It’s a bit off the usual topic here, but I can’t help but add my two bits to this national conversation about ISIS/ISIL or whatever they’re being called today. I used to work in this field so I know a thing or two about it, although I’m not as up to date as I used to be.
What bothers me is that this group is referred to as though it’s something new. It isn’t. ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) is just al-Qaeda under a new name. These people have been in Iraq from the beginning of the 2003 invasion.
Another thing people are generally unaware of is that we did their work for them for years. Without American involvement in Iraq, there would be no ISIL to speak of. When we invaded Iraq on the false pretext of Iraqi WMDs and involvement in 9/11, one of the first priorities was something called de-Baathification, i.e. the removal of those in the ruling Baath party from power (and often from ordinary jobs, too). It was modeled on the old “de-Nazification” of the immediate postwar era, but in some ways it was more severe, because all Sunni Iraqis fell under suspicion, and were ethnically cleansed from government in large areas of the country.
The reason the Sunnis dominated the Baath party was that Arab nationalism was a largely Sunni phenomenon in Iraq (unlike Syria). Our new Shiite “allies,” like Nouri al-Maliki, were aligned with theocratic Iran (al-Maliki is essentially an Iranian puppet).
During the early years of resistance against the US occupation, the remnants of the Baath party comprised the core of the resistance to the occupation. Over time, they lost, because they were facing the US armed forces and the majority Shiites, and it’s kind of hard to fight main battle tanks and attack helicopters with kalashnikovs, improvised explosives and RPGs. In the meanwhile, al-Qaeda in Iraq avoided confronting the Americans, choosing instead to carry out a brutal terrorist campaign against Shiites and Baathists. When the Baathists were beaten into submission by US forces, this left al-Qaeda in Iraq as the dominant Sunni power. At this point, Sunnis in Iraq had nobody to turn to but the Islamists.
Ironically, this is what Osama bin Laden had wanted from the beginning: to destroy the secular nationalist opposition to a new Sunni caliphate. He intentionally drew us into a war in the Middle East, anticipating the outcome we have today. If we had attacked Syria’s Baathist leadership, as many of our idiotic politicians wanted fairly recently, we would have only made things easier for ISIL/al-Qaeda.
Now, we are fighting ISIL, dropping bombs on northern Iraq and helping the Shiite puppets of Iran to prevent them from taking Baghdad. This shows that the invasion of Iraq and subsequent de-Baathification campaign was an enormously expensive blunder, because we have two crappy choices in regards to Iraq today: Islamic fanatics or Iranian allies. Saddam Hussein was a troublesome dictator, and his removal nothing to cry over, but dismantling Arab nationalism was highly destabilizing and expensive in terms of American wealth and lives.
Now that we’re looking at another war in Iraq, I really hope more Americans can come to a better understanding of how badly mismanaged our Middle East policy has been. I’m afraid I hope in vain, because I suspect there are a lot of people who prefer the status quo of eternal instability, and they have a lot of power over foreign policy.
I don’t expect ISIL to go head-to-head with the US. This is not its style. Instead of facing the US, they’ll double-down on terrorist attacks on internal enemies, and perhaps carry out some attacks in the West to bolster their street cred with the burgeoning Muslim population in Europe. Our bombs will make little difference and just further alienate the Sunni people who happen to live where they explode.
