Peter Bergen - Bush's toxic legacy in Iraq
Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a
director at the New
America Foundation and the author of ""The Longest War: The
Enduring Conflict between America
(CNN) -- ISIS, the brutal insurgent/terrorist
group formerly known as al Qaeda in Iraq ,
has seized much of western and northern Iraq
and even threatens towns not far from Baghdad . From where did ISIS spring?
One of George W. Bush's most toxic legacies is the introduction of al Qaeda
into Iraq , which is the ISIS mother ship. If this wasn't so tragic it would be supremely ironic,
because before the U.S.
invasion of Iraq
in 2003, top Bush officials were insisting that there was an al Qaeda-Iraq axis
of evil. Their claims that Saddam Hussein's men were training members of al
Qaeda how to make weapons of mass destruction seemed to be one of the most
compelling rationales for the impending war.
After the fall of Hussein's regime, no documents were
unearthed in Iraq
proving the Hussein-al Qaeda axis despite the fact that, like other
totalitarian regimes, Hussein's government kept massive and meticulous records. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency had by 2006 translated
34 million pages of documents from Hussein's Iraq and found there was nothing to
substantiate a "partnership" between Hussein and al Qaeda.
Two years later the Pentagon's own internal think tank, the
Institute for Defense Analyses, concluded after examining 600,000 Hussein-era
documents and several thousand hours of his regime's audio- and videotapes that
there was no "smoking gun (i.e. direct connection between
Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda.)"
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded in
2008, as every other investigation had before, that there was no
"cooperative relationship" between Hussein and al Qaeda. The
committee also found that "most of the contacts cited between Iraq and al
Qaeda before the war by the intelligence community and policy makers have been
determined not to have occurred." Instead of interrupting a budding relationship between
Hussein and al Qaeda, the Iraq War precipitated the arrival of al Qaeda into Iraq . Although
the Bush administration tended to gloss over the fact, al Qaeda only formally
established itself in Iraq a
year and a half after the U.S.
invasion.
On October 17, 2004, its brutal leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
issued an online statement pledging allegiance to Osama bin Laden. Zarqawi's
pledge was fulsome: "By God, O sheikh of the Mujahideen, if you bid us
plunge into the ocean, we would follow you. If you ordered it so, we would
obey." Zarqawi's special demonic genius was to launch Iraq down the
road to civil war. In early 2004, the U.S. military intercepted a letter
from Zarqawi to bin Laden in which he proposed provoking a civil war between
Sunnis and Shia.
Zarqawi's strategy was to hit the Shia so they would in turn
strike the Sunnis, so precipitating a vicious circle of violence in which al
Qaeda would be cast as the protector of the Sunnis against the wrath of the
Shia. It was a strategy that worked all too well, provoking first sectarian
conflict in Iraq
and later civil war. Al Qaeda in Iraq ,
or AQI, regularly attacked Shia religious processions, shrines and clerics. The
tipping point in the slide toward full-blown civil war was al Qaeda's February
2006 attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra ,
which is arguably the most
important Shia shrine in the world.
Three years into the Iraq War, AQI seemed all but
unstoppable. A classified Marine intelligence assessment dated August 17, 2006,
found that AQI had become the de facto government of the western Iraqi province of Anbar ,
which is strategically important because it borders Jordan , Syria
and Saudi Arabia and makes
up about a third of the landmass of Iraq . In addition, AQI controlled a good chunk of the exurban
belts around Baghdad , the "Triangle of
Death" to the south of the capital and many of the towns north of it, up
the Tigris River New
England and maintained an iron grip on much of the Sunni
population... read more:
