Monday, January 25, 2016

Op-Ed: After Bungling in Iraq, Libya and Syria, the West Needs Iran

 
Mehrdad Khonsari is a former Iranian diplomat. The views expressed are his own and Euronews does not endorse political opinions expressed here or elsewhere.

The November 2015 Paris attacks by radical Islamists associated with the so-called Islamic State, took place in the aftermath of more than a decade of conflict and confrontation since 9/11.

The post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq with the aim of promoting democratic values in the Middle East has proven to be disastrous. The tragedy in Paris may have finally brought an end to all such efforts.

After spending almost two trillion dollars, along with the lives of many thousands of people, which has now culminated in the largest flow of migration since World War II, it is now clear that the conceptual framework behind such actions was highly flawed.

Subsequent efforts by the Obama presidency to distance the United States and some of its allies from their original commitments to nation building in  Iraq and Afghanistan by withdrawing the bulk of American and allied troops from those countries, has also backfired.

All of the above actions have helped destroy the earlier equilibrium in places like Iraq, Syria and Libya, which has led to unprecedented levels of regional tension and insecurity precipitated by a revival of Shia-Sunni tensions, exacerbated by false promises of the Arab Spring. 

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Source: Euronews

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