in fact the United States created Isis
nothing like it existed before the
American occupation we created it it's
ours and now we're trying to deal with
the consequences
okay you ready the war in Iraq in the
streets of Baghdad no less than the
halls of Congress or in the stump
speeches of the campaign trail is in its
essence political not military like the
terrorists who hijacked American
airliners and flew them into American
buildings the fighters daily ambushing
American troops are attacking not
American military power but American
will and thanks to the way President
Bush and his colleagues chose to build
the case for war and the errors they've
made in prosecuting it American will is
an increasingly vulnerable target in the
end defeat our victory in Iraq will be
judged not by who controls Baghdad but
by whether the war has left America's
more secure than they were before it was
undertaken I wrote this piece in July
2003 insurgency very slowly very
particularly very specifically looking
at the various slender lines that
supported the occupation and cutting
precisely each line the UN snip the UN
fled the country the Jordanians who
might lend troops to the effort snip the
Jordanian embassy is attacked and even
as the American leaders in the United
States are telling the American people
that there's no insurgency at all by the
late summer it's absolutely clear that
not only is there an insurgency but it
is well lead well-planned and absolutely
ruthless the point of this piece was to
try to identify this insurgency as the
root enemy in the new war the first
weeks of the occupation in which
security in Baghdad collapsed chaos
ruled the streets and the fledgling
occupation authority daily issued
conflicting statements and made promises
it did not keep were fiasco they proved
an enormous boon to violent opponents
providing them in lawless streets of
post-war Iraq the
litical equivalent of a warm petri dish
in which to grow it had been based on
the threat of weapons of mass
destruction which turned out not to have
existed it was based also on a promise
given by the political leadership of the
Bush administration to the American
people that the war would be as one Bush
Ally put it a cakewalk both of those
promises were proved in the first months
of the war to be egregiously tragically
terribly wrong suddenly the Americans
were caught in a kind of existential
lonely world of the present where are we
why are we fighting why did we come here
when will we leave the enemy in Iraq in
other words is dynamic and changeable a
shadowy and loose group of forces made
up of former officers and soldiers of
the vast security and intelligence
organs of the ancien régime foreign-born
jihadis our ideological commandos who
have slipped into Iraq from Saudi Arabia
Syria and other Islamic countries
determined to confront and defeat the
United States and perhaps increasingly
young unemployed Iraqis angry at the
American occupation and the difficulties
that have brought eager to avenge a
relative's death or a personal affront
are simply desperate to earn some easy
money by hiring themselves out to attack
Americans
when you look at the goals of al-qaeda
when they attack the United States on
9/11 what was the goal exactly first of
all to create this enormous image or
kind of recruiting poster for jihadism
the image of the towers falling the
image of the towers attack but secondly
it was to draw the United States out of
its hole as one of the al-qaeda
theorists put it it was to in their
ambition to drag the United States into
a quagmire in Afghanistan and like the
Soviets before them we are going to
defeat the United States on the
battlefield in Afghanistan that was
their thought well of course the u.s.
did not occupy Afghanistan right away
and the way they expected they did
something much more beneficial to the
jihadist cause they occupied Iraq and
they provided day after day month after
month telegenic images of American
troops abusing Muslims this was exactly
what al-qaeda wanted to create if you
look at the images from Abu Ghraib they
might as well be recruitment posters
made on Madison Avenue for the jihadi
cause the first result of that was
insurgency itself the second result of
it is Isis because Isis of course is the
child the descendant of al-qaeda in Iraq
or al-qaeda in Mesopotamia or al-qaeda
of the two rivers whatever name you'd
like to use it is a result of Sunni
hatred dissatisfaction and vulnerability
at the new order in Iraq
that Iraqis loyal to a security obsessed
totalitarian regime of three decades
would seek to fight the Americans who
have overthrown it is not surprising nor
should it be surprising that jihadis
from outside and inside Iraq should
seize the opportunity to attack infidels
occupying an Islamic country what is
surprising is the degree to which the
Americans through their own lack of
attention to the critical political
tasks of the wars aftermath have in
effect assisted their efforts what was
the basic political task of the
occupation of Iraq it was to somehow
switch power from the Sunni minority to
the Shia majority and to do it in the
way that the Sunnis would accept it
non-violently in fact if you look at the
early days of the occupation everything
the Americans did seems to have been
pointed toward the opposite goal
the Americans acted again and again by
dissolving the army by deep pacifying
the country by doing a number of very
stupid policies they acted again and
again to enrage the Sunnis to make them
more vulnerable to make them think they
had to fight because a key part of the
insurgency even though that we think now
of ISIL is the Islamic state that is
mainly jihadist in fact it has a key
cadre a key level of functioning that
comes from the Iraqi army all of whom
came from this relatively successful
very large army that we dissolved with
very little thought beforehand and sent
four hundred thousand young men onto the
streets without any salaries and with
simply their guns
so we humiliated these people we laid
the seeds down for the insurgency
without a doubt
in effect the United States created Isis
nothing like it existed before the
American occupation it was an insurgency
that battened on the hatred of the
Americans and the vulnerability and
hatred of the Sunnis for the Shia
there's no way to understand it
happening without the Americans there
because it built itself like a kind of
bacterial host on the American
occupation we created it it's ours and
now we're trying to deal with the
consequences not for the first time the
United States has shown itself to be a
strange hybrid creature military giant
and political dwarf but Iraq is not
Lebanon from which the US could sail
away and invade Grenada the stakes are
much higher in the words of Hassan
Salameh the former Lebanese government
minister and scholar who was working for
the UN headquarters in Baghdad when it
was bombed you can't just get up and
walk away from a rock like you did
Lebanon no matter how bad it gets if a
rock turns into anarchy it's likely to
spill into the rest of the Gulf it would
be a catastrophe I think it is a
self-fulfilling prophecy
watch out while what you wish for you
will create it and that is exactly what
the United States ended up doing once
the u.s. began striking Isis from the
air in August 2014 it was an enormous
surge in Islamic state recruitment
pirates reported that in the six weeks
after those airstrikes began Isis had
recruited 6,000 jihadis a huge number in
a group that's supposed to number twenty
to thirty thousand fifteen hundred of
those or foreign fighters so I think the
central perception from the beginning
that the Iraq war was a dumb idea not
simply because it was going to be a lot
harder and a lot more complicated than
it was advertised as being but it was a
dumb idea because ideologically it was
the stupidest thing that the United
States could do but now we're in the new
war and this is the war that we're going
to lose indeed it may be that the United
States with its overwhelming military
power as
seated only in transforming an eventual
and speculative threat into a concrete
and immediate one now the Bush
administration finds itself trying to
perform the tightrope walk of building a
stable and friendly government beneath
the shadow of escalating violence and
growing an inevitable nationalism the
administration began its Iraq venture
with an era of absolute determination
taking a kind of grim pride defying the
United Nations and doing what is right
American Iraq will need a different kind
of determination now and a newfound
honesty to go with it don't start a
major policy until you know how you're
going to finish it because when I look
at this war against the Islamic state I
don't think our leaders know how it's
going to finish and it's going to be
carried to the next administration and
who knows how far it will go and at the
moment our actions are helping this
group recruit dramatically if we look at
the Islamic state in Iraq I think there
is a fair amount of evidence that it
would have collapsed in certain parts of
Iraq of its own interior internal
contradictions I think that the United
States if it has learned anything it
should have learned to stop acting
against its own best interests and I
think that the US has not learned that
you