Juan Cole: Washington Asks, 'Who Lost Ramadi?' But Washington Never Had Ramadi

[eridani]

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/05/21/washington-asks-who-lost-ramadi-washington-never-had-ramadi

The inside-the-Beltway debate set off by the fall of the Iraqi city of Ramadi to Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) on Sunday is, as usual, Dadaistic in its disconnection from reality. Republican talking points blame Barack Obama for withdrawing US troops from Iraq in 2011, as though Daesh suddenly began in 2012. The GOP figures typically don’t mention that it was George W. Bush who set the end of 2011 as the date for a total US withdrawal from Iraq, because that was all he could get from the Iraqi parliament.

But the whole debate about “who lost Ramadi?” assumes facts not in evidence, i.e. that Ramadi has ever been “pacified” or somehow a United States protectorate, sort of like Guam or Puerto Rico.

The United States has been for the Sunni Arabs of Iraq what the Mongols were to Baghdad in 1258, an alien invading force that came in and turned things upside down.

Bush invaded Iraq in spring of 2003.

Here is what I wrote at my blog in August, 2003, based on what I was seeing in the Iraqi press or hearing on shortwave radio in Arabic:

*Huge explosions at the US base at Ramadi west of Baghdad, but no word on casualties as I write. Guerrillas killed one soldier, wounded two others outside the police station at Baquba, northeast of Baghdad.

In November of 2004, Bush launched a massive attack on Falluja, just to Ramadi’s east. It was seen throughout the Sunni regions as a sign that Sunnis were going to be subordinated by the Americans to Shiites and Kurds.

In early 2005, I wondered if the Sunni insurgency could eventually turn into a “Third Baath coup.” By that I meant that the remnants of the Baath Party (socialist, nationalist) allied with Salafi Muslim hardliners were systematically killing members of the new political class being stood up by the Bush administration, and were angling to take back over the country. We now know that former Baath officers set up the so-called “Islamic State” as a means of gaining recruits for their ongoing insurgency, at a time when the Baath Party no longer had any cachet but political Islam seemed a growing trend. The ex-Baath/ Salafi cells of resistance were all along strong in Ramadi.