Tony Blair is right: without the Iraq war there would be no Isis
Only one of Tony Blair’s mea culpas
in his CNN interview stands out as truly significant: his partial
acknowledgment that without the Iraq war there would be no Islamic State
(Isis).
Until now, Blair had refused to link the two, insisting instead in
the lead-up to the war that sending western troops would deny jihadis an
arena and prevent Saddam Hussein from using them as proxies in his standoff with the west.
The 12 years since have constantly disproved both claims. Within six
months of British troops landing in Iraq, the SAS was sent to Baghdad’s
western outskirts to attack jihadis who had taken up residence in
Ramadi. Back then, they were a mob of foreigners and Iraqis who fed off a
broad Sunni discontent fuelled by the invasion; a serendipitous
vanguard that not long afterwards organised into al-Qaida in Iraq, then
the Islamic State of Iraq and, since mid-2013, Isis.
Throughout all its incarnations, the group’s grievances have been
largely consistent. Central to them is the belief that the invasion
destroyed a regional order, ousting a stalwart of Sunni rule, and
inviting the rival Shia sect to take over. The sense of loss was
profound, with many Sunnis passionately believing that the US and
Britain must have known exactly what they were doing.
These views, formed along contemporary faultlines of power and
patronage, drove a widespread Sunni resistance, a mix of non-ideologues
enraged by losing jobs, status and dignity, and others, like the
jihadis, who believed the war had been preordained in Islamic
prophecies. As Iraq unravelled, the latter began to hold sway – just as
later happened in Syria.
Rightly or wrongly, the Sunnis of the region have come to believe
that Blair’s decision to join George Bush’s war was the start of a
historical pivot towards Iran and the restoration of Persian hegemony.
They hold up a litany of developments to support their claim, including
de-Ba’athification, which was aimed at eliminating Saddam’s influence,
but also became a tool of repression against Sunnis, as well as the
installation of Iraqi leaders who hailed from Shia supremacist
backgrounds.
Perhaps even more directly relevant to Sunni grievances and
the rise of Isis, was the US-run prison system, which started with
rampant abuses at Abu Ghraib and evolved into mass detention, albeit of
both major sects. Sunni jihadis said the prison system was their most effective organising tool.
A senior Isis commander has told the Guardian that without the Camp Bucca facility in southern Iraq,
in which he and most of the senior leadership were at one point
detained, there would be no Isis today. “It made it all, it built our
ideology,” he told the Guardian last December, “We could never have all
got together like this in Baghdad, or anywhere else,” he said. “It would
have been impossibly dangerous. Here, we were not only safe, but we
were only a few hundred metres away from the entire al-Qaida
leadership.”
As Iraq sank into chaos from early 2005, sectarian positions steadily
hardened. Isis, though battered in 2006 when Iraqi tribal leaders
joined US troops in fighting them, was quelled for a time but never
defeated. In the years since 2011, when US troops left, and in the wake
of the Arab spring, Isis was able to feed off grievances that had
remained unresolved since the British and US armies rolled north from
Basra eight years earlier. The jihadis’ rallying call that British and
US-led aggression caused all of this resonates broadly, far beyond their
constituency.
In Baghdad on Sunday, Jihad Mohanned, a Sunni resident from the west
of the city, said Blair’s acknowledgment was “so obvious it’s surprising
he bothered to speak”.
He added: “It really isn’t possible to come to any other conclusion.
Without the invasion, we would not have Isis. It’s crystal clear.”
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