Between 2005 and 2008, this American attempt to rebuild the Iraqi state yielded a horrendous confessional civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. The Sunnis lost. And that largely explains the subsequent success of Daesh in creating a "Sunniland."
The US occupation-Arab Spring love affair
Now let's turn to the Syrian version of the Arab Spring in February/March 2011. Initial protests against Assad's iron rule were peaceful -- multi-communitarian and multi-confessional. But soon anti-Alawite rancor started to radicalize a significant part of the Sunni majority.
As historian Pierre-Jean Luizard, a specialist in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon at the French CNRS reminds us, Syria was the favorite land of Hanbalism -- a most conservative branch of Sunni Islam that highly influenced the emergence of Wahhabism in the Arabian Peninsula. That implies a virulent anti-Shiism. Thus the emergence among the Syrian armed opposition of multiple Salafi-jihadi groups, most of all Jabhat al-Nusra -- a.k.a. al-Qaeda in Syria.
Meanwhile, Assad fine-tuned a message to the West and his own Sunni bourgeoisie oscilating between allegiance and dissidence; it's me, or chaos. Chaos ensued, anyway; horrendous structural violence, all-around institutional decrepitude, total territorial fragmentation.
So it's fair to argue that both US occupation and the Syrian Arab Spring ended up producing the same result. With some differences; in Iraq, Daesh enjoys the (silent) support of a majority of Sunni Arabs. In Syria, Sunnis are divided; Daesh may rule the desert -- Bedouin culture, but it's Jabhat al-Nusra that captured significant Sunni support in big urban centers such as Aleppo. In Iraq, the borders between the three large communities -- Sunni, Shiite, Kurd -- are more or less frozen. In Syria, it's a never-ending jigsaw puzzle.
What happens next is a mystery. The de facto independence of Iraq Kurdistan may solidify. The Baghdad government may increasingly represent only Shiites. Yet it's hard to see Daesh consolidating its control of Sunni Iraq -- not with the ongoing Battle of Mosul.
Blowback rules the wilderness of mirrors
It's easy to dismiss Daesh as the apex of barbarian cultural idiosyncrasies. Even wallowing in gruesomeness, Daesh has been able to project a universalist dimension beyond its Sunni Arab Middle Eastern base. It's like the clash of civilizations playing in a wilderness of mirrors. Daesh amplifies the clash not between East and West, or the Arab world and the Atlanticist hegemon, but mostly between a certain (warped) conception of Islam and assorted infidels. Daesh "welcomes" everyone, even Catholic Europeans while persecuting Arab infidels and bad Muslims.
It's no wonder the Caliphate -- a concrete utopia on the ground -- finds an echo among young lone wolves living in the West. Because Daesh insists on the colonial Franco-British -- and then neocolonial American -- history of Muslims being trampled upon by a dominating, infidel West, they manage to channel a diffuse sentiment of injustice among the young.
Everyone -- US, France, Britain, Russia, Iran -- is now at war with Daesh (Turkey only half-heartedly, as well as the House of Saud and the GCC petrodollar gang; for them this not a priority.)
But this is a war without a serious political long-term perspective. No one is discussing the place for Sunni Arabs in an Iraq dominated by the Shiite majority; how to put the Syrian state back together; or whether private donors to Daesh from Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates will simply disappear.
The encirclement of Raqqa and the re-conquest of Mosul will mean absolutely nothing if the causes of Daesh's initial success are not addressed. It starts with the West's mission civilisatrice as the cover story for unbounded colonial domination, and it straddles the methodical, inexorable, slow motion American destruction of Iraq. Blowback will continue to reign over the wilderness of mirrors; an attack near the British Parliament by a knife-carrying lone wolf soldier answering "its call" killing four people mirrored by US jets bombing a school near Raqqa killing thirty-three civilians.
Petraeus may have trained them in the deserts of Al-Anbar. But most of all that rough beast, slouching towards Camp Bacca to be born, bore the touch of a Western mind.
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