Saturday, October 14, 2017

Embracing sectarianism

The single worst portion of Donald Trump's atrocious Iran strategy --

Over the last decade and a half, United States policy has also consistently prioritized the immediate threat of Sunni extremist organizations over the longer-term threat of Iranian-backed militancy. • In doing so, the United States has neglected Iran’s steady expansion of proxy forces and terrorist networks aimed at keeping its neighbors weak and unstable in hopes of dominating the greater Middle East. Recently, the Iranian regime has accelerated the seeding of these networks with increasingly destructive weapons as they try to establish a bridge from Iran to Lebanon and Syria. • The Trump Administration will not repeat these mistakes.

That's 3 decades of harsh lessons being reset to zero, from the emergence of extremist groups in Afghanistan in the 1980s to the widening scope of related groups in the 1990s, to 9/11, Al Qaeda in Iraq, ISIS, and whatever else is now brewing in Libya, Syria, and Yemen. 

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