Bush kicked who’s ass?
He had us fight Sunnis on behalf of Shias ... two religious factions that have been fighting each other for over 1000 years.
That’s not kicking ass That’s taking sides in a religious civil war that we should not be taking any part.
The question I want to know is WHY? Why do we care which faction of Islam wins out in any particular region? Is there that much of a difference? What is it to us?
If you read history both Sunni and Shia have been equally brutal to each other over the many centuries. Bagdad alone has been sacked and re-sacked dozens of times. Ditto other major cities in the Middle East. Sometimes the Sunnis are on top and sometimes Shias are on top.
What does it matter to us?
Bush invaded a muslim country with his allies and toppled the regime and Saddam Hussein. He kicked their ass
Why ?
petrodollars
Isn’t there one side of Sunnis or Shias that WON”T annihilate Israel?
In in the surge /Anbar Awakening we were fighting WITH the Sunni local tribal leaders against AQI, a coalition of al Dhouri’s most loyal Baathists and the Sunni fringe group/sect known as Salafists. All Salafists may be Sunnis but not all Sunnis are Salafists.
Al Dhouri was the Saddam advisor who led Saddam to start courting the hardline islamists in 1996 around the time of OBL’s declaration of war/fatwa on the “crusaders” a/k/a US coalition and Saddam’s fist huge offensive against the Kurds since 1991, begun in support of one Kurdish faction [a faction that also had US backing at one point, the KDP, against one that had had Iranian backing, the PUK, which had taken over the Kurdish parliament in Irbil.
Circa 1996, Saddam’s rhetoric took a distinctly islamist fire and brimstone flavor. Around 1998 with al Dhouri’s influence Saddam started building the megamosque with the minarets that looked like scud missiles and Kalishnakovs to commemorate his “victory” in the Gulf War, completing it just months before the 9/11 attacks. [To an Arab, just surviving a US strike is “victory.”] This mosque was to be Saddam’s mausoleum eventually, and also became the recruiting and propaganda center for the Iraqi insurgency under the “Association of Muslim Scholars” which was expelled from it in 2007- this group was opposed to sectarian violence between sunni and shia though it was/is a sunni group. Saddam made a point of writing a copy of the Quran in was claimed to be his own blood after an assassination attempt on his son Uday as a sort of penance, but this as viewed by other Sunnis such as the Saudis and UAE a sin and defilement of the Quran.
Saddam’s press in the 90s openly praised OBL and Saddam offered bin Laden safe haven in Iraq.
All this was done to try to appeal to islamists the regime thought would be most useful in deploying against the pro-western Kurds and the US. The Baathists followers of al Dhouri [who is a religious not secular Baathist] act as a sort of intelligence and financial arm of ISIS, while the late Zarqawi’s Palestinians and Baghdaddi’s people provide muscle. al Dhouri and ISIS’ goals do differ however so it has always been a marriage of convenience, al Dhouri at times at odds with the others because in the end after their mutual enemies are gone, each group wants exclusive power.