An Inconvenient Truth Mr Bolt

 I believe Obama finally came to realise what Tony Abbott and his public voice have still to learn

ISIS Is America's Legacy in Iraq

How 13 years of the War on Terror led to the Islamic State. By Tom Engelhardt

 

 Andrew Bolt ignores the images of horror left imprinted in the minds of Middle East Muslims. He conveniently ignores the virtual library of videos and other imagery the US generated, images widely viewed (or heard about and discussed) with no less horror in the Muslim world than ISIS's imagery is in ours.
 As a start, there were the infamous "screen saver" images straight out of the Marquis de Sade from Abu Ghraib prison.  There, Americans tortured and abused Iraqi prisoners, while creating their own iconic version of crucifixion imagery. Then there were the videos that no one (other than insiders) saw, but that everyone heard about. These, the CIA took of the repeated torture and abuse of al-Qaeda suspects in its "black sites."  In 2005, they were destroyed by an official of that agency, lest they be screened in an American court someday.
 There was also the Apache helicopter video released by WikiLeaks in which American pilots gunned down Iraqi civilians on the streets of Baghdad (including two Reuters correspondents), while on the sound track the crew are heard wisecracking.
There was the video of US troops urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. There were the trophy photos of body parts brought home by US soldiers. There were the snuff films of the victims of Washington's drone assassination campaigns in the tribal backlands of the planet (or "bug splat," as the drone pilots came to call the dead from those attacks) and similar footage from helicopter gunships.
There was the bin Laden snuff film video from the raid on Abbottabad, Pakistan, of which President Obama reportedly watched a live feed.  And that's only to begin to account for some of the imagery produced by the US since September 2001 from its various adventures in the Greater Middle East.

 Though the militants of ISIS would undoubtedly be horrified to think so, they are the spawn of Washington. Thirteen years of regional war, occupation, and intervention played a major role in clearing the ground for them. They may be our worst nightmare (thus far), but they are also our legacy—and not just because so many of their leaders came from the Iraqi army we disbanded, had their beliefs and skills honed in the prisons we set up (Camp Bucca seems to have been the West Point of Iraqi extremism), and gained experience facing US counterterror operations in the "surge" years of the occupation. In fact, just about everything done in the war on terror has facilitated their rise. After all, we dismantled the Iraqi army and rebuilt one that would flee at the first signs of ISIS's fighters, abandoning vast stores of Washington's weaponry to them. We essentially destroyed the Iraqi state, while fostering a Shia leader who would oppress enough Sunnis in enough ways to create a situation in which ISIS would be welcomed or tolerated throughout significant areas of the country.