ISIS-linked militants are threatening huge natural gas reserves the world needs badly right now, so their leaders are looking for new ways to fund their operations.
The US has given the Syrian people a chance at a brighter future. They want Assad gone and a real democratic government to rule on behalf of all of Syria. They want Assad to stop using chemical weapons on his own people.
But the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 gave us all the wrong incentives to believe that a democratic government cannot be stable and can be toppled by Islamist militants.
We heard, as a young Marine, that we would soon be fighting on the front lines of this war against the evil and un-American extremists who were threatening to destroy us.
And we believed it. We saw what happened in Fallujah.
We heard that the Iraqi people would go to the polls, and if they did not vote for the terrorists, who could defeat them? The United States.
But we did not see the results. We did not see how Iraqis turned their anger against Washington into an insurgency that became an anti-American resistance that turned into a violent and armed insurgency.
And what we did not see is that Washington’s strategy, which is based on fighting the Islamic State (ISIS) and the al-Nusra Front, has been a horrible one.
When the United States invaded Iraq, they promised their Iraqi and American soldiers and allies that the Iraqis would be fighting for democracy from the beginning.
The US had to fight the terrorists in Fallujah, and we helped liberate it.
Now, it turns out, Washington has completely lost its purpose in Iraq.
It is impossible to fight the terrorists when the Iraqi Sunnis are so angry with them and turning against them.
If the US had not invaded, the Iraqi Sunnis would not have turned against the West. This would have been a tragedy, but our goal was not to kill Iraqi Sunnis but to free
