Who's Responsible for ISIS? Bush, Cheney et al, That's Who.

Yep, these fuckers.

It's a deeply held belief in many quarters that one of the worst decisions in the post-9/11 era was the so-called de-Ba'athification of Iraq after our Iraq invasion and conquest. It's been also postulated that victims of this de-Ba'athification, the civil servants and military officers of the Saddam era, backed al Qaeda in Iraq, which morphed into ISIS as the Syrian civil war proceeded.

It's commonly understood that these former Iraq Ba-athists are deeply supportive of and entrenched in ISIS.

Also understood is that the loss of Iraq's professional class -- all of them Ba'athists -- destabilized post-war Iraq because the talent pool for running the country was made so thin. This left non-Ba'athist Shiites to badger and persecute Sunnis, further alienating and inciting Sunnis to rebellion. Although Sunnis relented during their so-called "Sunni Awakening," these Sunnis pivoted back to AQ and ISIS because of continuing persecution by the al-Maliki regime.

Who was responsible for de-Ba'athification? It's clear that Bush approved it and that the decision to implement it lay at Dick Cheney's feet.

When challenged at the time, Bremmer insisted that his orders came from the White House and the Defense Department. We found some ambiguity on who issued those orders. De-Ba’athification has come to be seen in many quarters as such a pivotal error, no one has leaped forward to take credit.

In addition to the inspector general’s report, there are two other assessments written by analysts with high-level access to insiders. One, from U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, reported that Bremmer was handed his instructions by an undersecretary of defense, Douglas Feith.

"President Bush had previously given Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld managerial control of the occupation, so it is possible that Feith spoke for Rumsfeld who spoke for Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney," the institute report said.

A report from the Rand Corporation, the grand-daddy of the private defense policy think tanks, said the National Security Council, "with President Bush in the chair," learned of the de-Ba’athfication order the day before it was implemented. "No one raised objections," the report said. However, the inspector general’s report finds that the move caught both the CIA and the State Department off guard.

A body of information ties Cheney to this decision. Cheney played a key role on the National Security Council and in all decisions surrounding the war. His chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby recruited Bremmer for his post in Iraq. Press reports at the time and analyses afterward put Cheney in a group of hard-liners within the White House and the Defense Department who sought to remake Iraq from the ground up.

While Cheney might not have drafted the de-Ba’athification order himself, we can safely say he supported it.

Yes, we can safely say that. As an astounding aside, the Poltifact article excepted above was purposed to analyze Chris Matthews' proposition that one could lay the ISIS debacle at Cheney's feet. After essentially proving Matthews correct, at the end of the article Politifact declared Matthews' statement as "mostly false," when my reading -- and I suspect yours -- shows the statement to be "mostly true." Go figure.

In any event, I'd put serious money that Dick Cheney, along with other members of his cabal, will blame Paris on Barack Obama because he's "weak" on Syria. It'll be like clockwork.

As for the "truth" of who's most responsible for ISIS, just google "isis bush cheney" for a serious history lesson. Here's the link.

Speaking of history, I found this passage in Wikipedia in an article entitled, "Sons of Iraq."

Following the 2010 re-election of Nouri al-Maliki, the Islamic State began a campaign of assassination of Sunni tribal leaders and the remnants of the Awakening movement in Iraq’s Al-Anbar province. The drive-by shootings and point-blank assassinations were documented in an Islamic State video called “The Clanging of the Swords.” Between 2009 and 2013, 1,345 Awakening members were killed. In one town, Jurf al-Sakhar south of Baghdad, 46 Awakening members were killed in 27 incidents.

That's just the way ISIS rolls, I guess.