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.