We anti-war protesters were right: the Iraq invasion has led to bloody chaos

[Igel]

24. Depends on how hard you dig.

The immediate cause would be support for the uprising against Assad. Without that there wouldn't have been the flood of jihadis into Syria, the establishment of territory in a large part of the country for ISIS to form and later morph into ISIL. Want an immediate cause, there you have it.

Of course, there's a lot of piddling in that, too. So when we started to help some anti-Assad groups, the "usual suspects" on the Peninsula helped their preferred anti-Assad groups. Weapons, money, etc. Without that help the "cause" might not have gotten to where it is.

The instability in Iraq is certainly a contributing factor. The Shi'ite government--nicely majoritarian, BTW, for those that love majoritarianism--has been treating the "out of power people" rather badly. It's bred resentment where none needed additional breeding.

Removing the strong-man Saddam was a factor, to be sure. It let all the forces that he'd helped build up explode. For Saddam was nothing if not sectarian--from seizing Shi'ite mosques and giving them to Sunni populations, moving Sunnis to Shi'ite areas to divide the area, re-establishing the authority of traditional tribes and playing them off against each other, esp. widening the Sunni/Shi'ite divide. Thanks to Saddam, most Sunnis were convinced that they were a majority of the population and the primary economic driver. They weren't, of course, but myth is stronger than fact for a lot of people. When you find somebody who likes driving wedges between people to shore up their base, you know you're looking at a horrible person.

Then there were the corrupt and the smugglers who made a lot of money under Saddam. They certainly didn't like losing influence. Like under Hamas in Gaza, the government knew who they were and what they were doing.

Anti-US protesters tended to support the anti-Assad protesters. Oops. They also defended, even when they should have known better, some of the nastier secular trends that Saddam employed to cause religious extremism to flourish. ("Secular" means "long-term" here. Yes, it's an established meaning of the word.)