Says Dick Cheney “de-Ba’athisized the Iraqi government and created ISIS.”
— Chris Matthews on Wednesday, September 10th, 2014 in a broadcast on MSNBC
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews leveled at dig at a major backer of the invasion of Iraq during the network’s coverage of President Barack Obama’s Sept. 10 address on ISIS.
“Do not listen to (former Vice President) Dick Cheney,” Matthews said. “He’s the one that created al-Qaida by taking over the holy land in Saudi Arabia. He’s the one that de-Ba’athisized the Iraqi government and created ISIS.”
We decided to take a closer look at the link between Cheney, ISIS and Iraq.
Through the MSNBC press office, we asked Matthews whether he could expand on how Cheney created ISIS. We did not hear back.
Saddam Hussein wielded power through the Ba’ath Party. For all practical purposes, leadership in the military and civilian sectors was synonymous with Ba’ath membership. Early in the occupation of Iraq, the George W. Bush administration decided to purge the Ba’athists.
We know that at least some of the success of ISIS on the battlefield is due to former generals and colonels under Hussein.
Lina Khatib, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, said there is no doubt about this.
“ISIS is indeed cooperating with former Ba’athists, especially military officers, who have been seminal in directing the group’s military strategy,” Khatib said.
But Matthew’s statement requires that we explore two points: Was Cheney responsible for de-Ba’athification? And how might that have led to the creation of ISIS?
Several researchers said that this Ba’athist connection between Cheney and ISIS is real but it is indirect.
We know that more than a year before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration began discussing plans to govern the country once coalition forces overthrew Hussein. A basic puzzle was this: to leave the Ba’athist leadership in place would give it the power to undermine anything the Americans might want. But to get rid of it wholesale risked chaos.
Initially, Bush signed off on a plan of “light” de-Ba’athification. The general notion was that the most senior leaders would be removed, and midlevel managers would stay.
In mid-May 2003, about two months after the invasion began, a very different policy took effect. Under Ambassador Paul Bremmer, the man in charge of Iraq’s reconstruction, at least 20,000 government workers were fired. Then Bremmer disbanded the entire Iraqi military. According to the inspector general’s report, “key U.S. generals on the ground in Iraq strongly opposed Bremer’s order. (They) anticipated using the Iraqi army to help stabilize the country and start the reconstruction process.”
There are two other assessments written by analysts with high-level access to insiders. One, from the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, reported that Bremmer was handed his instructions by an undersecretary of defense, Douglas Feith.
A report from the Rand Corp., the granddaddy of the private defense policy think tanks, said the National Security Council, “with President Bush in the chair,” learned of the de-Ba’athfication order the day before it was implemented.
Cheney played a key role on the National Security Council and in all decisions surrounding the war.
While Cheney might not have drafted the de-Ba’athification order himself, we can safely say he supported it.
Several key steps lie between the former Ba’ath leaders and the circumstances that ultimately produced ISIS.
Peter Neumann, a professor of security studies at King’s College London, said there is a tenuous link.
“De-Baathification and the dissolution of the Army disenfranchised Iraqi Sunnis, creat(ed) the kind of resentment that fueled the Iraqi insurgency in the mid-2000s,” Neumann said. “This helped al-Qaida in Iraq, ISIS’s predecessor, and it’s the same kind of resentment and mistrust toward Shiites that allowed ISIS to gain the support of Sunni tribes in its recent advances.”
William Braniff, the executive director at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, said ISIS draws its strength from powerful ideological beliefs and ethnic tensions.
“The Ba’athists are useful,” Braniff said, “but not the drivers of this murderous movement.”
Our ruling
Matthews said Cheney de-Ba’athisized the Iraqi government and created ISIS. We find that Cheney played a key role in de-Ba’athification and in creating the circumstances that led to the formation of ISIS. Former Ba’athists provide important military leadership in ISIS, as they did in the first few years after the invasion when they joined forces with the group that preceded ISIS, al-Qaida in Iraq.
Many of those same Ba’athists, however, later turned against al-Qaida in Iraq. They shifted back into the orbit of what became ISIS due to the repressive policies under Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
The causal link is too distant to say Cheney created ISIS.
We rate the claim Mostly False.
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