well the perception politically is clearly that ISIS is a result of Obama foreign policy.......thats not in dispute.
So this is just another thread manufactured in Candyland by progressives.
Trump’s False Obama-ISIS Link
Donald Trump claims that President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “founded ISIS.” But the origin of the Islamic State terrorist group dates back to the Bush administration.
Trump points to the withdrawal of troops from Iraq in 2011, under Obama, as “the founding of ISIS,” but experts say the expansion of the Islamic State after that point can’t be pinned on the troop withdrawal alone — if at all. And there’s the fact that President George W. Bush had signed the agreement and set the date for that withdrawal.
“It’s a massively complex problem,”
Clint Watts, the Robert A. Fox fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Program on the Middle East, told us. It “goes beyond one single policy decision about keeping or moving troops.”
Furthermore, Trump himself supported withdrawing troops from Iraq as early as 2007, telling CNN in a
March 16, 2007, interview that the U.S. should “declare victory and leave, because I’ll tell you, this country is just going to get further bogged down. … [T]his is a total catastrophe and you might as well get out now, because you just are wasting time.”
(snip)
RS, “The Islamic State and U.S. Policy,” June 27: The Islamic State’s direct ideological and organizational roots lie in the forces built and led by the late Abu Musab al Zarqawi in Iraq from 2002 through 2006. … Zarqawi took advantage of Sunni animosity toward U.S. forces and feelings of disenfranchisement at the hands of Iraq’s Shia and Kurds to advance a uniquely sectarian agenda that differed from Al Qaeda’s in important ways. … Following Zarqawi’s death at the hands of U.S. forces in June 2006, AQ-I leaders repackaged the group as a coalition called the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). ISI lost its two top leaders in 2010 and was weakened, but not eliminated, by the time of the U.S. withdrawal in 2011. The precise nature of ISI’s relationship to Al Qaeda leaders from 2006 onward is unclear.
Watts, with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said that 2006 was when the “big governance model” of what we now see as the Islamic State was formed. There was “some divergence from the al Qaeda brand name” and disagreements between the two groups at this point. When the U.S. troops withdrew, the terrorist group had gone underground, with members in prisons or detention camps, Watts said. In 2011 and 2012, the group was “lightly functioning,” but still in existence.
By 2013, the terrorist group was again launching attacks in Iraq and had spread to Syria, taking advantage of that country’s internal strike. Syria’s civil war started in March 2011.
Critics and experts have pointed to several actions during the Bush and Obama administrations that could have contributed to the rise of ISIS:The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
- The decisions by the U.S.-led provisional coalition government in 2003 to disband the Iraqi army and dissolve and ban the Baath Party, which drove Sunnis into militant groups.
- The rule of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, whose Shia government further ostracized Sunnis. “By disbanding the army and making the Baath party illegal and putting in power a Shiite like Maliki, you alienated and radicalized the Sunnis, and gave rise to ISIS in the process,” Haykel told us.
- The withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq by Dec. 31, 2011 — a date set by an agreement with the Iraqi government that was signed by President Bush in 2008, and left unchanged by the Obama administration.
Much more at:
Trump’s False Obama-ISIS Link
Talking points versus facts and consensus, which one do you believe?
