Originally Posted on April 5, 2014 by dandelion salad
SUGGESTED BY THOMAS BALDWIN Dandelion Salad

The West, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are Responsible for Talibanization of Iraq

Geopolitics of chaos backfire

[S]ome call it ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), other call it ISIL (Islamic State In Iraq and the Levant), but whatever it is, this Jihadist army with territorial ambition has taken a new dimension. Jihadist fighters are nothing new. They’ve been around under other names like Mujahideen or “freedom fighters,” in Afghanistan, for more than 30 years. Just like al-Qaeda, ISIS is the secret love child of United States imperialism and the kings and sheiks of the Gulf states. In other words, in the Middle East, engineering of failed states has been on the US foreign policy agenda for decades. This was already at play in the early 1980s, when the Reagan administration — effectively run by Vice President George Bush Sr — backed Saddam Hussein in Iraq’s war against Iran.

An all-out regional sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites might not have been the goal, but it is certainly the result. Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of the region should have known that Iraq, Libya and Syria, without strongmen like Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and Bashar al-Assad at their helm, were likely to implode into chaos. Who might ultimately profit from fueling a fratricidal war within Islam? Could this be a strategy of ash and ruins, preliminary to the expansion of the Jewish state into the so-called Greater Israel?

In 2003, under the pretext of a war on terror, the US invaded Iraq. Eleven years later, it is the Jihadists of ISIS who can say “mission accomplished.” Iraq and Syria are in ruins, soaked with the blood of several hundred thousand people, and millions of their nationals are scattered to the wind as refugees. As this tragedy continues for Iraqis and Syrians, their former government officials are enjoying their retirements with hobbies such as painting, without facing international tribunals for war crimes, such as using depleted uranium weapons in civilian areas. They are more eager than ever to rewrite history and pass the blame to someone else. What could have gone so wrong?

Policymakers in the US and European Union, as well as their mainstream media echo chambers, act as if they have been caught off guard by the rise of ISIS. Were they sleeping at the wheel when their Machiavellian policy of playing Sunnis against Shiites, using Islamist fundamentalists soldiers of fortune, blew up into their faces. Large swaths of Iraq and Syria have been taken by a 60,000-strong Jihadist army. They are on the move, are combat hardened and now have their own funds. ISIS is estimated to possess more than $2.3 billion in assets.

When ISIS  took Mosul in its three-day offensive, which also gave it control of Tikrit, it robbed all the assets of Mosul Central Bank: around $500 million plus a large amount of gold. Consequently, the Jihadists of ISIS do not have to rely on the deep pockets of Qatar and Saudi Arabia anymore and are no longer the tools of Saudis or Qataris. They have the numbers, plenty of money to make new recruits and buy weapons, and their own agenda. ISIS is stronger and more ambitious than al-Qaeda ever was. ISIS wants to redraw the map of the Middle East.

ISIS: Out of imperialism’s pandora’s box

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has rightly accused Saudi Arabia and Qatar of having sponsored the Jihadists of ISIS for about three years, ever since the start of the Syrian civil war. Al-Maliki should also blame the US and its European allies. By invading Iraq in 2003, toppling Saddam Hussein, and then fostering and sponsoring of the Jihadists in Syria since 2011, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the US have opened a geopolitical pandora’s box. Out of it came ISIS. United States foreign policy has been schizophrenic for decades, but it recently reached the apex of contradiction: to please Saudis and Qataris, Washington has supported the Jihadist fighters against Assad in Syria, and simultaneously in Iraq, Washington has supported (sort of) al-Maliki’s government against those same Jihadists.

The outcome was predictable, and one could wish that top policymakers would be held accountable for this crime of astonishing stupidity. As early as February 2012, we were raising concerns that Syria’s civil/proxy war could easily become a full-blown regional sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites. Again, on June 26, 2012, I commented in a Russia Today (RT) interview that the US was backing up a de facto Talibanization of the Middle East, just like the Reagan administration did in Afghanistan during the 1980s.

Welcome to Jihadistan!

The Islamist fighters thrived first in Iraq, where they seized on the opportunities presented by the toppling of Saddam Hussein, the US withdrawal, and a Shiite-dominated Iraqi government that largely failed to be inclusive of Sunnis. Then in 2011, ISIS and its many affiliates took advantage of a weakened Assad government in Syria. Flush with petro-dollars from Qatar and Saudi Arabia, they quickly became Assad’s leading military opposition. The Jihadists of ISIS are an Islamist foreign legion. They come from, not only the entire Islamic world, but also Europe. Thousands joined their ranks in Syria. The leader of ISIS is an Iraqi called al-Baghdadi. ISIS controls Syria’s southeast and all Iraq’s Sunni-majority area. The goal of ISIS is to impose a Caliphate, i.e. an Islamist state under strict sharia law to encompass much of the Arab world.

Who is afraid of ISIS?

The rise of ISIS is so concerning that it has motivated some abrupt reversal of alliances and made some strange bedfellows. On June 18, 2014, the Obama administration announced that 300 so-called military advisers would be sent to Iraq. Reading between the lines, this means that thousands of US special forces will be sent to secure the Iraqi oil fields and the Green Zone in Baghdad. The crisis has provoked a rapprochement between Washington and Teheran. Iran has sent at least 2,000 of its revolutionary guards to protect Baghdad. At least for the time being, American and Iranian special forces will be allied against ISIS.

Down the line, Iran’s military involvement could grow. The ISIS crisis will also be an opportunity for Assad’s troops, with the help of Hezbollah, to maintain their momentum. Those who should be most concerned about the Jihadists’ blitzkrieg in Iraq might be ISIS’ own biological fathers: the kings and sheiks of the Gulf States. If ISIS takes Baghdad, who can stop the Jihadist march on Doha (Qatar), Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), or even Amman (Jordan), in a most unwelcome return of the prodigal son.

Editor’s Notes: Photographs one, four, and six by James Gordon. Photographs two, seven and eleven from Freedom House. Photographs eight, nine and ten by Ahmad Mousa.

About the author
Gilbert Mercier is the Editor in Chief of News Junkie Post, where this essay originally appeared. 

– See more at: http://newsjunkiepost.com/2014/06/20/rise-of-isis-west-saudi-arabia-and-qatar-are-responsible-for-talibanization-of-iraq/#sthash.mE0mxPOC.dpuf

From TGP Superstation & Pravda.ru

US troops aren’t going “to Iraq.” They are going to bolster security at the US Embassy in Baghdad. Attempts to portray the routine move as an “intervention” is a ploy to undermine the credibility and sovereignty of the Iraqi government.

By Tony Cartalucci – LD

Barack Obama sends troops back to Iraq as Isis insurgency worsens,” in title alone leads the general population to believe the third “Iraq War” has begun. The article claims:

The US is urgently deploying several hundred armed troops in and around Iraq and considering sending an additional contingent of special forces soldiers as Baghdad struggles to repel a rampant insurgency.

Upon carefully reading the article, however, it is revealed that these troops are only to aid in the security of the US embassy in Baghdad. Buried 11 paragraphs down, amid suggestions, speculation, and conjecture, is the true nature of the latest deployment:

Obama said in his notification to Congress that the military personnel being sent to Iraq would provide support and security for the American embassy in Baghdad, but was “equipped for combat”.

All troops participating in such missions to protect and possibly evacuate US embassies anywhere on Earth are “equipped for combat.” This hyperbole at best is sensationalism, and at worst, intentional disinformation meant to further undermine the stability of Baghdad’s government, by implying that it both seeks and depends on US military forces for its continued survival.

It has been previously reported that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is a creation of the United States and its regional allies, with the CIA itself monitoring, arming, and funding the terrorist organization along the Turkish-Syrian border for the past 3 years. The ISIS’ incursion into northern Iraq was portended by their very public redeployment to eastern Syria in March 2014 where they then prepared for the invasion of Iraq.

Since invading, they have committed themselves to overt, sectarian bloodshed in an attempt to trigger reprisals across Iraq along sectarian lines and create a wider sectarian conflict. The relatively small ISIS force can and will be overwhelmed by Iraqi security forces if the psychological and strategic impact of its blitzkrieg-style tactics can be exposed and blunted. In the meantime, during this closing window of opportunity, the US in particular is struggling to undermine both the sociopolitical stability of Iraq itself, and the credibility of the government in Baghdad. Ironically, to do this, the US is posing as Baghdad’s ally.

America’s “Political Touch of Death”

The US has used insidious propaganda to distance itself from its own proxies in places like Egypt, portraying ElBaradei and Mohammed Morsi as “anti-Western.” Policymakers have admitted the need to do so to prevent anti-American sentiment from undermining the chances of success for their proxies. Following this logic, overtly “supporting” those the West opposes would be an effective way to in fact, undermine them.

Readers should recall during the opening phases of the very much US-engineered, so-called “Arab Spring,” that both the US and Israel intentionally and very publicly offered “support” for the embattled government of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, despite training and funding the very mobs that were set to overthrow his government. The alleged support was a psychological operation (psyop) designed not to help the embattled government, but to undermine it further. Egyptians on all sides of the political divide viewed the United States and Israel with everything from suspicion to outright scorn. By posing as allies of the Mubarak government, the US and Israel were able to politically poison the leadership in Cairo and deny it any support that could counter the Western-sponsored mobs in the streets.

In retrospect, the orchestrated Western-backed nature of the Tunisian, Egyptian, and Libyan unrest is clear. However, as the events played out, especially in the early stages, the corporate-owned Western media committed itself to breathtaking propagandizing. In Egypt, crowds of 50,000 were translated into “crowds of 2 million” through boldfaced lies, tight camera angles and disingenuous propagandists like BBC’s Jon Leyne. In Libya, the initial armed nature of the “rebellion” was omitted and the unrest was portrayed as “peaceful unarmed protests.”

Perhaps most diabolical of all is the manner in which the mainstream media portrayed Egypt’s opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei. Indeed, ElBaradei was at the very center of the protests, having returned to Egypt a year earlier in February 2010 to assemble his “National Front for Change” with the help of Egypt’s “youth movements” led by the US State Department trained April 6 Movement and Google’s Wael Ghonim. But we were all told he “just flew in,” and that he was viewed with “suspicion” by the West. We were also told that Hosni Mubarak was still our “chosen man” and reports even went as far as claiming (unsubstantiated claims) that Mubarak was preparing to flee to Tel Aviv, Israel of all places, and that Israel was airlifting in weapons to bolster his faltering regime.

Obviously those “attempts” to save Mubarak’s regime failed, precisely because they were never designed to succeed in the first place. And on the eve of Mubarak’s fall, the US eventually turned a full 180 degrees around from defending him, to demanding he step down.

With amazing “foresight,” the Council on Foreign Relations’ magazine Foreign Affairs reported in March 2010, a year before the so-called “Arab Spring,” the following (emphasis added):

“Further, Egypt’s close relationship with the United States has become a critical and negative factor in Egyptian politics. The opposition has used these ties to delegitimize the regime, while the government has engaged in its own displays of anti-Americanism to insulate itself from such charges. If ElBaradei actually has a reasonable chance of fostering political reform in Egypt, then U.S. policymakers would best serve his cause by not acting strongly. Somewhat paradoxically, ElBaradei’s chilly relationship with the United States as IAEA chief only advances U.S. interests now. “ 

Fully realizing US or Israeli support for ElBaradei would destroy any chance for the “revolution’s” success, it appears that the cartoonish act of overtly, even oafishly supporting Mubarak in the early stages of the unrest was a deliberate attempt to shift the ire of the Egyptian people toward him, and their suspicions away from the West’s proxy ElBaradei. Similar attempts have since been made to bolster the legitimacy of the Muslim Brotherhood while undermining the military-led government now ruling in Cairo.

Beyond Egypt, such a campaign unfolded in Libya against Muammar Qaddafi, with rumors circulated that Israel was trying to save the embattled regime by hiring mercenaries, and even claims being made that Qaddafi was Jewish. Mirroring the cartoonish propaganda aimed at galvanizing Mubarak’s opposition, attempts to tarnish Qaddafi’s image in the eyes of America’s and Israel’s enemies by feigning support for him was attempted, but ultimately failed. Against Syria, a similar campaign by the US and Israel met with even less success.

Still, the “political touch of death” the US and its regional allies wield is extended out toward any and all in the hopes that it will help undermine and destabilize targeted nations. This most recent attempt to portray Baghdad as a benefactor of possible US assistance seeks to both grant the US plausible deniability in its role of raising ISIS legions in the first place, and undermine the Iran-leaning government of Iraq’s Nouri al-Maliki in the eyes of enemies and allies alike.

The scum of the Earth go unpunished

By Pepe Escobar, Cross-posted from RT

The fact that the Phantom (Tony Blair) keeps getting away with his vast desert of convoluted lies — instead of languishing in some rotten, extraordinary rendition hotel — spells out all we need to know about so-called Western “elites,” of which he’s been a faithful, and handsomely rewarded, servant.

His most recent opus speaks for itself; like a Kabuki mask high on Earl Grey tea, the Phantom is eviscerated by his own mighty pen — actually — sword.

The fact that the Phantom keeps getting away with his vast desert of convoluted lies — instead of languishing in some rotten, extraordinary rendition hotel — spells out all we need to know about so-called Western “elites,” of which he’s been a faithful, and handsomely rewarded, servant.

So Western “inaction” in Syria has led to the latest Iraq tragedy? Sorry, Tony; it was yours and “Dubya’s” 2003 Shock and Awe “action” that set the whole Shakespearean tragedy in motion.

The Phantom always wanted the Obama administration to bomb Syria, as much as he labored for “Dubya” to destroy Iraq. Phantom logic never considered that would have installed in Damascus the same Islamic State of Iraqi and the Levant (ISIL) that is now making a push towards Baghdad.

Then there’s the gift that keeps on giving — the endlessly recycled, repackaged Global War on Terror (GWOT), of which the Phantom was the prime sidekick. So Phantom had to be on board the latest US craze — which brands ISIL as the avatar of a new 9/11.

In Syria, Phantom has been one of the prime instigators of the “rebel with a cause” ISIL and Jabhat al-Nusra-infested gang. If the Phantom’s bombing logic had won in Syria — he was preaching Damascus as a replay of 2003 Baghdad — Aleppo would be, for a while now, an avatar of Mosul.

The deeper we get into it, the Phantom looks and sounds like the heir of — also clueless — British commanders in 19th century Afghanistan. Look, for instance, at this unintended consequence of the 2001 American bombing of Afghanistan; now we have Hazaras — Afghan Shi’ites — fighting side by side with Iranians, alongside Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian army, against the Phantom-supported Syrian “rebels.” Oh Tony; not even your old cohort Peter “Lord of Darkness” Mandelson could have explained that.

By the way, the Phantom has always been a firm believer in the “evil” of Iran, constantly “warning” that Tehran was on the verge of assembling a nuclear weapon (old habits — as in the Phantom’s Saddam syndrome — die hard.) So imagine his Dick Cheney-worthy stupor when Washington and Tehran are on the verge of discussing in Vienna the set up of some sort of joint action to fight ISIL in Iraq, and even “uber-hawks” such as Republican Senator Lindsey Graham utter the unimaginable words, “We are probably going to need [Iran’s] help to hold Baghdad.”

The Phantom would be incapable of connecting the geopolitical dots from Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya and Syria; the bottom line he would be unable to identify is that there is absolutely no strategic, long-term Anglo-American foreign policy project in what the Pentagon still calls the “arc of instability.” If there ever was a motto, it was “Dubya’s… “you’re either with us or with the terrorists.” A motto turned on its head, because until this very moment Anglo-American power was “with the terrorists,” from Libya to Syria; a predictable perversion of time-tested Divide and Rule.

The Obama administration is going no-holds-barred to get a SOFA in Afghanistan — code for Enduring Freedom forever (with “discreet” Special Forces as the invisible stars.) Washington has already admitted it is sending lethal “assistance” to “moderate” rebels in Syria (as, in theory, the Islamic Front goons, not Jabhat al-Nusra or ISIL). As if Hollywoodish CIA assets wouldn’t know that these weapons will certainly be bought and/or stolen by hardcore jihadis.

ISIL in the borderless desert between Syria and Iraq is already a proto-Caliphate. Blowback from this weaponizing of so-called “moderates” — there are no “moderates,” as there are no Taliban “moderates” — will be no less than staggering. Victims include Kurds in Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran; Turkmen in Iraq (as it’s already happening this week); and of course Christians all over (as it already happened in Syria).

Bomb them into democracy, againThe Phantom now is preaching for American “intervention” in Iraq; first you starve them; then you bomb them into a wasteland and call it “democracy”; then you occupy them; then you infest them with jihadis; then they kick you out; then the jihadis raise hell (now flush with $425 million stolen from a government vault in Mosul, apart from loads of cash from Wahhabis in the Gulf to buy all those white Toyotas and RPGs); then you re-occupy them softly. It IS the gift that keeps on giving.

As for the notion — equally peddled by the Phantom and US neo-cons — that ISIL is a threat to Western security (“trying to do harm to Europe, to America and other people,” in Kerry’s words). That’s nonsense; a joke as monumental as that maze of American satellites incapable of tracking a long line of white Toyotas advancing in the Western Iraqi desert — leading to the swift disintegration of four Iraqi army divisions.

They saw it, they tracked it, and they kept mum. That’s straight from the Empire of Chaos’s playbook. Why not advance murderous “Divide and Rule” between Sunnis and Shiites? Let them eat corpses — and kill each other to kingdom come, as in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war.

ISIL’s push is a remix of the Sunni-Shi’ite civil war of 2006-2007, whose effects, pre-American surge, I documented in my reportage book Red Zone Blues. At the time, it was all centered in Baghdad; when al-Qaeda in Iraq took over the Dora neighborhood in Baghdad, that lasted only a short while. Sunnis themselves rebelled against the medieval jihadi “worldview.”

The Phantom, anyway, got his wish; Iraq is for all practical purposes broken, irretrievably fragmented, and cannot be “fixed” (Colin Powell’s terminology). The Kurds have already solved one of the most intractable problems of post-Shock and Awe; they’ve already rearranged Sykes-Picot by taking over oil-rich Kirkuk (not to mention the Nineveh plateau).

And as further proof ISIL has nothing to do with a threat to Western security, the tanks and heavy artillery they captured in Iraq were redirected to Syria, in their push to fight Damascus.

This is all too much for the Phantom to digest. Perhaps he should start by reading this — as in Iraqi works rejecting everything that happened even before 2003, and even before the Phantom’s limelight moment.

As for the Phantom’s key argument that what’s happening now in Iraq is the result of less — and not more — Western warmongering, call it phantom hubris. The “Middle East” — in fact Southwest Asia — is a Western fiction imposed by colonial powers on the local populations. What the Pentagon described since the early 2000s as the “arc of instability” is a self-fulfilling projection of anarchy, with some patches of “peace” represented by those repellent GCC petro-monarchies (after we need “our” oil).

And then there’s the slowly but surely inevitable process of progressive integration of Eurasia — along the myriad, Chinese-driven new silk roads. That’s anathema for the empire of chaos and its “special relationship” minion. So Southwest Asia in perpetual chaos is more than welcomed. Expect the hubristic Phantom to call for increased fuel to be added to this Western-concocted opera already on fire.

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times. His regular column, “The Roving Eye,” is widely read. He is an analyst for the online news channel Real News, the roving correspondent for Asia Times/Hong Kong, an analyst for RT and TomDispatch, and a frequent contributor to websites and radio shows ranging from the US to East Asia.  He argues that the world has become fragmented into “stans” — we are now living an intestinal war, an undeclared global civil war. He has published three books on geopolitics, including the spectacularly-titled “Globalistan: How the Globalised World Is Dissolving Into Liquid War”.  His latest book is “Obama Does Globalistan.”