http://www.nationalreview.com/node/427574/print No, George Bush Is Not to Blame for the Paris Attacks
By David French — November 24, 2015
Is there a statute of limitations for blaming George W. Bush for the world’s ills? This weekend, in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, the Huffington Post ran yet another piece repeating leftist conventional wisdom that Bush created ISIS with his disastrous Iraq invasion, that Obama’s missteps were minor by comparison, and oh, by the way, those who supported the Iraq invasion should just shut up.
As with many great lies, they begin with kernels of truth. Yes, there were key American missteps early in the war that gave al-Qaeda in Iraq (the precursor to ISIS) room to grow. We should not have disbanded the Iraqi Army and civil service. We should not have conducted a “light footprint” early invasion and occupation. We should not have allowed our detention facilities to be used for radical recruitment and training. In other words — just as with every American war ever fought — we made multiple, serious mistakes, and those mistakes had deadly consequences.
But this is only part of the story, a small part of the story. In Iraq, America ultimately righted the military ship, dealing al-Qaeda a comprehensive military defeat, leaving it with only 700 scattered members, a rag-tag and ineffective rump of a once-deadly insurgency. I watched the transformation with my own eyes. My deployment was at ground zero of al-Qaeda’s first attempt at a caliphate, where it declared itself the Islamic State of Iraq and established its “capital” in Baqubah, not far from our own forward operating base.
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