At Wednesday night’s presidential debate, Donald Trump repeated the claim that Hillary Clinton “gave us” the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.
Clinton did not found or “give us” ISIS.
The hard-line group’s predecessor organization was founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 1999. ISIS in its current form was founded by Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, who proclaimed himself caliph in 2014.
Don’t take it from me. Here’s an excerpt from an op-ed written by former National Security Council staffer Samantha Vinograd and Mike Morell, who served as acting director and deputy director of the CIA [emphasis added]:
So, who is most responsible for the rise of the Islamic State?
There are the obvious answers: Osama bin Laden, whose ideology spread to Iraq in the form of Ansar al-Islam two years before we removed Saddam from power; Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who founded Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the predecessor of ISIS, in the security vacuum created by the de-Baathification decision of the Coalition Provisional Authority (which was not fully coordinated within the Bush administration and was a surprise to the White House); and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the current leader of ISIS.
Outside the terrorists themselves, which is always a good place to start when parsing out blame for terrorism, those who contributed the most to the rise of the Islamic State were former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Syrian President Bashir Assad, and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are not on the list.
But maybe, just maybe, Morell and Vinograd didn’t have all the information. Writer Liz Meriwether tells a very different version of this story:
It was late one night in the White House when Obama first came up with the idea for ISIS. He hadn’t been sleeping well. Michelle told him to take some deep breaths, have some hot milk, and rewatch Princess Bride, but he’d made it all the way to the Billy Crystal scene, and he was out of milk, and Michelle had started snoring. The snoring was loud and nasty and kind of wet-sounding, like a broken boat was giving birth to another boat. He had to get out of there.
[...]
[F]inally, he decided the only person who could really help him was Hillary.
They were down in the kitchen one night eating Popsicles and staring into each other’s eyes when he asked if he could tell her a secret. Hillary laughed and said, “Is it about how you’re really a terrorist?” He looked at her and said, “Yes, actually.” She stopped eating her Popsicle. “Donald Trump was right about you?” He nodded. “About everything.”
Read the rest here.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularlyincitespolitical violence and is a