overwhelming air power in a variety of ways, including an air intervention in Libya, drone assassination campaigns across the backlands of the Greater Middle East, the loosing of cruise missiles, even the first cyberwar in history. Trillions of dollars have been spent; American troops have been deployed to war zones over and over again; almost 7,000 American lives have been lost (while thousands of active duty soldiers and reservists have, in the same period, committed suicide); tens of thousands of Americans have been wounded in action, hundreds of thousands of civilians and enemy fighters in those war zones have died, and millions of people have been uprooted and sent into internal exile or forced out of their countries. In the process, significant parts of the Greater Middle East and more recently Africa have been destabilized in devastating ways.

Think of it as a radical experiment involving what our latest two presidents have called ”the greatest force for freedom in the history of the world” and “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.” Despite ongoing wars and operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia, among other places, the results of that experiment are in. No single war, intervention, or minor conflict in which the U.S. military has taken part in these years has even come close to achieving the objectives set out by Washington and most have proven outright disasters. In just about every case, armed intervention, whatever form it took, demonstrably made matters worse, increased the destabilization of whatever country or region was involved, and led to the creation of more extremists and terrorists.

Imagine for a moment a lab that ran a series of experiments for 13 straight years in almost every imaginable combination through one disastrous failure after another and then promoted the experimenters and agreed to let them repeat the process all over again. This would defy logic or simply good sense anywhere but in Washington.

To summarize: 13 years later, the War Party is ascendant. It controls Congress. The president is visibly, if with his usual reluctance, placing his bets on war. The military is riding high. The end of all calls for serious Pentagon budget cuts is clearly in sight. And more of the same is undoubtedly in the works, no matter who wins the 2016 election.

That’s the “new” Washington. Peacetime? A fantasy creation of lefties, libertarians, and noodle heads. Peace? A dirty word that no self-respecting politician would be caught using.

http://www.salon.com/2014/12/14/the_chilling_rise_of_american_militarism/