How GW Bush made ISIS by dumb decisions

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/11/23/how-the-united-states-helped-create-the-islamic-state/

 What President George W. Bush’s administration did was to foster sectarian divisions and create a long-lasting insurgency.

At every point along the way, the Bush administration made choices that exacerbated sectarian tensions in Iraq and set the country on the path to break-up. The assertion by some observers that the country is riven by age-old hatreds, is ahistorical and incorrect. In previous decades, political passions centered on anti-colonialism or big landlordism and socialism. The vacuum of power created by the U.S. dissolution of the secular Baath Party encouraged Iraqi politicians to play on sectarian passions in unprecedented ways. Provoking a violent insurgency was likewise fateful. Once an insurgency comes into being, it typically does not subside for 10 to 15 years.

But Americans have difficulty recognizing their own culpability in the rise of the Islamic State for two reasons. First, the public (and the press) seldom understood or credited Iraqi social forces with the ability to act independently, focusing instead on the U.S. military’s campaigns. Second, Iraq became a football in partisan bickering, with dispassionate analysis abandoned for unsubstantiated blame games.