Sure, there is a very remote relationship if you ignore the observable fact that the Bathist/Sunni uprising in Iraq of 2004-2009 was quelled by the Awakening and was a non factor until the reconciliation process championed by the US was abandoned by a change in US policy. If there was a continued uprising without the multi year reversal you could make a more rational correlation but that is not there.
No one is butthurt by your statements. They are simply shallow and myopic and others are pointing out facts that illustrate that.
P.S. Thank you Skuzzy for not nuking the thread. I appreciate a good debate and reasoned discourse.
I want'ed to add a little understood corollary on "the awakening", because I think many find it baffling that you could have, in the space of but a few years, both the Sunni Awakening and the rapid genesis of ISIS.
Before I write and link that, though, I want to express admiration for your, Change's, and Scholz's handling of this topic - all of which was competent. I also want to point out a valid truth to which Zimme alluded and that weas given short shrift: leaving Saddam in power may have had a set of attendant problems, but ISIS as we now know it was not one of them. Recall, one of the old adages of US foreign policy - and one we seem to have forgotten - is that foreign SOB's can be useful, even if they're not necessarily YOUR SOB.
As for the Awakening, though, it looks to me as though it had more to do with a cry, from the Sunni, for mercy from the Shia death squads. It wasn't so much directly a consequence of the US surge as the fact that the surge put the US in a position to stop what was really putting the hurt on the Sunni. Once that US presence was gone, well - it was time for paybacks.
I was a little stunned by this article on the matter:
http://atimes.com/2015/12/romancing-the-sunni-a-us-policy-tragedy-in-three-acts-act-ii/Afterthought: Standing there at the urinal, I always do my best thinking, probably because of the increased oxygen supply available to my brain.
The real problem, imj, of the Iraq war in particular, but actually of US military ventures in the ME generally, is a failure to comprehend Machiavelli - and I'll paraphrase:
You embrace a Prince or kill him. Men will take revenge for slight injuries but are incapable of taking revenge for great ones.
In our context, "state-building" or humanitarian efforts are a misuse, imj, of the military because they are the equivalent of slight injuries. The proper way, per Machiavelli, to run a war would be to clearly identify the enemy, get unalloyed support across the represented base of our government (our mechanism for ensuring that, while some may undoubtedly profit from war, the war must be justifiable in the eyes of the represented base - a test, if you like, not available to non-rep forms of government and a refutation of at least one of Zimme's allusions to opportunistic drivers of wars), and then prosecute the war against that singular enemy until it is incapble of retaliation.
In the case of the awakening, "we" (State, mainly, if not DoD) misread the willingness of the Sunni to come to the table as "friendliness". See W.T. Sherman on how "convertible" are people's core convictions. They aren't - and the fools negotiating with the Sunni militas should've been snapping pics and getting addresses so that the CIA could send assassins post-agreement. That's just US dilettantism and naivete. A true weasel como yo would've cut the deal even as he singled those dudes out for annihilation, shaking their hands only to guess their weight (to size the height of the hangin' drop, decelxmass equaling force, a certain amount of which is needed to break a neck, see?).
