U.S. really create ISIS?

U.S. really create ISIS? How?

The US did not deliberately create ISIS. But there would have been no ISIS but for American missteps and incompetence during the US occupation of Iraq.

Before we invaded in 2003, there were no armed islamist groups like ISIS in Iraq. Horrible as Saddam was, he had at least managed to keep a lid on them. Then we invaded, removed Saddam from power, and the Pentagon failed to issue the necessary orders for securing property. That led to widespread looting and a nearly instantaneous social breakdown in the absence of minimal security.

Then the Coalition Provisional Authority geniuses we put in charge of running Iraq thought it would be a great idea to disband the Iraqi army - an act that instantly put hundreds of thousands of heavily armed young men, with nothing to do, out on the streets and out of anybody’s control.

Then, to triple down on the stupid, we implemented a “de-Baathaification” purge, along the lines of the de-Nazification that followed the defeat of Germany, notwithstanding glaring differences between the scope and reach of the Nazi party in Germany, and the toothless haplessness of the Baath party in Iraq. That removed thousands of technocrats and bureaucrats necessary for the routine functioning of government, and wrecked its ability to deliver basic services such as electricity, garbage removal, or furnishing the minimal safety necessary to keep schools open.

Needless to say, it didn’t take long for a complete collapse of law and order and a series of insurgencies spanning most of the country. And our incoherent response - waves of random arrests that swept both foe and would-be friend; a plethora of checkpoints manned by nervous, confused, and frequently trigger happy troops who shot up cars full of innocents; frequently indiscriminate use of firepower that piled up “collateral damage”; and numerous instances of abuse and even outright massacres that were often unpunished, added fuel to the fire.

The insurgency began attracting foreign Islamist fighters from all over for jihad tourism in Iraq. Something that hadn’t happened in decades of Saddam’s rule, did within months of US rule. Even Al-Qaeda, which had no prior presence in Iraq, opened up a branch office,Al-Qaeda in Iraq , which quickly became one of the most virulent and bloodthirsty of the insurgent groups. It even set up a proto statelet, openly governing some regions in Western Iraq - the same ones where ISIS would get its start a few years later.

Al Qaeda in Iraq was eventually beat down, but its surviving members, such as Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, would go on to form ISIS soon as the US withdrew from Iraq. Helped in no small part by America’s final gift: the US trained Iraqi army, a sad sack and astonishingly incompetent, corrupt, and cowardly mob - something I addressed in my answer to Why is the Iraqi army losing Abrams tanks so easily?

In short, we didn’t set out to create ISIS, but we screwed up so bad that the emergence of ISIS or something equally bad was inevitable.

Indirectly, yes.

Because the Americans intervene in Iraq, they killed Saddam and imposed democracy in a place that has sectarian conflicts, and didn´t work because the Iraqi factions do not understand each other. The Americans claim that Iraq had chemical weapons, but it didn´t, Iraq had ceased to use them for a long time, since the Iran-Iraq War, but even so, the US and UK invaded Iraq without the UN endorsement.

So the Iraqi people thought that the Americans wanted to destroy Iraq for invading their country without any apparent reason, and came to fight against them with the air bombings and civilian casualties. Iraqis became more and more angry with the Americans and then,they started to ally to armed groups that fought US Armed Forces.

Due to the US Armed Forces in Iraq are very strong, they began to use unconventional methods of combat, such as terrorism, insurgency, the use of car bombs and suicide bombers to try to defeat the Americans. Over time, these groups have gained strength,money and weapons. With the high(and maybe unnecessary) expenses in 2011, the US withdrew their troops from the country. Then came the saying "When the cat's away, the mice will play" and these groups started fighting each other, wanting to dominate areas in Iraq, and others harness the power.

Another factor that shows that the US may have helped in the creation ISIS, was that the American army has left some of their military equipment such as helicopters, Humvees, rifles, M1 Abrahms in Iraq during the withdrawal in 2011.

Create? No of course not. “Create” has a rigorous meaning that cannot be shifted just because of politics or expediency. The more important question is: Does the United States bear at least some responsibility for the creation of ISIS? The answer is quite clear: Yes.

The US has a terrible policy in the Middle East. It ceased being “good” about 1991. After that point in time, it began to completely fall apart. What do I mean about this? The US has always had a bit of Realpolitik and pragmatism. The US was never under any impression that the people wanted and certainly were not ready for contemporary republicanism.

It pushed regimes internally to modernize at a pace that worked for them while keeping the ship as steady as possible. After that point in time, the US has failed to keep that policy. Worse, it began to shift its own policy around the world from “Maintain stable regimes that favor trade” to “Also make sure we push regimes to democratize.”

Sounds great on paper. A lot of ideas sound great on paper but are horrible in application. There are others:

• Companies should publish all executive officers’ salaries.
• Congress should abolish pork spending and cease handing out bonus checks on the chamber floors to those members who have records of passing bills and cooperating.

In those two instances, removing those provisions caused chaos in their respective organizations. The former resulted in EO’s competing in the US for salary that drove the numbers through the roof. The latter resulted in polarization of politics because chamber leaders lost two strong (and very cheap: the debt has been impacted less than 5% by those aspects) methods of pulling members to the middle to get things done.

Idealists destroy systems. The world is complex and pragmatists understand that making politics has always been like making sausages — it’s ugly business that average citizens think they know what’s best for the world, but if they really saw and knew, they’d freak the fuck out. The law of unintended consequences says that generally systems fall into patterns that mostly work for them and to gum it up with idealistic gibberish usually causes more harm than good.

The American idealists who decided that Latin America and East Asia were ready for democracy after the fall of the USSR, also felt like it was time to bring that to the Middle East. It worked in Latin America and Asia, largely. Those regimes that favored the US (South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Philippines, Brazil, Chile and on and on) all converted to democracy from about 1979–1999, they all fell into standard republican patterns.

The US felt like this was a great thing and largely it was. But not in the Middle East. That region has a combination of potent religious and cultural attitudes that make it challenging to work. Many borders were arbitrarily formed by Gertrude Bell and Thomas Lawrence. The stable autocrats that were allowed to rise to power and created a “more or less” stable area, were dis-favored. After the First Gulf War and especially the Second Gulf War, the US’s attitudes about regime change caused a societal collapse that has resulted in people swinging to extremes.

Some of those people, in their desperation, joined various terrorist groups. One of those groups is ISIS. The people who founded that group get the credit for that affair. But the US cannot divorce itself from a significant portion of responsibility because Bush failed to anticipate the horrible results of his Administration’s vile actions and Obama failed to anticipate the results of the sudden withdraw of American forces in Iraq. Obama also made a promise about how/why the US would interfere, and then tippy-toed back away from that promise.