ISIS:
MADE IN WASHINGTON, RIYADH – AND TEL AVIV
There’s
more than one Dr. Frankenstein responsible for this monster
by
Justin Raimondo, August 25, 2014
The
Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is being touted
as the newest "threat" to the American homeland: hysterics
have pointed to Chicago as the locus of their interest, and we are told by
everyone from the President on down that if we don’t attack them – i.e. go back
into
Iraq (and even venture into
Syria) to root them out – they’ll soon show up on American shores.
How
is this supposed to work? Well, you see, that monster who beheaded James Foley
had a British accent, and there are reports of more
than a few Brits (and
Americans)
traveling to Syria to fight on behalf of ISIS. So these jihadi "internationalists"
could always just fly back to either Britain or the US, where another 9/11
would shortly be in the works.
Let’s
put aside the FBI
statement that, while Americans abroad may be in some unspecified degree of
danger, ISIS represents "no credible threat" to the continental
United States. If we take the ISIS-threatens-us-at-home war propaganda
seriously we have
to believe Western law enforcement agencies, with all the tools at their
command – including near total surveillance of online and telephonic
communications worldwide – have no idea what dubious characters have traveled
to Syria via, say, New York or London, and would in any case be powerless to
prevent their return.
In
short, we have to invade yet another country (or two) because our own post-9/11
security arrangements are virtually nonexistent – in spite of having spent untold
billions on building them up.
Can that really be true?
If
we step back from the hysteria
generated by the beheading
of US journalist James Foley, what’s clear is that this new bogeyman is the
creation of the United States and its allies in the region.
ISIS
didn’t just arise out of the earth like some Islamist variation on the fabled Myrmidons: they needed
money, weapons, logistics, propaganda facilities, and international connections
to reach the relatively high level of organization and lethality they seem to
have achieved in such a short period of time. Where did they get these assets?
None
of this is any secret: Saudi
Arabia, Qatar,
and the
rest of the oil-rich Gulf states have been backing them all the way. Prince
Bandar al-Sultan,
until
recently the head of the Kingdom’s intelligence agency – and still the
chief of its National Security Council – has been among their biggest backers.
Qatar and the Gulf states have also been generous
in their support for the Syrian jihadists who were too
radical for the US to openly back. Although pressure from Washington – only
recently exerted
– has reportedly forced them to cut off the aid, ISIS is now an accomplished
fact – and how can anyone say that support has entirely evaporated instead of
merely going underground?
Washington’s
responsibility for the success of ISIS is less direct, but no less damning.
The
US was in a de facto alliance with the groups that merged to form ISIS ever
since President Barack Obama declared Syria’s Bashar
al-Assad "must go" – and Washington started
funding Syrian rebel
groups whose composition and leadership kept changing. By funding the Free
Syrian Army (FSA), our "vetted"
Syrian Islamists, this administration has actively worked to defeat the only
forces capable of rooting out ISIS from its Syrian nest – Assad’s
Ba’athist government. Millions of dollars in overt aid – and who knows how
much covertly? – were pumped into the FSA. How much
of that seeped
into the coffers of ISIS when constantly forming and re-forming chameleon-like
rebel groups defected from the FSA? These defectors didn’t just go away: they joined
up with more
radical – and militarily effective – Islamist militias, some of which
undoubtedly found their way to ISIS.
How
many ISIS cadres who started out in the FSA were trained and equipped by
American "advisors" in neighboring Jordan? We’ll never know the exact
answer to that question, but the number is very likely not zero – and this
Mother Jones piece shows that, at least under the Clinton-Petraeus
duo, the "vetting" process was a joke. Furthermore, Senator Rand Paul
(R-Kentucky) may have been on to something when he confronted Hillary
with the contention that some of the arms looted from Gaddafi’s arsenals may
well have reached the Syrian rebels. There was, after all, the question of
where that mysterious "charity
ship," the Al Entisar, carrying "humanitarian aid" to
the Syrian rebels headquartered in Turkey, sailed from.
Secondly,
the open backing by the US of particular Syrian rebel groups no doubt discredited
them in the eyes of most Islamist types, driving them away from the FSA and
into the arms of ISIS. When it became clear Washington wasn’t
going to provide air support for rebel actions on the ground, these guys left
the FSA in droves – and swelled the ranks of groups that eventually coalesced
into ISIS.
Thirdly,
the one silent partner in all this has been the state of Israel. While there is
no evidence of direct Israeli backing, the public statements of some top
Israeli officials lead one to believe Tel Aviv has little interest in stopping
the ISIS threat – except, of course, to urge Washington to step deeper into the
Syrian quagmire.
In
a recent public event held at the Aspen Institute, former Israeli ambassador to
the US Michael Oren bluntly
stated that in any struggle between the Sunni jihadists and their Iranian
Shi’ite enemies, the former are the "lesser evil." They’re all
"bad guys," says
Oren, but "we always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred
the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by
Iran." Last year, Sima Shine, Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs, declared:
"The
alternative, whereby [Assad falls and] Jihadists flock to Syria, is not good.
We have no good options in Syria. But Assad remaining along with the Iranians
is worse. His ouster would exert immense pressure on Iran."
None
of this should come as much of a surprise to anyone who has been following
Israel’s machinations in the region. It has long been known that the Israelis
have been standing very close to the sidelines of the Syrian civil war,
gloating and hoping for "no outcome," as this
New York Times piece put it.
Israel’s
goal in the region has been to gin up as
much conflict
and chaos as possible, keeping its Islamic enemies divided, making it
impossible for any credible challenge to arise among its Arab neighbors – and
aiming the main blow at Tehran. As Ambassador Oren so brazenly asserted – while
paying lip service to the awfulness of ISIS and al-Qaeda – their quarrel isn’t
really with the Arabs, anyway – it’s with the Persians, whom they
fear and loathe, and whose destruction has been their number one objective
since the
days of Ariel Sharon.
Why
anyone is shocked that our Middle Eastern allies have been building up Sunni
radicals in the region is beyond me – because this has also been de facto US
policy since the Bush administration, which began recruiting American assets in
the Sunni region as the linchpin of the Iraqi "surge." This was part
and parcel of the so-called "Sunni
turn," or "redirection,"
in Seymour Hersh’s phrase, which, as I warned in
2006, would become Washington’s chosen strategy for dealing with what they
called the "Shia
crescent" – the crescent-shaped territory spanning Iran, Iraq, Syria,
and parts of Lebanon under Hezbollah’s control, which the neocons began pointing
to as the Big New Threat shortly after Saddam Hussein’s defeat.
The
pro-Sunni orientation of US policymakers wasn’t reversed with the change of
administrations: instead, it went into overdrive, especially after the
much-vaunted Arab Spring. Both Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State, and
David Petraeus, who had yet to disgrace himself and was still CIA director, lobbied
intensively for more support to the Syrian rebels. The Sunni Turn took a
fateful turn when the Three
Harpies of the Apocalypse – Hillary, Susan Rice, and now UN ambassador
Samantha Power – hectored
Obama into pursuing regime change in Libya. In this case the US and its
NATO allies acted as the Islamist
militia’s
air force while supplying them with arms on the ground and diplomatic support
internationally.
Yet
even as Libya was imploding
from the effects of its "liberation," the neocons and their
"liberal" interventionist allies in the Democratic party – and in the
highest reaches of the Obama administration – were building support for yet
another fateful "Sunni turn," this time in Syria. Caving to this
pressure, the Obama administration decided
to act on accusations of poison gas supposedly used by Assad against the rebels
to directly intervene with a bombing campaign modeled along Libyan lines. Only
a huge public
outcry stopped them.
ISIS
could never have been consolidated in the form it has now taken without the
strategic disaster of Washington’s "Sunni turn." While the US may
have reason to regret this harebrained strategy, it’s far too late for that –
and it looks to me like our "allies" in the region, including Israel,
aren’t about to turn on a dime at Obama’s command.
Last
year around this time Vladimir Putin very publicly warned
against the scenario we are seeing unfold in the Middle East:
“If
Assad goes today, a political vacuum emerges – who will fill it? Maybe those
terrorist organizations. Nobody wants this – but how can it be avoided? After
all, they are armed and aggressive.”
Now
that Putin’s prediction has come to pass, we’re too busy confronting
him in Ukraine – and dreaming
of the day we can do to him what we did to Assad – to acknowledge it. But
you can hear the gears of our policymaking machine screaming in protest as
Washington does an abrupt about-face
and starts cooperating with Assad – previously denounced
as the latest edition of Adolph Hitler – by sharing intelligence enabling the
Syrian army to target ISIS positions.
We
have always been at war with Eurasia. Or is that Eastasia? I
forget.
The lesson of all this?
What
a tangled web we weave when first we practice to intervene. And deceive – this
administration has not only been lying
to the American people about the nature of the Syrian "liberators"
we’ve been funding with their tax dollars, they also been deceiving themselves.
The Sunni Turn has turned on them, and with a vengeance.
The
ancient Greeks had a word for the particular sin committed by our political
class: they called it hubris – a mindset generated by the belief
that humankind can defy the gods and get away with it. Yet the divine pantheon
of Olympus had a way of giving these malefactors their comeuppance: they sent
the goddess Nemesis to
avenge such sacrilege – and she was relentless in her pursuit. The word nemesis
has come down to us to
mean "the inescapable agent of someone’s or something’s downfall"
– and that is as succinct an explanation of the origins of ISIS as we are
likely to come across.
Okay,
so the
anti-interventionists told us so – but now
what? What should the United States do about ISIS now that
they’ve taken over half of Syria and a third of Iraq?
The answer is:
let Assad,
the Iranians,
the Turks,
and, yes, the
Russians take care of it, since they are the states directly threatened by
the growth of the so-called Islamic State. Why should we fight their war for
them?
Contrary
to the War Party’s hebephrenic appeals to intervene, inaction on our
part is key to the destruction of ISIS. The Grand Caliph of the Islamic State would
like nothing more than to be able to portray ISIS as the valiant opponent
of a US reentry into the region. It would be a tremendous
propaganda victory for them to be able to frame their cause in this context
because the result would be a successful international recruiting drive that
would fill the ranks of the Islamic State’s army even as hundreds are killed by
US drones and missile strikes.
By
letting nature take its course and permitting Iraq’s predatory neighbors to
gobble up the charred remains of the Iraqi state we destroyed,
we can solve a problem we created in the first place, albeit not without
incurring the inevitable cost of our initial error – which was invading Iraq in
the first place.
ISIS
has made a big deal out of declaring the end of the Sykes-Picot
agreement, which divided the region between British and French interests at
the end of World War I. Having declared their "Islamic State," ISIS
claims to have destroyed the status quo by militarily – and, to much notice,
symbolically – erasing the border between Syria and Iraq. The claim is
laughable: a ragtag"army" of perhaps 17,000 fighters couldn’t have
achieved that without some significant outside help, not only from the Saudis
and the Qataris but, decisively, from Washington.
We
abolished Sykes-Picot by effectively putting an
end to Iraqi statehood. The process was completed when Washington
subsequently allied with Iraq’s Sunni
tribesmen in a vain hope to avoid the break up of Iraq and drive Al Qaeda
out of the country. What happened, instead, was that the Sunni tribesmen’s
brothers across the by-then-virtually-nonexistent border were drawn into the
Iraqi arena, where they took
up the fight against Baghdad – and their American backers.
ISIS
didn’t blast Sykes-Picot to pieces: we did, and now we must live with the
consequences. Nemesis has taken her pound of flesh.
The
best course now is to learn the lesson every child has to absorb before he can
attain adulthood in more than merely a physical sense: actions have
consequences. Applied to the Middle East, this lesson can only have one
meaning: stay out and keep out.
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More by Justin Raimondo
Ferguson:
Ten Days That Shook the Country – August 19th, 2014
MORE ON THE SUBJECT
Destroy All
Churches In The Arabian Peninsula – Saudi Grand Mufti - By RT.com (26/8/14)- By RT.com (26/8/14)
http://futurefastforward.com/financial-analysis/9945-destroy-all-churches-in-the-arabian-peninsula--saudi-grand-mufti-by-rtcom-26814.html
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El califato contra todos los demás. By Immanuel
Wallerstein. Lunes 25 de Ag de 2014. http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=188818. Del original en La Jornada: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2014/08/23/index.php?section=opinion&article=022a1mun
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US
Created ISIS & Use Its Staged-Cruelty as PRETEXT for the “Syria
Intervention” By Toni Cartalucci . Saturday, August 23, 2014
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The
History Of The Islamic State - By Walead Farwana (26/8/14) By Walead Farwana. Tuesday, 26 August 2014
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Why
is the U.S. Backing the Most Barbaric, Violent, Extreme Muslims … And
Overthrowing Moderates?
By Washington's Blog, August 26, 2014
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The
Engineered Destruction & Political Fragmentation of Iraq
Towards the Creation of a US Sponsored Islamist Caliphate. The Islamic State
of Iraq and al-Sham: An instrument of the Western Military Alliance By Prof Michel Chossudovsky. Global
Research, August 09, 2014
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