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<\/a>Odd too is the idea that ISIS, currently barreling toward the capital, Baghdad, is somehow a new killer on the block. While the gang, led by newcomer Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is not as ancient as the Egyptian goddess by the same name\u2014ISIS was previously known as Al Qaida in Iraq (A.Q.I.), reflecting its earlier, more modest mission. A.Q.I. was the brainchild of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, described aptly in the New Yorker as, \u201cA Jordanian who had been a convicted thief and sex criminal before turning to radical Islam.\u201d Commensurate with its morphing, expansive ambitions, A.Q.I. changed its name to ISIS. Whereas \u201cAl Qaida was originally envisioned as a kind of Sunni foreign legion, which would defend Muslim lands from Western occupation,\u201d writes New Yorker staffer Lawrence Wright, \u201cZarqawi had a different goal in mind. He hoped to provoke an Islamic civil war.\u201d George W. Bush\u2019s invasion primed Iraq for Zarqawi\u2019s purposes. \u201cThere was no better venue than the fractured state of Iraq, which sits astride the Sunni-Shiite fault line.\u201d<\/p>\nSo savage and extreme is ISIS, always has been, that it had been \u201cbooted out of the Al Qaida consortium,\u201d attests Wright. Remember the \u201cDear Al (Zarqawi)\u201d letter penned by Ayman al-Zawahiri to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in 2005? In it, Bin Laden\u2019s Capo Bastone<\/em> (Zawahiri) had asked the lieutenant (Zarqawi) to reconsider the wisdom of slaughtering so many Shia civilians in Iraq. Al-Z No. 1 broached the topic by counseling Al-Z No. 2 about the wisdom of bringing \u201cthe Muslim masses to the mujahed movement.\u201d To that end, killing so many of them was probably unhelpful. Yes, the Shia are a handful\u2014theologically problematic\u2014conceded Zawahiri. Suspect too was the Shia\u2019s history of \u201cconnivance with the Crusaders.\u201d But while Zawahiri didn\u2019t give a dried camel\u2019s hump about his Shia brethren, he thought better of slaughtering them, preferring to forgive their \u201cignorance.\u201d Besides, added Zawahiri as an afterthought, it\u2019s impossible for the mujahedeen to kill all Iraq\u2019s Shia.<\/p>\n While Zarqawi rejected Zawahiri\u2019s soft approach, his personal odyssey has a happy ending. Zarqawi died, killed by Americans in 2006. But his legacy, like that of Bush\u2019s invasion of Iraq, lives on in ISIS. Shia Iran, once a bitter enemy of Saddam Hussein\u2019s Iraq, now has pride-of-place in the Iraq that Bush built. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has been galvanized to the aid of the Iraqi army. But it is not the 930,000 members of the Iraqi security forces that the Revolutionary Guard aims to rouse. Despite the princely sums ($25 billion) Americans spent to train and prepare it, in Mosul, this inorganic, artificial creation of the Bush brigades fled before 1,300 ISIS fighters. To fight the marauding Sunnis, the Revolutionary Guard will likely corral well-motivated, tribal Shia militias. (In Iraq, Shiites make up about sixty percent of the population. Sunnis comprise less than twenty percent.)<\/p>\n It is this cauldron of sectarian strife that Saddam Hussein kept from bubbling over.<\/p>\n What\u2019s unfolding in Iraq, with ISIS, is no more than a progression along a predictable continuum, the starting point of which was an American occupation that unseated an extremely effective law-and-order leader: Saddam Hussein. Consequently, where there was once oppression and order, there is now only chaos and carnage. The lawlessness we brought to Iraq with our messianic, faith-based initiative has allowed the manifestation of divisions that have riven the region for four millennia.<\/p>\n As this column predicted in 2007<\/a>, \u201cOnce we decamp, some Saddam-like strongman will fill the power vacuum left. The dictator to emerge from the ruins of Iraq will impose Sharia, pray to the hidden Imam, and compel women to walk about in black nose bags. We had it good with Saddam because he was secular, an enemy of fundamentalist Islam. Can we have back what, in our folly, we fouled up? No.”<\/p>\n There is little reason for me to hope to impart something new about the predictable progression of Iraq from (sectarian) rogue state to failed state to Islamic state, in the wake of the American occupation. There is no reason to expect me to best a column dated December 2006, titled \u201cAt Least Saddam Kept Order\u201d<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201c\u2026 If Iraqis appear ungrateful or disoriented, it is because they are busy \u2026 busy dying at rates many times higher than under Saddam. In the final days of Saddam\u2019s reign of terror, i.e., in the 15 months preceding the invasion, the primary causes of death in Iraq were natural: \u201cheart attack, stroke and chronic illness,\u201d as The Lancet<\/em><\/a> reported. Since Iraq became a Bush object lesson, the primary cause of death has been violence. \u2026 \u201cIraq has slipped back into chaos,\u201d huffed one of Fox News\u2019 interchangeable commentators, who, heretofore, had been oblivious to the pal of despair that has engulfed this Gulf state; to the Christian community\u2019s near annihilation; to the millions of displaced Iraqis, refugees living in squalor within and without their country, all since Bush sicced the dogs of war on it.<\/p>\n \u201cI wish the Americans had never come,\u201d Baghdadi Mohammed Rejeb told veteran war correspondent Arwa Damon, a decade after the American Nakba<\/em> (catastrophe). \u201cThey ruined our country. They planted divisions. They made us cry for the days of Saddam Hussein.\u201d Wept another Iraqi woman, on that anniversary: \u201cI lost hope six to seven months ago. You don\u2019t feel it\u2019s home anymore.\u201d One after another, Iraqis all speak of the \u201ccorruption, suspicion and tribalism\u201d that have seeped into civil society since the invasion.<\/p>\n No. Iraq hasn\u2019t suddenly \u201cslipped back into\u201d this backward and benighted state. It was bombed there by a mulish military power which didn\u2019t know Shiite<\/em> from Shinola.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\n\u2026 Hussein\u2019s reign was one of the more peaceful periods in the history of this fractious people. What a shame it\u2019s too late to dust Saddam off, give him a sponge bath, and beg him to restore law and order to Iraq.<\/strong>
\nSecretly, that\u2019s what anyone with a head and a heart would want. We could promise solemnly never to mess with him again\u2014just so long as he kept his mitts off nukes, continued to check Iran (which he did splendidly), and minimized massacres. To be fair, Saddam\u2019s last major massacre was in 1991, during which only 3,000 Shiites were murdered. That\u2019s less than Iraq\u2019s monthly quota under \u201cdemocracy.\u201d
\nNo one is praising Saddam, yada, yada, yada. But even the Saddam-equals-Hitler crowd cannot but agree that Iraq was not a lawless society prior to our faith-based intervention. Even the war\u2019s enablers must finally admit that under our ministrations Iraq has gone from a secular to a religious country; from rogue to failed state.
\nPut yourself in the worn-out shoes of this sad, pathetic people. Would you rather live under Saddam\u2014who was a brutal dictator, but did provide Iraq with one of the foundations of civilization: order\u2014or under a force made up of ideological terrorists, feuding warlords, and an \u201cAli Baba\u201d element, all running rampant because they can, and where not even mosques provide a safe haven from these brutes and their bombs?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n