by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago I watched a fascinating episode of PBS’s
documentary series Frontline, “The
Secret History of ISIS,” though the history of ISIS presented was not so
“secret” at all. The show’s basic argument was that the U.S. decision to
scapegoat Iraq in general and Saddam Hussein in particular as the true
perpetrators of the 9/11 terror attacks, including “cooking the books” to make
it look as if Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were in cahoots all along to
attack America, was the real genesis of ISIS. The film traced the history of
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a street thug who was born and raised in Zarqa, Jordan
(his real family name was Musab; like a lot of Arabs, he went by a final name
that merely indicated where he was from: “al-Zarqawi” simply means “from
Zarqa”); he was arrested and imprisoned in Jordan and, like Malcolm X, while in
prison was educated by his fellow inmates in the basics of Islam. He’d gone in
a street criminal with a heavy-duty set of tattoos; he came out a committed
Islamic militant and had laboriously and painfully scraped the skin off his
body with a smuggled-in razor blade to remove the tattoos, which were not
considered appropriate for an Islamist militant. Looking for a place to join
the jihad, he first went to
Kandahar, Afghanistan to join Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda operation and fight
the infidels in Afghanistan, but bin Laden apparently didn’t think much of him
and basically told him to go home. Instead he went to Iraq and seized on the
opportunities presented by the U.S. invasion — particularly the disbanding of
the Iraqi army (which the person who ordered it, U.S. governor L. Paul Bremer, still thinks was a good idea!), which turned out 250,000
young men with guns and professional training in how to use them loose on the
Iraqi streets, ready for recruitment to a resistance movement. Zarqawi (to use
the form of his name by which he’s usually referred to in the West even though
that’s not how his Arab name really works) seized the opportunities presented
by the missteps of both U.S. and Iraqi governors — including the decision of
Iraq’s prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shi’a Muslim, to go after the Sunnis
and fight a sectarian civil war.
Zarqawi had already been artificially inflated
into a key part of the Iraqi resistance even before the war — in his infamous
U.N. speech then-Secretary of State Colin Powell had said Zarqawi was the
liaison between bin Laden and Saddam (when, as the film’s narrator, Will Lyman,
sardonically points out, if Saddam Hussein had known of Zarqawi’s existence he
would have had him executed immediately — Iraq under Saddam had no Islamist
terror movement to speak of because Saddam regarded such people as threats to
his own power and dealt with them as ruthlessly and brutally as he did anyone
else who threatened his power) — and he called his group al-Qaeda in Iraq (with
the apparently grudging acquiescence of bin Laden back in his redoubt in
Pakistan) and essentially largely led the Sunni side in an Iraqi civil war
until he was killed in a targeted strike in 2006. The next year President
George W. Bush ordered the “surge” in Iraq and the U.S. essentially bribed the
remaining Sunnis into stopping the war — the so-called “Sunni awakening” was
literally bought and paid for by the American taxpayers — but Zarqawi’s
operation continued under a new leader named Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (another Arab
taking a last name that simply meant where he was from — “from Baghdad”). What
was left of it laid low for three years until 2009, when President Bush’s term
expired, Barack Obama replaced him, and the new administration was determined
to withdraw the U.S. military from Iraq and leave the Iraqis in charge. One of
the things we did to accomplish this was to build a new Iraqi army, which as New
Yorker writer Dexter Filkins, one of the
show’s interviewees, put it, “which was built at incredible expense— I don’t
even know what the final price tag was, $30 billion dollars— largely by the
Americans, paid for by the American taxpayer, you know, all their equipment,
everything— it all came apart.” That really wouldn’t have been so surprising if
anyone in either the Bush or Obama administrations had realized that one of
Zarqawi’s
calls to his followers had been to have them sign up for the U.S.-organized
Iraqi army and get trained in how to fight — and then use their training and
new-found skills to fight against
the U.S. and the Shi’a Iraqis the U.S. invasion had put in control of the
country. So a lot of people in that so-called “Iraqi army” were, and had all
along been, on the other side. This show has some pretty well-defined heroes
and villains, and the villains are pretty obvious — not only Zarqawi and his
equally bloodthirsty successor, Baghdadi, but the Bush administration in
general and vice-president Dick Cheney and his associate Lewis “Scooter” Libby
in particular — while the closest the story (at least as presented here by
writers Michael Kirk, who also directed, and Michael Wiser) has to a hero(ine)
is Nada Bakos.
She worked for the CIA as a counterterrorism intelligence analyst
from 2000 to 2008 and futilely tried to talk the Bush administration, Cheney
and Libby in particular, out of their obsession with finding a connection
between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 that did not in fact exist. She also said the
CIA had actually located Zarqawi in 2002 and was ready to take him out — but
the Bush administration didn’t want to launch an attack in Iraq before they
were ready to fight the all-out war and vetoed the plan. Under Obama’s tenure
the U.S. pulled out of Iraq, the Iraqi army disintegrated as soon as ISIS
forces attacked, and just as Zarqawi had moved from Jordan to Iraq to find a
fertile ground for jihad, so
Baghdadi moved from Iraq to Syria and aligned ISIS with the rebels who were
fighting the Syrian government of Bashir al-Assad. Indeed, ISIS was so
successful in Syria they were able to capture a huge swath of territory and
unite it with the land they’d conquered in western Iraq to declare the new
Islamic Caliphate. The Caliphate was the Muslim empire that was founded by
Muhammad himself and reached its height under Iraqi king Haroun al-Raschid (who
was the Caliph during the time the Sinbad the Sailor stories take place), when it stretched from Spain to
India — indeed, the professed objective of the modern-day jihad is to reconquer all the former territories of the
Caliphate and bring them under Muslim rule, though Baghdadi isn’t content even
with that and wants his vicious,
evil brand of Islam to rule the entire world. (Right there that makes him
considerably more dangerous than Saddam Hussein or Bashir al-Assad, who were
content to rule one country but would ruthlessly kill anyone whom they consider
a threat to their rule.) According to this program, Osama bin Laden finally
broke with Baghdadi’s operation when it announced that it was forming a new
Caliphate, with the Syrian city of Raqqa as its capital — bin Laden apparently
didn’t think the historical timing was right for such a drastic step — though
reports at the time suggested that Baghdadi and his organization were working
more like a classical guerrilla army than a terrorist organization, focused
less on spectacular attacks around the world and more on conquering, holding
and ruling territory.
This has given Islamic State, under its various names
(originally it was called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which generated the
initials ISIS; later it was called ISIL, for “Islamic State in the Levant,” and
in Arabic its name is “Daesh,” which its adversaries like to use because the
pronunciation can be twisted so it sounds like an Arabic insult), far more
resources to carry on its struggle, including money it’s looted from the banks
in the areas it’s conquered and (a funding source oddly not mentioned on this
show) income from the sale of oil from the parts of Iraq they control. ISIS
originally questioned the strategy of doing big 9/11-style attacks in the West
on the ground that they didn’t bring the New Caliphate one step closer to
reality; later, as everyone knows, they abandoned that principle and started
authorizing attacks like the big assaults in Paris and Brussels. At the same
time it’s unclear just how many of the foreign actions are actually being
greenlighted by Baghdadi and his leadership councils in Raqqa and how many
(including, most likely, the attacks last December in San Bernardino) are being
done by freelancers who log onto ISIS’s Web site or Facebook page and declare
“allegiance” to ISIS. One can readily imagine someone in Raqqa monitoring the
group’s Facebook page, seeing these “declarations of allegiance” and wondering,
“Who the hell are these people?”
One interesting aspect of this program is that it all too clearly shows how
President Obama’s response to the renewed threat of terrorism from Iraq and
Syria via ISIS was conditioned by his tendency to issue a measured response to anything: where President George W. Bush had famously
boasted, “I don’t do nuance,” Though Obama declined a request to be interviewed
for this show, it includes a clip of him at a White House press conference
saying, “The notion that the way to solve every one of these problems is to
deploy our military— that hasn’t been true in the past and it won’t be true
now.”
To those of us who voted for him precisely because (among other issues)
we wanted someone in the White House whose knee-jerk response to terrorism wouldn’t be to find another country and invade it, whether
they had anything to do with the terrorists or not, that sounded like wisdom
and prudence; but to many Americans, it just came off as weak — which is why
Obama, the man who famously “nuanced” virtually every issue to death, is likely
to be replaced either by Hillary Clinton (who as secretary of state pleaded
with Obama for direct U.S. military action in Syria, and was turned down) or
Donald Trump, who like Bush seems to glory in not doing nuance and is so
personally combative and pugnacious he seems likely to get the U.S. in a war
just to offer further proof of his “manhood.” ISIS is virtually impossible to
deal with precisely because it’s more an idea than a specific group of people —
which is why you shouldn’t get your hopes up when the U.S. announced that a
targeted drone strike somewhere has taken out one ISIS leader or another. One
problem with ISIS is they seem to have a virtually infinite bench; take one of
their major figures out and there are two, three or 10 people ready and eager
to replace him. The old wisdom that you can only fight an idea — and for some
reason the New Islamic Caliphate ISIS promises has become an incredibly
attractive idea to Muslims (and some non-Muslims who were attracted enough by
it to convert) around the world — with a better idea has rarely been more true
than it is for ISIS, but the policy the Obama administration has based around
that idea — attempting to contain ISIS, trying to decapitate its leadership on
the ground and ultimately waiting for (or persuading) Muslims around the world
to embrace a better idea than the future offered by these murderous thugs — is
seen as dangerously “weak” by all too many of the American people and is likely
to be abandoned in favor of a more militaristic approach if Hillary Clinton or
Donald Trump is the next President.
