Eli5: how did America actually destabilize the Middle East in the Iraq war? What was done specifically that caused all of the chaos in the countries we were involved in?
In: 185
The thing that probably had the most consequences were the attempt at De-Ba’athification.
The thinking, in as far as there was much of it, was that Saddam was sort of like Hitler and that after WWII the US had denazified Germany, by banning all the high level Nazi party members from holding positions of power. Of course in Germany this was done rather halfhearted and often people escape consequences because the US needed them to stabilize the country for the coming cold war.
In any case they tried to do in Iraq, what they thought they did in Germany.
Saddam was part of the Ba’ath party. And they thought it was just a normal political party. it wasn’t. It was more complicated than that. It was full of Sunni Muslims who held most of the positions of power.
When the US and the allies came to Iraq one of the ways the convinced everyone to surrender as quickly as they (in addition to simple overwhelming firepower) did was by making promises.
Those promises weren’t kept. during the De-Ba’athification all the government workers from teachers to cops to clerks and most importantly most of the military officers lost their jobs, their pensions and became basically unemployable.
As you can imagine they were upset about that.
In addition with all the Sunnis out of power the Shi’a Muslims filled the gap.
Shi’a Islam is the dominant religion in neighboring Iran, which Iraq had had a long and bloody war with for decades before the first gulf war.
To many Iraqis who thought more along those sort of lines of sects and tribes instead of nations and parties they had been riven out of power and replaced with a group that looked a lot like their old enemy and the local minorities their formerly dominated.
Many of the people who had been part of the military and now had no jobs and no money and no power, were unhappy with the result.
Enter the Sunni Islamic fundamentalist. the were able to give people something to believe in and fight for and even if the ex-iraqi military people didn’t actually believe what they were saying it gave them an excuse to get back power.
Those guys eventually became ISIS.
ISIS hated the government is Iraq and Syria and the Kurds and everyone else who wasn’t them. The Iranians also were opposed to ISIS.
the Kurds just wanted to be left alone and ideally have their own country, but the US couldn’t give them that because Turkey would not have approved and Turkey was an alley. Iran and Syria who were not allies also wouldn’t have approved.
It all became a giant mess of competing interests.
It was not that Saddam was a good guy, he was extremely evil and removing him as a good thing, but doing it the way it was done was like removing a card at the bottom of a house of cards.
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