From Frontpage, Don’t Blame Bush for Al Qaeda in Iraq, Blame Obama, by Daniel Greenfield:

If you believe liberal supporters of Obama and opponents of the Iraq War, regime change in Iraq disastrously destabilized the region, but regime change in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Yemen and Syria didn’t.

But the theory that turned Al Qaeda into a regional monster didn’t come from Dick Cheney. It came from Obama’s Presidential Study Directive 11 which helped pave the way for the Arab Spring. The definitive speech that opened the gates of hell wasn’t Bush’s speech on Iraq, but Obama’s Cairo speech.

That speech and the policy implemented with it led to the fall of allied governments and the rise of Islamist militias aligned with Al Qaeda. The Arab Spring was a regime change operation on a much larger scale than the Iraq War. Unlike the Iraq War, it was completely unsupervised and uncontrolled.

ISIS picked up its weapons and manpower as a consequence of the conflicts in Libya and Syria. Obama chose to fight on the side of Al Qaeda in Libya. That led to the murder of four Americans in Benghazi after Islamic militias took over major cities.

Iraq would not have fallen apart nearly as badly without the Arab Spring. Al Qaeda would have gone on killing dozens of people in car bombings, but it wouldn’t have been moving on Baghdad. It wasn’t the Iraq War that turned Al Qaeda in Iraq into a monster that could menace two nations.

It was the Arab Spring.

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