Did The U.S. Help In Making The Islamic State A Threat?

Image Credit: REUTERS/Stringer

How The US Made ISIS A Threat -- Zachary Keck, The Diplomat

The U.S. not only helped create ISIS, but also turned it into a threat to the United States.

Over at The Debate, Ben Reynolds demolishes American pundits who, fearing the U.S. and Iran will cooperate on a shared interest, have tried to blame Iran and its allies for the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).

I have no doubt that Bashar al-Assad welcomed ISIS’s rise in the insurgency. An Alawite family does get to rule over Syria for decades by failing to recognize opportunities that land on its doorstep.

And while I disagree with aspects of Reynold’s piece, his argument that the U.S. did far more to facilitate ISIS’s rise than Iran is virtually undeniable. To briefly recap: In 2001 the U.S. was attacked by al-Qaeda, a Sunni Jihadist group, which claimed that America’s support for corrupt and insufficiently Islamic governments in the Middle East was preventing it from recreating the Islamic Caliphate. The U.S. responded by launching a global war on terrorism. After forcing the Taliban and al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan, the U.S. turned its sights on Iraq, a country without a terrorist problem that was led by Saddam Hussein, a secular Sunni Baathist leader that al-Qaeda was bent on overthrowing.

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My Comment: Radial Islam has been part of the fabric of the Middle East long before the U.S. was even a country. But in the past few years .... the U.S. in combination with it's allies, Iraqi political dysfunction, Syria, and Iranian influence ....  all of these groups bear some responsibility for the spread of this radical ideology.