09/09/2014
It was nearly a month ago that we were
pointing up the importance of al-Abadi to the Iraqi crisis, and how
things would change, once he secured
the backing of the Sunnis. Now, with
this piece, we see how long it takes the legacy media to point out that which was obvious all that time ago, and which knowledgeable students of Iraqi affairs could have discerned for themselves.
Thus we have to wait all this time to be told that the US view is that ISIS grew because it was able to exploit the grievances of Iraq's Sunni minority, who had been alienated by the heavy-handed and discriminatory policies of the Shia-dominated government of the outgoing prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.
And so we are assailed with the stunning intelligence that reforming Iraqi security forces and co-opting those Sunni tribes, as the US did from 2006 to 2008 when it smashed ISIS's forerunner Al-Qaeda in Iraq (the so-called
awakening), was viewed as impossible under the Maliki-era political order.
It is sad though that we have to get this from Shashank Joshi, a Senior Research Fellow of the prestige-laden Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and a PhD student at Harvard University â when it's something any competent journalist should have been telling us many weeks ago.
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