The Islamic State in the Levant

We have labeled the Islamic State in the Levant, (ISIL DAESH or ISIS) as a terrorist organization. I am not choosing to take issue with that. I have to believe that what they are doing is committing acts of terror in wholesale killings and other atrocities. Additionally, they are urging adherents to their cause to commit acts of terror globally—usually without any help from them and any planning. Because they are in a war in their own region.

The United States is bombing them from the skies, presumably without any ground controllers to call in these airstrikes. While our planes and bombs are more accurate today than they were during WW II, without ground controllers, our accuracy is limited. The military briefings may show pinpoint airstrikes, but those are the rounds that looked good. They edit out all those who may have killed civilians and non-combatants. The US military doesn't like to look bad.

So, we're fighting the bad guys, or the terrorists, but it is very important to know why they are "bad guys," or "terrorists." Firstly, the name of the group is important, "The Islamic State in the Levant." We are calling them transnational but the national borders that were drawn were drawn up by an Englishman and a Frenchman just after WW I. They used existing maps and a straight edge to draw nice, neat borders where there were no rivers or natural borders. ISIL is "transnational" because they don't recognize the borders drawn by these two Europeans. I do not believe they are transnational in the same way that al-Qaida is.

ISIL are, essentially, Sunni Muslims. The Sunni used to run Iraq and provided a neat foil that the United States used to offset Shi'ia Iran. Until GW Bush. I recall that when the Governor of Texas was running for President, he seemed to have considerable problems understanding anything about foreign policy and could not locate many countries on a map. Quickly, as his lack of any semblance of understanding about anything outside of the United States became apparent, his campaign trotted out Condoleeza Rice, a well-respected associate professor of Political Science at Stanford University to paper over Candidate Bush's frightening lack of knowledge.

As President, it is pretty apparent that the addition of Condi Rice to his team offered little in the way of security based on any kind of understanding of the world as it was in 2001. The Bush administration completely ignored the warnings given by the outgoing Clinton administration about al-Qaida and Osama bin-Ladin, and Bush, himself ignored the Presidential briefing he received that a terrorist strike was imminent 36 days before 9/11. Today, former members of that administration continue to lie about the significance of that briefing and also continue to suggest that it had no relevance to the 9/11 attacks.

Condi Rice was never able to get GW Bush's attention appropriately focused on the reality of the world outside of the United States during his two terms and the blunders he made during those eight years will continue to harm the United States for decades to come.

Bush never appreciated the nature of Iraq. It was a country that was held together by a dictatorship who was a member of a minority population in that country. The only way Saddam Hussein could hold the nation of Iraq together was by appealing to nationalism and by finding an external power that his country could unite over. For a while, that was Iran from September 1980 to August 1988 during a war with that nation. Then, after the first Gulf War (during Poppy Bush's administration) it was the United States. Saddam Hussein was an evil tyrant but, at least he was under control.

So we invaded. And the end result was a government that L. Paul Bremer helped to set up, which did not provide any guaranteed role for the Sunni population (which he had thrown out of work). Nuri al-Maliki immediately got to work, shoving all Sunni out of any position in government and proceeded to allow the Kurds to begin the formation of a Kurdistan in Iraq. It is not official, but their autonomy was traded for allowing al-Maliki to run things as he wished. And he wished to disenfranchise all Sunni in his county.

No hope

This created a situation of no hope for the Sunni population, who had previously made up the government and the heads of the military in the country. And, when you have a minority in a country that has no hope, you have created a perfect situation for an insurgency and a terrorist force inside of your own country.

Condi Rice had no effect on GW Bush's ignorance.

When we took over Iraq, we failed to even post guards on the many arsenals in that country. As a result, they were looted—initially to fight us, but later to begin the Iraqi Civil War. The Sunni have no trust for the Shi'ia in the country. Of course this is reciprocal. The Sunni were hardly kissing cousins to the Shi'ia when they had power under Saddam Hussein.

So, with the state of affairs in neighboring Syria, many Sunni must have thought that they ought to do what the Kurds did: Create a nation based on their background. This is probably what ought to have been done after WW I and the Bush administration ought to have known better than to "cleanse" the government of Sunnis. But, remember, GW Bush was "the decider," and his decisions were based on nothing more than his ignorance.

When you have an oppressed minority, you hope that they will become a "Loyal Opposition" and try to have their views heard via the ballot box. But what the Bush administration created was the seeds of a "Disloyal Opposition," dedicated to the overthrow of that government by force. And they have declared their own state (in the same way that the South declared their own state during our Civil War). The difference here is that it spreads into Syria as well as Iraq, redrawing borders.

I would ask that the United States begin talks with these terrorists—not to reward their terror but to either try to get them to be a Loyal Opposition, like we did in Northern Ireland or, alternatively to create their own nation, which eschews terror. Terror is the act of desperation. But I think that United States and Nuri al-Maliki may have driven them to that.

The War in Iraq

American troops approach the hideout of Saddam Hussein's sons

Why are we rehashing the war in Iraq? It is all in the past. And, in that several people running for President have all jumped in and disqualified themselves as potential leaders, that should count for something.Instead, it's re-opening a debate that we never had prior to the war in Iraq.

We were supposed to have had that debate BEFORE committing troops, not this many years on.

Fact is, what the Bush administration did was wrong, pure and simple. I knew it at the time, I know now. We all know now. And, a bunch of Republican candidates have all tried to re-argue everything. Thus disqualifying themselves. In fact, this should disqualify them from holding any elected office.

The war in Iraq is not the CIA's fault. The CIA had very few assets in Iraq because we didn't have any kind of a diplomatic relationship with them. Just like the CIA has no assets in North Korea. So, in every report to the President, they always offered the "we believe with very limited assurance that…" This means, "we are speculating." Just like, today, we are speculating that North Korea does not yet have the capability of launching a submarine-based missile. We don't have a "mole" in North Korea who knows for certain because the CIA has zero to very few assets in that country.

Saddam Hussein pulled out of his spider hole

The war in Iraq was a personal vendetta between the Bush family and the al-Tikriti family (Saddam Hussein's family). Saddam Hussein chose to try to send a hit squad after Poppy Bush and it was not successful. GW Bush thought he'd use the entire United States military to kill Saddam Hussein and he was successful. Then, after doing that, he didn't know what to do with the country. He also didn't know how to help New Orleans or Mobile Bay recover from Katrina, either. He was incompetent.

Iraqi soldiers graduate from basic training
after being trained by United States military advisers

We trained the Iraqi army. This was back during the war. The first thing is that we got rid of the all-ready trained army that Saddam Hussein had put together (because they were disloyal to the United States). Then, we accepted applications from people who were kept out of Saddam Hussein's army because they might have been disloyal to Saddam Hussein. Then, we "trained them." And, we had them all trained up before we left Iraq. And we left Iraq after GW Bush had signed an agreement with Nuri al-Maliki's government to GET out. So, the exit from Iraq was something that President Obama faithfully executed due to prior agreements with a generally hostile government in Iraq that wanted us out.

Today, Iraq is in a crisis. But President Obama did not create this crisis. It was created when Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot drew boundary lines and created countries in the wake of WW I after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. They created an Iraq with several different ethnic groups that Saddam Hussein held together using fear, brutality and a kind of strange nationalism based on hating the outsider (Iran, the US, Israel…)

Iraqi insurgents

When we marched into Iraq, I had previously educated myself about that country—we were there under Poppy Bush. I knew that they had several different ethnic groups and those groups didn't get along. Saddam Hussein's Baathists were running the show and they were the Sunni minority, based in the north and west of the country. Since they were the army and the government, they had control.

It was always a given that Iraq would descend into a civil war. The three main ethnic groups don't get along and won't unless they have a dictatorship. And al-Maliki made sure that the government in Iraq was all Shi'ia. The Bush appointee to run Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, had previously "cleaned out" the Sunnis, preventing them from holding any jobs in the military or the government and setting up a system that would create Sunni-Shi'ia conflict that would result in civil war. For members of the Bush administration to claim that they didn't know this would happen is a confession of complete incompetence. But we all ready knew they were incompetent. The primary focus of the Bush administration was to please those big corporations that made the most money from the war in Iraq, Halliburton, GE, Boeing, GM, General Dynamics and so on. This would also please the American oil companies for whom the Bush administration hoped would get extremely lucrative contracts to drill, produce oil and refine oil in the oil-rich nation of Iraq. The al-Maliki government didn't play along, though and awarded those contracts to companies from outside of the United States. The only ones who did play along were the Kurds.

Saddam Hussein statue toppled in Firdos Square
at the same time, an effigy of GW Bush is being
burned by Muqtada al-Sadr and his followers
but we didn't have a video camera on that.

We tried to re-fight the Vietnam war when John McCain ran for President. I thought that was really foolish. We made mistakes in Vietnam but McCain tried to re-fight it and declare failure a success. Unhappily, Vietnam's mistakes were the result of the failures of two administrations, one Democrat and the other Republican. The Iraq fiasco was not the result of the failure of the Obama administration. He, largely, followed what the Bush administration left him with—an agreement to get out.

So, now we're "training the Iraqi army" again. Remember, we did this before. We spent untold millions of dollars training them (instead of rebuilding New Orleans, instead of paying for a prescription plan for seniors, instead of rebuilding our infrastructure, instead of funding schools). If we are training them again, we are picking the Shi'ia side in a civil war. And we are doing this because the only way the Sunnis could possibly challenge the Shi'ia is to create a terrorist organization: ISIL (DASH, ISIS).

I am not an isolationist. But I would ask that we clearly define why we are so interested in the Iraqi civil war. Granted, our invasion certainly did create it, but after Bush and al-Maliki did everything in their power to plant the seeds of this civil war, we ought to simply recognize Kurdistan (our only friends there) and encourage the Sunnis to form their own political entity that we will recognize as a separate country—if they will agree to eschew terrorism.

The result will be three countries. Which is the way it ought to have been after WW I. Now, the Sunnis don't particularly like us because of Bremer, but if we promised them a country and recognition, they might stop the terrorist gambit.