[dsuth]

No, I don't believe that handing weapons to people turns them into fundamentalist terrorists, and I don't believe the Iraq war created a group whose modus operandi has been the same since the 1800's.

Take a look at the article I linked above; this form of religious extremism has been a powerful ally to those seeking political power in the Middle East for a long time. Saudi Arabia was built on the back of Wahhabism, which it then tried to subvert into a conservative institution to ensure its rule.

In short, these guys like to play with fire to further their ambitions, and ISIS is the latest explosion. If you reduce ISIS to 'this happened because we did this', then you're missing a whole lot of narrative, not to mention understanding of the situation.

Why do you think they're so well-funded, and well-organised? This is not the result of a corrupt war that decimated Iraq's population, it's an ambitious power play that appears to be getting out of hand (again).

[Udik]

Religious extremism, and in fact extremists of all kinds, always exist everywhere. What the USA has done has been to topple organized states or regimes that were able to keep some order and rule of the law in their territories, fuel hatred and desperation by killing hundreds of thousands of people, bombing the cities and destroying any form of economy, also with the aid of a decade long and ferocious embargo (the estimates put to a million the victims of the embargo, mostly children), and finally providing weapons and training to "rebels" to produce internal revolts to weaken the "enemies". A myopic and downright evil strategy that is now fully showing its obvious results.

[cocoablazing]

The invasion may have not been sufficient cause to produce the IS, but it was necessary.