Maybe these past three weeks will change the world as we have known it until now, with the proclamation of a Caliphate in Iraq and Syria that promises to extend its tentacles to the rest of the world.
The Middle East is famously scoffed at in the West for its conspiracy theories, and for a tendency to blame all its calamities on the USA.
But who does not know that the decades-old military and political interventions of the US in the Middle East -- just about always on the side of despots who were kept in power as long as they kept selling cheap oil and buying expensive US weapons – are behind the rise of Islamic extremism in the region? Who had heard of “Islamic fundamentalists” before 1979?
That year began with the fall of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, where the many underground forces arrayed against him found their only common platform: Islam. After ousting him the Shiite clergy, that had promised to let the people choose their next government, usurped the anti-Shah revolution and packaged it into a pro-Islamic uprising. It then bared its fangs on the force that had kept the despot on the throne for nearly four decades: the United States.
That year ended with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan next door, where for years Washington poured money, weapons and knowhow into the hands of the mujahedin fighters who ousted the Red Army, but then turned their venom against America. Osama bin Laden was a product of the US-funded Afghan “jihad.” If even Hollywood knows that (“Charlie Wilson’s War”), why don’t all Americans?
And when the US attacked Iraq in 1991 to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, couldn’t American leaders think of a better place to station their troops than Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s holiest shrines? Remember: it was this that had outraged bin Laden, who had returned home to Saudi Arabia from Afghanistan by this time.
Isn’t it time for American voters to wake up and wonder: Why is it that Washington remains good friends with the oil-rich Gulf monarchies, while its policies are so bitterly opposed by the people of those same countries?
For anyone who thinks that American statesmen have a screw or two missing, that they are very bad at planning, or that they do not understand the consequences of their actions, the plain truth is far more bitter and sinister: It is about gigantic profits for the US oil giants, and for America’s greedy and unscrupulous arms makers. It’s about profit over principle.
This, time and again, the US government – and the powerful forces that run it –has demonstrated: When billions in profits are involved, a few hundred or thousand lives – even of American soldiers – are of little consequence.
After all, the US sent forces into oil-rich Kuwait and Iraq, but not into energy-poor Syria.
Even Afghanistan, in the end, was about oil. In the 1990s, US oil firm UNOCAL was making a deal with Afghanistan’s same Taliban rulers -- that Washington was officially opposing -- for a Trans Afghanistan Pipeline to transport Turkmenistan’s huge oil and gas deposits to India.
It was in Afghanistan that al-Qaeda was born. And it is in Syria and Iraq that a much larger army of Islamic fighters, who in the past have shown great reach and resourcefulness, are becoming battle hardened.
In Syria, the US is funding and arming forces opposed to the secular government of Bashar al-Assad. These armies also have an Islamic ideology, even if Washington insists on calling them “moderate.” Who is a moderate in the war in Syria, where a few days ago eight rival fighters were crucified, just as in the Middle Ages?
Some of the weapons the US is supplying to “moderate” forces in Syria have reportedly ended up in the hands of more radical Islamists.
It is the turmoil in Syria that has already given birth to al-Qaeda offshoot, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), whose fighters within weeks have crushed the Iraqi army and taken control of large sweeps of territory, including the second-largest city, Mosul, and Anbar province, the largest. Their weapons, they have admitted, come from Syria.
ISIS has declared an Islamic State from Aleppo in Syria to Diyala in Iraq. Its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has called on Muslims around the world to join the “jihad,” to rise up and avenge the alleged wrongs committed against Islam.
"Muslims, rush to your state. Yes, it is your state. Rush, because Syria is not for the Syrians, and Iraq is not for the Iraqis. The earth is Allah's," Baghdadi said. "This is my advice to you. If you hold to it you will conquer Rome and own the world, if Allah wills," he told followers.
Together with Syria and Iraq, isn’t the rest of the world also endangered by this US-created Medusa? Baghdadi has threatened to conquer the capital of Christianity, Rome, and overrun the world.
With lies and on immoral grounds, and opposed by most of the world, the United States went and destroyed both Afghanistan and Iraq. Years later, the Taliban they fought in Afghanistan are not far from regaining power, and Iraq is falling apart.
From US Secretary of State John Kerry to UK Foreign Secretary William Hague -- both recently visited Iraq -- many leaders agree that ISIS cannot be stopped by war.
If the United States was trying to awe the world with its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it has achieved the opposite. What lies exposed is that this “superpower“ is nothing but a paper tiger. It dictates to the rest of the world, but is the only country guilty of mass destruction with its atom bombs. This “superpower” was licked in Vietnam, could not take on a rag-tag gang of thugs in Somalia, achieved nothing by invading Afghanistan and will be remembered by history for the likely splintering of Iraq.
The Iraqi military the Americans trained could not stand up to a few thousand insurgents. And now, US leaders have shamelessly explained that the few hundred troops and a handful of helicopters dispatched to Iraq are only there for the possible evacuation of US Embassy staff in Baghdad.
That brings another planned US mission to mind: “Operation Eagle Claw.”
In April 1980, the US sent in eight helicopters and a transport plane to Iran, in a covert mission to lift US embassy staff held hostage in Tehran. The elite Delta Force that was assigned the task managed to land as planned at a desert staging post south of Tehran. But the crack forces had overlooked one small detail: deserts have sandstorms. In the event, the Americans returned licking their wounds, after crashing a helicopter into a transport plane while taking off from the desert and leaving eight dead US servicemen behind.
Iran’s late Ayatollah Khomeini, himself a monster created out of US support for the Shah, coined the term “Great Satan” for the United States. His favorite saying, in the face of American threats: “America cannot do a damn thing.” How unfortunate that he was right on both counts.
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