David Cameron says Iraq War has almost nothing to do with why people join the Islamic State

GlobalPost

British Prime Minister David Cameron delivered a 5,000-word speech about the Islamic State and domestic radicalization on Monday, but it took him just a few words to tell people to stop blaming the rise of the Islamic State on the Iraq War.

Speaking at the Ninestiles School in Birmingham, Cameron laid out his theory of "Islamic extremism" — what it is, how it works in general, how it works in the context of the Islamic State, why it attracts people around the world to its cause, and how to fight it in the UK.

Cameron's main argument is this: "The root cause of the threat we face is the extremist ideology itself." Want to understand the Islamic State? Look at its ideas, or "extreme doctrine," as Cameron puts it. 

That would be a totally reasonable thing to argue, except in this case, Cameron's singular focus on ideology became its own kind of extreme doctrine — one that largely dismissed social, economic, and historical explanations for the rise and appeal of the Islamic State. 

Influences like Western military interventions in the Middle East. 

"Some argue it’s because of historic injustices and recent wars, or because of poverty and hardship," Cameron said, according to a transcript of the speech released by the UK government. "This argument, what I call the grievance justification, must be challenged. So when people say 'it’s because of the involvement in the Iraq War that people are attacking the West,' we should remind them: 9/11 — the biggest loss of life of British citizens in a terrorist attack — happened before the Iraq War."

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And that's it. That's all Cameron said about the Iraq War in his 5,000-word speech.

But there's plenty of evidence to suggest the Islamic State wouldn't exist in the form it does now if US President George W. Bush, with ample support from UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and other members of the so-called "Coalition of the Willing," hadn't invaded Iraq in 2003. Maybe a similar-looking army of Salafist takfiris would have managed to conquer parts of the Middle East and declare a caliphate, but it's nearly impossible to imagine how today's conditions in Iraq and Syria could have happened without the Iraq War.

The war killed between 120,000 and 500,000 Iraqis and created conditions of violence and chaos in which Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Al Qaeda in Iraq was able to mature into a powerful sectarian terrorist insurgency — and then evolve to become the Islamic State in Iraq in 2006, before evolving again to become the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (also known as ISIS, or ISIL) in 2013. The disbanding and black-listing of Saddam Hussein's Baathist army in 2003 created a class of unemployed former soldiers, 400,000-strong and looking for payback and a paycheck. Former Baathists now form the core of Islamic State leadership.

The links between the Iraq War and the Islamic State have been well researched and extensively described. Cameron should read Michael Weiss's and Hassan Hassan's "ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror" or Jessica Stern's and J.M. Berger's "ISIS: The State of Terror" if he'd like to learn more about it.

There's a chance Cameron would read those books and say — Sure, those are the material conditions that helped give rise to the Islamic State, but I'm talking here about the ideas that keep it running, that appeal to young people around the world, including young people in the UK.

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In that case, the British prime minister should perhaps also read an issue of "Dabiq," the Islamic State's glossy, English-language propaganda magazine in which it disseminates the "ideology" Cameron is talking about. Every issue of "Dabiq" starts with a quotation from the late father of the Islamic State, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

"The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify — by Allah's permission — until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq."

It's no surprise that government officials in the United States and Britain would, when explaining the roots of the Islamic State, want to downplay the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent decade-long occupation. But Cameron went further than that.

Oh, and as for Cameron's point about 9/11 happening before the Iraq War? That's true. It's also true that Osama bin Laden was furious over the presence of US (and UK) forces in Saudi Arabia after the First Gulf War. In 1996, he issued a fatwa titled "Declaration of Jihad Against the Americans Occupying a Land of the Two Holiest Sites."

If anything, Cameron's allusion to 9/11 should make us even more skeptical of his claims about Islamic State "ideology," which according to Cameron includes "ideas which are hostile to basic liberal values such as democracy, freedom and sexual equality." Sounds an awful lot like George W. Bush on Sept. 20, 2001, when he said of Al Qaeda, "they hate our freedoms."

We saw how that worked out.

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