Massacre In Iraq: Congratulations GOP! You Built That!

The Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIS), the Al Qaeda splinter group that took Iraq by storm last week with the capture of two major cities, has done something so reprehensible that even George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, or any other framer of the Iraq War, would call it reprehensible.

A series of images posted to a militant web site appear to show ISIS “freedom fighters” (or whatever they are calling themselves these days) loading captives onto a flatbed truck. The group’s victims are then forced to lie down in a shallow ditch, arms tied behind their backs. 

With rising GOP support for yet another invasion of Iraq in light of ISIS’ capture of Mosul and Tikrit, we’re reminded that, without United States intervention in Iraq ISIS would not have been able to become the richest terrorist organization in the world.

Without the Bush regime’s lies and manipulations aimed at an Iraq invasion, Saddam Hussein would have remained a stabilizing force in Iraq. Killing Saddam Hussein may have been gratifying on some level, but removing him from power opened Pandora’s Box in the region, allowing an explosion of sectarian violence.

Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, no matter how much right-wingers still wish to claim, were not allies. In 2002, Daniel Benjamin wrote in the NY Times:

Iraq and Al Qaeda are not obvious allies. In fact, they are natural enemies. A central tenet of Al Qaeda’s jihadist ideology is that secular Muslim rulers and their regimes have oppressed the believers and plunged Islam into a historic crisis. Hence, a paramount goal of Islamist revolutionaries for almost half a century has been the destruction of the regimes of such leaders as Presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar el-Sadat and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, President Hafez al-Assad of Syria, the military government in Algeria and even the Saudi royal family.

To contemporary jihadists, Saddam Hussein is another in a line of dangerous secularists, an enemy of the faith who refuses to rule by Shariah and has habitually murdered Sunni and Shiite religious leaders in Iraq who might oppose his regime. During the Persian Gulf war, Omar Abdel Rahman, the radical sheik now imprisoned in the United States, summed up the Islamist view when he was asked what the punishment should be for those who supported the United States in the conflict. He answered, ”Both [those] who are against and the ones who are with Iraq should be killed.’

In the years since, opposition to secular regimes has remained central to Islamist thinking. What has changed is the radicals’ strategy for toppling these governments. After decades in which jihadists were defeated by security services in their home countries, Osama bin Laden and his followers decided that they would attack the ”far enemy,” the United States, which they believe is the primary source of strength for the secularist regimes in the Arab world. If the United States withdrew its support, the ”near enemy” that holds power in Muslim capitals would be unable to defend itself. 

Like other Middle Eastern rulers, Saddam Hussein has long recognized that Al Qaeda and like-minded Islamists represent a threat to his regime. Consequently, he has shown no interest in working with them against their common enemy, the United States. This was the understanding of American intelligence in the 1990′s. In 1998, the National Security Council assigned staff to determine whether that conclusion was justified. After reviewing all the available intelligence that could have pointed to a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq, the group found no evidence of a noteworthy relationship.'

Look, Republicans, at what your partisan politics, greed, self-interest, and ignorance have wrought.

We do want to warn you that these images may be unsettling. If you have a weak stomach, PLEASE do not scroll any further. In the interest of not diluting the horrifying situation, we have chosen not to censor the photographs.