A Perspective on the Rise of ISIS
By Ruben Rosenberg Colorni | NEWS JUNKIE POST | March 10, 2015
One of the most popular pieces of “information” that is being circulated on the internet and newspapers in my own country of birth, Italy, is an announcement of the imminent arrival of ISIS fighters on our shores. According to United States intelligence agencies, which are not exactly impartial or neutral sources, throngs of Islamic terrorists are about to be shipped to our boot-shaped Mediterranean country from Libya. Panic. Fear. Insecurity. These are the words that are being thrown around like stale bread to the birds. Few column inches in the Italian national press, and elsewhere for that matter, have been devoted to any analysis of the validity of the threats or their inherent origins. Alas, this is a well-known technique: capitalize on those points that suit the needs of international interests and national politicians, and omit the information that really matters. It’s a dirty trick that causes entire populations to be plagued by short-term memory loss.
Sponsoring proxy armies
ISIS was founded in 1999 by a shadowy figure, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He has been reported killed and resurrected numerous times, as has been its successor. Let us not dwell on the first 12 years of ISIS, when it was a spinoff of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Instead, let us fast forward to 2011, when the NATO powers, led by France and the UK, engaged in an aerial offensive against Libya to topple Gaddafi and replace him with a pro-West government. This approach has been standard geopolitical operating procedure for the US and its Western-European allies for decades in places such as Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, Brazil, Vietnam, Iran, Yemen, Afghanistan, Chile and many more, where despotic regimes have been installed after Western-engineered coups. Often, the major powers do not get directly involved or send their own troops to die on foreign lands, because this would have severe repercussions on the standing of politicians in the public opinion. The praxis is to sponsor, fund and arm ruthless bands of “rebels” to fight against an established government. These groups are first funded to serve geopolitical interests, and when they are unwilling to do so any longer, they become an excuse to invade. Once in power, in fact, these groups tend to believe that they can stand on their own two feet without the support of their previous benefactors and often turn against them. Power beckons, and history indeed repeats itself. This is precisely the case with ISIS.
Libya: using the pretext of the Arab Spring
The meteoric rise of ISIS to power is not a coincidence or byproduct of innocent geopolitical mistakes. ISIS was initially created, for the sake of foreign-policy interests, to remove uncooperative governments like those in Libya, and then Syria which arguably became the pivotal point for the rise of ISIS. Until 2011 Libya was largely secular, sovereign, and fairly prosperous; now this country lies in ruins and is portrayed as having been invaded by a horde of foreign “Islamists”. The reality, however, is that France, Italy, the UK, and the US sponsored a small group of discontents to fight Gaddafi in 2011. They called themselves the Shabab, and they later constituted the “Libyan Transitional Council” which is now in government. The Libyan rebels were portrayed to the Western public as being “freedom fighters” who sought greater government accountability and increased liberties. In reality, it almost immediately became apparent that Islamic extremists had taken the leadership of the movement; the western powers were certainly aware of this.
Numerous reports warned that many of the fighters were affiliated with Al-Qaeda, another organization originally made powerful by the US to fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. From the start, the global left had denounced these pseudo-revolutionaries as being violent as well as extreme in their religious zeal: in short, bad news for everybody. Nobody heeded their calls. The demonization of Gaddafi continued in the mainstream Western media, and the glorification and support for the rebels grew to the point when NATO’s governments felt secure that their public would support bombing Libya. So they did. Let us also remember that the Libyan army was sufficiently well trained and disciplined to have almost neutralized the opposition, and it would have done so if NATO had not intervened. In short, if Gaddafi’s government existed today, ISIS might not.
It was not made widely public that many of Libya’s rebels were not Libyans but Iraqis from Al-Qaeda in Iraq. This organization cleverly re-branded itself to confuse the public, and it became ISIS. Abdel Hakim-Belhadj was the commander of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group that helped NATO to depose Gaddafi. It is almost unknown that Hakim-Belhadj was in fact an al-Qaeda lieutenant, turned double agent after being in the care of the CIA, and released back into operation. “The US was fully aware of and facilitating the delivery of weapons to the Al Qaeda-dominated rebel militias throughout the 2011 rebellion”, as stated by The Citizen’s Commission on Benghazi’s interim report. Far from the US being able to claim ignorance, this program was run and administered by Hillary Clinton, then the Secretary of State.
With NATO’s air support, the Libyan rebels captured Gaddafi (he was murdered by the rebels in a horror show that the mainstream media did not hesitate to broadcast). With Gaddafi gone, Hakim-Belhadj was rewarded by NATO and Washington with the title of Governor of Tripoli. With this position, he ensured the recruitment of Jihadists into Libya and the smuggling of hundreds of them to Syria through Turkey. This would create the backbone of what would eventually, and ironically, be named the “Free Syrian Army”. There is no equivocation on the fact that the very same members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group were flying the Al-Qaeda and ISIS flags following the murder of Gaddafi. This happened “before and during the time they were shipped on to fight in Syria against Bashar al Assad’s government forces – on behalf of those very same NATO-allied agencies” as reported by the 21st Century Wire.
Syria: toppling Assad
One year later, the Free Syrian Army arguably brought us to the brink of World War III by using chemical weapons against Syrian civilians, and they attempted to frame Assad for it. They are the same fighters who were using weapons shipped by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with logistic support from the CIA operating in Jordan, and they were also funded by the Saudis, Qataris and Americans. All of this, despite their benefactors’ knowledge that the weapons were falling in the hands of the Jihadists rather than the secular opposition. With help from the CIA, these governments and that of Turkey sharply increased their support for the Syrian rebels throughout 2013, expanding exponentially an airlift of arms and equipment for the uprising against Assad.
With the Jihadization of Damascus having failed, ISIS was born, led by the infamous al-Baghdadi, who was being sponsored just a few months before by the US to fight against Assad. This was achieved through missions coordinated by the likes of John McCain, who to this day maintains that he “knows these people very well” and they “are not terrorists”. The cognitive dissonance does not register in the minds of the majority of the western public. It is not understood that the people who are being paid by the US and NATO in Syria to get rid of Assad are the same people that we must supposedly fight in Libya. Politicians lie, the media parrots, and the populace believes. The infamous “Caliph” al-Baghdadi is now the new bogeyman, the new Bin Laden, the new scapegoat upon which the neocons of the world can capitalize. With Jeb Bush poised to be the leading US Republican candidate for the presidency, the parallels with his brother George W. Bush and his crusade against Al-Qaeda to justify the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are simply too sinister to ignore. It hardly matters whether one believes that ISIS is under direct control of the US or not. The point is that ISIS has achieved its primary role: that of creating an atmosphere of fear that can be exploited and manipulated to justify military and political interventions abroad.
We have to wonder about the goal of ISIS in bombing in Libya. If ISIS really wants to attack Rome, it can easily do so with home-grown members rather than risk the laborious task of smuggling fighters from Libya. Could it be to influence the US elections in favor of a neoconservative? Or to pretend to be fighting ISIS while bombing the pro-Gaddafi militias that have re-taken most of the southern regions of Libya? Whatever the reason, it appears that the support from the US to the supposed enemies of the US is allegedly not waning. The Pentagon is set to send 1,000 troops to aid the Syrian rebels, and in June 2014 Obama requested $500 million from the US Congress to train and arm the group that potentially includes ISIS combatants. This comes amidst claims from an alleged Islamic State commander in Pakistan that the US is directly funding ISIS fighters on the ground there, and from the Iraqi parliament that their army has downed two British military planes that were carrying weapons and explosives to be allegedly air-dropped on ISIS-controlled areas. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and the NATO powers are not the only ones who have at least indirectly supported ISIS; Israel too has also thrown its lot with these unsavory characters. For 18 months the Israeli “Defense” Forces provided medical and technical help to opposition groups fighting inside Syria, as observed by the UN peacekeeping missions in the Golan Heights.
If a hand strikes you, do you blame the hand that hit you or the mind that commanded it? The situation with ISIS is similar, and so the real question to be asked is the following: Who is the greatest enemy to our security here, ISIS or the US? For those willing to see, the truth is in plain sight.
Libya, ISIS and the Unaffordable Luxury of Hindsight
By AHMAD BARQAWI | CounterPunch | March 9, 2015
Who are you?” the late Muammar Gaddafi once rhetorically asked in a famous speech of his towards the end of his reign; (rightly) questioning the legitimacy of those seeking to over-throw his government at the time, calling them extremists, foreign agents, rats and drug-addicts. He was laughed at, unfairly caricatured, ridiculed and incessantly demonized; a distasteful parody video poking fun at the late Libyan leader even went viral on social media; evidently the maker of the video, an Israeli, thought the Libyan colloquial Arabic word “Zenga” (which means an Alleyway) sounded funny enough that he extracted it from one of Gaddafi’s speeches, looped it on top of a hip-hop backing track and voila… he got himself a hit video which was widely (and shamefully) circulated with a “revolutionary” zeal in the Arab world. We shared, we laughed, he died.
But the bloody joke is on all of us; Gaddafi knew what he was talking about; right from the get-go, he accused the so-called Libyan rebels of being influenced by Al-Qaeda ideology and Ben Laden’s school of thought; no one had taken his word for it of course, not even a little bit. I mean why should we have? After all, wasn’t he a vile, sex-centric dictator hell-bent on massacring half of the Libyan population while subjecting the other half to manic raping sprees with the aid of his trusted army of Viagra-gobbling, sub-Saharan mercenaries? At least that’s what we got from the visual cancer that is Al Jazeera channel and its even more acrid Saudi counterpart Al-Arabiya in their heavily skewed coverage of NATO’s vicious conquest of Libya. Plus Gaddafi did dress funny; why would anyone trust a haggard, weird-looking despot dressed in colorful rags when you have well-groomed Zionists like Bernard Henry Levy, John McCain and Hillary Clinton at your side, smiling and flashing the victory sign in group photo-ops, right?
Gaddafi called them drug-addicted, Islamic fundamentalists; we know them as ISIS… it doesn’t seem much of a joke now, does it? And ISIS is what had been in store for us all along; the “revolutionary” lynching and sodomization of Muammar Gaddafi amid manic chants of “Allahu Akbar”, lauded by many at the time as some sort of a warped triumph of the good of popular will (read: NATO-sponsored mob rule) over the evil of dictatorship (sovereign state), was nothing but a gory precursor for the future of the country and the region; mass lynching of entire populations in Libya, Syria and Iraq and the breakup of key Arab states into feuding mini-statelets. The gruesome video of Colonel Gaddafi’s murder, which puts to shame the majority of ISIS videos in terms of unhinged brutality and gore, did not invoke the merest of condemnations back then, on the contrary; everyone seemed perfectly fine with the grotesque end of the Libyan “tyrant”… except that it was only the beginning of a new and unprecedented reign of terror courtesy of NATO’s foot-soldiers and GCC-backed Islamic insurgents.
The rapid proliferation of trigger-happy terrorist groups and Jihadi factions drenched in petrodollars in Libya was not some sort of an intelligence failure on the part of western governments or a mere by-product of the power vacuum left by a slain Gaddafi; it was a deliberate, calculated policy sought after and implemented by NATO and its allies in the Gulf under the cringe-inducing moniker “Friends of Libya” (currently known as the International Coalition against ISIS) to turn the north-African country into the world’s largest ungovernable dumpster of weapons, al-Qaida militants and illegal oil trading.
So it is safe to say that UNSC resolution 1973, which practically gave free rein for NATO to bomb Libya into smithereens, has finally borne fruit… and it’s rotten to its nucleus, you can call the latest gruesome murder of 21 Egyptian fishermen and workers by the Libyan branch of the Islamic State exhibit “A”, not to mention of course the myriad of daily killings, bombings and mini-civil wars that are now dotting the entire country which, ever since the West engineered its coup-d’etat against the Gaddafi government, have become synonymous with the bleak landscape of lawlessness and death that is “Libya” today. And the gift of NATO liberation is sure to keep on giving for years of instability and chaos to come.
In an interview with the western media misinformation collective that is the BBC, ABC and the Sunday Times in February 2011; the late Muammar Gaddafi told his condescending interviewers; “have you seen the Al Qaeda operatives? Have you heard all these Jihadi broadcasts? It is Al Qaeda that is controlling the cities of Al Baida and Darnah, former Guantanamo inmates and extremists unleashed by America to terrorize the Libyan people…”. Darnah is now the main stronghold for ISIS in Libya.
In a bizarre coincidence (or some sort of cosmic irony); the date on which ISIS chose to release its video of the beheading of Egyptian captives, thereby officially declaring its presence in the war-torn country with three oil fields under its control, (appropriately) marked the 4th anniversary of the start of the so-called Libyan revolution on February 15th, 2011; a more apt “tribute” to commemorate the Western instigated regime-change debacle in Libya could not have been made.
But even long before ISIS became the buzzword, the acrid nature of a “revolutionary” Libya showed in full, sickening splendor almost instantly right after the old regime fell, everything the late Gaddafi was falsely accused of doing was literally perfected to a chilling degree by the so-called rebels; massacres, indiscriminate shelling of residential areas, car-bombings, mass arrests, torture, theft of oil and national resources… the whole lot. In 2013; two British pro-Palestine activists, on their way to Gaza with an aid convoy, got to experience first-hand the rotten fruits of the Libyan chapter of the so-called Arab Spring when they were abducted by a motely crew of Libyan revolutionaries-turned-warlords in the city of Benghazi and gang raped in front of their father.
Proponents of Humanitarian Interventions must be patting themselves on the back these days; now that Libya has completed its democratic makeover from a country with the highest standard of living in Africa under Gaddafi’s rule into a textbook definition of a failed state; a godless wasteland of religious fanaticism, internal bloodletting and wholesale head-chopping, in fact Libya became so “democratic” that there are now two parliaments and two (warring) governments; each with its own (criminal) army and supported with money and caches of weapons from competing foreign powers, not to mention the myriad of secessionist movements and militias which the illegal coup against Gaddafi has spawned all over the country while free health care, education and electricity, which the Libyans took for granted under Gaddafi’s regime, are all now but relics of the past; that’s the “Odyssey Dawn” the Libyans were promised; a sanitized version of Iraq sans the public outrage, neatly re-packaged in a “responsibility to protect” caveat and delivered via aerial bombing campaigns where even the West’s overzealous Gulf Co-conspirators Club (GCC), driven by nothing beyond petty personal vendettas against Gaddafi, got to test the lethality of its rusted, American-made military aircrafts alongside NATO on the people of Tripoli and Sirte.
This is what Gaddafi had predicted right from the get-go and then some; the ephemeral euphoria of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions was just too potent and too exhilarating for us to read the fine print; was it a conspiracy or a true revolutionary spirit gone awry? It doesn’t really matter now that ISIS has become the true legacy of Tahrir Square; “they will turn Libya into another Afghanistan, another Somalia, another Iraq… your women won’t be allowed out, they will transform Libya into an Islamic Emirate and America will bomb the country under the pretext of fighting terrorism”, the late Libyan leader had said in a televised speech on February 22nd, 2011, and more prophetic words were never spoken.
America’s “clean war” Libyan prototype proved to be such a success that it was replicated with a wanton abandon in Syria; Paul Bremer’s “Blackwater” death squads of old, which reigned terror all over Iraq, are back… with an Islamic twist; bearded, clad in black and explosives from head to toe and mounting convoys of Toyota Land Cruiser trucks with an ever-expanding, seemingly borderless Islamic Caliphate (that somehow leaves the Zionist regime unencumbered in its occupation of Palestine) set in their sights.
Everyday the Arab World is awakened to a new-videotaped atrocity; steeped in gore and maniacal terror courtesy of ISIS (or IS or ISIL), and countless of other “youtubeless”, albeit more heinous crimes courtesy of America’s very own ever-grinding, one-sided drone warfare; the entire region seesaws between machete beheadings and hellfire missile incinerations. Death from above… as well as below; the War on Terror rears its ugly head once again; to bring in line those nasty terrorists that the West itself funded and sponsored in the name of democracy to destabilize “unsavory” regimes; an unrelenting Groundhog Day that starts with the Responsibility to Protect and ends with the War on Terror, with thousands of innocent lives, typically chalked up to collateral damage, crushed in the process.
This is exactly what Gaddafi foresaw; a Libya mired in utter chaos, civil conflict and western diktats; a breeding ground for Jihadi fundamentalism and extremists… too bad we just laughed his warnings off to an Israeli-made parody tune.
Ahmad Barqawi, freelance columnist and writer.
The Destabilization Doctrine: ISIS, Proxies and Patsies
By Brandon Martinez | Non-Aligned Media | February 22, 2015
“Islam and the West at War,” reads a recent New York Times headline.
It would certainly seem that way if one were to take at face value the putrid assertions of Western governments that are not particularly known for their honesty or integrity. But astute observers of history and geopolitics can spot a deception when they see one, and the latest theatrical performances being marketed to the masses as real, organic occurrences remind one of a Monty Python sketch.
In the past week we have witnessed a number of expedient events that were designed to legitimize the West’s imperialist foreign policies in the minds of the masses. On Feb. 15 the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) released another highly choreographed and visually striking video allegedly depicting the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians. Shortly following the video’s release, the Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sissi launched air strikes against ISIS targets in Libya where the execution video was allegedly filmed, although experts are now saying that the production was faked.
ISIS’s continued provocations in the form of carefully crafted, emotionally impactful execution videos (real or faked), such as the recent immolation of a caged Jordanian pilot, cannot possibly be the work of rational actors seeking a military victory in any capacity. The videos only ever work to ISIS’s disadvantage, solidifying the resolve of their current ‘coalition’ opponents as well as creating new enemies upon every release.
Sixty-two countries and groups are presently fighting in the dubious ‘coalition’ against ISIS, most of which have modern militaries with advanced air and ground forces. Why in the world does ISIS continue to entice more countries to join the already over-crowded alliance against them? Why a group that purports to want to establish a ‘state’ which will ostensibly govern millions of people is deliberately seeking more and more enemies and a constant state of war with them beggars belief.
Does ISIS think it can do battle with the whole planet and achieve victory, culminating in world domination? How do people who harbor such ridiculous delusions have the wherewithal and resources at their disposal to organize and recruit thousands of fighters from around the world to an utterly ludicrous cause doomed to sheer failure? How can this be anything but a contrived prank of an operation?
The only logical conclusion that many analysts have come to is that ISIS does not represent a grassroots, organic movement, but rather operates entirely as a cat’s paw of Western foreign policy in the Middle East and North Africa, which is concurrently under the domination of Israel. ISIS’s actions expressly benefit Muslims least of all and Israel/the West most of all, the extent of which increases with every new atrocity and outrage ISIS inflicts upon innocents in Iraq and Syria that gets endless play in Western media. In fact, the Western media’s obsession with ISIS is in and of itself an effective form of PR for the group. Western media outlets are consciously performing an unqualified service for ISIS’s recruiting efforts by affording the terrorist group ‘premium level branding’ that will attract criminally-inclined degenerates, Wahhabist religious zealots and disaffected, suicidal lowlifes from around the world to join a cause predestined to abject failure.
This senile ‘ISIS vs. The World’ spectacle is little more than a melodramatic screenplay engineered in a boardroom by professional propagandists and marketing aficionados. It resembles a classic ‘problem, reaction, solution’ dialectic of deceit. Who in their right mind believes the rancid mythology surrounding this orchestrated ‘good vs. evil’ Hollywood blockbuster?
Proxy Warriors: Cannon Fodder for the Empire
The West is not sincerely at odds with ISIS nor is it seeking to “degrade and destroy” the group, as US President Barrack Obama claims. One piece of information that undermines this good cop/bad cop puppet show is the West’s clandestine support of ISIS beginning with the artificial uprising in Libya. In 2011, the West openly sought to depose Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi, and did so by backing ISIS and al-Qaeda-affiliated rebel groups to do it. The maniac rebels who sodomized and then murdered Gaddafi in the street like a dog were hailed as ‘freedom fighters’ by the repellant thugs in Washington, Paris and London, and were fully aided and abetted with NATO air strikes against Gaddafi’s forces. The rebel victory in Libya was only made possible through Western military intervention. “We came, we saw, he died,” said Obama’s former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in reference to the assassination of Gaddafi by Washington’s foot soldiers, cackling like a witch at the demise of the Libyan potentate.
In a Nov. 19, 2014, article for Global Research, analyst Tony Cartalucci noted that the “so-called ‘rebels’ NATO had backed [in Libya] were revealed to be terrorists led by Al Qaeda factions including the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).” During the manufactured ‘uprising’ Gaddafi routinely declared in public speeches that al-Qaeda was leading the way. “Gaddafi blames uprising on al-Qaeda,” read one Al Jazeera headline from February 2011. A March 2011 Guardian report spoke of how “hundreds of convicted members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an al-Qaida affiliate, have been freed and pardoned” under a “reform and repent” program headed by Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam. The same article acknowledged that the LIFG, which was established in Afghanistan in the 1990s, “has assassinated dozens of Libyan soldiers and policemen” since its founding and that Britain’s MI6 had previously supported the group. That group formed the backbone of the anti-Gaddafi insurgency, and received all manner of support from the West and allied Gulf sheikhdoms.
In the aforesaid Global Research article, Cartalucci outlines how the synthetic insurrection in Libya was spearheaded by al-Qaeda franchises that were later subsumed into ISIS. A February 2015 CNN report entitled “ISIS finds support in Libya” revealed that since the fall of Gaddafi, ISIS has established a large and menacing presence throughout the North African country. “The black flag of ISIS flies over government buildings,” according to CNN’s reportage. “Police cars carry the group’s insignia. The local football stadium is used for public executions.” It adds that, “Fighters loyal to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria are now in complete control of the city of Derna, population of about 100,000, not far from the Egyptian border and just about 200 miles from the southern shores of the European Union.”
NATO effectively carpet-bombed Libya into rubble, paving a path of blood for ISIS and al-Qaeda death squads to seize power and institute their medieval ideology. That’s the reward for falling afoul of ‘the West’ and whatever drives it. Cartalucci further proved in another report entitled “Libyan Terrorists Are Invading Syria” that as soon as Gaddafi’s regime collapsed and rebel gangs emerged triumphant, thousands of battle-hardened and fanatical jihadist fighters took their Western training and weapons over to Syria to fight Bashar al-Assad in accordance with Washington’s ‘bait and switch’ scheme. Apparently, these hired mercenaries behave a lot like wild dogs chasing a piece of raw meat.
An absolutely identical scenario unfolded in Syria where Washington and its regional puppets led by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey have been subsidizing the Islamist guerrillas from the outset. “Do you know of any major Arab ally of the US that embraces ISIL?” US Senator Lindsey Graham facetiously asked General Martin Dempsey at a Senate Armed Services Committee in 2014. To Graham’s surprise, Dempsey responded: “I know major Arab allies who fund them.” US Vice President Joe Biden himself confirmed this in an October 2014 speech wherein he told students at Harvard University that America’s Gulf allies – the Saudis and Qataris especially – were backing ISIS and Jahbat al-Nusra (an al-Qaeda affiliate) with substantive sums of arms and funds. A former US General, Thomas McInerney, told Fox News that the US government helped “build ISIS” by “backing some of the wrong people” and by facilitating weapons to al-Qaeda-linked Libyan rebels which ended up in the hands of ISIS militants in Syria. Retired US General and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, Wesley Clark, repeated this view in a February 2015 interview with CNN, saying that “ISIS got started through funding from our friends and allies [in the Gulf]” who sought to use religious fanatics to assail the Shia alliance of Syria, Iran and Hezbollah. “It’s like a Frankenstein,” he concluded.
A June 17, 2014, World Net Daily report highlights how Americans trained Syrian rebels who later joined ISIS in a secret base located in Jordan. Jordanian officials told WND’s Aaron Klein that “dozens of future ISIS members were trained [in a US run training facility in Jordan] at the time as part of covert aid to the insurgents targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.” Reports in Der Spiegel, the Guardian, Reuters and other mainstream outlets all confirmed that the US, Britain, France and their regional allies were training militants in secret bases in Jordan and Turkey as part of the West’s proxy war against the Assad regime.
The West has attempted to cover-up its support of ISIS and al-Qaeda elements by running a ‘two degrees of separation’ gambit. Washington claims to only provide support to ‘moderate, vetted’ rebel groupings, namely the Free Syrian Army (FSA), but this amounts to a calculated ruse to confound the credulous masses. FSA is the nom de gerre of a loose collection of rebel bandits who don’t operate under a central command framework or authority, rather acting independently or under the umbrella of other factions. Aron Lund, an expert on Syrian rebel groups, discerned in a March 2013 article titled “The Free Syrian Army Doesn’t Exist” that from the very beginning the FSA has been nothing more than a fictional branding operation.
During the initial stages of the insurgency, any militant faction in Syria looking for Western military aid called itself FSA and then took the weapons they received from the West straight to ISIS and Jahbat al-Nusra. The FSA functions as a conduit between Western governments and the Takfiri terrorists fighting Assad as well as an arms distribution network for them. In the aforesaid article, Lund explains that the FSA’s General Staff was set up in Turkey in 2012 “as a flag to rally the Western/Gulf-backed factions around, and probably also a funding channel and an arms distribution network, rather than as an actual command hierarchy.” Thousands of militants fighting under the FSA rubric have since joined or pledged allegiance to ISIS and al-Nusra.
Western governments know this and are apparently totally comfortable with it, revealing their bare complicity and collaboration with the Takfiri insurgents hell-bent on beheading their way to power in Syria and Iraq.
The Counterfeit Campaign
This inevitably creates confusion for people not studied in imperial geopolitics, especially after the West and its Gulf allies ‘declared war’ on ISIS in late 2014. The counterfeit campaign cannot be seen as anything other than a convenient, disingenuous volte-face maneuver designed to whitewash all of the aforementioned facts about the West’s dirty hands behind ISIS. Average plebs who receive all of their information from TV news channels won’t know about the West’s clandestine activities that effectively spawned ISIS and facilitated its rise to prominence in Iraq, Syria and Libya, so they will naturally take the West’s phony confrontation with ISIS at face value.
The West’s crusade to “degrade and destroy” ISIS is a preposterous hoax. In fact, evidence suggests that the West continues to covertly support ISIS with airdrops of weapons and supplies, whilst concurrently ‘bombing’ them in sketchy and deliberately ineffective air strikes.
Iran’s President Hassan Rohani called the US-led anti-ISIS coalition ‘a joke’ considering how many of its participants significantly helped bolster the terrorist group since its inception. In a January 2015 report, Iran’s Fars News Agency quotes a number of Iranian generals and Iraqi MPs who believe that the US is continuing to surreptitiously support ISIS with airdrops of weapons caches and other supplies. General Mohammad Reza Naqdi, a commander of Iran’s Basij (volunteer) Force, said that the US embassy in Baghdad is the “command center” for ISIS in the country. “The US directly supports the ISIL in Iraq and the US planes drop the needed aids and weapons for ISIL,” General Naqdi told a group of Basij forces in Tehran. Fars News cited Majid al-Gharawia, an Iraqi Parliamentary Security and Defense Commission MP, who said that the US are supplying ISIS with weapons and ammunition in a number of Iraqi jurisdictions.
An Iraqi security commission spoke of unidentified aircraft making drops to ISIS militants in Tikrit. Another senior Iraqi lawmaker, Nahlah al-Hababi, echoed these claims about US planes and other unidentified aircraft making deliveries to ISIS. She opined that, “The international coalition is not serious about air strikes on ISIL terrorists and is even seeking to take out the popular Basij (voluntary) forces from the battlefield against the Takfiris so that the problem with ISIL remains unsolved in the near future.” General Massoud Jazayeri, the Deputy Chief of Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces, called the US-led coalition against ISIS a farce. “The US and the so-called anti-ISIL coalition claim that they have launched a campaign against this terrorist and criminal group – while supplying them with weapons, food and medicine in Jalawla region (a town in Diyala Governorate, Iraq). This explicitly displays the falsity of the coalition’s and the US’ claims,” the general said.
The US military claims these air deliveries are mistakenly ending up in ISIS’s possession and that they were intended for Kurdish fighters, but such a ridiculous assertion rings hollow among the true opponents of ISIS – Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Shiite volunteers in Iraq. Meanwhile, the laughable nature of Washington’s anti-ISIS gambit is underscored by the fact that its initial air strikes against ISIS’s stronghold in Raqqa, Syria, in September 2014 did little more than destroy a bunch of empty buildings. CNN let slip that ISIS fighters had evacuated their command centers in the city 15 to 20 days before US air strikes commenced, indicating that they were probably tipped off. A Syrian opposition activist told ARA News that “the targeted places [in Raqqa], especially refineries, were set on fire, pointing out that IS militants evacuated their strongholds in the last two days to avoid the U.S.-led strikes.”
The Hidden Hand of Zionism
The sham rebellion in Syria was devised and executed by outsiders to serve a nefarious anti-Syrian agenda. All of this seems very confusing if one doesn’t take into consideration the destructive proclivities of the state of Israel in the region.
Israel has essentially used the United States as a cat’s paw in the Middle East, manipulating America’s Leviathan military to smash up her enemies. The formidable Israeli lobby inside the US and its neoconservative lackeys who are a dominant force in the war-making apparatus of the US Military Industrial Complex is a key factor driving the Washington foreign policy establishment’s intransigent approach to the Middle East. When it comes to Middle East policy, the Israelis always get their way. “America is a thing you can move very easily… in the right direction,” Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu once bragged. “Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We control America,” the former Israeli PM Ariel Sharon boasted.
The destruction of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Egypt and other Middle Eastern and North African states is a long-standing Zionist policy plan dating back to the 1950s. In 1982 a stunning Israeli strategy paper was published which outlined with remarkable candor a vast conspiracy to weaken, subjugate and ultimately destroy all of Israel’s military rivals. The document was called “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s,” authored by Oded Yinon, a prominent thinker in Israeli Likud circles. In the vein of the Ottoman millet system, Yinon envisioned the dissolution of Israel’s neighbors and a new Middle East made up of fractured and fragmented Arab/Muslim countries divided into multiple polities along ethnic and religious lines. In Yinon’s mind, the less unified the Arabs and Muslims are the better for Israel’s designs. Better yet, have the Arabs and Muslims fight each other over land and partition themselves into obscurity. Yinon suggests a way to accomplish this, primarily by instigating civil strife in the Arab/Muslim countries which will eventually lead to their dismemberment.
In the document, Yinon specifically recommended:
Lebanon’s total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula and is already following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi’ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the Hauran and in northern Jordan. This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run, and that aim is already within our reach today.
He later singled out Iraq as Israel’s most formidable enemy at the time, and outlined its downfall in these terms:
Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi’ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north. It is possible that the present Iranian-Iraqi confrontation will deepen this polarization.
Yinon’s vision seems to be unfolding rapidly in Iraq which is today on the verge of partition with the Sunni extremists of ISIS seizing vast swaths of territory for their ‘caliphate’ and the Northern Kurds still battling for independence from Baghdad which is ruled by a Shia clique headed by Haider al-Abadi and Nour al-Maliki. Syria too looks to be falling victim to Yinon’s venomous whims as ISIS has wrested control of large chunks of Syrian territory and presently enforces its brutal sectarianism on the Eastern population of the country.
The themes and ideas in Yinon’s Machiavellian manifesto are still held dear today by the Likudnik rulers in Israel and their neocon patrons in the West. Pro-Israel neocons basically replicated Yinon’s proposals in a 1996 strategy paper intended as advice for Benjamin Netanyahu, although in less direct language. Their report titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” spoke of “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq” as an “important Israeli strategic objective” that serves as a means of weakening Syria. The Clean Break authors advised that Israel should militarily engage Hezbollah, Syria and Iran along its Northern border. They go on to suggest air strikes on Syrian targets in Lebanon as well as inside Syria-proper. They also stipulate that, “Syrian territory is not immune to attacks emanating from Lebanon by Israeli proxy forces.”
These neocon recommendations seem to be playing out today like a perfectly gauged game of chess. The Syria crisis has unveiled Israel’s plans for destabilizing the region to their benefit. At many points since the unrest in Syria began in 2011, Israel has conducted air strikes on Syrian military sites, just as the Clean Break criminals encouraged. In a January 2015 interview with Foreign Affairs magazine, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad made note of Israel’s incessant attacks against Syrian army installations during the conflict: “[Tel Aviv is] supporting the rebels in Syria. It’s very clear. Because whenever we make advances in some place, they make an attack in order to undermine the army.” Assad further described Israel as “al-Qaeda’s air force.”
Israel’s support of the Takfiri militants inside Syria goes beyond periodic air strikes in their favor. According to a 2014 UN report, Israel has been providing sanctuary and hospital care to thousands of anti-Assad terrorists, including those of ISIS and al-Nusra, and then dispatching them back into the fight. A Russia Today report on the issue headlined “UN details Israel helping Syrian rebels at Golan Heights” noted: “Israeli security forces have kept steady contacts with the Syrian rebels over the past 18 months, mainly treating wounded fighters but possibly supplying them with arms, UN observers at the Israeli-Syrian border reported.”
Israel’s gains in this situation are manifold. Tel Aviv has been using the fog of war to weaken its primary adversary in Damascus and consequently draw its other foes – Iran and Hezbollah – into the quandary, thereby diminishing their collective resolve to fight Israel itself. The Zionist regime not only views the Takfiris of ISIS and al-Nusra as a “lesser enemy,” but also as proxy mercenaries against Damascus, a strategy explicated in the neocons’ Clean Break document. In fact, Tel Aviv doesn’t view the Takfiris as much of a threat at all; a point that was validated by ISIS itself which declared that it is “not interested” in fighting Israel. “ISIS: Fighting ‘Infidels’ Takes Precedence Over Fighting Israel,” reads an August 2014 headline in Arutz Sheva, an Israeli news outlet.
The former Israeli ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, substantiated all of this in a September 2013 interview with the Jerusalem Post. “’Bad guys’ backed by Iran are worse for Israel than ‘bad guys’ who are not supported by the Islamic Republic,” he told the Post, adding that the “greatest danger” to Israel is “the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc. That is a position we had well before the outbreak of hostilities in Syria. With the outbreak of hostilities we continued to want Assad to go.” Oren further remarked with glee about the total capitulation of the Gulf sheikhdoms – Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates – to Israel’s itinerary vis-à-vis Syria, Iran and the Palestinian issue, observing that “in the last 64 years there has probably never been a greater confluence of interest between us and several Gulf States. With these Gulf States we have agreements on Syria, on Egypt, on the Palestinian issue. We certainly have agreements on Iran. This is one of those opportunities presented by the Arab Spring.”
Roland Dumas, France’s former foreign minister, confirmed Israeli intrigue behind Syria’s internal woes. In a June 15, 2013, article for Global Research, journalist Gearóid Ó Colmáin quotes Dumas who told a French TV channel that the turmoil in Syria, which has cost the lives of more than 100,000 Syrians, was planned several years in advance. Dumas claimed that he met with British officials two years before the violence erupted in Damascus in 2011 and at the meeting they confessed to him “that they were organizing an invasion of rebels into Syria.” When asked for his support in the endeavor, Dumas declined, saying, “I’m French, that doesn’t interest me.’’ Dumas further pinpointed the architects of the madness as Israeli Zionists, suggesting that the Syria destabilization operation “goes way back. It was prepared, preconceived and planned [by the Israeli regime].” Dumas noted that Syria’s anti-Israel stance sealed its fate in this respect and also revealed that a former Israeli prime minister once told him “we’ll try to get on with our neighbours but those who don’t agree with us will be destroyed.”
“Israel planned this war of annihilation years ago in accordance with the Yinon Plan, which advocates balkanization of all states that pose a threat to Israel,” writes Gearóid Ó Colmáin in the aforesaid piece. “The Zionist entity is using Britain and France to goad the reluctant Obama administration into sending more American troops to their death in Syria on behalf of Tel Aviv.”
Ó Colmáin argues that the West “are doing [Israel’s] bidding by attempting to drag [the United States] into another ruinous war so that Israel can get control of the Middle East’s energy reserves, eventually replacing the United States as the ruling state in the world. It has also been necessary for Tel Aviv to remain silent so as not to expose their role in the ‘revolutions’, given the fact that the Jihadist fanatics don’t realize they are fighting for Israel.”
ISIS: A Repository of Patsies for the False Flaggers
At long last, this brings us to the ‘second phase’ of the ISIS psyop: scaring Westerners into submission.
It’s no coincidence that the notorious belligerence of ISIS in its quest for a ‘caliphate’ aligns perfectly with the neocon agenda which aims to inculcate in the minds of the masses the myth of a ‘clash of civilizations’ between the West and Islam. In its official magazine, Dabiq, ISIS ideologues advanced a parallel attitude with the neocon desire for a civilizational conflict. Is that merely happenstance? Or has ISIS been manufactured by the neocons to serve as the ultimate boogeyman and straw man caricature of ‘Islamic radicalism’?
The godfather of neoconservatism, Leo Strauss, espoused a dogma of deception, stipulating that in order to corral society behind the wishes of an elite vanguard an ‘external enemy’ must be fashioned. This ‘enemy’ could be real, but enemies usually exist in the eye of the beholder and in the minds of those seeking opposition. Strauss made it clear that if this societal ‘enemy’ did not exist or was not formidable enough to generate an adequate amount of fear required to paralyze and manipulate the masses, then one should be invented or inflated and then advertised to the populace as a real, pressing danger.
For the neocons, this phantom nemesis forms the crux of their strategy of subjugation. Without it, the public would never consent to their lunatic foreign policies, nor would anyone feel threatened enough to willingly relinquish their freedoms in the name of security. This is what ISIS is all about.
As demonstrated earlier, ISIS was cultivated by our own governments to destabilize and ultimately overthrow various regimes in the Middle East and North Africa that fell astray of the Globalist-Zionist program. The Western media has purposely marketed the ISIS ‘brand’ across the globe, making it a household name. The Zionist globalists built up ISIS to do their bidding abroad, but despite media sensationalism the group is not nearly strong enough to pose any serious threat to Western countries. So while ISIS represents no legitimate military threat to the West, its global reputation for brutality and obscene violence is seen as a fantastic propaganda tool to frighten Western populations into consenting to the extirpation of their freedoms at home.
The Zionist globalists have put that carefully crafted ISIS image to work, fabricating a series of perfectly timed ‘terror events’ inside Western countries which have been used to curtail freedoms under the guise of ‘keeping us safe from the terrorists.’ What the gullible commoners don’t realize is that these ‘terrorists’ are controlled by our own governments and are being wielded against us to vindicate the construction of an Orwellian police state.
The string of ‘lone-wolf’ attacks that hit Ottawa, Sydney, Paris and now Copenhagen over the past five months since the West first ‘declared war’ on ISIS are all part of an organized neocon strategy of tension. The intelligence agencies of the West and Israel stand behind them all. In every case, the ‘terrorists’ had long histories of mental illness and/or frequent run-ins with the law; the standard rap-sheet of a patsy whose innumerable weaknesses are exploited by government agents to produce a type-cast ‘fall guy’ to play the part of the ‘wily gunman’ who ‘hates our freedoms.’ ISIS therefore in effect provides the false flag con artists who control our governments with an inexhaustible wellspring of patsies for their operations.
As the researcher Joshua Blakeney pointed out, “Some peasant in Yemen may be angry [enough at the West to want to harm it] but he [could] never [physically carry out] such an attack without it being made possible by the false-flag planners.” A ‘let it happen’ or a ‘made it happen’ scenario amounts to the same thing – without the connivance of the government in question there is no ‘attack’ to even discuss. Since ISIS is a ‘global’ phenomenon, according to our controlled media, authorities don’t even have to prove that these deranged individuals are even members of the group. All they have to say is that they were ‘inspired’ by the group’s message which can be accessed online, and that’s enough to indict them in the court of public opinion. Even if all that were true, it still wouldn’t eliminate potential state involvement, which usually comes in the form of equipping the dupe with the necessary armaments to execute the plot and preventing well-meaning police and intelligence people from intervening to stop it. These are the kinds of queries the West’s big media patently refuses to pursue, knowing full well that the state is almost always complicit with, and keen to exploit, whatever tragedy befalls their population.
All of the latest traumatic terror events in Western capitals have been instantly branded by lying, cynical politicians as attacks on ‘free speech’ and the ‘values of Western civilization,’ a familiar trope first trotted out by George W. Bush and his neocon puppet masters after the false flag attacks of 9/11.
However, what many are starting to realize is that whatever threat some mind controlled junkie might pose to our lives, our own governments are a markedly more dangerous menace to our liberties, well being and way of life. They prove this point every single day with a manifold of new freedom-busting laws that they pass using the comical excuse of protecting us from their own Frankenstein.
That’s the simple truth of the matter that the neocon false flaggers seek to suppress at all costs as they desperately hold up the façade of their artificial power which will inevitably collapse under its own weight.
Brandon Martinez is an independent writer and journalist from Canada who specializes in foreign policy issues, international affairs and 20th and 21st century history. He is the co-founder of Non-Aligned Media and the author of the 2014 books Grand Deceptions and Hidden History. Readers can contact him at martinezperspective[at]hotmail.com or visit his blog at http://martinezperspective.com
Copyright 2015 Brandon Martinez
Illegal Occupation, the Elephant In The Room
The Origin of Modern Terror and Crumbling Western Values
By John Chuckman | Aletho News | January 26, 2015
Do you ever solve problems by ignoring them? Most of us would say that is not possible, yet that is precisely what western governments do in their efforts to counteract what is called “Islamic terror.” Yes, there are vast and costly efforts to suppress the symptoms of what western governments regard as a modern plague, including killing many people presumed to be infected with it, fomenting rebellion and destruction in places presumed to be prone to it, secretly returning to barbaric practices such as torture, things we thought had been left behind centuries ago, to fight it, and violating rights of their own citizens we thought were as firmly established as the need for food and shelter. Governments ignore, in all these destructive efforts, what in private they know very well is the origin of the problem.
Have Islamic radicals always existed? Yes, we have records through the history of British and French empire-building of strange and fearsome groups. It appears every large religion has a spectrum of believers, always including at one end of the spectrum extreme fundamentalists. They are not a new phenomenon anywhere, so why has one group of them, in the sands of the Middle East, become part of our everyday awareness?
It is also nothing new that young men become hot-blooded and disturbed over what they regard as attacks upon their kind. Western society’s record of crusades, religious wars, colonial wars, and revolts, all total likely having no equal in the histories of the world’s peoples, offers countless examples of young men being angered by this or that circumstance and joining up or running off to fight.
George Bush told us today’s terrorists hate our freedom and democratic values, but like virtually every utterance of George Bush, that one was fatuous, explaining nothing. Nevertheless, his is the explanation pounded into public consciousness because governments and the corporate press never stop repeating versions of it, the Charlie Hebdo affair and its theatrical posturing over free speech being only the latest. Theatrical? Yes, when we know perfectly well that most of those who marched at the front of the parade in Paris are anything but friends of free speech.
All backward peoples are uncomfortable with certain western values, that being the nature of backwardness, and backwardness is a defining characteristic of all fundamentalist religious groups – Hasidic or ultra-Orthodox Jews, Mennonites, Roman Catholic Cardinals, cloistered nuns, Sikhs, and many others – who typically choose modes of dress, rules to obey, and even foods to eat having little or no relationship with the contemporary world and science. Of course, that is their right so long as they are peaceful and law-abiding.
Any fundamentalist group, pushed by more powerful people from outside their community, is entirely capable of, and even prone to, violence, and all human beings are capable of violence when faced with abuse and injustice. Centuries of religious wars and terrors in Europe about such matters as how the Mass is celebrated prove the proposition and should be held as a warning, but they are forgotten by most, if they were ever known. The tendency towards violence continues today amongst many fundamentalist faiths. In so relatively small and seemingly homogeneous a society as Israel, there are regular attacks from ultra-Orthodox Jews against the country’s worldly citizens or against fair-minded rules about such pedestrian matters as women riding buses or walking on a street. The attacks become quite violent – punching, spitting, burning down homes, and killing sometimes – and all go against what we call western values, but because the scale is fairly small, and our press also has a constant protective bias concerning all things Israeli, these events rarely make our mainline news. They must be found on the Internet.
It took Western Europe literally centuries to leave behind such recurrent and violent themes as witches and the need to burn them alive, the Evil Eye, casting out demons, execution for differences of belief, and countless other stupidities which characterized whole societies and destroyed lives. And if you want to go still further back, go to the Old Testament, a collection of ancient writing packed with violence, superstition, prejudice, and just plain ignorance, which Christians and others even today regard as containing important truths for contemporary life. Human progress, at least in some matters, takes a very long time indeed.
Our world has more backward people than most of us can imagine. The news does not feature their extremes and savageries because it serves no political purpose. In Africa, for example, we find practices and beliefs utterly repellent to modern minds: the practice of senior village men raping young girls as an accepted right, the genital mutilation of 3 million girls annually (an African, not an Islamic, practice), the hunting down and butchering such “strange” people as albinos, their parts to be eaten as medicine, and many others. In India, a country well on its way to becoming modern yet one with a huge backward population, we have practices such as marrying off mere girls to old men rich enough to pay dowries to poor parents. At one stroke this enriches the parents and relieves them of the burden of a child, a female child too, always viewed less favorably. The practice generates a large population of widows when the old husbands of girls married at, say, twelve die. These women are then condemned to entire lives as widows, never allowed to remarry, required to dress and eat in certain ways, and basically shunned to live in squalid equivalents of old folks homes, living entirely meaningless lives. India also has the practice of “bride burning” where new brides who are deemed unacceptable for various reasons become the prey of the groom’s family, literally being burned alive. There are many other barbarities in that society too, including “honor killing” and young women who are made inmates in certain temples to serve as glorified prostitutes.
Our press assiduously avoids much of the world’s horrors as it focuses on “Islamic extremism,” and politics are the only explanation for the bias. The press theme of Islamic terror and indeed real incidents of terror grow from a reality always taken for granted, never debated, and certainly never criticised: the elephant in the room, as it were, is Israel’s illegal and agonizingly long occupation of the Palestinians.
It may be not be important to our press and governments that Israel holds millions as prisoners, crippling the lives of generation after generation, or that Israel periodically strikes out in every direction – Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank – causing the deaths of many thousands, or that Israel is seen to bulldoze people’s homes and sacred monuments with complete impunity, but it very much matters to many millions of Muslims in the world, and some of them, fundamentalist men, strike out against it just as young men everywhere have sometimes struck out against keenly-felt hurts and injustice.
In western countries, under the hard influence of America, a country in turn under the hard influence of the world’s best organized and financed lobby, the Israel Lobby, we have come to regard Israel’s behavior as normal, but it is, of course, not normal, not in any detail. What is normal about holding several million people prisoner for half a century? What is normal about bulldozing homes and literally stealing the land upon which they stood? What is normal about declaring an honestly elected government as criminal and treating its people as though they were criminals? What is normal about limiting people’s opportunity to earn a living or to import some of the needs of life? What is normal about killing nearly a thousand children, as Israel has done just in Gaza, since 2008?
Pretending that Israel’s behavior is not the major cause of what screams from our headlines and news broadcasts has reached absurd levels. America has only vastly compounded the problem of Israel’s organized abuse of a people: it and its silent partners have destroyed Iraq, destroyed Libya, are working hard to destroy Syria, have seen to it that Egypt’s tens of millions again live under absolute government, ignore countless inequities and barbarities in secretly-helpful countries like Saudi Arabia, and carry out extra-judicial killings through much of the region. All of it is carried out on Israel’s behalf and with Israel’s cooperation. Can any reasonable person not see that this vast factory of death also manufactures countless grievances and vendettas? The stupidity is on a colossal scale, rooted in the notion that you can kill your way out of the terrible consequences of terrible policies.
In America, paid political shills (Newt Gingrich was one) have campaigned about there being no such thing as a Palestinian. Others (Dick Armey was one) have said that millions of Palestinians should be removed, all their land left conveniently to Israel. That last is an odd thing to say, isn’t it, considering there are supposed to be no such thing as Palestinians? And just what country would take millions of “non-existent” Palestinians? Obviously no politician with even pretence of integrity would say such things, and how can intelligent and successful people like America’s Jews take satisfaction in hearing politicians reciting such embarrassing scripts? But this is a good measure of the way intelligence and sound thinking are scorned in American politics. How can you achieve anything worth achieving without intelligence and sound thinking? You cannot, but that doesn’t stop American Presidents and Secretaries of State from carrying on the world’s longest-running dumb show, something called the “peace process.” The sombre, moose-like figure of John Kerry is photographed playacting at statesmanship while American-supplied arms just keep killing thousands of innocent people.
The Fantasy of an Iran-US Partnership
By Seyed Mohammad Marandi | Tehran Times | January 6, 2015
Western pundits who blithely assert that the Islamic Republic of Iran can or will cooperate with the United States in Iraq against ISIL ignore a basic problem; how can the US be a serious partner in fighting a terrorist movement that Washington may have played a critical role in creating?
When US Vice-President Joe Biden told an American university audience in October that Turkey, the UAE and Saudi Arabia are responsible for arming al-Nusra, ISIL, and other al-Qaeda-rooted extremists in Syria and that there is no “moderate middle” in the country, there was (as most non-Americans expected) little coverage of this stunning admission in the US mainstream media.
Indeed, what little coverage there was focused on Biden’s subsequent apologies to Turkish, Emirati, and Saudi leaders for having made such comments in the first place.
Predictably, there was no follow-up reporting in The New York Times reminding Americans that the US is itself complicit in funding and arming extremists in Syria.
CIA producing weapons
In early 2013, the newspaper reported what many in the region already knew; that since the beginning of 2012, the CIA had been deeply involved in procuring weapons for anti-Assad forces, airlifting arms to Jordanian and Turkish airports, and “vetting” rebel commanders – all to help US allies “support the lethal side of the civil war”. Other reports pointed out that these shipments were actually paid for by US allies, at the bidding of the Obama administration.
But, after the Biden revelation, the so-called “newspaper of record” made no reference to how the US, in violation of international law, helped to facilitate the Syrian civil war – and, in the process, to enable the rise of ISIL.
Western-backed extremism is neither a new nor regionally-bound concept. Whether it is the “Contra” rebels in Nicaragua or al-Qaeda-like groups in Afghanistan, the objective has always been to achieve strategic objectives through the infliction of mass suffering – for, in the “free and civilised world” of the US and its allies, the utopian end too often justifies the Mephistophelean means.
More recently, an important footnote to the Libyan civil war was the involvement of Abdul Hakim Belhaj, previously the leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group as well as an al-Qaeda member.
He was one of many Libyan militants influenced by a takfiri (apostate) ideology; the groups with which he was affiliated were designated as terrorist organisations by the US State Department.
Nevertheless, he, along with other like-minded militants, became central components in the efforts of western and Arab-backed anti-Gaddafi forces to capture Tripoli, the Libyan capital.
Western willingness to cooperate with al-Qaeda (or “former” al-Qaeda) militants in Libya was a major turning point. Even the subsequent death of the US ambassador to Libya did not change US policy in this regard. Belhaj became the representative of Libya’s interim president after Gaddafi’s overthrow (before the complete ruin of the country).
More importantly, the willingness of the US and European and “Middle Eastern” allies to embrace al-Qaeda-like militants took US and western foreign policy in the region back to what it had been before the September 11, 2001 attacks – a policy of cooperation with violent extremists to undermine regional actors the West considers problematic.
Monster they created
This policy quickly expanded from Libya to Syria and the repercussions are being felt today in countries like Pakistan, Nigeria, Australia, and China.
After Gaddafi’s overthrow, Turkey – a NATO member – allegedly helped Belhaj to meet with leaders of the so-called “Free Syrian Army” in Istanbul and along the Syrian-Turkish border. In the meetings the former al-Qaeda leader discussed supporting the FSA with money, weapons, and fighters, at a time when the CIA was a major conduit for the transfer of weapons from Libya to Syria.
While Belhaj was just one of many al-Qaeda affiliates involved in violent anti-government campaigns in both Libya and Syria, his openly acknowledged role underscores how the supposedly “moderate” FSA was, from early on in the Syrian civil war, as Iran repeatedly warned, deeply associated with and infiltrated by extremists.
US arms sales hit record levels
Over time, the problem grew so large with ISIL’s rise that it became impossible to hide the monster that the US and its allies had created. And so, Washington launched yet another chapter in its never-ending post-9/11 “war on terror”.
Notwithstanding Washington’s professed determination to degrade and, ultimately, to destroy ISIL, Iran remains profoundly skeptical of US intentions.
Even after dramatic gains by ISIL in Iraq and the formation of a US-led coalition of the guilty to fight it, this coalition has, on average, carried out just nine airstrikes per day in both Iraq and Syria.
In comparison, western reports indicate that, in the same period, the Syrian air force alone has at times carried out up to 200 strikes in 36 hours. Even as these largely inconsequential US-led airstrikes are carried out in Iraq and Syria, some regional players continue to provide extensive logistical support to ISIL; along Syria’s borders with Jordan and the Israeli regime, the Nusra Front continues to collaborate with other extremist militias backed by foreign (including western) powers.
In light of these realities, Iranians – who have been indispensable in preventing the fall of Damascus, Baghdad, Aleppo, and Erbil – simply do not buy the argument that a repentant US is now waging a real war against ISIL, the Nusra Front, and other extremist organisations in Iraq and Syria.
Rather, Iranians see the evidence as pointing to a complex (yet foolish) policy undertaken by Washington and its allies for the purpose of “containing” the Islamic Republic.
What, then, would be the justification – under such circumstances and as Iranian allies are successfully pushing back extremists in Iraq and Syria – for the Islamic Republic to cooperate with the US in Iraq?
No matter how much some may try to tempt it, Iran will not play Faust to America’s Mephistopheles.
Seyed Mohammad Marandi is professor of North American Studies and dean of the Faculty of World Studies at the University of Tehran. He can be reached at mmarandi@ut.ac.ir.
Selling ‘Peace Groups’ on US-Led Wars
By Margaret Sarfehjooy and Coleen Rowley | Consortium News | December 25, 2014
“War is peace” double-speak has become commonplace these days. And, the more astute foreign policy journalists and commentators are beginning to realize the extent of how “liberal interventionists” work in sync with neocon warhawks to produce and sustain a perpetual state of U.S. war.
More and more “peace and social justice” groups are even being twisted into “democracy promotion,” U.S. militarism style. But rarely do we get a window to see as clearly into how this Orwellian transformation occurs as with the “Committee in Solidarity with the People of Syria” (CISPOS) based in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, a spin-off of “Friends for a Nonviolent World” (FNVW), steering its Quaker-inspired founding in nonviolence to promote speakers and essayists with strong ties to the violent uprising to topple the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad, resulting in a war that has already taken some 200,000 lives.
Do the real pacifist members approve? Or even know?
Middle Eastern expats who support U.S. intervention in their countries are especially effective in promoting their message to Western audiences because they provide “proof” of the demonization of governments that the U.S. plans to invade and dominate, and often peace groups include these expats in presentations believing them to be representatives of an entire country.
In Minneapolis, FNVW and its spin-off CISPOS hosted several events with Syrian expats who were on record as supporting the U.S. bombing of their country. (This isn’t only happening in the U.S. In April 2011, a Vancouver peace group documented its objection to the fact that other Canadian “peace” groups were sponsoring speakers who justified and advocated “in favour of the NATO bombing of Libya.”)
Often Syrian “experts” speaking to peace groups, such as FNVW/CISPOS’s upcoming speaker, Mohja Kahf, have ties to the early destabilization of Syria. This American Prospect article documents how Najib Ghadbian, Kahf’s husband of over 20 years (apparently up to last year when they divorced) was one of the Syrian dissidents who attended the early 2006 meeting with Liz Cheney (then-Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter), along with other Syrian dissidents to plan how to destabilize Syria and topple its government. Like some Syrian version of Ahmed Chalabi, the neocons’ choice to run post-invasion Iraq, Kahf’s husband apparently got himself invited to Liz Cheney’s “Iran-Syria Operations Group” by having signed the “Damascus Declaration” in 2005, the year before.
When Najib and Mohja sat down for a long 2011 interview with The Arkansas Traveler, they discussed their involvement with the Syrian Revolution, even joking about Ghadbian becoming the next Prime Minister. Kahf and Ghadbian reportedly divorced in 2013 but when CISPOS-FNVW first published her long essays, they were still appearing together at Syrian revolutionary meetings and speaking forums. Additionally, CISPOS’s latest handout (December 2014) lists Ghadbian’s organization, www.etilaf.us (The National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary Forces) as a resource “For More Information on Syria and How to Help.”
Resources for information on Syria often come from “citizen journalists” with deep ties to neocons and U.S. government sources. From the State Department’s website , the $330 million in support for the Syrian opposition includes training for networks of citizen journalists, bloggers and cyber-activists to support their documentation and dissemination of information on developments in Syria.
Syrian dissidents received funding from the Los Angeles-based Democracy Council, which ran a Syria-related program called the “Civil Society Strengthening Initiative” funded with $6.3 million from the State Department. The program is described as “a discrete collaborative effort between the Democracy Council and local partners” to produce, among other things, “various broadcast concepts.”
James Prince, the founder and President of the Democracy Council, is also an adviser to CyberDissidents.org , a project created in 2008 by the Jerusalem-based Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies, founded and funded by Sheldon Adelson, a patron and confidant of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Other resources include postings on social media and alternative websites with sensational stories such as the anti-Assad activist “Gay Girl in Damascus” who turned out to be a middle-aged American man in Scotland or Syrian Danny Abdul Dayem, who was frequently interviewed using fake gun fire and flames in his interviews.
With all of the information about Syria, what are we to believe as true? We know the facts about recent U.S. interventions in Middle Eastern countries. Why would Syria be any different?
Afghanistan is still in shambles with the majority of the people living in extreme poverty; Libya, which had the highest GDP per capita and life expectancy on the continent, is now a failed state; Western intervention transformed Iraq from an emerging country with moderate prosperity into an impoverished country with a starving population. In the lead-up to each intervention, “experts” emerged to explain that while anti-imperialism is good in general and in past scenarios, this time is different. Is it?
Isn’t it time for war-weary Americans to wise up and stop falling for these pretexts of bringing democracy and human rights to foreign countries through training and funding of “color (and umbrella) revolutions,” inciting of coups and regime changes and eventually, through U.S.-NATO military might?
Liberal interventionists clearly assist neocon warhawks towards their mutual goal of “full spectrum dominance” under the euphemistic guise of Pax Americana. Only the “Pax” always turns out to be endless war and occupation.
Margaret Sarfehjooy is an anti-war activist and registered nurse in Minnesota. Coleen Rowley is a retired FBI agent and former Minneapolis Division legal counsel.
5 not-so-peaceful Obama actions since nabbing Nobel Prize
RT | December 10, 2014
Five years on from President Barack Obama scooping a Nobel Peace Prize, and the White House has taken anything but a Zen approach to foreign policy under his watch. Here are the top 5 not-so-peaceful moves the laureate has made in the past half-decade.
1. Afghan Surge
Obama didn’t start the war gin Afghanistan, but he certainly took a page from his predecessors playbook in trying to finish it. He recognized his precarious position at prize time.
“But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the commander-in-chief of a nation in the midst of two wars,” he said after accepting the Nobel Prize in Oslo, Norway, on December 9, 2009.
While he said the war in Iraq was “winding down,” things in Afghanistan were just starting to heat up. A week before accepting the prize, Obama announced he was sending 33,000 more troops to Afghanistan as part of his “surge policy,” intended to beat back the Taliban and train Afghan security forces to take the country into their own hands. The following years would become the deadliest for both US troops and Afghan civilians. Again, it wasn’t Obama’s war. But then came…
2. Military strikes in Libya
Following UN Resolution 1973 on March 17, 2011, which called for “an immediate ceasefire” in Libya and authorized the international community to set up a no-fly zone to protect civilians, Obama, along with his NATO allies, would soon launch military strikes to turn the tide of the 2011 Civil War in the North African state. NATO conducted 9,700 strike sorties and dropped over 7,700 precision bombs. A Human Rights Watch report would go on to detail eight incidents where at least 72 Libyan civilians died as a result of the aerial campaign.
But the real damage to overthrowing the Gaddafi regime came in the ensuing years, with the country descending into a civil war between Islamist forces and the weak post-revolutionary government. In August, Obama admitted his Libyan policy was a failure, but not because he chose to intervene militarily. Rather, he says the problem was that America and its European partners did not “come in full force” to take Gaddafi out. Although his then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seemed to rejoice in his death, wryly noting “We came, we saw, he died.”
3. Drone Wars in Yemen, Pakistan
Since the US first started targeting Yemeni militants in 2002, Obama has launched all but one of the 15 airstrikes and 101 drone strikes in the country. According to the web portal New America.net, which has meticulously complied data on the strikes, up to 1,073 people have been killed in the strikes. An estimated 81-87 of those killed were civilians, while the identity of another 31-50 remains unknown. But Yemen was just one prong in Obama’s so-called Drone War, though, as we shall see, it was the site of a game-changing incident.
Unlike in Yemen, drone strikes in Pakistan were in favor long before Obama came to power. A report conducted by Stanford and New York Universities’ Law schools found that between 2,562 and 3,325 people were killed by drone strikes in Pakistan between June 2004 and mid-September 2012. Anywhere between 474 and 881 of those were civilians, and 176 were children. While Obama didn’t start the Pakistani drone war, he aggressively expanded it.
Between 2004 and 2007, only 10 drone strikes were launched in Pakistan. The following year saw 36 such strikes, and 54 were launched in 2009.
But 2010 would be the deadliest year by far, with 122 strikes launched and 849 people killed. He would go on to authorize 73 and 46 strikes in 2011 and 2012 respectively.
Following widespread opposition at home and abroad, in May 2013, Obama promised a new era of transparency to protect civilians, saying control of the program would be transferred from the CIA to the Pentagon. But…
4. Obama has a secret kill list
In February 2013, the Obama administration’s internal legal justification for assassinating US citizens abroad came to light for the first time. According to the Justice Department document, the White House has the legal authority to kill Americans who are “senior operational leaders,” of Al-Qaeda or “an associated force” even if they are not actively engaged in any active plot to attack the US.
In September 2011, a US drone strike in Yemen killed two American citizens: Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. The following month, a drone strike killed al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, who was born in Colorado.
The concept of the US president exercising the right to kill US citizens without the benefit of a trial has resonated throughout American culture.
In the comic-book-inspired film ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’, the issue of targeted killings and “kill lists” features prominently in the plot.
5. Redrawing red lines
President Barack Obama drew a red line around Syria’s use of chemical weapons, pushing the international community to punish Damascus with military strikes following the August 21 Ghouta Attack.
After the UK balked at airstrikes, Moscow and Washington took the diplomatic route, resulting in a historic deal that has seen Damascus abandon its chemical weapons stockpiles.
But US-led airstrikes on Syria were only postponed. On August 8, 2014, the United States started bombing so-called Islamic State (IS) militants in Iraq to protect embattled Kurds. The following month, the US would launch airstrikes against IS militants in Syria as well. Of all the US military interventions in recent years, the battle against the IS has been met with widespread approval. Still, Syria was the seventh country Obama has bombed in six years.
Quite a feat for a Nobel Peace Prize-winner.
West’s action in Libya in 2011 was a ‘mistake’ – Italy’s foreign ministry
RT | December 5, 2014
Western countries made a ‘mistake’ three years ago, when they intervened in Libya to overthrow the Gaddafi regime, according to Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs. The statement came amid reports of the US discussing airstrikes on Libya’s territory.
“Three years ago we might have made a mistake, when international forces interfered without thinking through the scenario, what will happen afterwards. Italian voice was too weak,” Italy’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Paolo Gentiloni said in a TV interview with national broadcaster RAI, as quoted by Tass news agency.
While meeting international journalists on Friday, the minister said that stabilizing the situation in Libya – which at the moment is an uncontrollable land of “chaos” – and in the whole Mediterranean region was a key priority of Italy’s foreign policy.
Meanwhile, the US has plans to expand its anti Islamic State military campaign to Libya, The Times reported on Friday. Amid western countries’ concerns over Libya’s political instability, that could possibly be used by the IS terrorists in their favor, a top US general has confirmed the Islamic State runs jihadist training camps in eastern Libya.
Now “an American commander has acknowledged that discussions are under way in Washington about broadening the anti-Isis campaign to Libya,” The Times wrote.
The fall of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime back in 2011 and the turmoil that followed it has provided a fertile ground for extremism. Since August, Libya’s capital of Tripoli has been in the hands of Libya Dawn – a coalition of Islamist-backed militias who appointed their own administration, while the internationally-recognized government and parliament have been pushed a thousand kilometers away to Tobruk.
The UN has condemned the recent fighting – the worst since 2011. An international contact group, which gathered in Addis Ababa earlier this week to discuss the Libyan crisis, has rejected the use of force to solve it. But the country’s officials have ruled out peace talks after Libya Dawn allied itself with jihadi groups.
“We cannot continue with two governments, two parliaments, so Libya Dawn should end or we are going to arrest them all,” Libya’s military commander, General Khalifa Hiftar told RT.
Moscow has said only neighboring countries in the region should participate in stabilizing the situation in Libya, while others stay put. When meeting his Sudanese counterpart earlier in the week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that “interference from overseas assuming a leading role in settling sovereignty issues” that has been witnessed in Iraq and Libya, and now is being attempted in Syria, leads to tragedy and a state’s breakup.
READ MORE: France urges new Libya intervention, calls it ‘terrorist hub’ on Europe’s doorstep
Militarism and Capital Accumulation
The Pentagon and Big Oil
By James Petras | October 25, 2014
There is no question that, in the immediate aftermath and for several years following US military conquests, wars, occupations and sanctions, US multi-national corporations lost out on profitable sites for investments. The biggest losses were in the exploitation of natural resources – in particular, gas and oil – in the Middle East, the Persian Gulf and South Asia.
As a result some observers speculated that there were deep fissures and contradictory interests within the US ruling class. They argued that, on the one hand, political elites linked to pro-Israel lobbies and the military industrial power configuration, promoted a highly militarized foreign policy agenda and, on the other hand, some of the biggest and wealthiest multi-national corporations sought diplomatic solutions.
Yet this seeming ‘elite division’ did not materialize. There is no evidence for example that the multi-national oil companies sought to oppose the Iraq, Libyan, Afghan, Syrian wars. Nor did the powerful 10 largest oil companies with a net value of over $1.1 trillion dollars mobilize their lobbyists and influentials in the mass media to the cause of peaceful capital penetration and domination of the oil fields via neo-liberal political clients.
In the run-up to the Iraq war, the three major US oil companies, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Conoco Phillips, eager to exploit the third largest oil reserves in the world, did not engage in Congressional lobbying or exert pressure on the Bush or later Obama Administration for a peaceful resolution of the conflict. At no point did the Big Ten challenge the pro-war Israel lobby and its phony arguments that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction with an alternative policy.
Similar “political passivity” was evidenced in the run-up to the Libyan war. Big Oil was actually signing off on lucrative oil deals, when the militarists in Washington struck again – destroying the Libyan state and tearing asunder the entire fabric of the Libyan economy.
Big oil may have bemoaned the loss of oil and profits but there was no concerted effort, before or after the Libyan debacle, to critically examine or evaluate the loss of a major oil producing region. In the case of economic sanctions against Iran, possessing the second largest oil reserves, the MNC again were notable by their absence from the halls of Congress and the Treasury Department where the sanctions policy was decided. Prominent Zionist policymakers, Stuart Levey and David Cohen designed and implemented sanctions which prevented US (and EU) oil companies from investing or trading with Teheran.
In fact, despite the seeming divergence of interest between a highly militarized foreign policy and the drive of MNCs to pursue the global accumulation of capital, no political conflicts erupted. The basic question that this paper seeks to address is: Why did the major MNCs submit to an imperial foreign policy which resulted in lost economic opportunities?
Why the MNCs Fail to Oppose Imperial Militarism
There are several possible hypotheses accounting for the MNC accommodation to a highly militarized version of imperial expansion.
In the first instance, the CEOs of the MNCs may have believed that the wars, especially the Iraq war, would be short-term, and would lead to a period of stability under a client regime willing and able to privatize and de-nationalize the oil and gas sector. In other words, the petrol elites bought into the arguments of Rumsfeld, Chaney, Wolfowitz and Feith, that the invasion and conquest would “pay for itself”.
Secondly, even after the prolonged-decade long destructive war and the deepening sectarian conflict, many CEOs believed that a lost decade would be compensated by “long term” gain. They believed that future profits would flow, once the country was stabilized. The oil majors entry after 2010; however, was immediately threatened by the ISIS offensive. The ‘time frame’ of the MNCs’ strategic planners was understated if not totally wrong headed.
Thirdly, most CEOs believed that the US-NATO invasion of Libya would lead to monopoly ownership and greater profits than what they received from a public-private partnership with the Gaddafi regime. The oil majors believed that they would secure total or majority control. In other words the war would allow the oil MNCs to secure monopoly profits for an extended period. Instead the end of a stable partnership led to a Hobbesian world in which anarchy and chaos inhibited any large scale, long-term entry of MNCs.
Fourthly, the MNCs, including the big oil corporations, have invested in hundreds of sites in dozens of countries. They are not tied to a single location. They depend on the militarized imperial state to defend their global interests. Hence they probably are not willing to contest or challenge the militarists in, say Iraq, for fear that it might endanger US imperial intervention in other sites.
Fifthly, many MNCs interlock across economic sectors: they invest in oil fields and refineries; banking, financing and insurance as well as extractive sectors. To the degree that MNCs’ capital is diversified they are less dependent on a single region, sector, or source for profit. Hence destructive wars, in one or several countries, may not have as great a prejudicial effect as in the past when “Big Oil” was just ‘oil’.
Six, the agencies of the US imperial state are heavily weighted to military rather than economic activity. The international bureaucracy of the US is overwhelmingly made up of military, intelligence and counter-insurgency officials. In contrast, China, Japan, Germany and other emerging states (Brazil, Russia and India) have a large economic component in their overseas bureaucracy. The difference is significant. US MNCs do not have access to economic officials and resources in the same way as China’s MNCs. The Chinese overseas expansion and its MNCs, are built around powerful economic support systems and agencies. US MNCs have to deal with Special Forces, spooks and highly militarized ‘aid officials’. In other words the CEOs who look for “state support” perforce have mostly ‘military’ counterparts who view the MNCs as instruments of policy rather than as subjects of policy.
Seventh, the recent decade has witnessed the rise of the financial sector as the dominant recipient of State support. As a result, big banks exercise major influence on public policy. To the extent that is true, much of what is ‘oil money’ has gone over to finance and profits accrue by pillaging the Treasury. As a result, oil interests merge with the financial sector and their ‘profits’ are as much dependent on the state as on exploiting overseas sites.
Eighth, while Big Oil has vast sums of capital, its diverse locations, multiple activities and dependence on state protection (military), weaken its opposition to US wars in lucrative oil countries. As a result other powerful pro-war lobbies which have no such constraints have a free hand. For example the pro-Israel power configuration has far less ‘capital’ than any of the top ten oil companies. But it has a far greater number of lobbyists with much more influence over Congress people. Moreover, it has far more effective propaganda – media leverage- than Big Oil. Many more critics of US foreign policy, including its military and sanctions policies, are willing to criticize “Big Oil” than Zionist lobbies.
Finally the rise of domestic oil production resulting from fracking opens new sites for Big Oil to profit outside of the Middle East – even though the costs may be higher and the duration shorter. The oil industry has replaced losses in Middle East sites (due to wars) with domestic investments.
Nevertheless, there is tension and conflict between oil capital and militarism. The most recent case is between Exxon-Mobil’s plans to invest $38 billion in a joint venture in the Russian Arctic with the Russian oil grant Rosneft. Obama’s sanctions against Russia is scheduled to shut down the deal much to the dismay of the senior executives of Exxon Mobil, who have already invested $3.2 billion in an area the size of Texas.
Conclusion
The latent conflicts and overt difference between military and economic expansion may eventually find greater articulation in Washington. However, up to now, because of the global structures and orientation of the oil industry, because of their dependence on the military for ‘security’, the oil industry in particular, and the MNCs in general, have sacrificed short and middle term profits for “future gains” in the hopes that the wars will end and lucrative profits will return.
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15 Saudi ‘hijackers’ were CIA agents working for US: Scholar
Press TV – April 13, 2016
Fifteen of the 9/11 “hijackers” from Saudi Arabia were CIA agents working for the United States government, which was seeking to destroy the Middle East for Israel and to double the American military budget, says Dr. Kevin Barrett, an American academic who has been studying the events of 9/11 since late 2003…. continue
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