DID GEORGE W. BUSH CREATE ISIS?
http://www.newyorker.com/ne...

Reading this.... its sad how you twist the truth just to put it off on Obama. Pathetic...

Did not Putin, in just one week CLEARLY show that no serious effort has been put forth to REALLY hit ISIS hard??? I mean come on!! in one week he flattens HUNDREDS of oil tankers, pounds the crap out of their lovely new caliphate capital, to the point where ISIS is begging the international community to make him stop!! Putin just made the Obama admn,once again look like a complete joke! like him or not, he just proved it!!

In reality, Putin didn't drop so much as a single bomb on ISIS.

How anyone could argue that the rise of ISIL occurred due to anything other then the chaos created by the Iraq invasion is absolutely delusional.

The delusional right will do anything, use any propaganda to try and deceive to "win." Which as we have seen is just creating more disaster and divide. By any measurement, this President is successful, extremely successful.

I say that hating both parties.

Have you been watching or reading anything that has been going on over there??? Hillary and Kerry both were the top advisers, to Obama. they have been "claiming" we have been effectively striking ISIS hard.even Hillary now is a hawk !! But once again Putin just made them look like complete morons. In ONE WEEK he some how manages to find ISIS' main source of income.....all this time HUNDREDS of oil tankers have been shipping oil,and sitting in teh wide open desert. Putin sends in long range bombers and destroys them all!!! He then hits the caliphate capital so hard that they(isis) are running for cover and begging the un to get him to stop. other than taking out a few clowns, it IS OBVIOUS the Obama admn has not tried at all, or is just flat out clueless on how to stop isis. why do you think the French are talking to Putin right now???

hahahahaha idiot!

Fighting each other is better than planning other attacks

Smokers blaming the doctor for lung cancer.

I think we need to chech the back if their heads to see if the 666 mark is there.

Did Obama Create ISIS?

http://youtu.be/tRdOulx5cCk

The scary part is NO STRATEGY TO ERADICATE RADICAL ISLAM.

ISIL, Al Qaeda, Hamas, Iran, etc. = all symptoms of the same evil disease which is Radical Islam. Terrorism also is but a symptom.

No disease is cured by treating symptoms. Kill and annihilate the evil ideology of Radical Islam and the rest will die naturally.

People here need a history lesson, so here it is:
IS/ISIL/ISIS is the successor to an organization known as ISI in Iraq, which is in turn the successor of the organization known as Al Qaeda in Iraq - AQI.

This group traces to 2004 under the leadership of Al Zarqawi, a militant Islamist from Jordan. Zarqawi had gone to Afghanistan too late in 1989 to fight the Soviets, became friends with bin Laden and started a paramilitary Islamist group there to take over Jordan. Arrested and imprisoned several years in Jordan, he was released and went to Afghanistan, started a paramilitary training camp in 1999 with money from bin Laden and mostly fighters from Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon, but it had been disbanded or scattered before the US-led invasion. After another arrest and release in Jordan, Zarqawi returned to Afghanistan to fight against the invasion. Injured, he went for treatment to Iran.

Zarqawi went to Iraq in late 2001 or 2002. There, he plotted the assassination of a US diplomat in Jordan and bombings and trained forces in planning poison attacks. In 2004, he founded AQI - basically, his group there sought to be AQ in Iraq and this was okayed by bin Laden, but it remained an independent branch.

Though Zarqawi was killed in 2006, AQI continued. From 2003-2011, it joined with other Sunni insurgents. They formed a council later called Islamic State of Iraq - ISI - and drew support in various Sunni areas, because Sunnis resented the new power of Kurds and Shiites supported by the US. However, a backlash against their violence started to weaken their influence somewhat even before Zarqawi died.

Leadership of AQI passed to Al Baghdadi, a Sunni Iraqi with a doctorate in Islamic studies from Iraq's main university, a pre-invasion cleric who had been a civilian internee of the US forces in 2004. After his release, he helped found a militant group that joined the council in 2006. He rose in the ISI and became top leader by 2010.

ISI expanded into Syria and announced its new name of ISIL in 2013. Al Bagdadhi claimed that the Al Nusra Front in the Syrian civil war, also an Al Qaeda branch, was an extension of ISI in Syria and would now merge into ISIL, but its leader objected and Al Zawahiri, now leader of Al Qaeda, also objected and said ISI should stick to Iraq. Al Baghdadi ignored this and managed to take control of about 80% of Al Nusra's foreign fighters. By February of 2014, AQ under Al Zawahiri cut all ties to ISI/ISIL, though the ties had never been strong because AQ had long disapproved of ISI extremism (!).

Meanwhile, it has been claimed that foreign Al Nusra fighters were not the only rebels in Syria that had joined ISIL. It has been claimed that, in 2012, US forces vetted a small group of non-AQ rebels against Assad, secretly trained in Jordan, and sent them back to Syria armed to fight, but that they subsequently joined ISIL (!). In effect, what Obama had claimed from the beginning about Syria was apparently true - it's just too difficult to be sure that, even with thorough vetting, giving arms to rebels in Syria is really arming the "good guys."

Thus, the groups that morphed into ISIL/ISIS/IS preexisted Obama's presidency, AQI was founded only after the US invasion of Iraq and partly in response to that invasion and absorbed disaffected Sunni insurgents. Moreover, AQI had had an aim to take over Jordan in the past of Al Zarqawi, and Al Baghdadi obviously saw that the vision of a greater Islamic state that could be brought about opportunistically by exploiting the Syrian civil war.

So actual problem traces back perhaps as far as the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan under Reagan or Zarkawi's AQ-funded terrorist training camp in the year 2000, the last year of Clinton's term - at the end of which Clinton tried to offer Bush warnings and advice that were rebuffed. It became serious only in response to Bush's Iraq invasion, after which it was an endemic problem exacerbated by the fact that it was impossible for us to fix Syria.

It's worth noting that McCain was beating the drums for war with Iran in 2008, and AQI had wanted to incite such a war for several years to get the US off its back, and again that McCain was beating the drums for support for Syrian rebel groups early on, and the claimed attempt to support them apparently came to help the group into which AQI in the end.

If the GOP just stopped blaming our decent president and made it possible to collaborate on stopping the actual enemy of the US, humanity, and stability in the Middle East, our government might be able to accomplish that aim.

Much of the information above can be found by reading wikis on ISIL, the groups that morphed into it, and Al Zarkawi and Al Baghdadi, so please give credit to them - I don't mean to be a plagiarist.

All very valid points but the "History Lesson" extends back 1400 years beginning with the first Radical Islamists which rampaged thru the then Christian Middle East. This is a resurgence of a 1400 year old ideology, dormant for about 100 years since 1920s and began its resurgence with the Muslim Brotherhood in 1920s.

Also the "Arab Spring" has turned into ideal breeding ground for widespread conditions for a popular "Islamist Renaissance" - situation is not optimistic.

you forget Obama love to the Muslim brotherhood that start it all.

The truth is we had no fight with Libya and we had no dog in the fight in Syria, if obama had stayed out of this crap the whole world would be better off and thousands would not be dead. But he was not by him self in this, that insane McCain and gramnesty were up to their necks in this BS. How many times has McCain visited the so called rebels in Syria.

All of it is a manifestation of Obama's support for the Arab Spring.
Arrest the treasonous vermin in DC

obama by-passed congress and armed ISIS is SYRIA to fight against ASSAD,, Not knowing who they where, but wanted ASSAD removed because he protected CHRISTIANS...is there any dought as to WHY they are not blowing them to smithereens ????

he knew who they are

Another thing that the article should have mentioned is that Obama's support of the Maliki/Shiite-supremacist regime led directly to Sunni officers in the Iraqi Army abandoning their posts and equipment to ISIS in Iraq.

No other factor allowed ISIS to grab huge chunks of territory in such a small amount of time.

No one "caused" ISIS. The objective of establishing a caliphate has been on the agenda for a long time. U.S. intellectuals have the attention span of cocktail ice. What a farce.

wrong, the united states engineered all arms shipments to the rebels through turkey.

That's part of it...but not all of it. Libya, Syria, Al Qaeda, support for MB. They've been at this for 3+ years funding and supporting radicals across N. Africa and the Middle east.

"The major difficulty in our working with Egypt is that Egypt’s
leadership is rather hostile to the U.S., in the form the U.S. has taken
under the present administration. It feels viscerally that the
administration foisted the Muslim Brotherhood on Egypt, and it expresses
this fact in the usual, dangerously oversimplified nationalistic terms."
Well, damn!

This is actually a good article. But I think ISIS is contained for now...they're too freaky for the Mideast, and their loss of mojo is mainly due to the fact that they overplayed their hand, which always results in forces coalescing against the aggressor. Tribes in the Mideast know how to contain a threat. But does anyone have a plan for the Saudis? And the Iranians are still building those nukes. What then? That's where we should be focused. Once the nukes arrive, all bets are off.

they are not contain with Obama as president

Every time I read discussions on this site it reminds of conjecture about which direction the water flows in a toilet bowl in the Southern hemisphere. And the answer is always, "Blame all the shit on Obama." But you never admit who put the shit in the bowl in the first place. Which was Bush. And there you have it. That's how conservative comes to conclusions. Focus on the shit that goes round and round and avoid the shit that's been staring you in the face for 10 or 15 years.

Can't you see the irony in your post?

The Left: The Bush Derangement Syndrome.

How about the LAST 6 years.
Liberals think Bush is still president!
Amazing!

Well said Chris! All these conservative idiots have left their brains behind somewhere. It was Bush and Cheney stupid that has caused this instability in Iraq and ISIS. It was Obama and not Bush who killed Bin Laden. So be a patriot and support your President in going after ISIS.

The Middle East was the most peaceful in decades after Saddam fell up to November 2008, when Obama was elected.
And then everything in the World fell apart.

Well Chris, you've has almost 6 years of "expert democrat leadership" now. How's that workin' for ya?

Now that is plumb dumb, Clintoon was offered Ben on a platter, instead he killed the night watchman in an aspirin factory.

When was al Qaeda founded? When did it kill its first Americans? When was the World Trade Center first bombed? Which president first considered pre-emptively assasinating OBL? When did the Clintons and Kerry advocate regime change in Iraq premised on the threat of Saddam's use or export of WMDs? When did fundamentalist Muslims first take Americans hostage en masse? (Facts are stubborn things; the illogic you purport to ascribe to "conservative" is precisely your own.)

You may recall (as fact) that Clinton wanted to kill OBL and could not get good enough intelligence and/or permission to do it. And when Bush was offered all kinds of collaboration in transition from the Clinton administration, he flatly turned it down. All because he thought he was smarter than anyone else, and it turned out they had their "own agenda," the Bush doctrine that was supposed to work without a hitch. But then came the ugly actions. As in: Bush/Cheney ignored clear (and well-documented) warnings about OBL and the 9/11 attacks. They then used their own incompetence as an excuse to ramp up and invade Iraq under false premises when international inspectors provided clear evidence there were no WMDs. And it was Bush who then proceeded, despite promises to hunt down OBL, to publicly "forget" about bin Laden by his own admission, allowing expansion of Al Qaeda. The Bushies it turned out had absolutely no plan for the occupation of Iraq, indeed, they thought no occupation would be necessary. This combination of ugly aggression and naivete by the Bush administration is still costing us to this day, has led to instability in the region especially as it relates to the fractional divisions in Iraq. But you cannot bring yourself to admit a single thing that ever happened in the recent past. Instead the circularity of your blaming arguments go round and round, avoiding the shit that caused all this in the first place.

Please tell everyone whose permission clitoon needed to kill OBL, he did not need approval to kill the aspirin factory guards.

Obama declared that he would stand with Islam.

And then he went on his apology tours.

Obama is responsible for everyone killed in the Middle East since 2009 in revolutions and mass murder by Islamists.

No he did not!

“I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”

Obama said he would stand with the Muslims.

He stood with them, contrary to the interests of the United States.
(The End.)

“I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”

Page 261, “The Audacity of Hope.”

Or also look for: “The Duplicity of Dopes”.
(The Democrats are still working on that book - almost finished!)

He thought the brotherhood taking over Egypt was a great thing.

In a word......Apathy.

The ISIS threat couldn't be addressed until Iraq's political dysfunction was addressed first. Unlike a lot of people, Obama recognized that and stuck to a toughminded approach that focused on getting rid of Maliki instead of getting distracted by endless calls for a stronger intervention before Maliki was gone. It wasn't easy, but it was the smart thing to do. Kevin Drum's take.

There is no excuse for letting the snake ISIS grow up.

Please. The Maliki excuse was one just invented this summer, not in 2009

This is a ridiculous article to say the least. Your fixation with Obama bashing is disgusting. Root cause of all of this was the Iraq invasion.

No way we needed to get involved in Syria in a multi front war - especially unilaterally without our allies. The comment that the moderate rebels could have won out in Syria is pure speculation.

Having our soldiers in the middle east for nation building is a fools game. All that does is attract nut cases to go there and attack us.

Karl B, your socialist comment is disgusting. Nobody is rooting for ISIS as you mention.

the Muslim brotherhood support from Obama is not because of any Iraq invasion.

Your comment is ridiculous

Very, very wrong, IMO.
This is the most important piece I have seen setting out the big picture...
And it is the forst piece that makes a point of discussing moral and political "inversion"...an idea that needs to be fruitfully developed.

And your comparison is also apples to kumquats. Obama didn't need to do much more to topple Mubarak because it went easily. As soon he supported his ouster the world supported it and thus the momentum was born. Population and education demographic is also far different in Egypt than Syria which makes a difference in tactics, approach and even results. There are many factors involved to topple a country and willingness by the people is only one and a minor one at that as evidenced by the American Revolution.

Assad did a better job of fighting back plus gained the support of not just Iran but also back door support of Russia and China. Huge difference there.

The worst part of it though is Obama as well as McCain and Graham never ever bothered to check who it was they were supporting in Syria. That is some of the most pi** poor judgment I have seen in a good many years. The so called 'moderates' they touted threw in their support to ISIS. They folded faster than a cheap suit in a Georgia summer.

His actions aids and abets the enemy and nobody apparently can wonder if this is deliberate! He intensify s border crossings and the enemy very possibly is crossing into America and no one is asking if he is aiding and abetting America's enemy!

There should be a Congressional Investigation and this isn't happening either.