The Associated Press reports that the ghost of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq is alive and well in the upper echelons of ISIS’ leadership. Of course, it’s Bush’s fault;
How officers from Saddam’s mainly secular regime came to infuse one of the most radical Islamic extremist groups in the world is explained by a confluence of events over the past 20 years — including a Saddam-era program that tolerated Islamic hard-liners in the military in the 1990s, anger among Sunni officers when the U.S. disbanded Saddam’s military in 2003, and the evolution of the Sunni insurgency that ensued.
It looks like the Bush Administration did the right thing by disbanding the Iraqi Army in 2003. In fact, the article opens with the story of how one of Hussein’s generals, Taha Taher al-Ani, now a commander for ISIS, was loading up weapons and ammunition for an insurgency before the Americans even got to Baghdad in 2003. So, disbanding the Army had nothing to do with his decision, did it?
The Associated Press also blames the US-run prison, Bucca, for introducing these ISIS people to each other;
The prison was a significant incubator for the Islamic State group, bringing militants like al-Baghdadi [the leader of ISIS] into contact with former Saddam officers, including members of special forces, the elite Republican Guard and the paramilitary force called Fedayeen.
In Bucca’s Ward 6, al-Baghdadi gave sermons and [al-Baghdadi’s current deputy and a former Saddam-era army major, Saud Mohsen] Hassan emerged as an effective organizer, leading strikes by the prisoners to gain concessions from their American jailers, the intelligence chief said.
Former Bucca prisoners are now throughout the IS leadership.
Yeah, well, it appears as though we had all of the right people in prison, then. It begs the question “Why are they out now?”
Saddam-era veterans also serve as “governors” for seven of the 12 “provinces” set up by the Islamic State group in the territory it holds in Iraq, the intelligence chief said.
The article claims that these former officers of Saddam’s bring a measure of tactical expertise to ISIS. I wonder how they figure there is any military expertise to gain from forcing their soldiers into murderous waves against the Iranians, or forcing them to sit like ducks for the air campaign that the US waged against them in 1991 or their full-flight from Baghdad in 2003. Yeah, that’s some kind of expertise they have going there. It doesn’t take expertise to wrest control of towns and villages from unarmed civilians and cowing them into submission by beheading their neighbors in public.
“IS’s military performance has far exceeded what we expected. The running of battles by the veterans of the Saddam military came as a shock,” a brigadier general in military intelligence told the AP….
The only experience the Saddam-era leaders have is being shot at…by the Iranians and by the US. ISIS military successes are a result of the terror they inflict on folks, not some magical expertise they learned from Saddam Hussein. ISIS gained prominence in the region because the US left Iraq and refused to take the lead to end the civil war in Syria. ISIS took advantage of that void. Period.
Well, of course, the answer to everything is “It’s Bush’s fault”.
And, they guys who commanded the troops who trampled all over each other to surrender suddenly got it right? I don’t think so.
Hey, FIRST!!!! And the second line should be “the” not “they guys”.
Who are you going to call …?
OK, the answer is obvious.
This weekend it was announced that Bill Murray will star in the third “Ghost Busters”. To be released as a summer block “buster” in 2016.
So, who are you going to call? Ghost Busters!
OUT!
“Yeah, well, it appears as though we had all of the right people in prison, then.”
History repeats itself…
“Up to the present date he has served five and a half months. By October 1st he will have expiated his offences by ten and a half months’ detention. [He] has shown himself to be an orderly, disciplined prisoner, not only in his own person, but also with reference to his fellow prisoners, among whom he has preserved good discipline. He is amenable, unassuming, and modest. He has never made exceptional demands, conducts himself in a uniformly quiet and reasonable manner, and has put up with the deprivations and restrictions of imprisonment very well. He has no personal vanity, is content with the prison diet, neither smokes nor drinks, and has exercised a helpful authority over other prisoners.”
That’s just part of the glowing evaluation done by request of the prosecutor regarding the prisoner and subject of the evaluation. It concluded that his behavior “while under detention merits the grant of an early release.”
The prisoner was A. Hitler and the prison the Landsberg Fortress.
It might be worthwhile here to recall that the run-up to the Iraq war was on my watch, and I saw a consensus, including the Democrats, that this war was necessary.
There was a near-immediate turn to talk of a “quagmire” so extreme that reporters were asking “Do we have a quagmire yet?” before the invasion. I later found out that Tom Daschle and his bunch had pivoted, and decided to “ride the Iraq war all the way to the White House.” I watched my Democratic party first decide to put our troops in harm’s way, and then do everything they could to undermine them.
They did eventually get the White House, and they have had their way. This mess is theirs, from the get-go.
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp – or what’s a Heaven for?
The Democrats’ path to power in Washington always seems to plow right through Arlington National Cemetery.
What have been our great military sucesses over the past 100 years? The defeat, and long term occupation of, Germany. The defeat, and long term occupation of, Japan. And the defense, and long term occupation of South Korea.
There’s a lesson there for anyone inclined to notice it.
So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people – greedy, barbarous, and cruel, as they are now.
+1 Lawrence of Arabia, but who from Daesh could truthfully be called “a river unto his people”?
(Other than the river Styx, that is?)
Styx? Oh, that is so Greeking of you!
The most important point to take from this story is in one sentence. “It doesn’t take expertise to wrest control of towns and villages from UNARMED CIVILIANS”….this will bring the gun grabbers to the greatest orgasm of their lives.
Obama supported the Shiite Muslim rage that toppled nations. As a result the Saudis in direct response to a failed take over of Bahrain initially created ISIS in Syria as a response. Now the dogs only see red and anyone who opposes them.
Thanks, Obama. Without your ability to be a chump, support Shiite terror groups, and leave Iraq prematurely we wouldn’t have as many Islamic terror havens as we do now that are plaguing the globe.
Islamist in chief
The movie has been interesting, but I don’t think I want a rerun. Do you?
Make no mistake: we shouldn’t have gone into Iraq, but when we did, we screwed it up by the numbers. We had no appreciation for the people, the politics, or the culture, and we took several steps that made thing worse. One of the dumbest things was disbanding the Iraqi army. I was there, and at the time I thought it was a good idea, so I should know.
I served as an advisor in Iraq. The division between Sunni and Shia runs very deep, and disbanding the Iraqi army had a huge impact on the future of the country because it made that division even deeper.
The former regime rejectionists, as we called them at the time, turned first to organized crime then to terrorism. I personally interviewed former Sadam officers that had joined Zarqawis organization because they had nowhere else to go and were deathly afraid of what the Shia would do when they had complete control.
Zarqawi, of course ran the organization formerly known as Alqaeda in Iraq, then Al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers, then the Levant, which today you know and love as ISIS.
No, these guys aren’t military geniuses. However, they can get a rocket or mortar to hit a target, and they learned about how to keep people in line through intimidation and terror fromthe best, Sadam himself. They had also changed their national defense strategy into a huge UW/guerrilla war campaign in the event of invasion from the western allies.
The Iraqi army didn’t run from ISIS out of fear per se, they ran because most of them are Shia, and they really don’t want to die defending Sunnis that hate them from Sunnis that hate them even more.
Iraq is a western invention- Interesting that you quote Lawrence of Arabia, you should look up his contemporary, Gertrude of Iraq ( Getrude Bell).
The fact is that we mishandled this war as well as the first Gulf War. If we had taken Sadam out the first time, it would have been just as bad. I was in both, and it wasn’t until my umpteenth trip to Iraq in 2008 that I finally got a basic understanding of the real issues.
We are witnessing the Civil War of the Middle East, and we are switching sides constantly. It is Arab vs Persian, Sunni vs Shiite, everyone vs Iran.
You can hate the Iranians, and I do as well, but the fact is that the Shia terrorists and Iran in general are consistent and predictable. They have an actual nation state with rule of law and a concern for their people.
Isis and the corrupt Sunni regimes are most dangerous because they are completely devoid of concern for their people, and therefore unpredictable. The worst thing that could happen to ISIS is that they actually have to govern an area long term. They simple lay can’t make the trains run on time while beheading women for not F-I got for Jihad.
Reddevil. You have well described the problem, within the confines of the ME. What of terrorism’s export to Europe, Australia, and the US/Canada? How is that explained in terms of the intra-Muslim hatred? Mere backlash? And what, in your view, is the solution for the ME mess? Let them fight it out and we deal with–or destroy–the winner? I am interested in hearing your view of the matter.
Terrorism isn’t being exported to Europe- they are producing it themselves.
Study the background of the terrorists in Europe, or even here- the pair that beheaded the soldier in London, for instance. You will find that most of them are the children of immigrants from former colonial holdings that never assimilated.
ISIS, and Al Qaeda before it, represent Terrorism 2.0- good old fashioned terrorist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, etc, had a state sponsor and an underlying structure- they were ‘spiders’ if you’ve read ‘The Starfish and the Spider’. Terrorism 2.0 organizations are starfish- they are semi organized around a compelling idea and will morph to meet their environment. In Iraq right now, it is convenient and useful to have a firmer structure, so that’s what they did.
I’m torn on what to do. Having spent some of the best years of my life training the Iraqi Army or trying to find bad guys so someone could kill them, on one hand I don’t want to feel that my time and the missed birthdays were wasted. On the other hand, I don’t think we should have a single American die for Iraqi Freedom.
That said, this is Hitler stuff. Can we stand by and watch this humanitarian crisis unfold?
A simple solution is to do what Biden suggested years ago (yeah, that guy), and let the line redraw themselves naturally into Kurdistan, Sunnistan, and Shiastan. The problem with that is that the Iranians will quickly take control of the Shia areas (as if they weren’t already running them…)
Sending ground forces would be the only way to defeat ISIS in its current form. Of course, they will return with a new name somewhere, and we will have to do it again.
I think that it will require someone with a better Big Idea that can compel the people of theME not to kill each other. The problem here is that all of the best and brightest Arabs are living somewhere else and wouldn’t go back if you paid them- trust me, we tried.
Here’s an example. One of my ‘terps was a Kurd- I’ll call him ‘M’. M had been a professor (in Mosul, I think) married to an Iraqi Arab when Sadam took over. He fled with his Arab wife and family to the U.S., specifically Michigan.
Now, anyone who met an Iraqi American can tell you that they seem to love Sterling Heights Michigan. I assumed that’s where M went with his wife, but he said no, she didn’t want to be around Arabs because they cause so much trouble for themselves.
Ironically, most if not all violence in the ME is sectarian- mostly Sunnis killing Shias or blowing up mosques. Most international Islamic terrorism is again Sunnis killing westerners, and has nothing to do with the Sunni Shia struggle.
It’s never been in doubt that disbanding the Army caused a host of problems. But what I remain to be convinced about is whether those problems were worse than the alternative – having the Iraqi Army be led by a cohort of Saddam loyalists committed to the failure of the project of a new Iraq, inevitably led by Shias. As you well know (and it sounds like, as you helped create), the Iraqi Army was by far the most trusted institution in that country by 2009-2010. Honestly, would the project have had the slightest chance of success without that backbone? And could that backbone have possibly developed if we hadn’t rebuilt it from the ground up?
That’s why I’m still unconvinced that it was a bad decision – it was a hard choice, and it caused a lot of problems, but I don’t see any path to the pre-pullout success without it.
We’ll. The Sadam loyalists were Baathists and almost exclusively Sunni. A real bunch of assholes.
Don’t get me wrong, my guys weren’t good guys really. Many called them the new Shia Death Squads. Look up ‘The Dirty Brigade’.
I was only involved in one actual pseudo-battle, called Charge of the Knights bynthe Iraqis and theBattle of Basra by us. It was really the umpteenth Battle of Basra, but who’s counting.
The brutality, mostly off the battlefield, is what struck me. I was involved on the fringes; some might call it in the shadows. We had guys trying to infiltrate the other side. Since this was a Shia-Shia fight, there were lots of opportunities…
Someone once told me that HUMiNT is all about betrayal. Our top source is the enemy’s top traitor. What the Shia did to traitors was absolutely horrible. The scene from ‘American Sniper’ with the drill? The reality Wasn’t a Sunni insurgent, and it wasn’t a knee.
Hey. I see that Reddevil posted exactly at midnight. Talk about being first…
Strike Hold, Bitch
Thanks for the response. I always appreciate food for thought.
African Yellow Cake Fake, Colin Powell before the UN Security Council, with all the information from extremely unreliable source vetted only by the Bush White House.
A real cluster puke of a way to start a war. But, with proper leadership Retired Army 3-Star Garner if given $60M to furnish the Baathist Military Officers with food for their families, they would have been with the USA and allies. Garner was replaced by Hush Puppy What’s his Face?, the Baathist officers and NCOs went with Al Queda, and now with ISIL and the rest is history. I’m not a democrat, but this krapola shouldn’t be blamed on Obama. There were some SFB’s
(__it for brains) in charge of that matter of history. Iraq was a doomed, improperly prepared, with no exit strategy from the start and Obama was on record and voted against it. Now the Hawks want to place the blame on him for political purposes. Fortunately, some of us have memories. Respectfully, JAJ.