Saddam Hussein must be laughing in his grave.

Two events over the last few weeks might have given the former Iraqi dictator a certain perverse pleasure were he around today.

The first would be the standing down of Tony Blair as Middle East envoy.

Mr Blair is expected to leave next month after he fulfils "outstanding commitments".

Just a pity that same word- outstanding- cannot be used in reference to his performance as envoy to the troubled region

No doubt Saddam Hussein would find a certain irony in the fact that Mr Blair tasked with mediating in the Middle East, leaves his post precisely at the moment when the troubles he in great part created wreak havoc in the region.

The former Iraqi strongman would find a certain sense of military retribution too in the knowledge that many of his own former Ba'athist army officers are the reason why the Islamic State (IS) group are causing such a headache for those now in power in Baghdad and Washington.

As the Iraqi army regroups in an effort to retake the key city of Ramadi from which it was recently routed, questions persist over whether they are up to the task and why at every turn IS seems to better them on the battlefield despite the jihadists being heavily outnumbered.

The importance Ramadi represents to IS was highlighted this week by the appearance in the city of one of its senior figures known as the "the blind judge". According to Ramadi residents a blind man with one hand, whose head was shrouded delivered a speech in the Anbar provincial capital's main mosque after evening prayer on Wednesday.

Iraqi security expert Hisham al-Hashimi, who closely tracks the ultra-hardline IS insurgents, identified the man as Ali Attiya al-Jubouri, also known as Abu Asim, or "the blind judge of the Islamic State".

This cleric is said to be the second highest religious authority after the group's leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and the fifth man in the organisation.

His appearance is doubtless intended as a morale booster as IS prepare to resist an offensive by Iraqi government forces and Shi'ite militiamen.

Spiritual support from the blind cleric aside, IS will have at their disposal former Ba'athist commanders whose military skill and expertise have been one of the main reasons why Iraqi government forces have been kept on the back foot.

Many of these men are battle hardened veterans who trained under Saddam and have spent the past 12 years moving in and out of Anbar province fighting both American and Shi'ite led forces.

According to some analysts, IS leader Abu Bakr al- Baghdadi, has given many of these officers free reign in tactical terms.

Not only have these officers grown up in the Sunni heartland of Anbar but their knowledge and association with the province's tribes, customs and elders enables them to make calls as to who they can bring onside and who needs to be militarily eliminated.

"Their level of intelligence collection is straight out of the Ba'ath Party playbook... very precise, very personal," was how Ahmed Ali, a senior fellow at Washington based think-tank Education for Peace in Iraq Centre, summed it up recently in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine.

All this of course is an unintended by-product of the US inspired so called de-Ba'athification programmes that saw intense efforts to remove Iraqi Ba'ath Party members from the country's new political and social structure.

Rather than neuter their influence what this in effect did was push these Ba'athist officers in the direction of Islamic insurgents linked to al-Qaeda and ultimately IS even if such groups were far from the Ba'athist's natural ideological allies.

Not content with Washington's own Ba'athist purging, the situation was compounded when in the years following then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Shi'ite government pushed yet more experienced Sunni commanders from the security forces out on to the street and into the hand of the insurgents.

All this brings us to the present situation where these highly capable officers fuse the zeal of IS fighters with their own strategic and tactical prowess to making a formidable adversary for Iraqi government forces.

Now in Iraq, IS fighters already hold most of the land where their fellow Sunni Muslim Arabs predominate. The Shi'ite-led government has responded to the loss of Ramadi in the Euphrates River valley by dispatching Iran-backed Shi'ite militia, fresh from beating IS fighters in the valley of Iraq's other great river, the Tigris

This Shi'ite militia, with Iranian funds, weapons and advisers, have themselves proven a particularly capable force on the battlefield. While on one level Washington will be happy to see anti-IS fighters capable of holding their ground the US remains worried above all that the militias' presence will exacerbate Sunni-Shia sectarian tensions.

These Shi'ite militiamen too might well drive local Sunni tribes to embrace IS, providing its locally astute former Ba'athist commanders with yet more committed Sunni fighters.

For now with the capture of Ramadi, IS fighters have reached the natural boundaries of a state to rule Sunni territory. Whether they can be deprived of this territorial trophy and pushed back, fighting in the coming days will determine.

Speaking of Ramadi and events of the last few weeks, US Defence Secretary Ash Carter said they had highlighted "the central importance of having a capable ground partner" on Iraq's battlefields. How right he is. IS certainly would appear to have learned that lesson some time ago.