Is George W. Bush to blame for ISIS?

[Simfan34]

Yes he is.

Saddam Hussein would have ruthlessly suppressed them.

I wonder if he feels any guilt about how his actions lead to what is happening in Iraq now or if he's too busy finger-painting like a 5 year old, since he's a "great" painter these days.

Just like Bashar al-Assad has?

[Simfan34]

Maliki deserves most of the blame, as far as Iraq is concerned. I would hope everyone could agree on that much.

No, I'd say most goes to Saudi Arabia.

[Simfan34]

Not this again...

[Simfan34]

Indeed. Now I see. I personally blame Abdol-Madjid Madjidi and his subordinates for lacking spine.

[Simfan34]

Seriously though, Bremer's dissolution of the Iraqi Army was a major mistake, and it remains a major mistake. It was an essentially unilateral decision taken without consulting neither State nor Defense nor the White House nor even the commanders on the ground.

It is why there were so many angry Sunnis with guns running around Iraq in the following years and good part of why why these particular angry Sunnis are running around now. If there was a single decision that could be pointed to as the largest factor in the present situation in Iraq, this would be it.

[Simfan34]

Of course, that went hand-in-hand with the excesses of de-Baathification; purging every single member of the party, irrespective of rank, from the civil service, which ended up amounting to up to 100,000 people. Besides the serious diminution of state capacity this effected, it alienated, and deprived of their livelihoods, much of what was the Iraqi middle class. I mean, the state collapse in Iraq can rather plainly be traced to the gutting of the state by the provisional authority. This is particularly bizarre, as we had learnt the perils of such an approach in Germany and didn't even try it in Japan. 

The failure of the US to achieve its goals in Iraq had less to do with the goals themselves as opposed to the people who were entrusted to carry them out. The Bush administration gave the provisional authority an alarming degree of latitude in hastily determining policy, who in turn gave much credence to people like al-Jafari or Chalabi (who arguably got us into this whole mess). It goes back to the disinterest that administration officials had in planning for the post-war reconstruction process. Which, I suppose, stemmed in turn from the naive neo-conservative belief that the Iraqi people would embrace "democracy" eagerly and quickly resolve their problems on their own.