I’m starting to think that the OP may have been rhetorical question.
More info here.
Look at the date on the article, please. The office referenced in that article was abolished 11 months ago.
No. The position was abolished in 2015. Your article there is over a year old. From his Wiki page (which is where you should have started, though I can see why you’d Google to get the exact answer you wanted):
The growth of ISIS is a direct result of the Shia leadership in Iraq. When the US pulled out of that country al Qaeda was a beaten force, with only a few hardened fighters left. Maliki, the Shia PM, was a paranioac, seeing Sunni conspiracies under every bush. When Maliki first made a state visit to Obama he told the President that the bodyguards of his Sunni VP were plotting against him (total BS). Obama told him that it was a purely internal affair, the business of Iraq not the US. Maliki thoought he’d been given the green light by the US to deal with the Sunni as he thought fit (not what Obama meant at all).
Over the next few years Maliki idiotically started coming down hard on the Sunni, arresting, imprisoning and murdering them in their thousands. Predictably the Sunni turned to anyone who would protect them, hence the meteoric rise of ISIS, enormously aided by the burgeoning civil war in Syria, which also pitted the Shia government there against the Sunni.
We owe this whole shitstorm to Maliki and his oppression of the Sunni minority in Iraq.
He’s not reinstated in his old job where the intelligence services work for him. Adviser and special envoy sounds like his span of control is only as big as the king gives him and he’s close enough to watch carefully. That’s probably a smart move compared to just leaving someone potentially influential underfoot with a lot of free time and less supervision (keep … your enemies closer). It certainly doesn’t sound like he’s necessarily reinstated to a position of equal influence and responsibility. We’d need to see important envoy tasks assigned to him to make the case that he’s been given any kind of real responsibility or trust.
rhetorical is one word.
Would this have been Bandar too, if it says what Graham says it says ? Or is it all meh.
Vox has a pretty decent article that addresses the OP.
Sunni extremists blew up the al-Askari mosque in February of 2006, kicking off the Sunni-Shia civil war several months before Maliki became MP (in May of that year).
His heavy-handedness certainly didn’t help though, I’ll give you that.
Idiotically - or cynically.
Perhaps Maliki and the Shi’ite militias cynically decided that alienating the Sunni minority was simply “worth it,” in order to gain the ultimate price: Baghdad, which went from perhaps 50% Shi’ite in 2003 to ca. 80% Shi’ite in 2008.
Ah now, that mentions the story about the Syrians releasing prisoners to radicalise the opposition and give themselves a reason to crack down - false flag type thing.
I don’t know what to make of that. I’ve read accounts by people saying they are ex Syrian intelligence who say it’s true, and other people just say it’s anti Assad conspiracy.
I don’t know, though I do think that those who say that the Syrian government can play such games should also allow that the Western governments are also capable of such deviousness.
Did the Syrian gov really do this ? It seems to have got a bit out of hand if they did. [that’s British understatement, just to be clear]
But going with a theme –
I didn’t know about Stavridis thanks.
I take your point but one might ask them what does it profit a man to gain Baghdad if he loses half of Iraq.