270 AMERICAN SPYwould relay his concerns to Washington. As my Iraqi escorts and I headed
out across the Iraqi desert for Amman, my thoughts kept turning to the sig-
nificance of Sheik Omar’s words and how they would be received by those
in power. It was clear to me that if the US government did not immediately
alter course and implement some intelligent, commonsense policies along
the lines of what Sheik Omar had suggested, the situation would become
irreversibly FUBAR in Anbar.
A few days later, I relayed his important messages and warnings to
Washington via my US government contacts. Given the Bush administra-
tion’s serial bungling of events in Iraq, I did not expect anyone in DC to
pay much heed to my report. As history has since shown, my expectations
were met if not exceeded.
The Anbar-based, anti-American insurgency began almost immedi-
ately after Sheik Omar’s explicit warning. Ramadi and Fallujah formed
the heart of Iraq’s Sunni insurgency, which soon became known as al-
Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Until the US invasion of Iraq, there was neither a
foreign nor a home-grown al-Qaeda presence in the country. Afterward,
both existed, in large part because Bremer’s dismantling of the Iraqi Army
and the Ba’ath Party resulted in tens of thousands of angry, well-armed
Iraqis with nothing but time on their hands.
There was also no link between Saddam and the 9/11 attacks. Much
as the Serbs had done in Bosnia when they cynically claimed they were
defending the West against Muslim extremism (which was minimal in
Bosnia until the Serbs started the war), the United States created a self-
fulfilling prophecy in Iraq. Previously nonexistent AQI was formed pre-
cisely because of the invasion, and it later morphed into ISIS (Daesh).
Foreign fighters poured into Iraq to join AQI and ISIS and to kill Amer-
ican troops who had invaded a Middle Eastern country without justifica-
tion. There is no question that Saddam was a despicable, murderous thug,
but he did not pose a threat to America’s national security.
There is a clear, “proximate cause” link between the US invasion and
removal of Saddam, Bremer’s disbanding of the Iraqi military (and other
bad decisions), and the evolution of the scourge of AQI and ISIS. The
Bush administration was willfully blind to the dangerous reality that Sheik
Omar could see and articulated so clearly. The entire world suffers the con-
sequences of this willful blindness to this day.