The rise of terror group ISIS is the result of allowing Iran to meddle in Iraqi politics at the end of the second Gulf War, Emma Sky, a former political advisor to U.S. General Ray Odierno, and who served as the Governorate Coordinator of Kirkuk for the Coalition Provisional Authority has said.
A key mistake made by the West was leaving a power vacuum in the region that was exploited by Tehran, she told the Foreign Affairs website.
The British Middle East expert said: “When you look at Iraq in 2003, the way we went in, there was no plan for what came next. We allowed the power vacuum to emerge, all these armed groups started coming forward, then the debathification, dissolving the military, a lot of people put outside the process started to go into armed groups and end up with the total collapse of the state.
“There are some mistakes on initial years. I think if you look at the period 2007 to 2009, that was only period in the whole war we actually had the right strategy, the right leadership, and the right resources.
“In my mind, the biggest mistake made by the Obama administration was actually in 2010, not upholding the election results. It was a very, very close election.
“To everybody’s surprise, it was actually won by the party called Iraqia headed by Ayad Allawi, and this party was campaigning on a non-sectarian platform.
“This party won two more votes than Nouri al-Maliki. He blamed the international community for tampering with the results, he demanded a recount, he started to use debuffication to try and disqualify the Iraqian leaders.”
At that point, Iran stepped in and tried to unite Shia Muslims to support Maliki, she said.
She added: “I think in 2010, if we’d actually brokered the formation of government, if it was brokered by us and not by the Iranians, I think we would have seen Iraq’s trajectory continue in a positive direction.
“It was not inevitable that everything would collapse. It collapsed because the politics didn’t work. All the billions that we spent in Iraq, you can’t see anything from it because you didn’t get the politics right.
Ms Sky said the world bad now become ‘ISIS-obsessed’, but the group were in fact a symptom of a broader problem in the Middle East – that Iraq had been left as a weak state and had enabled the rise of Iran.
She told Foreign Affairs: “The levels of sectarianism that are playing out today, this is something very, very new in the region. If you look at the history of the region, it’s characterized much more by peace among its peoples than it is by war.”
But she added: “Baghdad used to be culture capital of the world. You can’t erase that history. No matter what ISIS blows up, that history is documented. It’s in the art galleries, it’s in the annals, and that is something for future generations to be so inspired by. Don’t give up on Iraq.”
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