The rise of ISIS is Obama’s fault—wildly wrong.

The real blame for the rise of ISIS in Iraq falls both on Malaki and on President Bush. Even aside from the original sin of invading Iraq under false pretense, there were a number of early mistakes whose impacts are still being felt. After the initial overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s government, President Bush did not send in enough troops to stabilize the country after overthrowing the government. Notably, he fired then Chief-of-Staff or the Army General Shinseki, who when pressed, said in testimony that the United States would need to have hundreds of thousands of soldiers on the ground. Bush compounded the problem by disbanding the Iraqi government and the military through a misguided attempt at de-Baathification, leading thousands of newly-jobless Sunnis. Finally, the selection of Maliki, who had spent his exile years in Iran, as the country’s first prime minister, ensured that sectarianism would play a dominant role in Iraqi politics.

These steps all but guaranteed that ISIS and Iran would become influential in Iraq. Al-Baghdadi, the head of ISIS, was an obscure cleric who became radicalized when the United States arrested and imprisoned him. And many of his troops and leaders were former members of the Iraqi government and intelligence services.

Similarly, ISIS itself is an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which only came into Iraq to exploit the chaos that followed the U.S. invasion. And while it was driven out of Iraq temporarily in 2007 thanks to the strategic arming of the Sunni tribesmen in the Sunni Awakening, it regrouped in Syria and came back with a vengeance in 2014.