Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

The monarch had also lodged complaints with U.S. officials about the aftermath of the invasion. In July 2003, before Iraq spiraled into chaos, Abdullah met with L. Paul Bremer, the White House–appointed head of Iraq’s provisional government, and urged him to reconsider decisions to disband the Iraqi army and blacklist members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. Pulling Bremer aside during a meeting at an economic forum in Jordan, the king warned that the decisions “would blow up in all of our faces,” according to his account of the conversation. “I said I hoped he understood that if he was going to de-Baathify across the board, he would be setting himself up for major resistance across the board, and would create a power vacuum that someone would have to fill,” Abdullah wrote in his 2011 memoir. As for disbanding the army, “it was crazy…a recipe for anarchy and chaos,” he said.