ISISU.S. decision to dismantle Saddam’s army led to ISIS emergence: U.K. foreign secretary

Philip Hammond, the British foreign secretary, said that the single most disastrous mistake relating to the U.S. 2003 invasion of Iraq was the mass removal of supporters of the Ba’ath party from the Iraqi army.

Hammond said this decision led directly to the creation of ISIS.

Hammond said the decision by Paul Bremer, who was appointed by President George W. Bush to govern after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, to dismantle the Iraqi army was a disastrous mistake, because it made 400,000 soldiers unemployed and sent them to the streets.

Rudaw reports that on Thursday the Chilcot Report, which examined the U.K. involvement in Iraq, harshly criticized Tony Blair’s decision to go to war on the basis of inaccurate – even bogus — intelligence and for not having any plans for post-invasion Iraq.

Blair rejected the connection Hammond made between Bremer’s decision to dismantle the Iraqi army and the rise of ISIS, saying the world was a better place as a result of removing Saddam Hussein from power.

“I can regret the mistakes and I can regret many things about it, but I genuinely believe not just that we acted out of good motives and I did what I did out of good faith, but I sincerely believe that we would be in a worse position if we hadn’t acted that way. I may be completely wrong about that,” Blair said.

Blair added that if Saddam had been allowed to stay in power, “he would have gone back to his [weapons of mass destruction] programs again.” Blair added that had the Iraqi president still been in power during the Arab spring, he would have tried to fight on, as Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, has done.

Bremer defended his decision to “de-Ba’athize” the Iraqi army, police, and security services – but that those who implemented his policy had gone too far, and that he had only meant for a small percentage of the army to be removed.

Hammond, testifying before the Commons foreign affairs committee, said: “Many of the problems we see in Iraq today stem from that disastrous decision to dismantle the Iraqi army and embark on a program of de-Ba’athification.

“That was the big mistake of post-conflict planning. If we had gone a different way afterwards, we might have been able to see a different outcome.”

The flow of professionally trained soldiers into groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq and its successor, ISIS, had increased the ability and the threat they posed, he said. “It is clear a significant number of former Ba’athist officers have formed the professional core of Daesh [ISIS] in Syria and Iraq, and have given that organization the military capability it has shown in conducting its operations.”

The U.S. military had criticized the United Kingdom for not doing a good job pacifying the southern part of Iraq and for pulling out of Iraq too hastily.

When pressed to address the U.S. criticism, Hammond said: “Maybe it was too great an ambition to dismantle quite a sophisticated country with a long-established civilization, traditions, and culture of its own, and to recreate a mid-Atlantic construct of what government should look like, often going against the grain of local culture and tradition.”