A Look Back on Iraq and the Rise of the Islamic State

The assertion by some observers that [Iraq] is riven by age-old hatreds, is ahistorical and incorrect. In previous decades, political passions centered on anti-colonialism or big landlordism and socialism. The vacuum of power created by the U.S. dissolution of the secular Baath Party encouraged Iraqi politicians to play on sectarian passions in unprecedented ways. Provoking a violent insurgency was likewise fateful.

[...]

After the 2003 invasion, Bush administration officials deliberately pushed aside Iraq’s Sunni Arabs, who had dominated Saddam Hussein’s regime, and favored a clique of Shiite operatives. [...] Shiite Bush allies like the late Ahmad Chalabi and Nouri al-Maliki (who would serve as prime minister from 2006 until 2014) formed a “Debaathification Commission” that fired close to 100,000 Sunni Arabs from government jobs, even from teaching school. This was at a time when there were no private-sector jobs.

[...]

Bush’s viceroy, Paul Bremer, a militant free-marketeer, at the same time dissolved most state-owned factories and threw the economy into a tailspin. Then Bremer dissolved the vaunted Iraqi million-man army, sending officers and troops away with no pensions and no prospects. Unemployment swept the Sunni Arab provinces the way bubonic plague swept medieval Europe.

[...]

The administration’s vindictive targeting of Fallujah after four security contractors were killed in spring of 2004 reduced a proud city to rubble by the following late autumn and alienated Sunni Arabs in other cities, who refused to vote in the January 2005 elections. The resulting parliament was Shiite-dominated, and charged with crafting the constitution, a constitution all the Sunni-majority provinces rejected.

[...]

In 2011 when youth protests broke out in Mosul and Fallujah, al-Maliki ordered them brutally repressed, ending any hope Sunnis had for political reform and inclusion.

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Some 50 major cells emerged in the Sunni-majority provinces. One of these, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, [...] attracted not only the religious-minded Sunnis[...], but also former Baath officers who knew where Saddam Hussein’s hidden arms depots were located.

After al-Zarqawi was killed in 2006 by an American airstrike, Iraqis took over the leadership of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. They created the so-called Islamic State in Iraq, which began holding swaths of territory. Many of the leaders of this group were former Baathist military officers.

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When, in 2011, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad attacked the youth revolution against him militarily and turned it into a violent insurgency, Islamic State fighters went off to Syria to fight the remaining Baath regime.

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In June 2014, [... local] Sunni Arab elites, sick of being marginalized and humiliated by Shiite Baghdad, decided they would risk an alliance with the Islamic State.

[...]

Why Bush chose sectarian favoritism over South Africa-style reconciliation remains mysterious.

  Juan Cole at WaPo

Really? I'm pretty sure it was because W, on God's command, was convinced he was going to bring the entire world to heel and be crowned Emperor of All That Is on Earth. No?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.