{"id":2589,"date":"2015-07-27T01:48:22","date_gmt":"2015-07-27T05:48:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/?p=2589"},"modified":"2015-07-27T01:48:22","modified_gmt":"2015-07-27T05:48:22","slug":"obvious-the-iraq-war-created-isis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/2015\/07\/obvious-the-iraq-war-created-isis.html","title":{"rendered":"Obvious: The Iraq War created ISIS"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Iraq
Iraq War Consequences by Steve Sack<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is something that is so obvious, it is in danger of never being said, in which case those who led us into war will try to pretend it isn’t true as they argue the case for the next one. Simply put – the Iraq War (a war of choice, irrelevant to 9-11, sold to the public on the basis of weapons of mass destruction that never existed) is directly responsible for the rise of ISIS<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In the broadest view, Isis seems the product of a catastrophic war \u2013 the Anglo-American assault on Iraq. There is no doubt that the ground for it was prepared by this systematic devastation \u2013 the murder and displacement of millions, which came after more than a decade of brutalisation by sanctions and embargoes. The dismantling of the Iraqi army, de-Ba\u2019athification and the Anglo-American imprimatur to Shia supremacism provoked the formation in Mesopotamia of al-Qaida, Isis\u2019s precursor. Many local factors converged to make Isis\u2019s emergence possible last year: vengeful Sunnis; reorganised Ba\u2019athists in Iraq; the co-dependence of the west on despotic allies (al-Sisi, al-Maliki) and incoherence over Syria; the cynical manoeuvres of Assad; Turkey\u2019s hubristic neo-Ottomanism, which seems exceeded in its recklessness only by the actions of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.<\/p>\n

The failure of the Arab Spring has also played a part. Tunisia, its originator, has sent the largest contingent of foreign jihadis to Iraq and Syria. Altogether an estimated 17,000 people, mostly young men, from 90 countries have travelled to Syria and Iraq to offer their services to Isis. Dozens of British women have gone, despite the fact that men of Isis have enslaved and raped girls as young as 10 years old, and stipulated that Muslim girls marry between the ages of nine and 17, and live in total seclusion. \u201cYou can easily earn yourself a higher station with God almighty,\u201d a Canadian insurrectionist, Andre Poulin, exhorted in a video used by Isis for online recruitment, \u201cby sacrificing just a small bit of this worldly life.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ironically, had we done nothing in Iraq, the Arab Spring might have succeeded – in Iraq first. And that might have resulted in different outcomes in Egypt, in Syria…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is something that is so obvious, it is in danger of never being said, in which case those who led us into war will try to pretend it isn’t true as they argue the case for the next one. Simply put – the Iraq War (a war of choice, irrelevant to 9-11, sold to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":165,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,2],"tags":[120,294,466,35],"class_list":["post-2589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nation-building","category-read-this","category-the-gash-of-civilizations","tag-iraq","tag-iraq-war","tag-isis","tag-wombat"],"yoast_head":"\nObvious: The Iraq War created ISIS - City of Brass<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex, follow\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Obvious: The Iraq War created ISIS - City of Brass\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This is something that is so obvious, it is in danger of never being said, in which case those who led us into war will try to pretend it isn’t true as they argue the case for the next one. Simply put – the Iraq War (a war of choice, irrelevant to 9-11, sold to…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/2015\/07\/obvious-the-iraq-war-created-isis.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"City of Brass\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2015-07-27T05:48:22+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/files\/2015\/07\/iraq-isis.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Aziz Poonawalla\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Obvious: The Iraq War created ISIS - City of Brass","robots":{"index":"noindex","follow":"follow"},"og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Obvious: The Iraq War created ISIS - City of Brass","og_description":"This is something that is so obvious, it is in danger of never being said, in which case those who led us into war will try to pretend it isn’t true as they argue the case for the next one. 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City of Brass is his weblog, which was founded in 2002 under the name UNMEDIA. He is a co-founder of the annual Brass Crescent Awards. The name City of Brass refers to the Story of the City of Brass in the Thousand and One Nights, and the poem by Rudyard Kipling of the same name: Here was a people whom, after their works, thou shalt see wept over for their lost dominion; And in this palace is the last information respecting lords collected in the dust. -- Thousand and One Nights, Story of the City of Brass IN A land that the sand overlays, the ways to her gates are untrod, A multitude ended their days whose fates were made splendid by God, Till they grew drunk and were smitten with madness and went to their fall, And of these is a story written: but Allah Alone knoweth all! -- Rudyard Kipling, The City of Brass (1909)"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/165"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2589"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2591,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2589\/revisions\/2591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}