U.S. really create ISIS?

U.S. really create ISIS? How?

The US did not deliberately create ISIS. But there would have been no ISIS but for American missteps and incompetence during the US occupation of Iraq.

Before we invaded in 2003, there were no armed islamist groups like ISIS in Iraq. Horrible as Saddam was, he had at least managed to keep a lid on them. Then we invaded, removed Saddam from power, and the Pentagon failed to issue the necessary orders for securing property. That led to widespread looting and a nearly instantaneous social breakdown in the absence of minimal security.

Then the Coalition Provisional Authority geniuses we put in charge of running Iraq thought it would be a great idea to disband the Iraqi army - an act that instantly put hundreds of thousands of heavily armed young men, with nothing to do, out on the streets and out of anybody’s control.

Then, to triple down on the stupid, we implemented a “de-Baathaification” purge, along the lines of the de-Nazification that followed the defeat of Germany, notwithstanding glaring differences between the scope and reach of the Nazi party in Germany, and the toothless haplessness of the Baath party in Iraq. That removed thousands of technocrats and bureaucrats necessary for the routine functioning of government, and wrecked its ability to deliver basic services such as electricity, garbage removal, or furnishing the minimal safety necessary to keep schools open.

Needless to say, it didn’t take long for a complete collapse of law and order and a series of insurgencies spanning most of the country. And our incoherent response - waves of random arrests that swept both foe and would-be friend; a plethora of checkpoints manned by nervous, confused, and frequently trigger happy troops who shot up cars full of innocents; frequently indiscriminate use of firepower that piled up “collateral damage”; and numerous instances of abuse and even outright massacres that were often unpunished, added fuel to the fire.

The insurgency began attracting foreign Islamist fighters from all over for jihad tourism in Iraq. Something that hadn’t happened in decades of Saddam’s rule, did within months of US rule. Even Al-Qaeda, which had no prior presence in Iraq, opened up a branch office,Al-Qaeda in Iraq , which quickly became one of the most virulent and bloodthirsty of the insurgent groups. It even set up a proto statelet, openly governing some regions in Western Iraq - the same ones where ISIS would get its start a few years later.

Al Qaeda in Iraq was eventually beat down, but its surviving members, such as Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, would go on to form ISIS soon as the US withdrew from Iraq. Helped in no small part by America’s final gift: the US trained Iraqi army, a sad sack and astonishingly incompetent, corrupt, and cowardly mob - something I addressed in my answer to Why is the Iraqi army losing Abrams tanks so easily?

In short, we didn’t set out to create ISIS, but we screwed up so bad that the emergence of ISIS or something equally bad was inevitable.

Indirectly, yes.

Because the Americans intervene in Iraq, they killed Saddam and imposed democracy in a place that has sectarian conflicts, and didn´t work because the Iraqi factions do not understand each other. The Americans claim that Iraq had chemical weapons, but it didn´t, Iraq had ceased to use them for a long time, since the Iran-Iraq War, but even so, the US and UK invaded Iraq without the UN endorsement.

So the Iraqi people thought that the Americans wanted to destroy Iraq for invading their country without any apparent reason, and came to fight against them with the air bombings and civilian casualties. Iraqis became more and more angry with the Americans and then,they started to ally to armed groups that fought US Armed Forces.

Due to the US Armed Forces in Iraq are very strong, they began to use unconventional methods of combat, such as terrorism, insurgency, the use of car bombs and suicide bombers to try to defeat the Americans. Over time, these groups have gained strength,money and weapons. With the high(and maybe unnecessary) expenses in 2011, the US withdrew their troops from the country. Then came the saying "When the cat's away, the mice will play" and these groups started fighting each other, wanting to dominate areas in Iraq, and others harness the power.

Another factor that shows that the US may have helped in the creation ISIS, was that the American army has left some of their military equipment such as helicopters, Humvees, rifles, M1 Abrahms in Iraq during the withdrawal in 2011.

Create? No of course not. “Create” has a rigorous meaning that cannot be shifted just because of politics or expediency. The more important question is: Does the United States bear at least some responsibility for the creation of ISIS? The answer is quite clear: Yes.

The US has a terrible policy in the Middle East. It ceased being “good” about 1991. After that point in time, it began to completely fall apart. What do I mean about this? The US has always had a bit of Realpolitik and pragmatism. The US was never under any impression that the people wanted and certainly were not ready for contemporary republicanism.

It pushed regimes internally to modernize at a pace that worked for them while keeping the ship as steady as possible. After that point in time, the US has failed to keep that policy. Worse, it began to shift its own policy around the world from “Maintain stable regimes that favor trade” to “Also make sure we push regimes to democratize.”

Sounds great on paper. A lot of ideas sound great on paper but are horrible in application. There are others:

• Companies should publish all executive officers’ salaries.
• Congress should abolish pork spending and cease handing out bonus checks on the chamber floors to those members who have records of passing bills and cooperating.

In those two instances, removing those provisions caused chaos in their respective organizations. The former resulted in EO’s competing in the US for salary that drove the numbers through the roof. The latter resulted in polarization of politics because chamber leaders lost two strong (and very cheap: the debt has been impacted less than 5% by those aspects) methods of pulling members to the middle to get things done.

Idealists destroy systems. The world is complex and pragmatists understand that making politics has always been like making sausages — it’s ugly business that average citizens think they know what’s best for the world, but if they really saw and knew, they’d freak the fuck out. The law of unintended consequences says that generally systems fall into patterns that mostly work for them and to gum it up with idealistic gibberish usually causes more harm than good.

The American idealists who decided that Latin America and East Asia were ready for democracy after the fall of the USSR, also felt like it was time to bring that to the Middle East. It worked in Latin America and Asia, largely. Those regimes that favored the US (South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Philippines, Brazil, Chile and on and on) all converted to democracy from about 1979–1999, they all fell into standard republican patterns.

The US felt like this was a great thing and largely it was. But not in the Middle East. That region has a combination of potent religious and cultural attitudes that make it challenging to work. Many borders were arbitrarily formed by Gertrude Bell and Thomas Lawrence. The stable autocrats that were allowed to rise to power and created a “more or less” stable area, were dis-favored. After the First Gulf War and especially the Second Gulf War, the US’s attitudes about regime change caused a societal collapse that has resulted in people swinging to extremes.

Some of those people, in their desperation, joined various terrorist groups. One of those groups is ISIS. The people who founded that group get the credit for that affair. But the US cannot divorce itself from a significant portion of responsibility because Bush failed to anticipate the horrible results of his Administration’s vile actions and Obama failed to anticipate the results of the sudden withdraw of American forces in Iraq. Obama also made a promise about how/why the US would interfere, and then tippy-toed back away from that promise.

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How to make money online Affiliate Marketing

At the core of our society, people make money by selling stuff to others. Why? Because people need stuff. Even the most "self-sufficient" person in 2010 cannot supply themselves with everything (heck, even Thoreau needed some help). If you want to sell stuff, you need someone to sell to -- someone who needs (or wants) your stuff. The more people who need or want your stuff, the better! And that's the case for a variety of reasons, the most basic of which is the more people there are, the easier it is to reach out to them. If there are five people in your community who have interest in your stuff, it's a lot harder to find and get in touch with them than if there are five hundred or five thousand people in your community with interest in your stuff. And by extension, that means it can take a lot less time to find a buyer in a pool of five thousand prospective purchasers than in just five. So, if you want to sell your stuff fast, your stuff better be something that a lot of people have a need or want for (the only real alternative is to have a buyer pool with a smaller number of people who have a very serious need or want for something -- see commercial and military airplanes, for example -- but in reality those are the exceptions rather than the rule).

When you think for a second, what are the true necessities of life? Food, water, shelter and habitat. Okay, so you could start a lemonade stand, or maybe buy one of those portable hot dog stands. The latter has a pretty high startup cost, though. And lemonade stands are neat and all, but that might probably look a little weird if you're older than ten or eleven. Fresh, drinkable water is incredibly scarce and even if you find an unused spring, building a purification and bottling plant is rather expensive (bottled water providers apparently agree on both points: http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/0... ), not to mention people who are thirsty need only find the nearest public sink or water fountain should they for whatever reason not have a government-provided source of water in their abode. Shelter and habitat could be combined, all things considered, and while real estate isn't exactly a booming industry throughout much of America right now, even at its peak it wasn't the quickest or most effective system in the world. With those "essentials" more or less out of the question, let's dig a little deeper into things that, while essential to the way we live our lives, aren't so critically essential that they fall under the duty of government to secure for its citizens (food stamps for those in need, government water infrastructures, Section 8 housing subsidies for those in need). Let's pick clothes. Everybody needs clothes. That's just over 307 million people that go into your pool of potential purchasers in the United States alone.

So now we have our stuff. For the sake of argument, let's say that we've made it ourselves or purchased it from a wholesaler or whatever. How do we sell it? You could go door-to-door. Not very costly from a transportation standpoint. But your pool of potential purchasers is now whittled down to how many people you can find. And besides, there's no guarantee that the people you do find will be interested. That doesn't seem very efficient. If people need or even want something, they're in a position where they should be finding you! Of course, I don't mean to say that you should just sit in your house with these clothes you want to sell and never tell anyone that you're looking to sell, and just assume that people will telepathically find you and start banging down your door ... but with this kind of stuff, there is always someone who needs it, and if someone needs something, they will more often than not go out of their way to find it.

In 2010, if people need to buy things, where do they look? They could look in a catalog, a brick and mortar store (or an ad in a newspaper or magazine that acts as a mini-catalog for a brick and mortar store), or online. Starting a product catalog and getting it in the hands of consumers doesn't exactly sound like a fast process. Nor does opening a brick and mortar store, or even putting together -- to borrow from a previous example -- a clothes stand. So how about online! While the pool of prospective buyers created by a catalog is limited to the number of people receiving it, and the pool created by a brick and mortar store to the number of people who pass by it and hear of it by word of mouth, with the Internet your pool automatically starts at over 230 million in the United States.

You could start your own store website, but that can take a good amount of effort just to get up and running, and frankly you may as well go back to door-to-door marketing given how difficult it can be to get even a few dozen people to visit your website a day. Or, you could pay someone a nominal price to place your stuff on one of the most popular websites in the world. Someone who reports having tens of millions of active accounts. Someone like eBay. Where purchasers go to find things to bid on or buy right then and there and sellers go to make sure that those purchasers find what they're looking for.

So...to finally answer your question, I'm of the opinion that the fastest way to make money outside of setting up a food and drink cooler at a fair, beach or busy street on a hot summer's day is probably just to buy various generic clothing items from wholesalers (like t-shirts, for example from http://www.blankshirts.com/ ) and trying to auction them off/offer a Buy It Now price somewhere above cost on eBay. Maybe you sell them in twos or threes or something of the sort. You're not likely to make a ton in profit in each individual sale, and like almost everything in life, sales are not a guarantee, but the turnaround from wholesale purchase to shipment to your customer can be rather quick, and unlike something like PayPerPost, the process isn't inherently scammy or spammy -- not to mention you can be in control of everything. It's probably the most effective way for people selling general consumer goods to reach their target market if they don't have a couple of million dollars to spend on a Super Bowl ad.

A2A: I’ll tell you the secret to the BEST way to make ABUNDANT MONEY:

• Leverage

Let me ask you something:

Does working harder make you more money?

Billions of people around the world are working harder than ever in history and they cant seem to be able improve their finances…

Do we need to work harder?

Is it even possible?

Most households require a combined income of husband and wife to barely make it, yet, even with this extra effort, its not good enough, many of us must fill the financial gap with credit; which adds additional stress.

What went wrong?

The Industrial Revolution raised the most wealthy generation in human history: Baby Boomers.

But now humanity faces a HUGE problem:

Today we are past that labor-intensive age.

Politicians promise: “I will bring jobs back to America”… really? Thats not going to happen! IMPOSSIBLE!

Today, we live in a new world, a new economy, a new age of accelerated change and these changes are causing confusion.

We are now in a technological revolution: I call it the Leverage Age.

TECHNOLOGY = LEVERAGE!

Over the past few decades our economy has been slowly shifting from the Industrial Era to the Digital Era. Digital transformation “disappears” physical products. Photography, mail, documents, music, books… All dematerialized. Disrupted. As a consequence, millions of jobs that depended on such industries are struggling to make a good living. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Do we understand it? Are we aware of it?

I think billions of people are still blind to this new reality. Today´s changes are invisible. This is an invisible enemy. We cant easily see the changes. But… wow… can we feel them!

During the Industrial Revolution people could see physical change and progress. Efficiency and technological advances were easily exposed. But today, how can we fight an enemy we cant see or understand? People need to visualize and understand disruption.

Whats the solution?

I believe education is our only hope.

I strongly believe that ignorance will be the #1 cause of poverty in the decades to come. Hard work is not good enough anymore. We need a new ingredient: Leverage.

The BEST way to make abundant money in this new economy is learn, master and apply the most important knowledge of the 21 century:

Tech-leverage!

. . . .

I train merchants on MultichannelSecrets.com to expand their customer reach and establish new revenue streams without huge upfront costs with the power of Cloud Technology. Follow me on Quora for more business tips!

There are several ways to go about answering this question, and it all depends on your risk tolerance. If you’re risk seeking, start a company. Starting a company is likely the riskiest way to go since you’ll, in most cases, have to take on some sort of debt. This debt can come in the form of foregone wages, savings, or actual borrowed money. If you’ve successfully started/exited a company in the past, you may be able to convince a fellow risk seeking person/angel or venture capitalist to fund your startup.

If you’re risk averse, you can take a more established route like blogging, drop-shipping, wholesale -> retail, freelance work, etc. The reward with almost any risk-averse option is very positively correlated with time/effort. I suppose this is the case with anything, but it’s even more true here. If you spend several thousand hours learning to code you’ll be able to make far more money than any blogging or spread/margin profits via various schemes.

Of course, I didn’t answer your question for no reason, my company offers a very simple way to make money online. Read about it here: Make Money Online.

1.Make upto 20k usd per Month on Youtube

You don't even need to be as famous as other are suggesting. Lets do some math.

Based on this blog, pre-roll ads generate $5 per 1k views and banner ads generate $0.80 per 1k view. For this example we will settle on average $2 per 1k views.

 2.Doing other people’s homework and assignments: Online Tutoring, Homework Help, Assignment Help is a platform where college students from around the world post their homework, assignments, projects and subject queries. I answer them as an online tutor and earn cash rewards for it. I also earn Royalty on my answers. It means that if website sells a subscription because of my answer, I earn 80% of whatever the student pays as the royalty – even long after I have stopped working for the website. Great place to build passive income source for your future!

3. You can earn $5/day from 2 simple websites and you don't need to invest any money.

1. Fiverr - do whatever you can (cover design, video editing, audio editing, content creation, proofreading, video recording).

2. Write articles on iWriter (work 1-2 hours a day for the first 25 reviews and then less than 1 hour/day for $5/day). You can start this within 10 minutes. All you need is a PayPal account and a PC.

3. Work on Freelancer as a Virtual Assistant - write content or take advantage of your skills.

To get results really quick, I highly recommend iWriter. Since I was 18 years old (now I'm 23), I've been trying to make money on my own by using the Internet:

• I bought watches from eBay from China and resold them for a commission;
• I worked as a Virtual Assistant;
• I wrote articles for an Indian Automotive Forum;
• I tried to create 3D models, but I failed completely;

At the moment, I run a blog and I self-publish books on Amazon on different topics (most regarding online marketing and self-improvement).

If you want to start a business, you will need money. A blog requires capital, to publish a book requires capital, to create a course requires capital. 99% of the businesses require capital, but iWriter is the best way to start making money, especially if you only need $5/day.

I have a completely free eBook of 25 pages which explains 20 ways to make money online today (even if you don't have starting capital).

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What single change in your daily routine had the biggest impact in your life?

Doing a series of pushups every day.

I started this discipline to lose weight.

I didn’t. In fact, I was gaining pounds each year. Nonetheless my fitness performace increased significantly and I learned the value of perseverance.

Before my life transformation, a good chunk of my personal philosophy was the belief that not much depends on my actions. I was afraid that my efforts to get more out of life would be in vain. I would work my ass off just to get exhausted. My dreams couldn’t come true.

Reading The Slight Edge I reminded myself of the instances where I did something consistently and got the results. It wasn’t a massive action, but it was focused and stretched over a long period of time.

I did one series of pushups every day for a few years and I extended my limits. I was eventually able to do more than 120 consecutive pushups.

This realization has shaken my small world

Something clicked in my head. My personal philosophy shifted into “time plus effort equals results.”

I developed tiny disciplines, which I practiced consistently: tracking my expenses, tracking my calorie intake, writing, speed-reading. I observed some results almost immediately.
Within a month, I was reading almost 50 percent faster.
In seven months, I reached my dream weight.
Those rapid results kept me going with the disciplines I couldn’t have believed would have ever brought me results.

What Changes have made the biggest impact in my life? I’ve had added a few over just the last 1.5 years that have proven worthy of integrating into your day.

When I found myself in a depressed state last year I seeked out many therapies and research hard to find out what the most happiest and successful people’s day looks like.

Here is what has worked for me. These are all very practical explanations that I will present in order of how your day unfolds.

The First 60 minutes of the day - This is where you set the tone. You really can’t make it worse but you can certainly improve the likelihood of your day going positively. This time should be your time, no matter what happens today, no matter how much of yourself you give to your work, your team, your family, you’ll be able to look back and say, “well, I had that for myself.” You know you won’t get that time after work, when you have to go to the gym, spend time with the family, make dinner and settle down.

What should you do in this time? I have a few ideas, but if you practice nothing else in this time, practice gratitude. Look around, look where you are right now, think about the people in your life, where you live, how lucky you are to be born at this time in history, in one of only a few countries where you can do anything you want.

Think about the things you have done, the things you have earned (yes, even material things) and the timing of how things have come together to bring you to this moment, where you can simply reflect on it. Be thankful for all this.

Even if you live in this crappiest apartment in the crappiest part of town, find something to be thankful for, it may be dandelion growing through a crack in the concrete below your apartment. That dandelion is there, against all odds, and you and it get to have this moment together in it’s brief lifespan. You could have been born anything, be thankful you aren’t a single celled microbe without a conscious.

Practicing gratitude has had a profound effect on my perspective. I was in a very dark place, I had a lot to be thankful for but I couldn’t even see it, and I still occasionally get tested by these thoughts, but I find that gratitude is the antidote. It’s like a muscle, if you exercise it regularly, it will become stronger, more coordinated and more efficient. You can literally switch your default state of mind permanently.

What else can you do in this time?

Read - The person you will be in five years is a combination of the books you read, the people you meet, and the experiences you’ve had. Block out 15–30 minutes of the time and read a chapter of something in the personal development/self-help category. Right now I take my dog for a walk and listen to about 30 minutes of audio book. Currently I am listening to Stephen Pressfield’s The War of Art.

Breathe - There are numerous breathing methods out there, the two I like most are The Wim Hof Breathing Method and Box Breathing. This is an amazing way to manipulate the chemicals in your brain to focus you and put you in the moment. The Wim Hof Method can put you into an almost meditative state that can bring subconscious thought to the surface.

I have a YouTube video I did on the Wim Hof Method that makes it easy to practice and explains the benefits, it’s got over 30,000 views, people seem to really enjoy it.

Practicing calming your mind is just like practicing gratitude, you get better at it with practice. Being able to harness your thoughts at the start of the day will set the tone for the rest of the day. You’ll be less likely to get derailed or distracted by the many things grasping for our attention.

You get more work done at a higher quality by batching. With batching you set a timer to only focus on one specific task at time until you’ve reached completion or a specific milestone, in that time you turn off all notifications and you do not let people derail you. By some over-ear headphones and put them on, even if you don’t play music people will assume you cannot hear them and are less likely to even bother trying to get your attention.

Set up an autoresponder in your email accounts that says specifically what time you check your email and will reply to them. If you have to be on Facebook to run ads or communicate on a specific project with a group or person then get a feed blocker extension for your browser (chrome has a couple). Set up autoresponders in your FB messages that say specifically when you will get back to them. This is something I got from reading Tim Ferriss’s Four Hour Work Week.

Do the same with emails and messages, instead of doing them one by one and always letting them derail your focus, just have a specific time each day that you check all your emails and be done with it.

You will be surprised at how much high quality work you will produce in a given time period by batching. I actually do it with my quora posts, it’s how I practice writing. Every night I find one question and focus exclusively on it. I dedicate myself to it and deliver the very best, most thought out answer I can.

Lastly, and I’ll keep this one short because it’s been talked about in other posts. Exercise. At 5:30p every day, except Thursdays and Sundays, I drop everything and get my workout in. Just like the start of the day, this is for me. I do CrossFit, and I actually own a CrossFit gym here in Phoenix. I’m not going to tell you what to do, just find something that moves you and do it.

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