This isn't true. The Ba'ath party had already largely lost its Arab nationalist identity and become progressively more and more Islamist after the first Gulf War.
Saddam announced the "return to faith" campaign[0] in 1993 (which he publicly hinted at by writing Allahuakbar on the Iraqi flag in 1991) and by the time of the second 2003 invasion, Ba'ath party loyalists were already beheading suspected prostitutes in the streets.
What created the backbone of ISIS is a culmination of things - mostly around the collective, ongoing punishment of the Middle East. Arab nationalism was challenged in every direction by the West, country-based nationalism was challenged in every direction, and then the US put on a surprised pikachu face when the only thing left was religious identity.
That's not so much the point the parent comment was making, I believe. Mostly that by making sure the previous military and political leaders would not be allowed to play any role in the future and not get pensions, they'd obviously have zero incentive to work with the new regime/administration/whatever.
On the other hand, they had plenty of incentive to work against it, which they then did. They may have gone full Arab nationalist if that had been an option, but to be funded in the middle east in a war against the US and Shiite-aligned governments, you'll look to the Saudis, and that pretty much only leaves Wahabi fundamentalism as your rally-cry.
Picture that: your skill is to organize soldiers and military operations but the only local and legal employer refuses you and denies you any pension. Did they really think they would go beg in the streets rather than join the militias in dire need or organizational advices?
Interestingly, it was GWB that also put a lot of effort into pandemic preparedness. See: https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/homeland/pandemi...
History is kind of a weird place.
Sure he may have done some things that are good, but he made many horrible decisions.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President%27s_Emergency_Plan_f...
How did Bush get a fifth year from a four year presidency?
Why is this complicated and where did the number 5 even come from?
I think this is splitting hairs over who gets credit. Remember that Congress needed to raise the money and the taxpayers needed to pay it.
From a practical standpoint, usually some credit is given for leadship to the one who gets a program off the ground. It seems fair in this case that GWB gets credit for that. You can also look at later people over a longer span of time and give them credit/blame for maintaining and administering it, as well (or letting it stagnate, like his pandemic plan, unfortunately).
The main point here is that the GWB presidency was not black and white. I think he was a good person and made many good decisions and one really bad one. Quite possibly, with a different VP, he would be a lauded and dignified president, and a lot of things would be different.
Or, if his pandemic plan had been maintained, and bore fruit today (that is showed benefits in fighting coronavirus), it may have redeemed his presidency entirely.
But consider at the time, the United States had just suffered an unprecedented terrorist attack, the conventional wisdom (and much intelligence) was that Iraq held chemical weapons and finally the United States was engaging the Iraqi military on a regular basis as the sole enforcer of the UN sanctioned no fly zone. I won’t argue that the Iraq War wasn’t a mistake. It was, but it was made in good faith and largely, I think, out of fear.
He was a warmonger. His aides and his vice president stood to make tons of money out of that war.
The GWB admin still had the level of competence to organize something like the last Iraq war so it made sense it could have pandemic preparedness which is orders of magnitudes easier.
I don't think the US public really realize how incompetent and dumb the current administration looks from abroad.
But O'Sullivan came to Iraq via the State Department, and Rumsfeld didn't want her there, which seems to indicate that perhaps she wasn't as insane as the Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Cheany neo-con people.
In anycase, I think this article makes a good basic point: lots of countries are going to be in deep trouble with this oil price.
Yeah, I really needed a State Department analyst to tell me that.
The point of analysis pieces often isn't to share new information, but instead is to share that fact that information is now very important.
Also I for one didn't realise that most of Saudi support in Congress had eroded enough in favor of the US industry to the point where is was now (to quote) "a sharp increase in hostility from members of the U.S. Congress who in the past appeared to appreciate the multifaceted relationship between Riyadh and Washington"
> She was an assistant to Paul Bremer in the Coalition Provisional Authority. She was Senior Director for Iraq at the United States National Security Council.
Around that time, Bremer decided to bar former ba'ath officer from either serving the new military or getting pension. That decision almost single-handedly created the backbone of the terrorist networks that would become ISIS.
People from that admin should be shunned from any published analysis but failing that, I am happy that forums like this allows us to augment their biographies.
On the other hand, I have yet to see a Bloomberg article not about finance that was not misinformed. Those about tech especially are pretty bad, and every time I dug a bit around their geopolitical analysis, I was pretty underwhelmed.