Brands and Feaver contended that different American policy choices could have thwarted the rise of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. They reached this conclusion after considering a range of counter-factual scenarios, including alternatives to US disengagement from Iraq in 2010–11, robust early intervention in the Syrian civil war, and action against ISIS before its assault on western Iraq. They argued, however, that the Iraq invasion did not make the rise of ISIS inevitable; quite the contrary, they showed that different, but plausible decisions by the Obama administration could have profoundly reduced the ISIS threat before it emerged.
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