Asymetry

The abstraction: suppose country A provides arms to, and trains, a local militia, B, in country C.

Question: is country A an evil interfering superpower, at least as seen by those in C fighting the local militia, B?

If A is Russia and C is Ukraine, the answer is yes. If A is the US and C is ISIS (with ambitions to be a state ), the answer one generally gets is 'no'.

But to those who have been oppressed by the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government, and who think (perhaps wrongly) that ISIS is their salvation, I imagine that's the way the US will be seen if it continues to support Iraq's sectarian government.

Richard Hass (on FZs' GPS) noted that incrementalism is leading nowhere. But getting in more robustly isn't the right answer (as Larry Ellison noted wrt. Apple "we tried that experiment"). So something completely different is needed. Most serious thinkers seem to have concluded that Iraq as a single entity is a non-starter now. So the questions should be: 1) what does a partitioned Iraq look like and 2) how does it get there as painlessly as possible?