Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick

Abdullah’s candor did not sit well with some Bush appointees in the room. Liz Cheney, the vice president’s elder daughter, then a senior official in the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs section, turned to one of the king’s aides with a word of unsolicited advice, according to the king’s memoir: Abdullah should avoid making such discordant statements in public. The aide initially wondered if the comment was meant as a joke, but the next day, Cheney telephoned him again to reinforce the message. She said she had discussed the king’s remark with Paul Wolfowitz, the Defense Department official who had been one of the architects of Bush’s Iraq policy, and both had agreed that Abdullah should keep his views to himself. The monarch was exasperated. “What I said over dinner was true,” he wrote afterward. “I was shocked that some members of the administration and their supporters seemed to feel that there could be no dissent on Iraq—and that in America, a country that prides itself on opinionated self-expression, they would try to muzzle inconvenient news.” The reality that was becoming painfully clear to Abdullah was an Iraq engulfed in flames and seeding the entire region with dangerous sparks. Jayousi and his poison bomb had drifted into Jordan on a fire whirl, and Jordan’s Mukhabarat had only narrowly managed to stop them. Meanwhile, the man who directed and financed the plot remained free inside Iraq to try again.