Where Did ISIS Ccme From?

Look who Bush put in charge... Jewish neocons with no military or Middle East experience... and of course hard drinking Dick Cheney.

Where did ISIS come from? The story starts here.

It took us five years to talk honestly about Vietnam. It’s time to do that with Iraq, and Paul Bremer’s tenure is the place to begin.

AS SOON AS I ARRIVE AT HIS HOME, a well-kept but slightly dated fieldstone Colonial in Chevy Chase, Maryland, he ushers me down a staircase into the basement, past one bookcase packed with white binders and another stacked with board games. We end up in a dimly lit corner where a desk, a couch, and a treadmill all jockey for space. “This is basically my office,” L. Paul Bremer tells me, adding almost apologetically, “and our exercise area.”

For a man who once commanded the world’s attention, working out of a palace and wielding expansive powers over 25 million people while serving as America’s viceroy in postwar Iraq, these quarters seem modest. But the reminders of a more influential time are all around. Each of those white binders is labeled “CPA Archives,” as in the Coalition Provisional Authority that President George W. Bush appointed Bremer to run one month after US troops had cruised into Baghdad. (At one point during his reign, Bremer is said to have waved off a British general’s concerns about the legality of a certain security measure with the quip “I am the law.”) Along the white-paneled walls hang framed photos of Bremer with the biggest stars in the firmament of Republican administrations over the last half century: Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bushes 41 and 43, as well as Kissinger, Haig, Rumsfeld, and Cheney.



When George W. appointed Bremer in May 2003, after the exhilaration around the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue had been quickly followed by a descent into looting and lawlessness, most people were caught off guard. That included the Bush administration’s first postwar point man in Iraq, retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner, who had just arrived in Baghdad when he learned he was about to be replaced. Although Bremer was a former ambassador, he spoke no Arabic, had no experience with postwar reconstruction or with running a large organization, had never served in the military or the Arab world, and had never even visited Iraq. Those shortcomings did not hinder his candidacy. Perversely, as I would learn from Bremer, they enhanced it.

Bremer’s Iraq tour turned out to be relatively brief, just 14 months, yet it continues to resonate to this day. That’s particularly true around a couple of enormously consequential decisions that he announced during just his first two weeks in Baghdad. In those decisions, critics argue, one can find the roots of the lethal insurgency that upended Iraq, as well as the scourge of ISIS that followed and now threatens to draw American troops back onto Iraqi soil for the third time in as many decades. In the end, though, how much should Bremer be held responsible for the continuing mess of the Middle East?

It’s been more than five years since US combat troops left Iraq. It took about that long after Vietnam for the nation to begin wrestling honestly with the forces that had led us into that mistaken war. It’s time we start doing the same with Iraq. And the case of L. Paul Bremer — at once well intentioned, infuriating, and tragic — is the ideal place to anchor this kind of reexamination.

He and I both knew we would be getting to those tough questions soon enough. I decided to start with the lighter stuff. In recent years, Bremer, who is now 74, has turned his focus to painting, following in the steps of his former boss. “Bush is a better artist than I am,” he tells me.

Bremer’s biggest source of inspiration for his oil-on-canvas creations are the landscapes of Vermont, where he and his wife, Francie, bought a country house shortly before he was asked to decamp for Baghdad. He tells me that planning the kitchen remodel for that rambling house — a former bed-and-breakfast in Chester — provided his favorite form of escape during his bleakest hours in Iraq. He and Francie, who both grew up in Connecticut, usually spend chunks of the winter and summer in Vermont, although his wife’s health has kept them at home in Maryland this year. A longtime sufferer of fibromyalgia, Francie is now undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. They’re upbeat about her prognosis but acknowledge that the treatments have been extremely taxing.



Bremer paints from both houses. Sitting in the basement in Chevy Chase, I ask if we can move to his attic studio to see his artwork. “Do you mind if we do that later?” he replies. Francie is sleeping in their second-floor bedroom, and he doesn’t want to wake her en route.

So much for starting with the lighter stuff.

AT A MEETING IN THE PENTAGON shortly before Bremer’s appointment in 2003, influential Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz turned to him and asked, “You do believe in democracy, don’t you?”

A startled Bremer replied, “Of course I believe in democracy.”

Recounting this exchange now as we sit in his basement, Bremer tells me: “I thought it was a bizarre thing to say. I didn’t unlock it then, though I subsequently did.”

Why had Bremer’s lack of expertise in the Middle East made him more attractive to the neoconservatives in the Bush administration?


Wolfowitz, a former academic dean, believed too many of the “Arabist” regional specialists in the State Department had concluded that democracy wasn’t possible in the Middle East.

Bremer says Wolfowitz had wanted to make sure he hadn’t been “infected” by that kind of defeatist thinking.

On Bremer’s office wall, my eye catches a framed photograph that contains more clues to explain his improbable path to power in Iraq.

The black-and-white photo was taken aboard Air Force One in 1975. President Gerald Ford is standing at the center, talking to his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. Seated at Kissinger’s side is Bremer, who, as a young foreign service officer not long out of Yale and Harvard Business School, had climbed the ranks in the last-man-standing climate of the post-Watergate presidency to become Kissinger’s chief aide.

The most pivotal figure is seated at the back, partially obscured by the president. It is Dick Cheney, a Yale dropout with a drunken-driving record who somehow became the youngest White House chief of staff in history. Cheney owed his remarkable rise almost entirely to one man, Donald Rumsfeld. He had tapped Cheney to be his replacement when Rumsfeld departed the position to become Ford’s secretary of defense.

The Ford years marked the low point of influence for both the presidency and the military in 20th-century America. Congress walked all over the accidental commander in chief, and the Pentagon brass licked their wounds after having presided over the nation’s first lost war. It was also during this period that Cheney and Rumsfeld forged their bedrock views about how power and force should best be exercised.

Nearly three decades later, when they were back at the controls, Cheney as the most powerful vice president in US history and Rumsfeld as the most assertive defense secretary in memory, they put those beliefs into action.

Shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, they began orchestrating a new kind of war for the 21st century, one that would be lean on troops, heavy on technology, and preemptive rather than provoked. Beginning in March 2003, it took a slim US force of 150,000 troops just three weeks to roll over the enemy in the sands of the Middle East with “shock and awe.”

However, Iraq after the fall of Baghdad was not awash in appreciation for this liberation, as Cheney and Rumsfeld had predicted, but rather slipping into chaos. The shock was over a superpower’s impotence to stop the ransacking of a nation by desperate civilians and brazen thugs. The awe sprang from how derelict the planning for the postwar period must have been to have let this happen. Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush needed a take-charge guy who could rapidly get things under control.

Bremer received an exploratory call from his old friend Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was serving as Cheney’s chief of staff. The two shared a given name that neither used. Lewis Paul Bremer III had been known since birth as “Jerry,” a nickname to differentiate him from his father and grandfather and selected because he had been born on the feast day of St. Jerome.

Drawing a nickname from a patron saint might suggest Bremer was born into a Catholic family, but in fact he came from Connecticut Episcopalian stock. He had followed a well-trod WASP path from New Canaan Country School to Phillips Academy, Andover, to Yale. (He and his wife would convert to Roman Catholicism much later in life, motivated by Pope John Paul II’s stance against communism and abortion.)

Despite a very different background, Bremer exuded a Bobby Kennedy vibe — a slight marathoner of a man, forever projecting youth and restless energy. When he got the Iraq call, he was 62 but looked a decade younger, with a helmet of thick brown hair and a toothy grin. He even had a vaguely Kennedy-esque accent, rendering the word “against” as “ah-GAIN-st.”

Bremer’s strong support for invading Iraq suggested loyalty to the neocon cause, while his decades in the foreign service (including as President Reagan’s ambassador to the Netherlands and for counterterrorism) promised to improve toxic relations between the State and Defense departments. More recently, he had served as managing director of Kissinger’s private consulting firm. Kissinger called him a control freak, and meant it as a compliment.

Thin in foreign policy, Bush had decided to make Iraq the battleground for confronting terrorism after his advisers’ different rationales for toppling Saddam coalesced.

Even if you take Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz at their word — that they genuinely believed there were real connections between Saddam and Al Qaeda and that Saddam was harboring weapons of mass destruction, or WMD — it’s clear the war could also serve as a demonstration project for their own animating philosophies.

For Cheney, it was the importance of untrammeled executive authority. He had run the White House under a hamstrung President Ford and saw a powerful wartime presidency as the best weapon for confronting the existential threat of terrorism after 9/11. And a big win over a notorious regime in Iraq promised more clarity and strategic importance than did Afghanistan.

For Rumsfeld, Iraq would give him the chance to make the Pentagon’s generals, whom he saw as trapped in outdated Cold War thinking, see the wisdom of his plan to modernize the military with a smaller, faster, more technologically advanced fighting force.

When, during the run-up to the war, the Army’s chief of staff testified that securing postwar Iraq would require at least several hundred thousand troops, Rumsfeld dismissed that warning and marginalized the general who had delivered it.


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https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazin...starts-here/eOHwJQgnZPNj8SE91Vw5hK/story.html

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For Wolfowitz, it was the belief that only a bold, military-initiated experiment in democracy could free the Middle East from its decades-long paralysis of despotism and anti-Semitism. Toppling Saddam, the brutal dictator who had gassed his own people, would allow a new democratic Iraq to emerge, one that would be gratefully pro-American, would dutifully make peace with Israel, and would promptly unleash the spread of democracy across the Middle East.

Although there had been sufficient overlap in these rationales to back the invasion, it didn’t take long for the fissures to show. Rumsfeld’s lean and fast military operation was geared for a short war and quick handoff to Iraqis. And while Wolfowitz had also voiced support for a speedy handoff, the promise of a stable, democratic Iraq was predicated on having a credible, reliable Iraqi contingent to take the baton.

The lawlessness that led to Bremer’s appointment exposed the Bush administration’s astonishing lack of planning. The Pentagon had wrested control of postwar planning, icing out the State Department and its ambitious initiative, but then failed to take the responsibility seriously. During World War II, planning for postwar Germany had begun more than two years before the end of fighting. For the Iraq War, the administration launched General Garner’s postwar planning operation slightly more than two months before the end of combat. For Bremer, the time between his appointment to replace Garner and his arrival in Baghdad had been just two weeks.

NOT LONG AFTER US TROOPS ROLLED INTO Baghdad in 2003, I wrote an article for the Globe exploring the unintended consequences of military occupations and the surprisingly small events on which they often pivot. The panicked reaction of a few Israeli soldiers during the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon in 1983 had birthed a ferocious Shia resistance. The presence of US troops on sacred Muslim soil in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War had radicalized Osama bin Laden against the United States, the Saudi royal family, and his own family, which had won contracts to build those bases. My piece concluded with this quote from Middle East specialist As’ad AbuKhalil: “The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan gave us the Taliban. The American occupation of Saudi Arabia gave us bin Laden and Al Qaeda. The Israeli occupation of Lebanon gave us Hezbollah. Let us see what the American occupation of Iraq is going to give us.”

The suspense is over. We now know that the American occupation of Iraq gave us ISIS. (More on that later.) However, pinpointing when it became a doomed occupation is harder to determine.

AbuKhalil, a professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus, argues all occupations are fated to fail in the modern era. But he suggests the tipping point for this one came with the selection of Bremer. “They chose the best man to do the worst job,” he says. “They chose a very arrogant person with a very colonial attitude.”

Bremer’s willingness to throw himself into the job was admirable and his 20-hour-a-day work ethic unimpeachable. But his I-am-the-law attitude may well have set the wrong tone for Iraqis looking for signs that their lives would improve and their dignity be preserved. Even Bremer’s choice of daily uniform — navy blazer, tie, and pocket square, paired with the tan Timberland boots his son had given him (with the note “Go kick some butt, Dad!&#8221 — seems unfortunate in hindsight. It made him look like an English nobleman headed to his country house for some upland hunting of quail, a reminder of Iraq’s belittling experience under British rule after World War I.

Others argue that the American occupation of Iraq had already been lost before Bremer stepped foot in Baghdad. In the documentary No End in Sight, diplomat Barbara Bodine, who had been part of Garner’s initial postwar team sent to Baghdad, dates the tipping point as April 11, 2003, about a month before Bremer’s arrival. After a couple of days of the too-small contingent of US troops in Baghdad idly watching as Iraqi marauders ransacked every ministry building and museum, destroying priceless Mesopotamian artifacts up to 7,000 years old, Donald Rumsfeld held a news conference. He jokily dismissed criticisms about the Pentagon’s planning failures as “henny penny” overreactions and concluded, “Stuff happens.” To proud Iraqis looking for clues about whether the American leaders respected their cradle-of-civilization past and were invested in their future, Rumsfeld’s snickering spoke volumes.

Even as odious as occupations are, this one might have remained salvageable had Bremer handled two momentous decisions differently during his first two weeks in power.

On his fifth day in Baghdad, Bremer issued CPA Order No. 1, “De-Baathification of Iraqi Society,” banning many members of Saddam’s Baath Party from public sector employment. One week after that, he announced CPA Order No. 2, disbanding the entire Iraqi military.

 

BREMER TAKES A SMALL FRAME DOWN from the shelf above his computer. Behind the glass is a copy of the handwritten note national security adviser Condoleezza Rice had sent President Bush during a NATO meeting on June 28, 2004.

Bremer reads it aloud. “Mr. President, Iraq is sovereign. Letter was passed from Bremer at 10:26 a.m. Iraq time. Condi.” Bush had promptly added his own comment in black marker before passing the information on to British Prime Minister Tony Blair: “Let Freedom Reign!”

Handing off sovereignty to an Iraqi government had been Bremer’s final act before leaving the country. That he had conducted the handoff two days earlier than planned, then posed for the press in a decoy C-130 to mask his true flight out of Iraq, testified to the shaky state of sovereignty. He had already survived an assassination attempt. His security team was determined to avoid one more.

While most critics fault Bremer for his orders de-Baathifying the government and disbanding the army, the Pentagon’s war architects blame him for handing over sovereignty near the end of his tenure rather than closer to the start. Just hours after arriving in Baghdad on May 12, 2003, he scuttled the plan Jay Garner had announced for a quick appointment of a temporary Iraqi government. (Bush officials had moved to replace the personable Garner after some concluded that he was in over his head.)

Doug Feith, the Defense Department’s undersecretary for policy and Paul Wolfowitz’s chief deputy, argues in his memoir that a quick handoff would have prevented the Iraqi insurgency from taking root.

Bremer remains reluctant to criticize the neocons head-on, despite the blame they toss his way. “Look,” he says, “I still see Feith and Wolfowitz from time to time. I still consider them friends.” But he argues persuasively that the damage to civil society under Saddam was so profound that there was simply no credible, representative group of Iraqis capable of handling government in the immediate postwar period.

Bremer says that the darling of the neocons, the brilliant but slippery businessman and Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, was clearly not the right man for the job.

This wasn’t just because he had provided intelligence on Saddam’s alleged WMD program that turned out to be dead wrong. Chalabi hadn’t lived in Iraq for decades and had no domestic base of support.

Handing him the keys right away would have been a disaster, Bremer says. The United States needed time to put in place the necessary building blocks for the democracy project to succeed.

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In the end, the deBaathification order is believed to have hoovered up 85,000 to 100,000 Iraqis, including thousands of teachers and mid-level technocrats who were summarily shut out of Iraq’s public sector future.

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https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2016/03/10/where-did-isis-come-from-the-story-starts-here/eOHwJQgnZPNj8SE91Vw5hK/story.html

Was there ever such a team of fools?

 

A hand picked group of idiots with no military or Middle East experience by genius George Bush.

 

Really several of your fellow travelers with the "Bush lied" mantra insist the war is still going on and is thus the longest war in American history.

 

What it is...is the biggest foreign policy disaster in our history.

Worse than Vietnam in it's consequences.

 

How is that possible given that fifteen times as many Americans died in Vietnam?

 

jeez, more anti-Semitism.

at least you didn't spew more crap about dual citizens.

 

Obama opened the door for ISIS.

Then he took their coats and offered them a drink.

 

No comment on which is worse but, is the measure of "foreign policy disaster" determined simply by the number of Americans killed ?

 

What was the end result of the Vietnam War?

Did it destabilize a region?

Did it spur the growth of a terrorist organization that is scaring the crap out of everyone?

No?

 

The only thing worse than copy and pasting an entire novel is the knowledge that someone will quote it in a reply.

As for how ISIS began it is not complicated and certainly not the fault of Bush or any other American. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan they were met by resistance fighters called the mujahideen of which one of these fighters were Osama bin laden.

Extremely well funded by the US and other sources, they were successful in driving out the Soviets eventually. However, after the war, many of these fighters returned home but a large part of them wanted to keep fighting and they had plenty of munitions and firepower leftover. Bin laden seized on this and quickly rose in popularity with his angry rhetoric and formed this group into al-Qaeda.

Bin laden had a history with saddam and saddam hated bin laden and his new group because he considered it a threat to his power so he actively began hunting and killing bin ladens members which put al-Qaeda directly against iraqs regime. In fact, Iraq had become the number one target of al-Qaeda at this time and this back and forth guerilla war continued until saddam invaded Kuwait and was about to storm Saudi Arabia.

At this point Bin Laden went to the king of Saudi Arabia and after a series of meetings tried to convince the king that al-Qaeda could defend the kingdom from saddam, after all, they were already waging war on them and they had defeated the Soviets. However, as a member of the UN, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were entitled to UN protection under the threat of invasion and bush approached the king with this offer of help and left the king a choice; go with al-Qaeda or UN power.

The king chose the UN, and more specifically, the US which infuriated Bin Laden at which point he turned his hate to not only Iraq, but all regimes in the ME but most importantly towards the US who he blamed for this subversion. With the subsequent destruction of al-Qaeda leadership a power vacuum developed and this group was splintered and had basically lost.

The fighters still existed however and new leadership arose who were of the belief that only a state power could effectively reign in control of the ME regimes who were in the pocket of the UN and who they considered sell outs. This hardcore leadership became known as ISIS and were very skilled at reforming the old al-Qaeda members as well as recruiting new people to their new state. Pulling from the freedom fighter mystique of the mujahideen they were able to reform their army as they had so long ago.

This has been a long process, not something created by one man in the bush administration.

 

US Troops Overwhelmingly Support Trump, Reject Neocon Foreign Policy

In an exclusive survey of American military personnel, Donald Trump emerged as active-duty service members’ top choice to become the next commander in chief.


In an exclusive survey of American military personnel, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders emerged as active-duty service members’ top choices to become the next commander in chief...

http://www.militarytimes.com/story/...-survey-donald-trump-bernie-sanders/81767560/

The first thing that catches your eye is that the two biggest establishment neocons when it comes to U.S. foreign policy, Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio, have virtually zero support. While Trump sits in the top spot, this isn’t totally surprising given his campaign rhetoric advocating for both a military buildup as well as a more circumspect approach when it comes to interventionism. That said, what is downright shocking is how Bernie Sanders occupies a close second to Trump while absolutely crushing Hillary Clinton. Since the U.S. military is not known for being a bunch of socialist hippies, there’s something extremely significant going on here, and that something is a rejection of neocon interventionist foreign policy by the U.S. military.

The U.S. establishment can either fade away quietly or it can be tossed away kicking and screaming, but go it will. From all ends of the political spectrum, the American public has had enough and is beginning to forcefully reject the corrupt and criminal status quo. It can’t happen soon enough.

For some examples of foreign policy disasters during the neocon Obama administration, see:

Further Details Emerge on the Epic U.S. Foreign Policy Disaster that is Syria

“Stop Thanking Me for My Service” – Former U.S. Army Ranger Blasts American Foreign Policy and The Corporate State

More Foreign Policy Incompetence – U.S. Humanitarian Aid is Going Directly to ISIS

Afghan President Hamid Karzai Slams U.S. Foreign Policy in Farewell Speech

America’s Disastrous Foreign Policy – My Thoughts on Iraq

“We Came, We Saw, He Died” – Revisiting the Incredible Disaster That Is Libya

 

In that case we have two Democratic Party Presidents, LBJ and BHO that committed America to the worst foreign policy disasters in America's history. LBJ for going to war in Nam and the Tonkin Gulf incident and BHO in the premature withdrawal from Iraq.

 

Ha, there have been so many mistakes it's hard to pinpoint.

Not pushing our invasion of Russia during their revolution had far more consequences worldwide in my opinion.

 

Whoops I almost forgot that little Wilson error. As I understand it, Wilson did abandon some American soldiers in Russia at the time.

 

Something that needs to be said about U.S. Imperialism.

Do not ever forget that our economy and currency are on life support and that the only thing keeping this clown car in drive just happens to be the only functional bureaucracy left: The United States Military.

Make no mistake, when the empire comes crumbling down our quality of life is going to be dramatically reduced. Eventually, it will be time to pay the piper.

Be careful what you wish for.

 

Actually you are overthinking that way to much. Bernie didn't score higher the Hillary because of what you just said. He scored higher because the military despises Hillary and sees her as the women who dies things like abandon our people, leave them to die, send no help even though we could, and then lie about it. Yeah. Things like that.

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How do you figure that?

 

Millions of dead in Southeast Asia and hundreds of thousands of refugees might disagree with you

 

From the standpoint of Americans, probably yes.

 

Thats false.

Obama pulled out of Iraq and backed ISIS and Al Queda in Libya, then transported them and weapons to Turkey for attacks in Syria.

 

I was questioning the validity of using only "American Deaths" as the measure of "disaster".

Certainly it is part of the equation but certainly not the whole equation.

 

Ah.. so you expected Obama to undo President Bush's work in declaring the war in Iraq was won and Maliki was in charge..

In 2003 that idiot Paul Bremer, after five days in Iraq and with NO military or Middle East experience, de-Baathicised Iraq .. destroying all institutions and getting even lowly school teachers fired..

Face it.. George Bush hired a cadre of Jewish neocons with zero experience.. a clutch of nincompoops rarely brought together in one group..

Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Chalabi.... oh boy. Gen Tommy Franks said that Feith , who was in charge, was the dumbest f***** on earth.

 

I do not think that pulling out of Iraq had much to do with the rise of ISIS given we were on their side in the beginning. If anything it may have slowed it down.

http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2...-my-son-into-that-mess-on-the-crisis-in-iraq/

As you know, arming of the extremist Sunni opposition (Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, Salafi) in Syria is what led to the rise of ISIS. It was these Strict Sharia loving extremists, emboldened and armed by their powerful allies (Saud, Turkey, US and others) that decided to form a caliphate - Islamic State.

After all, the plan from the outset was for "regime change". Who then was supposed to form the new regime if not the people we were arming ? How is then plan then not to give these people their own state ?

The Bush Admin was obviously responsible for destabilization of Iraq and this created a sectarian civil war (same as the destabilization of Libya) but, it was Obama that poured fuel on the fire by arming the Sunni extremists in Syria.

The area under control of these folks encompasses territory in both Syria and Iraq and so it was natural that the region under control in Iraq became part of the caliphate.

In general, the idea that the Bush administration had something to do with arming the extremists in Syria is utter nonsense.

 

I think you need to give Americans more credit. Obviously for some that may be all that matters but, there are numerous other factors that come into play when assessing foreign policy.

The Global Chessboard is large and complicated. We lost many lives in WW2 but would our efforts there be classified as a foreign policy disaster because we lost more lives than in Guatemala or El Salvador or Nicaragua ?

 

First, the Bush administration was anything but a group of idiots with no experience. It was the most experienced administration in modern times. Bremer was chief aid to Kissinger. He didn't have experience in postwar occupation? Who did? It hadn't been done before in the Middle East since colonialism.

The rapid handing over of sovereignty was a horrible mistake. It wasn't Bremer's decision to make. It was clear Bush wanted it to happen quickly.

As far as de-baathification, so what? That was the least of their problems. That was a symptom of a greater problem, the lack of "westernizing" political, educational, cultural and military institutions. That would've taken, oh probably up until about now, almost 15 years later or even longer.

As far as creating ISIS - It was Obama who pulled us out knowing extremists would fill the vacuum. Iraq was not stabilized. It had a long way to go, and was doomed to fail without our long-term dedication to making it what people claim Bremer (and everyone else) wanted from the beginning, but didn't have the political will to achieve, a westernized Iraqi society built on the rule of law and a new cog in the globalization wheel.