By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 20 June 2023
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi: Bringing the Islamic State to Saddam’s Iraq and Joining Al-Qaeda
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Tag Archives: Iraq War
Islamic State Attacks Iran and Many Iranians Ask: Did it Really?
The 2007 Islamic State Book “Informing Mankind” of its Justifications for the Caliphate
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 22 November 2021
The Islamic State movement published an 87-page book, “Informing Mankind of the Birth of the Islamic State” or “Informing the People of the Birth of the Islamic State” (I’lam al-Anam bi-Milad Dawlat al-Islam), on 7 January 2007. The document was released by Al-Furqan Media Foundation, the central Islamic State propaganda institution, and first appeared on the World News Network website. A rough translation of the book appears below.
The CIA and Iraq: Intelligence Failures, Media Successes
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 28 December 2019
In a long article last week, I looked at why the U.S. ran a formal occupation of Iraq for fourteen months after the fall of Saddam Husayn in April 2003, given that there had been an explicit pre-invasion decision not to have an occupation government. The short answer is that the occupation was installed through deception by the State Department, supported by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). State and CIA had argued for a protracted occupation in the Situation Room debates in 2002, but President George W. Bush had sided with the Pentagon, which advocated a rapid transfer of power to Iraqis. Having lost in the formal inter-agency process, the State Department succeeded by subversion in getting its way on the ground in Iraq. The disaster this caused in the mismanagement of post-Saddam Iraq was, as the article explained in detail, only the most serious impact of the toxic schism between State/CIA and the Pentagon, a factor whose import is difficult to overstate when examining how the Bush administration functioned. (This feud also at times drew in the Vice President’s Office, which tended to support the Pentagon.)
Why Was There Ever An American Occupation of Iraq?
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 22 December 2019
Douglas Feith was the U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 2001 to 2005, one of the most senior positions at the Pentagon during one of the most consequential periods in recent history, covering the 11 September 2001 atrocities and early phase of the U.S.-led response. Feith later wrote a highly illuminating memoir, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, which tried to drain some of the hysteria out of the public “debate” about the Iraq dimension of the U.S. policy in particular by explaining the internal arguments in the Bush administration leading up to the decision to finish with Saddam Husayn in 2003, and trying to set those arguments in their proper historical context, both in relation to Iraq—where “the war” had begun twelve years earlier—and the altered American threat perceptions in the shadow of 9/11. Unlike a lot of the gossipy tomes that emerged from former officials, Feith’s book is notably light on opinion and contains reams of declassified documents so readers can check his analysis against the source material. One of Feith’s key judgments is that “the chief mistake was maintaining an occupation government in Iraq for over a year”.[1] As Feith explains in great detail in the book, this was never supposed to happen. So how did it?
Looking At the Islamic State’s Past, Seeing its Future
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on August 27, 2016
Michael Ware
Only the Dead documents the experience of Michael Ware, an Australian journalist who arrived in Iraq in early 2003 and spent eleven months-per-year there for seven years. Ware made contact soon after the fall of Saddam Hussein with those resisting the new order, at a time when the Americans were struggling to map such forces.
Ware established communication with the more nationalist-Islamist forces. Once in that milieu, the globalist jihadists, who were working in the shadows, a small, foreign-dominated force towards which even many insurgents were guarded, found him. The leader of the jihadists, Ahmad al-Khalayleh, became something of an obsession for Ware as he stepped onto the world stage with his gruesome tactics as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi, the “Shaykh of the Slaughters,” would found an organization that became a movement and then burst Iraq’s frontiers, known to us now as the Islamic State (IS).
In tracking Zarqawi and his men, Ware presents some incredible footage and gives some snapshots from the fascinating days, whose effects we are all still feeling, when the Iraqi insurgency was taking root. Continue reading
Did Saddam Hussein Become A Religious Believer?
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on September 12, 2015
Saddam Hussein prays at a mosque in Samarra, March 12, 1998 (AP Photo)
It should be stated up front that the question posed in the headline is, strictly speaking, unanswerable: only Saddam Hussein could ever answer that question, and even then any out-loud answer given by Saddam could be untrue in any number of directions, for any number of reasons. Still, from the available evidence it does seem Saddam had some kind of “born-again” experience.
Of crucial importance, however, is that while Saddam’s actual beliefs had a significant impact in providing some of the colour and shape to the Faith Campaign, even if one believes Saddam remained a secularist and Islamized his regime as a wholly cynical means of shoring-up support, this is completely irrelevant to the effect this Islamization had. Saddam put in place a governmental administration that created a religious movement, which brought men to a faith they otherwise would not have had, and in combination with the increased sectarianism fostered by Saddam’s regime, this prepared the ground for al-Qaeda and its offshoots like the Islamic State (ISIS) in the aftermath of the regime. Continue reading
There Have Been Real Achievements In Afghanistan, But Leaving Puts Them At Risk
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on November 22, 2014
Since President Obama’s 2009 announcement of a ‘surge’ in Afghanistan that simultaneously announced the date of withdrawal, the western focus in Afghanistan has shifted to the exits.
The steady drizzle of bad news since then has reinforced this sense that it’s over, we’ve had enough and we’re leaving.
American and British troops quit Helmand in late October, basically ceding it to Taliban control. On Tuesday John Sopko, the head of the American auditor mechanism (SIGAR) said that efforts to promote economic growth in Afghanistan have ‘accomplished nothing.’ Continue reading
The Anti-Interventionists Got What They Wanted in Syria and Iraq: Are They Happy Now?
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on July 1, 2014
BBC map of ISIS’/Islamic State’s operational area
As we enter the fortieth month of Syria’s ordeal, and with the renegade Zarqawi’ite network in Iraq finally declaring that its virtual ministries are being uploaded into a fully restored Caliphate extending from Raqqa to Tikrit, the most depressing thought of all is that it did not have to be this way. Continue reading
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