Who’s to Blame for DAESH? (updated)

In an op-ed at the New York Times Middle East analyst Kyle Orton presents what is to me a counter-intuitive argument: that Saddam Hussein is the primary culprit to blame for the rise of DAESH. Here’s the meat of his argument:

The campaign of Islamization intensified further after Iraq’s devastating defeat in Kuwait in 1991 and the subsequent Shiite revolt, culminating in 1993 with Mr. Hussein’s abandonment of the last vestiges of Baath secularism when he initiated the Faith Campaign. In some respects, Mr. Hussein’s government was following rather than leading public opinion, as Iraqis fell back on their faith for solace under the harsh international sanctions. But what began as a cynical attempt to shore up support, as the regime retreated to its Sunni tribal base, took on a life of its own, transforming Iraq into an Islamist state and imposing lasting changes on Iraqi society.

The government imposed a version of Shariah law: Thieves had their hands cut off, homosexuals were thrown from rooftops and prostitutes were beheaded in public squares. Numerous mosques were built, Quran study became a national focus and midlevel clerics acquired new roles as community leaders.

The Faith Campaign claimed to be ecumenical, but its clear pro-Sunni tilt led to a final collapse of relations between the state and the Shiite population and heightened sectarian tensions. In the Sunni areas, however, the campaign was effective, creating a religious movement I call Baathi-Salafism, under Mr. Hussein’s leadership. It also eased strains between the regime and independent religious movements like the “pure” Salafists, whose long opposition to the regime gave way to some of its members serving in its administration, even though Mr. Hussein was warned by his intelligence chief that if the alliance continued, the Salafists would eventually supplant the regime.

Alongside the Faith Campaign, Mr. Hussein’s regime constructed a system of cross-border smuggling networks designed to evade the sanctions. This funded a system of patronage, much of it distributed through mosques, that maintained a series of militias directly loyal to the ruler, like the Fedayeen Saddam and the Sunni tribes, as a hedge against any repeat of the 1991 Shiite revolt. These networks, which are deeply entrenched in the local populations, especially the tribes of western Iraq, are now run by the Islamic State, adding to the difficulty of uprooting the “caliphate.”

One of the less advertised aspects of the Faith Campaign was the infiltration of mosques by military intelligence officers. There was a trapdoor in this policy: With Baathism a spent force by the late 1990s, many of them slid into Salafism. The security sector had been profoundly influenced by Salafism by the time Mr. Hussein’s government fell.

It’s true that disbanding the Iraqi Army after 2003 put professional soldiers at the service of the Sunni insurgency. It’s also true that Al Qaeda in Iraq — the small, foreign-led nucleus of what became the Islamic State — used poorly run American prisons like Camp Bucca to recruit former regime elements. But the significant fact is that those who assumed leadership roles in the Islamic State’s military council had been radicalized earlier, under Mr. Hussein’s regime.

I find that somewhat self-refuting, cf. the second sentence of the quoted passage: “In some respects, Mr. Hussein’s government was following rather than leading public opinion, as Iraqis fell back on their faith for solace under the harsh international sanctions.” If you agree with his stated causality, the cause was the international sanctions.

I wish he dwelt a little more on the factors that drove Ba’athism from its secular roots through Neo-Ba’athism and ultimately (in Iraq) to Islamization. Why wasn’t there a similar transition to Islamization in Syria? Or was there?

I have tended to view Ba’athism as a Middle Eastern variant of fascism that was impelled for populist reasons to move from pan-Arabism to nationalism to Islamization. That would imply that the fault wasn’t Saddam Hussein’s but the social and political conditions prevailing in Iraq.

At any rate I think I would say that the blame for the rise of DAESH can’t just be laid at the feet of one, solitary culprit but has many fathers. Among them I would include (in no particular order):

• The U. S. intervention in the Middle East 1990 known as the “Gulf War”, the subsequent sanctions, and the eventual invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam Hussein by the U. S. in 2003.
• Saddam Hussein
• The colonial powers (mostly the United Kingdom and France)
• The post-revolution Iranian regime.
• The social and political factors prevailing in Iraq (and Syria, the other Ba’athist state)
• The strategy of the elite in the Gulf states (particularly the Saudis) to promote their own power by spreading their own version of Islam and exporting disaffected young men to promote their extremism at the point of a gun.
• The textual violence and supremacism in Islam (greater than in other Abrahamic religions) coupled with the lack of a magisterium which lends Islam to misinterpretation by the poorly educated or the unscrupulous.

In the final analysis I would dispute any attempt to hold the U. S. blameless in the rise of DAESH. It may not be all our fault but we weren’t innocent bystanders.