... soldiers in Iraq, hitting the Ain al-Assad base in Anbar province and a military base near Erbil. It later turned out that the Iraqi Prime Minister was warned of the attacks in advance and transmitted the information to the Americans. This, along with the ... ... East, built by Iran for decades, increases the risk of an asymmetric Iranian response and threatens US allies in the Persian Gulf and Israel.
Such a war would have affected global markets, given the importance of the Middle East to world’s oil trade....
..., and that is an understatement; many Sunnis do not even consider Shiites to be Muslims. That is why so much money from rich Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar is going to fund, train, arm, and equip Sunni jihadist extremists like ISIS to go fight ... ... rivalries into the mix, which have been red-hot since the Lebanese Civil War, continuing through the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, through the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and now through conflict in Yemen and Syria.
Recruits are coming from all over ...
... to the Syrian Civil War, 2.) was not even not the among first Western nations formally recognizing the opposition, 3.) has been very lightly involved compared with other major international meddlers in this conflict (e.g. Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, the Gulf states…), and 4.) since the overall post-2003 Iraq mess, for which the U.S. does bear a majority of overall responsibility, was actually at its best levels of security all throughout the first two years of the protests/fighting in Syria, we cannot even begin to argue that the U.S. destabilizing Iraq ...