By Glen Ford
Two years ago, President Obama said he had
no strategy to combat the Islamic State. The U.S. is still not waging war
against ISIS or “jihadists of any brand in Syria.” The international iihadist
network is a U.S. imperial asset. “The general aim of the Obama
administration’s jihadist policy, now deeply in crisis, is to preserve the
Islamic State as a fighting force for deployment under another brand name,
under new top leadership.”
June 03, 2016 "Information Clearing House"
- "BAR"
- The U.S. claim that it is waging a global “war on
terror” is the biggest lie of the 21st century, a mega-fiction
on the same historical scale of evil as Hitler’s claim that he was defending
Germany from an assault by world
Jewry, or that the trans-Atlantic slave trade was a Christianizing mission. In
reality, the U.S. is the birth mother and chief
nurturer of the global jihadist network – a truth recognized by most
of the world’s people, including the 82
percent of Syrians that believe “the U.S. created the Islamic State.”
(Even 62 percent of Syrians in Islamic State-controlled regions believe this to
be true.)
Only “exceptionalism”-addled Americans and colonial-minded
Europeans give Washington’s insane cover story the slightest credibility. However, it is dangerous in the extreme for any
country to state the fact clearly: that it is the United States that has
inflicted Islamic jihadist terror on the world. Once the charade has been
abandoned; once there is no longer the international pretense that Washington
is not the Mother Of All Terror, what kind of dialogue is possible with the
crazed and desperate perpetrator? What do you do with a superpower criminal,
once you have accused him of such unspeakable evil?
President Vladimir Putin came closest last November, after
Russia unleashed a devastating bombing and missile campaign against the Islamic
State’s industrial scale infrastructure in Syria – facilities and transportation systems that the U.S.
had left virtually untouched since Obama’s phony
declaration of war against ISIS in September of 2014. The Islamic
State had operated a gigantic oil sales and delivery enterprise with impunity,
right under the eyes of American bombers. “I’ve shown our colleagues photos
taken from space and from aircraft which clearly demonstrate the scale of the
illegal trade in oil and petroleum products,” said
Putin. “The motorcade of refueling vehicles stretched for dozens of
kilometers, so that from a height of 4,000 to 5,000 meters they stretch beyond
the horizon.” Russian bombers destroyed hundreds of the oil tankers within a
week, and cruise missiles launched from Russian ships on the Caspian Sea
knocked out vital ISIS command-and-control sites.
Putin’s derision of U.S. military actions against ISIS shamed
and embarrassed Barack Obama before the world – an affront that only a fellow nuclear superpower would dare.
Yet, even the Russian president chose his words carefully, understanding that
deployment of jihadists has become central to U.S. imperial policy, and cannot
be directly confronted without risks that could be fatal to the planet. Simply
put, Washington has no substitute for the jihadists, who have been a tool of
U.S. policy since the last days of President Jimmy Carter’s administration.
That’s why, in August of 2014, President Obama admitted “We don’t have a strategy yet” to deal with ISIS. It had been thirteen years
since 9/11, but none of the U.S./Saudi-sponsored jihadists had ever “gone off
the reservation,” spitting on the hands that fed them, attacking the al-Qaida
fighters (al-Nusra) that are the real force behind so-called “moderate”
anti-Assad “rebels,” and threatening to overthrow
the Saudi and other Persian Gulf monarchies. Obama had no strategy to
combat ISIS, because the U.S. had no strategy to fight jihadists of any brand
in Syria, since all the other terrorists worked for the U.S. and its allies.
Obama is still not waging a “war” against the Islamic State –
certainly not on a superpower scale, and not nearly as vigorously as did the
far smaller Russian forces before their partial
withdrawal in March of this year.
The New
York Times last week published an article that was half apology,
half critical of the U.S. air campaign in ISIS territory. The Americans blamed
their lackadaisical air campaign on “poor intelligence,” “clumsy targeting,”
“inexperienced planners,” “staffing shortages,” “internal rivalries” and – this
from a nation that has caused the deaths of 20
to 30 million people since World War Two – “fear of causing civilian
casualties.” However, the Pentagon now claims to have hit its stride, and is
concentrating on blowing up the Islamic State’s money, targeting cash storage
sites, resulting in reductions in salaries of about 50 percent for ISIS troops.
The U.S. military says it has destroyed about 400 ISIS oil tankers. (The
Russians claim to have destroyed a total of 2,000.)
As a counterpoint, the Times quoted David
A. Deptula, a retired three-star Air Force general who planned air campaigns in
Afghanistan in 2001 and in the Persian Gulf in 1991. He called the current U.S.
air campaign against the Islamic State “symbolic” and “anemic when considered
relative to previous operations.”
The U.S. has averaged 14.5 air strikes a day in the combined Syrian
and Iraqi theaters of war, with a peak of 17 a day in April. That’s far lower
than NATO’s 50 strikes a day against Libya in 2011, 85 strikes a day
against Afghanistan in 2001, and 800 a day in Iraq in 2003. It’s way below
Russia’s 55 Syrian strikes a day – 9,000 total strikes over a five and a half
month period – by an air force a fraction of the size of the 750 U.S. aircraft
stationed in the region (not counting planes on aircraft carriers, or cruise
missiles).
The numbers tell the tale: the U.S. is not carrying on a
serious “war” against ISIS troop formations, which remain
aggressive, mobile and effective in Syria. The Pentagon’s claim that fear of
inflicting civilian casualties should be dismissed outright, coming from an
agency that has killed between 1.3
million and 2 million people since 9/11, according to a 2015 study by
Physicians for Social Responsibility.
American excuses concerning “poor intelligence,” “clumsy
targeting,” “inexperienced planners,” “staffing shortages,” and “internal
rivalries” might even contain some kernels of truth, since one would
expect gaps in gathering intelligence and targeting information on jihadists
that were considered U.S. assets, not enemies. And, there is no question that
“internal rivalries” do abound in the U.S. war machine, with CIA-sponsored
jihadists attacking Pentagon-sponsored
jihadists in Syria – the point being, the U.S. backs a wide range of jihadists
that have conflicts with one another.
The U.S. plays up the killing of Islamic State “leaders” and
the blowing up of money caches. This is consistent with what appears
to be the general aim of the Obama administration’s jihadist policy, now deeply
in crisis: to preserve the Islamic State as a fighting force for deployment
under another brand name, under new top leadership. The Islamic State went
“rogue,” by the Americans’ definition, when it began pursuing its own mission,
two years ago. Even so, the U.S. mainly targeted top ISIS leaders for elimination,
allowing the main body of fighters, estimated at around 30,000, to not only
remain intact, but to be constantly resupplied and to carry on a vast oil
business, mainly with NATO ally Turkey. (The U.S. has also been quite
publicly protecting
the al-Qaida affiliate in Syria, al-Nusra, from Russian bombing,
despite U.S. co-sponsorship of a UN resolution calling for international war
against al-Nusra.)
To a military man like retired general Deptula, this looks
like a “symbolic” and “anemic” campaign. It’s actually a desperate effort
to balance U.S. interests in preserving ISIS as a American military asset,
while also maintaining the Mother Of All Lies, that the U.S. is engaged in a
global war on terror, rather than acting as the headquarters of terror in
world. To maintain that tattered fiction, at least in the bubble of the
home country, requires the maintenance of a massive and constant psychological
operations apparatus. It’s called the corporate news media.
----
BAR executive
editor Glen Ford can be
contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
See also -
US
asks Russia to not hit Nusra Front in Syria: Moscow: Russia's foreign
minister says Washington has asked Moscow not to target the al-Qaida's branch
in Syria, the Nusra Front, for fear of hitting the moderate opposition
----
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