Rebutting the Claim That America Created ISIS and Every Other Enemy

According to a popular theory, America is so powerful that it single-handedly creates every enemy it has, and so feeble that it can never defeat any of them. Both halves cannot be true. The theory survives anyway, because it flatters everyone who holds it: the critic gets to feel important, and the enemy gets to be innocent.

I want to take the claim seriously, because it is held by serious people on the left and on a restrainer wing of the right. It runs: the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, destroyed the state, and thereby created al-Qaeda in Iraq and its successor, ISIS. Before that it armed the Afghan mujahideen and so created the jihadists. Before that it overthrew an Iranian government in 1953 and so created the Islamic Republic. Every enemy, in short, is blowback. If you want to end terrorism, stop causing it.

Here is my thesis. The claim contains true observations about American mistakes, and I will grant every one of them. But as an explanation of enemies it fails on the evidence, and it fails morally, because it treats the people who commit atrocities as weather, as natural events with no ideas, no decisions and no responsibility. A cause is something that makes an outcome possible or likelier. A creator is an agent who brings a thing into being. America may be a cause of some outcomes. It is not the creator of an ideology that predates it by centuries, nor of the men who chose to embrace it.

The claim at its strongest

Let me state it the way its best advocates would. The Iraq War began in March 2003 on intelligence about weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be wrong. The occupation authority disbanded the Iraqi army in May 2003 and purged members of the Baath Party from government jobs, throwing hundreds of thousands of armed, trained and aggrieved men into the street. The invasion destroyed the Sunni-dominated order without building a replacement. The Sunni insurgency grew. The detention camps, including Camp Bucca, concentrated militants together. In 2011 America withdrew all its forces, a sectarian Iraqi government alienated the Sunnis, and the groups returned. By 2014 ISIS held Mosul. On this account the line from the invasion to the caliphate is straight, and anyone who denies it is protecting the architects of the war.

That is a serious argument. There is a good deal in it. Now let me answer it.

The answer in six numbered points

1. The man who built the organization was already linked to Iraq before the invasion, and the ideology was older than the war. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian jihadist, ran a training camp in Afghanistan in the late 1990s and was linked, before the invasion, to militant networks in northern Iraq. He founded the group that became al-Qaeda in Iraq. In August 2003 the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad was bombed, with Zarqawi the prime suspect, and the United Nations headquarters was bombed that same month, killing the UN's special representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello; no group claimed either attack. Whoever carried them out, they struck Jordan and the world body that had opposed the invasion, not an occupying army. Zarqawi's movement, meanwhile, had its own plan: to start a sectarian war, destroy the new Iraq, and build a state on Sunni extremist principles. In 2004 Zarqawi swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden. The people who joined him were making a choice, and their own propaganda said so.

1. Al-Qaeda in Iraq nearly died, and America killed it, until politics undid the victory. By 2006 the group had provoked a sectarian civil war. Its bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra in February of that year, a Shia holy site, set off a wave of killing. In the same period Sunni tribes in Anbar Province, revolted by the group's brutality, turned against it and joined with American forces in what became the Anbar Awakening. Zarqawi was killed in an American airstrike in June 2006. The troop surge of 2007 followed, and by 2008 and 2009 the organization was a shadow of itself. This is the point blowback theorists skip: the American military, in this period, was destroying the creature that the theory says it created. The group was brought low by American arms and Iraqi tribal anger. It did not require an American invention to revive.

1. The collapse came after the American exit and inside the Syrian war. American combat forces left Iraq in December 2011. The negotiations to keep a residual force, which would have required legal protections for American troops, failed, and the question of who bears blame for that is a matter of real argument that I will not pretend is settled. What is not in dispute is the chronology. The Syrian civil war began in 2011 as an uprising against the Assad government and was met with brutal repression. The conflict created a vast ungoverned space on the other side of a border that the surviving remnant of al-Qaeda in Iraq, under its new leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was ready to cross. In 2013 the group announced it was operating in Syria under the name of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. Al-Qaeda's own leadership, which is not known for squeamishness, disowned the group in early 2014 because it found its violence too extreme and its disobedience intolerable. A creature of American policy does not get kicked out of al-Qaeda for insubordination.

1. ISIS has its own theology, and it says so. In June 2014 its forces took Mosul, and on June 29 the group declared a caliphate, with Baghdadi as caliph. It published its own magazines and manuals and a long jihadist literature of its own, including a text called The Management of Savagery that circulated in jihadist circles years earlier. The group's stated project is a revived caliphate, a program derived from a reading of Islamic history, not from a reading of American foreign policy. Its victims were not primarily Americans. They were Shia Muslims, Kurds, Christians and the Yazidi people, whose communities in northern Iraq were targeted in August 2014 in what the United States government later formally called genocide. A movement whose declared enemies include Shia Iran, the Assad government, Russia, Hezbollah, the Kurds, the Gulf monarchies and the West is not well explained as an American project. It is hard to find the American hand in the enslavement of the Yazidis. Look, instead, at the choices of the men doing it.

1. The "every other enemy" part does not hold on chronology. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928. The Iranian revolution of 1979 was a clerical movement led by Ayatollah Khomeini, and within months of taking power its followers seized the American embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979. Hezbollah emerged in Lebanon in the early 1980s with Iranian backing and is widely held responsible for the Beirut bombings of 1983, the story told in Beirut 1983 Was the First Lesson in How Iran Fights Through Proxies. Bin Laden issued a declaration of war in 1996 and another in 1998, years before any American soldier entered Iraq; see Bin Laden Declared War on America Twice Before Anyone Listened. In each case the enemy had an ideology, an organization and a plan that did not wait for permission from Washington. You can argue about what America should have done in response. You cannot argue that it invented the thing responded to.

1. The theory erases moral agency, which is a mistake in philosophy and in policy. The Hebrew prophet Ezekiel taught that the person who sins is the one who answers for it, and that responsibility does not pass to another. That is the center of a moral tradition in which individuals choose and are accountable. If a man straps on a belt of explosives, the question "who made him do it" is the wrong one. The right one is "who recruited him, what did he believe, and how do we stop the next one?" A theory that explains every atrocity by pointing at the West treats non-Western people as objects that things happen to, never as subjects who act. Strangely, this is a form of condescension.

The fair concession: what the Iraq War critics got right

I promised to grant what is true, and I mean it. A good argument is one that can afford its concessions.

The intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was wrong. That is not a matter for debate, and the people who relied on it, including conservatives, ought to say so without squirming. The decisions of May 2003, the dissolution of the Iraqi army and the sweeping removal of Baath Party members from public life, widened the insurgency. Many of the early military and intelligence figures in ISIS were former officers of Saddam's regime, which is what you would expect when you hand trained men a grievance and a reason to organize. The occupation was poorly planned, and the years of insufficient troop levels before the surge cost lives. The detention system gave hardened extremists an environment in which to network, and the future leader Baghdadi was himself reported to have been held by American forces in 2004, though accounts of the dates differ.

And the Libyan intervention of 2011 left a vacuum that ISIS later tried to fill on the Mediterranean coast. The general lesson is a real one: toppling a government without a plan for what follows is a recipe for the worst actors in the room.

None of this adds up to creation. Errors of the occupier can widen the opening that enemies exploit. They do not write the enemy's ideology, supply his ambitions or excuse his choices. A man who leaves the front door unlocked is careless. The burglar is still the burglar. If a bank is robbed, we may investigate the security, but we do not charge the bank with creating the robber.

The strongest remaining objection, answered

A skeptic can say: "Fine, but without the invasion there would have been no al-Qaeda in Iraq and no ISIS. That is a causal fact. You are splitting hairs between creating and causing."

I will answer it in three parts. First, the counterfactual is unknowable and cuts both ways. Syria's civil war began in 2011 for reasons that had nothing to do with the Iraq invasion, and a collapsing Syria next to a restive Sunni population in Iraq was a standing opportunity for any jihadist organization, whatever its origins. Second, the same objection applies to every disaster of the twentieth century: without the harsh terms of 1919, there would have been no Nazi movement as it was, and no one concludes that the victors of the First World War created Hitler. They are responsible for their mistakes. He is responsible for his crimes. Third, even if you grant the causal chain in full, the policy lesson is not the one the restrainer draws. The lesson is not "never act." The lesson is "do not leave a vacuum." The surge worked, and the later withdrawal and the abandonment of Syria's non-jihadist opposition left a space. The remedy for botched victories is finished ones, which is the question debated in Why Did We Lose in Afghanistan? Twelve Questions the Record Can Answer.

There is also a practical danger in the blowback theory. If you believe your own side creates every enemy, then you will believe that every enemy can be appeased by a change in your own conduct. History does not support it. The attacks of September 11, 2001, came before the Iraq war, before the Afghan campaign, and, as The 9/11 Commission Found a Failure of Imagination, Read Its Real Lessons documents, after a long series of warnings that were not heeded. The enemies who attacked on that day had declared their war in public. They did not need an invitation.

What the Founders would have said

The Constitution grants Congress the power "To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations." The Founders knew what it was to face enemies who denied the legitimacy of lawful order, because they had faced the Barbary corsairs. Their policy was neither to blame themselves nor to appease. It was to fight where necessary, to be clear who the enemy was, and to answer to the people for the means.

The Declaration of Independence begins from the proposition that governments are instituted "to secure these rights." That purpose requires the government to see clearly. A government that mistakes its enemies for its own creations cannot defend its citizens against them, because it will always be looking in the mirror. Federalist No. 3, by John Jay, argued that safety from foreign danger is among the first objects of a people's attention. It is the first duty of an American government to name its enemies accurately and to act on the name. Accuracy about enemies is also the best protection against the overreach that critics fear, because a country that knows who threatens it has no need to look for threats everywhere, a point developed in The Patriot Act After Two Decades, Two Conservative Verdicts Compared and Sixty Words Passed in 2001 Still Carry America's Wars, and That Is a Problem.

The moral center is simple. Accountability belongs to the person who acts. America can and should debate its mistakes, loudly and with evidence. But a country that cannot say "they chose this" is a country that cannot say "they are wrong," and a country that cannot say that cannot lead the free world against an enemy who has no such inhibitions.

The case in brief

1. The claim that America created ISIS and every other enemy confuses cause with creation, and treats enemies as weather.
2. Zarqawi's network predated the invasion's aftermath, nearly collapsed under the surge and the Anbar Awakening, and revived in the Syrian war, after the 2011 American exit, under leaders with their own ideology.
3. Al-Qaeda disowned ISIS, and ISIS's victims, Shia, Kurds, Christians and Yazidis, show a program of its own, not an American one.
4. Iran's revolution, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood and bin Laden's declarations all have their own dates and plans, mostly earlier than the Iraq war.
5. The Iraq War critics are right about the faulty intelligence, the disbanded army and the planning failures, and the lesson is to finish what we start and never leave a vacuum.

What you can do: read the text of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force on Congress.gov, then ask your representative whether Congress should update it or let it stand.