Obama is right, Bush's invasion of Iraq helped create ISIS

Quick question: From which country does the Islamic State (IS) get maximum popular support? The answer: Saudi Arabia.

According to a Brookings Institute survey, Saudi Arabia tops the league of nations from which people send messages of support on Twitter to IS. The results:

Source: Brookings Institute

Saudi Arabia has played a decisive role in creating, funding and nurturing IS for narrow sectarian ends. Sunni Saudi Arabia regards Shia Iran, on the cusp of acquiring nuclear capability despite United States-led sanctions and ongoing talks, as its principal enemy in the Middle-East.

Saudi Arabia's global terror tentacles bite deep and wide: it has an allegedly secret deal with Pakistan over Islamabad's nuclear arsenal. It funded al-Qaeda for years and fathered the even more brutal IS. The Frankenstein is now out of Saudi Arabia's control, forcing the desert kingdom to build a 400-km wall on its northern border with Iraq to keep IS out.  

US President Barack Obama spoke with the honesty of a man who will never fight another election in his life once his second term is over in 22 months. Here's what he said: "Islamic State (IS) is a direct outgrowth … that grew out of our invasion (ordered by former President George Bush) which is an example of unintended consequences."

The blame actually goes back further: George Bush's father, George H. Bush, US president from 1988 to 1992, made a serious strategic error by not going after Saddam Hussein following the US-led coalition victory to liberate Kuwait in 1991. Instead, Bush Sr. withdrew coalition forces. Kuwait was free but so was Saddam, a Sunni dictator ruling Shia-majority Iraq. This led to over a decade of US economic and military sanctions that crippled Iraq, divided Sunni and Shia and laid the groundwork for the rise of multiple sectarian militias and terror groups.

Worse was to follow. Bush's son, President George W Bush, reacted to the September 11, 2001 terror attack on the US with "shock and awe" bombing of Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden was in hiding. But instead of chasing down Osama, on the run in the mountains at Tora Bora, Bush Jr, like his father, left the job half-done.

Making a mistake that historians will forever eviscerate him, Bush allowed the Taliban to regroup in Af-Pak. Inexplicably, he turned his attention to Iraq. In 2003, Bush launched what most today consider was an illegal war - without proper United Nations authorisation - to eliminate weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Saddam's Iraq.

In trying to find what didn't exist, the US and Britain ended up dismembering the Iraqi army, destroying the ruling Ba'ath party, disbanding its secular bureaucracy, driving a wedge between Sunni and Shia, and ensuring that Iraq's economy, already crippled by sanctions, was ground into the dust.

It was during the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq between 2003 and 2011 that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, self-declared Caliph of the self-declared Islamic State, was imprisoned and radicalised. On his release in 2004 and spurred by the exit of the US from Iraq in 2011, a vengeful al-Baghdadi began to lay the foundation for what would in 2014 be declared the Islamic State Caliphate.

The two Bushes, father and son, made three mistakes. One, not liberating Iraq in 1991, then still a relatively modern secular country with plentiful oil revenue where women walked around Baghdad not in burqas but skirts. Two, not pursuing Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora caves in 2001, allowing the Taliban to grow into a hydra-headed terror group. Three, illegally re-invading Iraq in 2003 on a trumped-up WMD charge, destroying the country's administrative and military edifice. IS filled the power vacuum.  

In all these errors Saudi Arabia has been a sinister observer, delighting in the Sunni-Shia schism and funding the Islamic State to wreak havoc on the three Shia countries the Saudi princes fear: Iran, Iraq and Syria.  

The US-Saudi axis has long made the Middle-East a battlefield, pitting Sunni against Shia. Following the defeat of its German allies in the First World War in 1918, the Ottoman Empire lost its Muslim lands - in the arc from Egypt to the Balkans - to the US, Britain and France. Only the rump, Turkey, remained. The violence in the Middle-East is a reaction of a people whose liberties have been mortgaged to the private interests of their corrupt leaders and their Western paymasters since 1924, when the Ottoman Caliphate was officially abolished. In 1932, the US and Britain established Saudi Arabia - custodian of the holy mosques in Mecca and Medina and a part of the Ottoman Empire since 1818 - as an independent Islamic kingdom under the Wahhabi al Saud dynasty. Over the next thirty years, a pro-West military dictator or sheikh was installed in virtually every Arab country. Wedged between the collusive interests of western Anglo-Saxons and Arab sheikhs, the Arab citizen had no democracy and few liberties but, thanks to oil, reasonable prosperity. As the democratic tide has ebbed and flowed since the Arab Spring, Islamists have wreaked havoc in Libya, Syria and Iraq.

Meanwhile, the Islamic State is finally in retreat. Iraqi and Turkish Peshmerga forces recently broke the 5-month-long siege on Kobane, a town on the Turkish border. An assault is under way by Iraqi and Iranian forces to take back Tikrit, Saddam's home town, which fell to IS last year.

But the Iraqi army, disbanded by the US a decade ago, is now a shadow of its former self. Without Iranian support it could not have launched an offensive against Tikrit. A decisive battle lies ahead in Mosul, a city of two million, which IS has turned into a fortress. A successful assault on Mosul could be months away. There is little doubt though that IS is now on the defensive, its money and jihadist manpower receding by the day.

The US, however, could be about to commit its fourth mistake, this time under President Obama. Because of its antipathy towards the regimes in Iran and Syria (both ironically helping in the fight to defeat IS), the US is holding back. True, its 5,300-plus air attacks on IS positions across Iraq have played a large part in damaging IS and stalling its advance. But the same US military, which invaded Iraq in 2003-11 and created fertile conditions for IS, is allowing the situation to drift which might help a weakened IS to regroup - just as a weakened Taliban did after December 2001.

The two Bushes made three huge errors of judgment in Afghanistan and the Middle-East. Obama may just be about to make a fourth by not deploying the full might of US military power to finish IS off.