Tony Blair Admits Iraq War Led To Rise Of ISIS, Apologizes For “Mistakes”

If there’s one lesson Washington simply refuses to learn when it comes to Mid-East foreign policy it’s that forcibly removing autocrats almost invariably leads to chaos.
That’s not to say that promoting democratic principles and encouraging government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’ isn’t somehow a noble pursuit at the theoretical level. It’s simply to say that real political change must be completely organic and cannot be brought about via military intervention or by covert attempts to support popular uprisings.
Importantly, this principle applies in countries where the seeds for change have already been sown. That is, you must let the process play out on its own, even if the ball is already rolling. You cannot, for instance, say something like this: ‘well, there are popular uprisings against someone we believe to be a dictator and so, because the populace clearly wants change, we’ll go in and accelerate the process by fomenting discord.’
That strategy will not work.
The people are just as likely as not to view outside interference as stemming from ulterior motives and the regime is just as likely as not to become even more dictatorial than it already was in the face of what will inevitably be perceived as foreign meddling in the affairs of a sovereign state.
The results of implementing this type of failed strategy are everywhere apparent in the Mid-East. There’s Libya, which is now a war-torn wasteland in the wake of Gaddafi’s death. There’s Egypt, where the confusion that reigned during the Arab Spring cornered the US into supporting the rise of Mohamed Morsi only to see his government overthrown in a counter coup that eventually installed Mubarak’s former head of military intelligence Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in the Presidency. There’s Syria, where efforts on the part of Washington, Ankara, Riyadh, and Doha to destabilize the Assad regime have led to a bloody civil war that’s left hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced. And of course there’s Iraq, which the US and Britain invaded on false pretenses only to see the country careen into chaos following Saddam’s ouster.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on 10/25/2015.