At
the Intercept, Mehdi Hasan makes a basic point that's seldom made here:
ISIS is our child, the spawn of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the acts
that followed from it. Tom
“Your brother created ISIS,” college
student Ivy Ziedrich told a startled Jeb Bush after a town hall meeting
in Reno, Nevada, in May 2015. The then-Republican presidential hopeful
tried to defend his elder sibling, former President George W. Bush, by
blaming the rise of the Islamic State on Barack Obama, “because
Americans pulled back” from Iraq in 2011.
"It sounds a bit
conspiratorial, right? Calling Dubya the creator of ISIS? The reality,
however, is that Ziedrich’s accusation wasn’t far off the mark.
"Had it not been for Bush’s catastrophic decision to invade and occupy
Iraq in 2003, in defiance of international law, the world’s most feared
terrorist group would not exist today. ISIS is blowback.
"In this
week’s episode of my six-part series on blowback, I examine the three
ways in which Bush’s misadventure in Mesopotamia helped birth a group
that the U.S. now considers to be one of the biggest threats to both
U.S. national security and Middle East peace.
"First, foreign
military occupations tend to radicalize local populations and breed
violent insurgencies. Take Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Or Hamas in
the Gaza Strip.
"In Iraq, the U.S. morphed from heroic liberators
into brutal occupiers within a matter of weeks. In Fallujah, which
would later become an ISIS stronghold, U.S. troops opened fire on a
crowd of peaceful protesters in April 2003, killing and wounding dozens
of Iraqis.
"The shootings, the torture, the general chaos, all
helped drive thousands of Iraqis from the minority Sunni community into
the arms of radical groups led by brutal gangsters, such as Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda in Iraq, formed in 2004 to fight U.S.
troops and their local allies, was a precursor organization to … ISIS.
"Second, in May 2003, in a criminally stupid and reckless move, the
U.S. occupying authorities disbanded the Iraqi army. That’s right: The
U.S. made more than half a million well-armed and well-trained Iraqi
troops unemployed overnight. No less an authority than Gen. Colin
Powell, Bush’s secretary of state and America’s former top soldier,
would later describe those jobless soldiers as “prime recruits for
insurgency.”
"In recent years, many of the top commanders in ISIS
have been identified as former senior officers in Saddam Hussein’s
army. Coincidence?
"Third, the U.S. military detained tens of
thousands of Iraqis, many of them noncombatants, at Camp Bucca in
southern Iraq, where imprisoned jihadis were able to not only radicalize
new recruits in plain sight, but also plan future operations and
attacks. “Many of us at Camp Bucca were concerned that instead of just
holding detainees, we had created a pressure cooker for extremism,”
compound Cmdr. James Skylar Gerrond would later remark.
"One
former Bucca detainee, incidentally, was none other than Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi. Yes, the self-proclaimed caliph and leader of ISIS who,
according to Iraqi terrorism expert Hisham al-Hashimi, “absorbed the
jihadist ideology and established himself among the big names” while at
Bucca.
"To be clear, then, ISIS is blowback from the U.S.
invasion and occupation of Iraq. And don’t just take my word for it.
Listen to David Kilcullen, a former adviser to both Gen. David Petraeus
and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, considered to be one of
the world’s leading counter-insurgency experts. “We have to recognize
that a lot of the problem is of our own making,” Kilcullen told Channel 4
News in March 2016. “There, undeniably, would be no ISIS if we hadn’t
invaded Iraq.”
