Remember those days of Sunnis being rounded up without charges or arrest warrants?
And they'd be tossed into jails and prisons and become part of Iraq's disappeared?
They'd be tortured? Girls and women would be raped?
Thank goodness US President Barack Obama installed the completely different Shi'ite (who just happens to also belong to the Dawa political party that Nouri al-Maliki heads) last August.
What a difference that has made.
If you believe the spin and ignore the acctual events.
So many people ignore reality.
Or maybe they were just too stupid to pay attention?
Take this nonsense:
We'll avoid name calling the Tweeter. But he's the one short on facts.
The Islamic State is not al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. The two were at war with one another -- remember when the press found that amusing and ran with stories of how IS was so extreme it couldn't work with al Qaeda?
Years from now, someone may write the definitive book on the creation of the Islamic State.
But people who paid attention in real time -- hint, we weren't watching Morning Joe and/or MSNBC to get our information -- know that the Islamic State came to power in Iraq for a number of reasons and that it happened post-Bully Boy Bush.
Unlike MSNBC, Rudaw's always covered the events in Iraq -- repeatedly every day. David Romano notes at the website today:
Regular readers of this newspaper will be quite familiar with the story of how the Jihadis of the Islamic State (ISIS) made a comeback in Iraq. It is a story of broken promises and complete alienation of the Sunni Arab community in the country, combined with the chaos in neighbouring Syria (which is also related to the disenfranchisement of the Sunni Arab community there). The recent fall of Ramadi and the destruction of the important Baiji refinery, despite all the military assistance to the Iraqi government, highlight the need for a political strategy to complement the military effort in Iraq. To understand the outlines of the needed political strategy, we need only remember key factors that led Iraqis to their current crisis with ISIS.
[. . .]
The Sunni Awakening Councils went unpaid after being transferred to Baghdad’s responsibility. Despite winning a plurality of the votes in the March 2010 general election, the majority Sunni party of Iyad Alawi was denied their right to try and form the next government. Instead, an increasingly authoritarian and power-centralizing Prime Minister Maliki remained in office. Promises to share power with Alawi’s party, the Kurds and others were never fulfilled.
When leading Sunni Arab politician and Vice-President Tarek al-Hashimi reacted to Mr. Maliki’s policies and supported Sunni efforts in Diyala and other governorates to form their own region (and thereby carve out some autonomous space vis-à-vis Baghdad), the Maliki-controlled judiciary put out an arrest warrant for him on “terrorism” charges. This was only two days after the withdrawal of the last American troops in December 2011. Arrest warrants for other leading Sunni politicians, such as Finance Minister Rafi al-Issawi, soon followed. Sunni Arab popular protests were met with brutal repression. In short, the trust that moderate Sunni Arab Iraqis had shown by trying to cooperate with the new regime and play by the rules was betrayed.
None of that is acknowledged by the Tweeter raging at Morning Joe.
He's very lucky that his ignorance is widespread so that only those who actually give (and gave) a damn about Iraq will realize how grossly uninformed he is.
Iraq's very unfortunate that the US media has paid so little attention to it. But then, they largely withdrew at the end of 2008 -- the only real US withdrawal from Iraq.
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