Friendly reminder: the US basically created ISIS through it's hamfisted invasion of Iraq. Cheerleading tbis sort of effort is like congratulating a child when they decide to eat their peas.
Yes and no. US did also invade Afghanistan, but that didn't create a phenomenon like ISIS.
ISIS was actually there, founded by Zarqawi like any other group, but its main differentiator was its swift rise to power and popularity after 2011 benefiting from the unbearable oppression of Sunnis in Iraq by Iran and its proxy, which made them align with whoever could be their savior and get rid of the Iranian influence. You can see this clearly when ISIS stormed the prisons where thousands of Sunnis were sentenced to death, and made them into the second wave of recruits.
US did enable ISIS, Zarqawi and co created it, Iran gave people a reason to join it in mass, and international agenda, most importantly the US object to get its enemies (Iran and ISIS) bleed each other, and the Kurdish leftists to ask for its help to the degree to become its proxies, left a space for it to be the monster it was.
Can't also ignore the Turkish and Kurdistani indifference (before ISIS started attacking them, there were ISIS/Kurdistani checkpoints side by side drinking tea together), and the Syrian allowance of fighters flood to Iraq through its the eastern borders since the invasion.
Blaming only the US (although it's the initial culprit) doesn't address the complexity of this problem.
The invasion was not enough to create ISIS. To do that, US had to name an idiot as Iraq's governor. Enters Paul Bremer. A single decision of his made ISIS possible.
He got to manage a country that just got invaded, that used to have a huge military and where the occupiers are still fighting the remnants of rebel forces in some part of the country.
In that context, he decided that the former officers from Saddam Hussein's regime would be barred from the new Iraq military and that they should not receive pension either.
He, put yourself in their shoes: when your job is to organize a military, that the only lawful employer refused your services and denies your pension, are you going to go homeless and beg in the streets or are you going to join a rebellious startup?
The ISIS of the origin was organized just like the Baath army was, because that's the framework the officers knew. There were some documents captured (that involved less "hacking" than physical invasion of command structures but of course we never know the amount of covert ops going on) and what they revealed was that one budget line was the biggest of the whole organization: pensions. Suicide bombing is not the career path everybody chose there.
ISIS is not a US creation: that would imply GWB's administration capacity to plan such a thing. But it came from crucial mistakes the US did despite being warned about these years prior.
I recommend the book "The ISIS apocalypse: The history, strategy, and doomsday vision of the Islamic State", if anything else it makes for fascinating reading.
The apocalyptic aspect (literally), for instance, is essential to understand ISIS, and it's early split from Al-Qaeda, for example.
That's really being generous. Turkey and Qatar directly financed ISIS and facilitated movements of terrorists. People were recruited in countries like Tunisia through mosques, some of them very far from being a committed to the religion. The jackpot was money to be paid, and whatever "pussy" your hands can get once you are in Syria.
The US turned a blind eye because ISIS was fighting a regime they wanted to change. They could have pressured Turkey and Qatar to stop; and they would oblige. But everything has a cost I guess.
While some of this may have happened, both Turkey and Qatar's assistance is dispute, reports say 70% of members in Syria were Syrian and 90% of members in Iraq were Iraqi. The leadership has been full of former members of the Ba'ath army and intelligence agencies who lost their jobs during De-Ba'athification.
Stopping the help provided by outside countries may have weakened the movement, but not prevented it.
The US finances many terrorist groups ourselves, so I'm not sure what your point is—nations are happy to take advantage of new powers regardless of how it conflicts with their propaganda. I don't know how you could look at the invasion of Iraq and come away with the conclusion that ISIS is either surprising or could have formed without our help.
I believe the issue is not the invasion itself but what they did/didn't do after they "won".
It's indeed sad to see no good side/party. Just a mess that brought a lot of misery.
Unless an explicit claim to hegemony is involved, when a party isn't part of the country involved, we normally don't say "civil" but instead "proxy" warfare.
As CIA and the Pentagon support different sides in Syria, does this imply they're likely running offensive ops against each other? Do black (psywar) black (hat) hackers have any sort of IFF to prevent blue-on-blue?
(for a different blue-on-blue scenario: what might the cyber equivalent of leaving a grenade pin on an officer's pillow be?)
And how would the Arab spring have gone with Saddam still in power? It's too simple to boil the situation down to one sentence; that also ignores that Hussein was a brutal Tyrant who had used Weapons of Mass destruction (Chemical Weapons including Mustard Gas and Nerve Agents) as part of a genocide against the Kurds.
The invasion wasn't the hamfisted part - the problem was being reckless after the invasion and not really thinking properly about how to manage the country.
> Dropping bombs is like taking antibiotics, sometimes necessary but always creates resistance.
Does taking antibiotics always result in antibiotic resistant bacteria?
I wasn't aware of that, and at first glance it seems implausible as otherwise all antibiotics would have been ineffective before we even discovered them?
> that also ignores that Hussein was a brutal Tyrant who had used Weapons of Mass destruction (Chemical Weapons including Mustard Gas and Nerve Agents) as part of a genocide against the Kurds.
And who supplied those weapons of mass destruction to saddam? I wonder...
Maybe unintentionally enabled, but I am pretty sure the elements of ISIS were around well before the invasion. After all, what is Assassin's Creed based on?
ISIS was founded earlier, yes, but it only became so "successful" because of Ba'athist officers who were little more than mercenaries with no place to go after the dissolution of Sadam's regime. They needed to survive somehow and so many ended up going to ISIS that it turned into a full blown military force with fully trained Iraqi officers, all of them veterans of at least one war, with tons of left over American and NATO hardware.
I won't go so far as to say that the whole fiasco could have been avoided with a functioning economy and some new civil service/protection branch to absorb the officers, but the US's strategy was one of the biggest contributors to ISIS's growth.
I'm guessing because either you'd be tried for crimes committed under Sadam, or because your old enemies would be in the new government and just kill you without the trial step.
