Or Are They Doing It On Purpose?
Who is the greatest recruiter for anti-American terrorists around the world? If you think about it a bit it’s an easy question to answer. Who treats the entire world as a free-fire zone? Who bombs weddings and ambulances? Who flies attack drones over people’s heads, killing and threatening, obliging them to live in constant fear? Who fills their towns and fields with delayed-action cluster bombs? Who treats these same people’s valuable natural resources as their own? Who surrounds their countries with military bases and missiles? Who changes their sovereign governments on a whim? Who creates false-flag operations and proxy wars against any country they fancy destabilizing? Who has the greatest military budget in the world (more than at least the next seven countries’ defense spending) to enforce this multi-pronged injustice? The evidence for all this wretchedness is in the public domain. They can’t deny it.
What does the United States expect to gain with all this death and destruction? How do they try to cover it up? How do they try to justify it?
We are privy to very little of the US government thinking, Nor can we trust the news. Insofar as the government and the media form part of the same military-industrial-congressional team, the power elite doesn’t even have to persuade them to play ball. They’re already on board. But we are obliged to form our opinions based on what we see, what we can learn from whistleblowers, what we can read in books by dissenters and the alternative media. The Internet is an incredible asset in this endeavor, though it does require some navigation skills and solid criteria for separating the wheat from the chaff, and there is a lot of both.
What we can see clearly is that the United States has been functioning in permanent-war mode since at least as far back as the Korean War. Some 40,000 American soldiers died in that pointless war, which ended in the same place it started, the 38th parallel. The rationale behind that empty adventure? There were two, actually, anti-communism and, more importantly, world domination. In the beginning, the American authorities pussyfooted around this self-evident fact, using euphemisms, red herrings, and flashy distractions. Why has anti-communism been used so often to put patches on the worst transgressions of American imperialism? Could it be that it’s a message that Americans are predisposed to believe, thanks to decades of having their brains laundered?
The Greatest Irony in the “War on Terror”
Not only has the United States fomented terrorism indirectly by their aggressive lack of respect for other people and countries around the world, but they have also played important roles in the creation of the forerunners of some of the most deadly Islamic terrorist groups. It was a CIA program called Operation Cyclone that channeled funds through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency to the Afghan mujahideen. (Does “Osama bin Laden” sound familiar?) After the fall of the Soviet Union the mujahideen, also known in the US as “Afghan freedom fighters,” morphed–with some strategic and ideological twists–into the Taliban.
The CIA was not the only friend of the mujahideen. An alleged meeting took place in the summer of 1988 among bin Laden; the leaders of Egyptian Islamic Jihad; and Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, the father of global jihad. They agreed to use bin Laden’s money with the expertise of the Islamic Jihad organization and take up the jihadist cause elsewhere after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan. The result was al-Qaeda. (Source: Wikipedia)
Then There Was ISIS
ISIS is another offshoot of the American interventions in Iraq and Syria. On 8 April 2013, al-Baghdadi, the present leader of ISIS, released an audio statement in which he announced that the al-Nusra Front had been established, financed, and supported by ISIL and that the two groups were merging under the name Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (referring to Syria).
According to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), as of January, 2018, 59 districts, approximately 14.5 percent of that charming Himalayan country where people weave rugs and chase kites, remained under the Taliban control. (Source: al-Jazeera.com) ISIL holds another piece of the country. As soon as the Americans have consummated President Trump’s recently-announced withdrawal from Afghanistan, ISIS and the Taliban will fight over the scraps. Even more blood on the streets of Kabul. Never has the United States taken so long to lose a war.
According to an article posted by The Intercept on January 29, 2018:
Had it not been for Bush’s catastrophic decision to invade and occupy Iraq in 2003, in defiance of international law, the world’s most feared terrorist group would not exist today. ISIS is blowback.
In December, 2018, in one of his many victory pronouncements, President Donald Trump declared the Islamic State to have been destroyed and announced that U.S. troops would immediately leave Syria. But even after Trump declared victory, the war against ISIS/ISIL continued. Today their cells remain scattered throughout Syria and Iraq waging a deadly insurgency. And thousands of American and European troops remain in parts of Syria controlled by the SDF hunting down those cells… (Source: The Daily Beast.com)
American Follies in Syria, Iraq and Libya
The American interventions in Syria consisted of two stages with two different objectives. The first, at the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, the Obama Administration considered various options for unseating Syrian President Bashar al- Assad. By 2013, at the direction of U.S. President Barack Obama, the CIA was put in charge of Timber Sycamore, a $1 billion covert program to arm and train anti-Assad rebels (whom they refer to as “the Syrian opposition”) which was decimated by Russian bombing and canceled in mid-2017 by the Trump administration. Meanwhile, the US had managed to put together an international coalition whose mission was to combat ISIL in Syria. In 2015, US officials said that Timber Sycamore had become one the agency’s largest covert operations, with a budget approaching $1 billion a year. As of August 2017, the coalition had flown 168,000 sorties in both Syria and Iraq, with a roughly 45/55 split between the two, respectively. (Source: Wikipedia)
In an article published in the Washington Post on February 6, 2019, Vali Nasr, the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, wrote:
On Tuesday night, President Trump told the American people that the Islamic State has been defeated — that the only thing left is “remnants,” which our allies will destroy. That is less a statement of fact than an expression of his eagerness to go down in history as the president who ended America’s military involvement in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
What continues to drive the progress of Islamic insurgent movements across the Middle East? For one thing, the overthrow of secular Arab governments in Syria and Libya led to the rise of fundamentalist militias. And huge numbers of civilian deaths at the hands of aerial drone assaults have made ordinary citizens vengeful towards the west and caused them to embrace jihadi martyrdom.
Isolationist sanctions throughout the 1990s and 2000s led to the segregation of many Muslim countries from the rest of the world. Combining that segregation with regional poverty and strong ideological propaganda from Islamist organizations, it’s not hard to understand why groups like ISIS, Boko Haram, and the Taliban have spread so rapidly across the region. (Source: FEE.org)
What’s to Be Done?
One can make a convincing case that there is nothing to be done as long as a large part of the Muslim world, including both Sunnis and Shiites, feels it is being brutally accosted and exploited by the United States, its allies and client states. This stalemate is immensely complicated by oil and pipeline considerations.–“What’s our oil doing under their sand?”–There are other “business” issues in play, as well, such as the American need to feed their voracious permanent-war machine and to support their sinister allies in the region, e.g. Israel and Saudi Arabia. In all, it’s amply clear that the War on Terror is not the answer. The issues are far too complicated and intertwined for martial solutions. It seems that a viable end to the problem of Muslim terrorism in the Middle East and around the world may ultimately have to wait for global developments. That said, be careful what you wish for.
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Trump and All the Rest 