For those interested in the Iraq War and the current situation with ISIS, the Washington Post has links to two articles that provide a useful overview of a core fact to understanding and combating ISIS — by and large the organization consists not of fundamentalist terrorists, but rather Saddam Hussein’s former Baathist army and its generals. If, as Republicans insist, it is necessary to accurately describe your opponents, we are not so much fighting “radical Islam,” as continuing to fight an unfinished (or unsuccessful) Iraq War.
As Liz Sly writes in “The hidden hand behind the Islamic State militants? Saddam Hussein’s”:
Even with the influx of thousands of foreign fighters, almost all of the leaders of the Islamic State are former Iraqi officers, including the members of its shadowy military and security committees, and the majority of its emirs and princes, according to Iraqis, Syrians and analysts who study the group.
They have brought to the organization the military expertise and some of the agendas of the former Baathists, as well as the smuggling networks developed to avoid sanctions in the 1990s and which now facilitate the Islamic State’s illicit oil trading.
. . . . At first glance, the secularist dogma of Hussein’s tyrannical Baath Party seems at odds with the Islamic State’s harsh interpretation of the Islamic laws it purports to uphold.
But the two creeds broadly overlap in several regards, especially their reliance on fear to secure the submission of the people under the group’s rule. Two decades ago, the elaborate and cruel forms of torture perpetrated by Hussein dominated the discourse about Iraq, much as the Islamic State’s harsh punishments do today.
. . . . The brutality deployed by the Islamic State today recalls the bloodthirstiness of some of those Fedayeen, said Hassan. Promotional videos from the Hussein era include scenes resembling those broadcast today by the Islamic State, showing the Fedayeen training, marching in black masks, practicing the art of decapitation and in one instance eating a live dog.
And in another article today titled “How the United States helped create the Islamic State,” Juan Cole makes a similar point:
After the 2003 invasion, Bush administration officials deliberately pushed aside Iraq’s Sunni Arabs, who had dominated Saddam Hussein’s regime, and favored a clique of Shiite operatives. The main vehicle of politics in Iraq, the secular-minded but sanguinary Baath Party, which ruled 1968 to 2003, was dissolved. Shiite Bush allies like the late Ahmad Chalabi and Nouri al-Maliki (who would serve as prime minister from 2006 until 2014) formed a “Debaathification Commission” that fired close to 100,000 Sunni Arabs from government jobs, even from teaching school. This was at a time when there were no private-sector jobs. Shiite Baathists went largely untouched.
Bush’s viceroy, Paul Bremer, a militant free-marketeer, at the same time dissolved most state-owned factories and threw the economy into a tailspin. Then Bremer dissolved the vaunted Iraqi million-man army, sending officers and troops away with no pensions and no prospects. Unemployment swept the Sunni Arab provinces the way bubonic plague swept medieval Europe. Idleness reached levels of 70 percent in Sunni Arab areas where insurgencies grew up. In contrast, the Shiite cliques the Americans brought to power made sure to get jobs for their coreligionists in the new government. The Bush administration and its Iraqi allies did everything the opposite of the way Nelson Mandela handled national reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa. They also got the opposite outcome.
. . . . The Bush administration’s patent favoritism toward Shiite religious parties and marginalization of the Sunni Arabs had created a powerful constituency for the Islamic State in Iraq.
Why Bush chose sectarian favoritism over South Africa-style reconciliation remains mysterious. The odd conviction among some politicians that a longer or more brutal American occupation of Iraq could have forestalled the rise of the Islamic State betrays a profound misunderstanding of the actual dynamics. The U.S. occupation created the conditions under which the group flourished.
If this view is correct, then the nature of our current fight is different from a pure military conflict with a radical Islamist terrorist ideology, and more of a continuing failure of the U.S. to “win the peace” following the Iraq War, and the entirely predictable Sunni-Shia conflict that our invasion was certain to unleash. And, in that sense, it is important to note that some of the root causes of the continuing conflict — and thus the way to potentially end it — remains the economic and power imbalances among Iraqi Sunnis:
Among them was Brig. Gen. Hassan Dulaimi, a former intelligence officer in the old Iraqi army who was recruited back into service by U.S. troops in 2006, as a police commander in Ramadi, the capital of the long restive province of Anbar.
Within months of the American departure, he was dismissed, he said, losing his salary and his pension, along with 124 other officers who had served alongside the Americans. . . .
He cited the case of a close friend, a former intelligence officer in Baghdad who was fired in 2003 and struggled for many years to make a living. He now serves as the Islamic State’s wali, or leader, in the Anbar town of Hit, Dulaimi said.
“I last saw him in 2009. He complained that he was very poor. He is an old friend, so I gave him some money,” he recalled. “He was fixable. If someone had given him a job and a salary, he wouldn’t have joined the Islamic State.
“There are hundreds, thousands like him,” he added. “The people in charge of military operations in the Islamic State were the best officers in the former Iraqi army, and that is why the Islamic State beats us in intelligence and on the battlefield.”
Now, I am not suggesting that ISIS represents a movement by legitimately aggrieved workers. But I am saying that from the inception of the Sunni insurgency (that continues today under the name ISIS) the cause and outcome of issues has been more motivated by economic considerations than religious beliefs. For example, our much celebrated “surge” in Iraq was primarily about surging money to the Sunni areas, not U.S. soldiers. See “Surge or splurge in Iraq?”:
It's a truth many hold to be self-evident that more American troops translate into less Iraqi violence. As President Bush said in January's State of the Union speech, "Some may deny the surge is working, but among the terrorists there is no doubt."
But some military experts do have doubts, arguing there's actually a mightier force at work -- hundreds of millions in cash given to Iraqis, for everything from picking up garbage to taking up arms against al Qaeda.
Retired Army Col. Doug Macgregor, a longtime critic of top Iraq commander Gen. David Petraeus, said it's a "cash-for-peace" scheme that is bound to backfire. "Normally when you begin paying off your enemy on the scale that we are, it is seen by your enemy as well as others as a tacit admission of failure, not of success," Macgregor said.
It's hard to pin down exactly how many millions are going to former insurgents to switch sides, but Macgregor argues the result is artificial progress.
"What we've done is we've also flooded the Sunni-Arab insurgents with cash to create a temporary cease-fire to reduce the numbers of U.S. casualties," he said.
As the above points out, simply trying to buy your way out of a mess is doomed to fail, but it nonetheless can't be ignored that a principal reason we went from fighting-to not fighting-to fighting again an Iraqi Sunni insurgency is because the economic benefits to those Sunnis turned off-then turned on-and then turned back off again. And so it seems apparent that any “victory” in this problem is going to need to involve a political-economic compromise that includes the Iraqi Sunnis . . . more than it will involve some stunning military victory.
And, in practical terms, it seems necessary that the fight against ISIS recognizes that we are principally fighting a deposed Baathist Iraqi military and Sunni leadership class. I don’t pretend to be an expert in this area, but I would think that this may require that U.S. military and intelligence action be directed primarily to disrupting the economic benefits, assets and income streams recently gained by the ISIS leaders . . . combined with covert diplomacy designed to peel off this Sunni, former military leadership with promises of genuine political and economic reform in Iraqi governance if they return to the fold. In this sense, we likely will less need armies from our Middle East allies like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Turkey than we will need financial commitments from them to help finance a political settlement that has some chance of lasting, and is not another phony, temporary “surge.” Then, without this Iraqi Baathist support, ISIS would be dramatically, maybe fatally, weakened.
In essence, I am arguing that our fight against ISIS may be more of a fight against traditional state actors and elites than we care to admit, and less a fight against incomprehensible religious fundamentalism. That may ultimately be a positive thing. In any event, as Republicans like to say, I think it is necessary to understand who your enemy is, and we seem to be failing that test.