“I agree with him on that, and I don’t want to, because I cheered when the statue of Saddam came down.
I cheered when he got captured. And I watched his execution, but I don’t recall cheering that.
But now look what has become of all that.
This is a real mess, and we made it.
Damn.”
Between the mid-1980s and 2003 Saddam Islamized the ruling Baath Party, the state administration and the legal and educational systems. It began as a coldly calculated cynical step designed to refute Khomeini’s accusations of Baathi atheism, but toward the end, at least Saddam personally, became a born-again Muslim. The Islamization Campaign, while designed to bring the more religious Shi’i population closer to the regime and to their Sunni co-patriots, it in fact deepened the gulf between the two communities. The senior Shi’i religious leadership was suppressed, while the more compliant Sunni clerics were supported heavily.
A 1991 bloody suppression of a Shi’i revolt further drove the two communities away from each other. The regime’s elite was weaned of their Baathi secularism, which was replaced by Shari’ah, Qur’an and Hadith studies. Even those Baathis who remained secular at the core identified the great political advantage provided by the “Islamization” and faked Islamic piety. But which Islam? The regime’s official Islam was of the soft Sunni version, but Sunni it was.
Unofficially, very radical Sunni trends, anti-Shi’i Wahhabi as well as Sufi ones, were encouraged as long as they did not turn against the regime. The result was a growing sense of discrimination and oppression on the part of the Shi’ah. “Caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of ISIS/Daesh, is the result of Saddam’s education, except that he performed a quantum leap in terms of radicalizing Saddam’s Islam, and he abandoned Saddam’s ambivalence toward the Shi’ah in favor of coherent anti-Shi’i revulsion.
I’d say the Muslim world made this mess, due to increasing fanaticism among the believers - a radicalization that Muslim rulers responded to, by adopting it lock, stock and barrel, to avoid being swept away by rebels assuming the mantle of holy men sent by Allah to remove the insufficiently devout from power.
Well you may have a point, but I am very bothered by America’s arming of “moderate muslims” to this or that or whatever ever it is that our goal is.
I don’t want our nose in this business at all. I do not want us in bed with islamists. It makes us look like bad guys.