Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

“We had created a black hole,” he said. The failure to provide security after the invasion had been a sin of omission: U.S. officials had not anticipated the breakdown in civil authority that would follow the invasion. By contrast, the decisions to dissolve the Iraqi army and ban Baath Party members from positions of authority were as deliberate as they were misguided. In Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, anyone seeking a management job—from school principal or police captain to the head of the intelligence service—was obliged to join the Baath Party. So were applicants for Iraq’s universities. Overnight, tens of thousands of professional workers and experienced bureaucrats were out of work, and U.S. officials in Iraq found themselves confronting two mammoth problems. One was an absence of the kinds of local security agencies best equipped to preserve order and root out illicit networks. The other was a large contingent of embittered and well-connected Iraqi officials who now had to fend for themselves without salaries or pensions.