Posted on 01/04/2016 5:55:51 PM PST by presidio9
Donald Trump said on Saturday that President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "created ISIS."
Like many of Trump's charges this one doesn't hold much water. Clinton left the State Department in January 2013 and ISIS wasn't even founded until three months later.
But Trump's charge does raise an interesting question, which is how best to assign responsibility for the rise of ISIS, including the issue of how might the Obama administration's exit from Iraq at the end of 2011 have helped smooth the path for ISIS?
It began with a thug
The rise of ISIS starts with a Jordanian thug named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who founded ISIS' parent organization, al Qaeda in Iraq.
It was Zarqawi who inaugurated al Qaeda in Iraq's televised beheadings with the killing of American businessman Nick Berg in 2004. And it was Zarqawi who ignited a civil war against the Shiites in Iraq the same year. These tactics and policies remain today at the core of ISIS.
What gave Zarqawi the opportunity to create al Qaeda in Iraq? It was, of course, George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein brutally repressed all forms of opposition to his regime and before the Iraq War al Qaeda had no presence in Iraq.
Al Qaeda in Iraq grew in strength in 2006 so that it controlled much of the massive Anbar province in western Iraq. At the beginning of 2007, Bush authorized a surge of new troops and brought in a new commander, David Petraeus. Allied with a movement of Sunni tribesmen angered by al Qaeda known as "the Awakening," U.S. troops had largely extirpated al Qaeda from Iraq by 2008.
The 4 big factors
So how did al Qaeda in Iraq surge back as ISIS?
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Sorry. Not in the mood to vomit tonight.
maybe tomorrow.
she wasn’t even in office!!! and we know these things just sprout out of thing air!! nothing leads up to them forming!!
@#$@#$ you whoever the writer is.
Spinning like a Tx tornado
Bush’s fault or Jeb!’s fault?
This is nonsense. They weren’t called ISIS back then, they were called Moderate Islamists
Bingo
Obama/Hillary were arming “Moderate Islamists” that started a civil war in Syria which became ISIS. ISIS didn’t just start out of the blue, it took months of preparation which was in Hillary’s term
Her and obuma were right in the thick of it, and after she left her sad tail of failures, it became ISIS, which obuma will not say or admit to because he's afraid of ‘treason’ which he should be impeached on...
Hillary should be in prison for her part of 4 Americans being killed on American Soil, and the ‘emailgate’ she is being investigated on, rather than running for POTUS...how STUPID are these people in our government???!!!
The punk called them the JV squad. The punk drew a red line in Syria. The punk bailed out of Iraq against the recommendation of our generals.
The punk owns ISIS no matter how the mediaPAC tries to spin it.
The Syrian rebel group that ISIS sprung from was financed and armed by all the usual western thugs at the time. Hillary included. ISIS entered Iraq from Syria. Remember all those nice new shiny pickup trucks ?
Do you mean ISIL?
Obama's never heard of ISIS. It has the word Syria in it, and that's a no-no.
Ben! That would make a perfect billboard!
I wonder if McDepends liked the toilet facilities at the site in Syria. He looks like he has a pant load.
Leon Panetta criticizes Obama for Iraq withdrawal
In a new book, former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta suggests that President Obama failed to heed his advisers who wanted to leave troops in Iraq past December 2011, which may have contributed to the rise of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
right at the start of the writers argument stating it wasn’t founded until 3 months after Hillary was out wouldn’t pass any reasonable fact check. Does the writer believe they hadn’t been setting up for a long time?
Bergen, you assclown, then why take out Gaddafi?
ON this one there’s plenty of blame to go around - Bush, L Paul Bremer, Clinton, Obama, Maliki, and more.
Let's, all of us, clear the air once and for all about ISIS, so that we can answer this question definitively the next time we are confronted by a liberal who "knows" that it was Bush's fault.
I spent some time reading the Hillary Rodham Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State wikipedia page (which, for some reason is longer than the Presidency of Jimmy Carter Wikipedia page) last night to understand the liberal point of view. I wanted to verify Clinton's final day in office. It was February 1, 2013.
The word "ISIS" is not mentioned. Nor is "Syria," other than an account of her travels there in 2012. I have a Wikipedia account, and have a good mind to correct this oversight at some point in the next 11 months.
For the time being, Let's get a couple of things straight: Before there was an ISIS, there were various other terror groups in the neighborhood, including one we now sometimes refer to as ISI (or Islamic State of Iraq), that did form during the Iraq War, had allegiance to al Qaeda, and was led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
It is important to note that before ISIS stated beheading people we never referred to ISI. It was known as al-Qaeda in Iraq (or AQI). al-Baghdadi was a contemporary of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and may have studied with him at the University of Baghdad, but the two were not close, and al-Baghdadi's goals were not the same as al-Zarqawi's. When the US sent it's 500 pound love note to al-Zarqawi, al-Baghdadi did not originally take over. When he did, AQI (or ISI) was moderately successful at attacking Sunni targets in Iraq, particularly after US troops were withdrawn. It did not claim credit against any US troops or civilian targets.
Meanwhile, in Syria, we have a group called al-Nusra Front, which announced its formation on January 23, 2012 (note the date). The group had been attracting foreign jihadis in the war against Bashir Asad. On April 8, 2013 AQI (or, now in the scrubbed for Hillary Version, ISI) announced a merger with al-Nusra Front to form Daesh or ISIS. Soon thereafter al-Baghdadi had a falling out with al-Nursa leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani who went his own way, but 80% of the foreign fighters remained loyal to al-Baghdadi. Mostly because the al-Qaeda group had American weapons that they had seized from the Iraqi Army after the US withdrew from the region. A scaled-back al-Nusra Front continues to fight in the Syrian war, against both Asad and ISIS, and is currently being bombed by the Russians. Shed no tears, they are definitely a terrorist group.
My view of ISIS is that it is the brainchild of al-Baghdadi, who was radicalized during the Bathist repression that took place during the Saddam administration. The man is a sociopathic megalomaniac along the lines of Hitler. It is true that without the Bush43 invasion, he would never have had the opportunity to lead al Qaeda in Iraq. However, without the troop withdrawl, he would most likely be dead right now. Without the Arab Spring, he would never have been given the opportunity in Syria. And if US troops had been in Syria, he would have taken advantage of softer Islamic targets and ISIS would never have been able to seize large strategic targets.
A good analogy is that, given the chaos in Germany in 1945, if the US and the Soviet Union had both withdrawn at that time, it is very likely that a successor to the Nazi legacy would have emerged to cause similar problems. The difference with Islamic terrorists is, of course, the religious component, and that makes them far more dangerous.
What is happening to today in Islamic State is that a new generation of true believers, similar to the Hitler Youth, are being systematically indoctrinated, making future action against them increasingly more dangerous as each year goes by.
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