The disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq wasn't just an American war of choice. As much as anything else, it was a war of talking points. Designed, as President Bush once explained, to "catapult the propaganda," the tried and untrue sound bites about "the smoking gun that could come in the form of mushroom cloud," about Saddam seeking uranium in Africa, about being "greeted as liberators," about an insurgency in its "last throes" in 2005, about the "ties going on between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime" and so much more converted the Bush administration into a weapon of mass deception.
But it was ten years ago this weekend that George W. Bush vomited forth one of the more reprehensible defenses of his debacle in Iraq. Nineteen months after launching the invasion, 17 months after announcing "major combat operations in Iraq have ended" and 14 after declaring "bring 'em on" to the growing ranks of insurgents, President Bush offered this lone lament in an August 29, 2004 interview with Time magazine:

"Had we had to do it [the invasion of Iraq] over again, we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success - being so successful so fast that an enemy that should have surrendered or been done in escaped and lived to fight another day."

Fight another day, indeed. Eleven years after George W. Bush opened the Pandora's Box of sectarian conflict in Iraq and 10 after he proclaimed it a "catastrophic success," the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS) has emerged with a vengeance. And ISIS owes its stunning battlefield victories to a deadly alliance of Al Qaeda fighters Bush admitted he attracted to Iraq, Sunni tribesmen alienated by his man in Baghdad Nouri al-Maliki and, is turns out, some of Saddam's former officers who "should have surrendered or been done in."
As the New York Times has been reporting for months, the Islamic State has been bolstered by the experience and tenacity of Saddam's officers and Ba'athist cadres, many of whom were imprisoned by either the U.S. or the Shiite-controlled government in Baghdad. "The involvement of the Baathists helps explain why just a few thousand Islamic State in Iraq and Syria fighters, many of them fresh off the battlefields of Syria," the Times detailed in June, "have been able to capture so much territory so quickly."

Many of the former regime loyalists, including intelligence officers and Republican Guard soldiers -- commonly referred to as the "deep state" in the Arab world -- belong to a group called the Men of the Army of the Naqshbandia Order, often referred to as J.R.T.N., the initials of its Arabic name. The group announced its establishment in 2007, not long after the execution of Mr. Hussein, and its putative leader, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, was one of Mr. Hussein's most trusted deputies and the highest-ranking figure of the old regime who avoided capture by the Americans.

As it turns out, many Iraqi Sunnis who were captured by the United States nevertheless have provided both the foot soldiers and leaders for ISIS. The self-proclaimed emir of the Islamic State caliphate, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was held in the notorious U.S. prison at Camp Bucca from February 2004 until his release in December 2004. Bolstering their ranks were several hundred fighters freed in 2012 and 2013 from Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons in a series of daring raids by ISIS. And as the Times' Ben Hubbard and Eric Schmitt explained this week, "handpicked many of his deputies from among the men he met while a prisoner in American custody at the Camp Bucca detention center a decade ago."

He had a preference for military men, and so his leadership team includes many officers from Saddam Hussein's long-disbanded army.
They include former Iraqi officers like Fadel al-Hayali, the top deputy for Iraq, who once served Mr. Hussein as a lieutenant colonel, and Adnan al-Sweidawi, a former lieutenant colonel who now heads the group's military council.
The pedigree of its leadership, outlined by an Iraqi who has seen documents seized by the Iraqi military, as well as by American intelligence officials, helps explain its battlefield successes: Its leaders augmented traditional military skill with terrorist techniques refined through years of fighting American troops, while also having deep local knowledge and contacts. ISIS is in effect a hybrid of terrorists and an army.

And how is it these "former regime elements" came to develop years of expertise fighting American troops? Well, they had a lot of help from President Bush and his head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer.
No one person might have done more to spur Sunni disenchantment and violence than Viceroy Bremer. As his own letters show, just three weeks after President Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, Bremer indeed told Bush that he planned to disband Saddam's military and that the President casually--and unquestioningly--went along for the ride.
The letters provided by Bremer revealed that President Bush nonchalantly blessed the May 2003 plan to dissolve the Iraqi military. Bremer released both his May 22, 2003 letter detailing his plans and progress on de-Baathification and the disbanding of Saddam's army, as well as President Bush's May 23rd response.
In his May 22 letter, Bremer informed Bush that:

"We must make it clear to everyone that we mean business: that Saddam and the Baathists are finished...I will parallel this step [de-Baathification] with an even more robust measure dissolving Saddam's military and intelligence structures to emphasize that we mean business."

In his shockingly brief May 23 reply, Bush seemingly OK's Bremer's fateful step to dissolve the Iraqi military:

"Your leadership is apparent. You have quickly made a positive and significant impact. You have my full support and confidence. You also have the backing of our Administration that knows our work will take time."

That decision came as a shock to most American military leaders, including retired General Jay Garner, the first American administrator in Iraq. Along with the de-Baathification policy and privatization of the economy, the dissolution of Saddam's army is almost universally viewed as the spark that turned the post-war tinderbox of Iraq into a conflagration. In his definitive account of the U.S. occupation, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, Rajiv Chandrasekaran details the arrogance of Bremer's CPA and its troika of disastrous decisions that made 2003 "the lost year in Iraq." In the devastating 2007 documentary No End in Sight, former deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage describes the collective shock, "I thought we had just created a problem. We had a lot of out of work [Iraqi] soldiers." That same fall, the former British army chief General Sir Mike Jackson declared the policy "very short-sighted," concluding "We should have kept the Iraqi security services in being and put them under the command of the coalition."
So much for President Bush's tall tale to Dead Certain biographer Robert Draper, "The policy was to keep the army intact; didn't happen."
That's not all that didn't happen. The gains of the Sunni Awakening which began in 2006 were largely lost as Bush's handpicked Shiite strongman in Baghdad turned his back on national unity and instead turned to sectarian consolidation of power. The result is that many of the Sunni tribal sheiks and the thousands of fighters who loyalty they commanded switched from battling foreign Al Qaeda terrorists to making their 2014 conquests possible.
As Zach Beauchamp rightly noted in Vox, "Without the American invasion, al-Qaeda in Iraq never would have been so strong, and ISIS never would have grown out of it." President Bush couldn't agree more. After all, in his December 2008 interview with Martha Raddatz of ABC News he acknowledged that it was the American presence that drew Al Qaeda fighters to Iraq, and not the reverse:

BUSH: One of the major theaters against al Qaeda turns out to have been Iraq. This is where al Qaeda said they were going to take their stand. This is where al Qaeda was hoping to take -
RADDATZ: But not until after the U.S. invaded.
BUSH: Yeah, that's right. So what? The point is that al Qaeda said they're going to take a stand. Well, first of all in the post-9/11 environment Saddam Hussein posed a threat. And then upon removal, al Qaeda decides to take a stand.

And the defeat of Al Qaeda in the western provinces of Iraq would not have been possible without the Sunni Awakening in which the United States purchased the allegiance of tribal sheiks and armed 90,000 of their fighters. But those "Sons of Iraq" of Iraq would only stay bought if Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his Shiite majority integrated them into the nation's security forces.
But accommodating the Sunni groups was precisely what Maliki--George W. Bush's man in Baghdad--refused to do. As Dexter Filkins explained earlier this year:

In the two and a half years since the Americans' departure, Maliki has centralized power within his own circle, cut the Sunnis out of political power, and unleashed a wave of arrests and repression. Maliki's march to authoritarian rule has fueled the reemergence of the Sunni insurgency directly. With nowhere else to go, Iraq's Sunnis are turning, once again, to the extremists to protect them.

As many warned at the time, the decision of Sheik Ahmed Abu Risha and other Sunni tribal leaders in August 2006 to turn on the Al Qaeda forces led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and partner with the U.S. in arming the Sons of Iraq came with a big asterisk attached. As the Washington Post noted in 2008:

But experts stress the moves by Sunni sheikhs was less an embrace of U.S. objectives and more a repudiation of al-Qaeda in Iraq's actions...
"The Americans think they have purchased Sunni loyalty," Nir Rosen, a fellow at New York University Center on Law and Security, told Congress in April 2008. "But in fact it is the Sunnis who have bought the Americans" by buying time to challenge the Shiite government.

By late 2007, there were already worries that the Sunnis wouldn't stay bought. Shiite politicians and CIA analysts warned that "when the U.S. leaves, what we'll have are two armies" and "there is a danger here that we are going to have armed all three sides: the Kurds in the north, the Shiite and now the Sunni militias." And that risk would be elevated if the Shiite-controlled government led by Prime Minister Al-Maliki refused to accommodate Sunni interests in running the army and the country. And, as the New York Times warned as the last American troops were leaving Iraq in December 2011, that fear was being realized:

The Shiite-dominated central government has arrested prominent Sunnis on accusations that they are secret members of the long-disbanded Baath Party, which has alienated Sunni elites. Meanwhile, a Sunni revolt a few hundred miles to the north of here against the Shiite-aligned government in neighboring Syria is gathering force.
Last month, government police officers wounded two guards and detained two others in a raid on the home of a Sunni, Sheik Albo Baz, in Salahuddin Province, prompting a protest by several thousand Sunnis in Samarra, a city divided by sect.
This followed the roundup by police officers of 600 suspected Baath Party sympathizers in October; they were accused of planning a coup.

Now, Maliki is gone. But even with a new government in Baghdad, President Obama is learning that the enemy of our enemy is not our friend. The U.S. and Iran finding themselves on the same side in backing Prime Minister-designate Haider al-Abadi's efforts to roll back ISIS gains in the north and west of Iraq. Having routed the supposed moderates of the Free Syrian Army, ISIS is now expanding its challenge to the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. With friends like that, the United States doesn't need enemies. Even as the U.S. began air surveillance of Syria in advance of possible strikes against ISIS forces there, Obama's deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes had to explain:

"It is not the case that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Joining forces with Assad would essentially permanently alienate the Sunni population in both Syria and Iraq, who are necessary to dislodging ISIL."

That, in a nutshell, is a mess. To put it another way, President Bush's legacy of "taking the lid off" of the pot of simmering sectarian tensions has been a disaster, a calamity, a fiasco and, yes, a catastrophe. But 10 years after Bush first announced it, his war in Iraq certainly has not been a success.