Past is Prologue: Abroad in Syria with the Ghosts of Iraq PKSOI Papers | Page 8

INTRODUCTION
“ Although they made their own mistakes , ORHA and the CPA were both victims of the Pentagon ’ s cavalier attitude toward postwar responsibilities . There were no coherent plans for establishing governance , providing security , or restoring public services .” -introduction to an interview with General Jay Garner
Nature abhors a vacuum , and the end of violent conflict by definition leaves a big one . If that vacuum is not filled by something positive , it will be filled by something negative , and the negative tends to move with shocking speed ; this is as close to inevitable as history offers us . In the absence of good governance , peace and security , warlords , transnational criminals , paramilitaries and factional forces take the field unchallenged . All of these individually are a threat to local populations , but each of them also fits into a pattern of regional and international security threats serious enough that the error of leaving these power vacuums unaddressed results in unstable environments .
History offers another in its short list of inevitabilities : all wars eventually end , but they rarely end cleanly . Thus it ’ s a safe assumption that there will be eventual reconstruction missions in countries such as Syria , Libya and Yemen , but it ’ s also a safe assumption that every dynamic that would otherwise have held these countries together as unified , peaceful nations will have been shattered by the time the reconstruction operation begins . Even if the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria ( ISIS ) and Syrian President Bashar al
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