ISIS Creation Story

In the beginning (1997) there was the Project for a New American Century. Many leading Republicans read and signed the document including Dick Cheney and Jeb Bush. GWB was considered a lightweight and not asked to read or sign this. This is in some ways how his administration proceeded as well.

The Project for a New American Century touted invading and conquering Iraq as a means to regime change as the first step to securing the Middle East, creating stability and ensuring that the U.S. had sufficient access to oil. The second major step was to destabilize and take over Syria. Having Iraq and Syria controlled by the U.S. would allow for a base of power to take over Iran as well. Denying China, the oil resources needed to grow at double digit rates were a big part of the plan to make the next century an American century as opposed to a Chinese century. There are lots of places that keep a copy of the document online. Here is a link to a Wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century

The initial phases of this plan went well. The U.S. was able to invade and topple the Iraq regime with popular support at home based on a combination of lies concerning 9/11 (70% of the U.S. populace and 85% of armed services personnel believed that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were involved in 9/11 as late as 2003) and lies concerning weapons of mass destruction. There was even the glib Republican response that we would use Iraq oil to pay for the military intervention so that this would not cost the U.S. tax payer anything.

The setting up of an Iraqi puppet government that would sign over the desired oil rights proved beyond the capability of the GWB administration. The Iraqi representatives would not cooperate in a plan for the U.S. to loot the Iraqi oil wealth in exchange for U.S. support for them personally to gain positions of wealth and power. This is historically an almost unheard of level of nationalism for the region so the GWB administration was very surprised. They were unable to overcome this obstacle. The Iraqi conflict was very expensive to U.S. tax payers. The GWB administration decided to hide this fact by doing the war off the books so to speak. They did not put it in their budget. They funded it as a series of one off funding bills that were separate. This allowed them to maintain the illusion of fiscal responsibility from a bugetary perspective while running up enough debt to fund the development of alternative energy sources that would have made the U.S. energy independent. That however did not fit with the plans of the Bush family or the rest of the powers that be.

The inability to legally gain independent financing via oil revenues for a wider Middle Eastern conflict put a damper on the efforts to destabilize and ultimately control Syria. The U.S. has definitely contributed to the destabilization via military support to opponents of the Assad regime. In the end there was not enough resources to control the outcome and all of the players. I am not sure if this was possible to begin with, but it surely did not happen with what was available.

The GWB administration negotiated the drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq. GWB signed it in 2008. It established that the U.S. would withdraw from Iraqi cities by 2009 and combat forces would withdraw completely from Iraq by 2011.

The Iraqi government was weakened as a result of U.S. action. Syria was thrown into chaos. There was no longer a coherent plan to fill this vacuum as of 2008 when the GWB administration negotiated the withdrawal of U.S troops from Iraq.

This power vacuum in Syria and Iraq is often touted as the key condition that allowed ISIS to organize in an uncontrolled area between these states.

The conflict that destabilized Iraq, the support for Syrian rebels as well as the withdrawal of troops from the region were all actions taken by the leaders of the Republican party in line with their published plan and its subsequent failure.

Currently the Republican candidate for President is saying that Obama and Hillary Clinton are responsible for this and are literally the “founders of ISIS.” This is sort of like the Republicans blaming Bill Clinton for 9/11. They just can’t seem to admit even to themselves that this all happened on their watch and by their hand.