The tangled web of the Muslim Brotherhood, Taliban, Al-Qaeda, ISIL, US foreign policy and Islam
“Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. Andalusia (Spain), Sicily, the Balkans, the Italian coast, as well as the islands of the Mediterranean are all Muslim Mediterranean colonies, and must return to the embrace of Islam.” — Hassan al-Banna, 1928 in founding statement of the Muslim Brotherhood
I’ll say it. The foreign policy of the United States in the Muslim world at least exacerbated the explosion of Islamist movements, and arguably caused its massive resurgence in the latter half of the 20th century. Those same policies create and exacerbate radical fundamentalist Islamists today. However, this does not mean that the USA started Kalifa-restoration Islamism. The Muslim Brotherhood was formed in 1928 about four years after the 1923 fall of the Ottoman Empire with the goal of restoring an Islamic empire. By 1949, Hassan al-Banna was killed in Cairo for creating a vast organization that conducted assassinations, bombings and insurgent training across the Middle East.
The Muslim Brotherhood is the ancestor of Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIL, and other groups seeking to reinstall the Islamic Caliphate (Kalifa). They may bicker to the point of killing each other, but they descend from Hassan al-Banna’s group and mostly base upon Q’tub’s lyrical theological treatise, “In the Shade of the Quran.” Q’tub, in turn, descends theologically from Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab, the founder of Wahabbism, the state religion of the Saudi Arabian kingdom. Q’tub’s book, “In the Shade of the Quran,” is a fundamentalist call to return Islam to the way it was in the time of the prophet Mohammed. The Islamic reformer al-Wahhab called for the same. This is why Saudi Arabia chops off hands and heads, adhering to Sharia law in most ways. But in the modern era, Al Banna was the seed.
The Saudi royal family’s ascendancy to the throne brought al-Wahhab’s fundamentalism into power. In Saudi Arabia it is respectable to editorialize in major (state approved) newspapers about the need to bring chattel slavery laws back in order to conform with Sharia law. That kind of fundamentalist conformance to Sharia law gave the Saudi royal family claim to being “more Muslim than thou” and justifies their control over Mecca. It is from this branch that Islamists of Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and ISIL come. From this sprang the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideal of life lived in the “cool shade of Quran.”
Carter, Afghanistan and Islam
“Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.’” — Zbignew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, 1998 interview.
July 3, 1979 Jimmy Carter signed an order to give aid to the mujahedeen for the purpose of inducing the USSR to invade Afghanistan in order to embroil the USSR in a Vietnam-like mess. The Soviet Union bit on the jihadist bait, invading Afghanistan December 25, 1979. Most Americans think that Charlie Wilson helped the Afghanis after the USSR invaded. The movie about it gives the impression that it was just old Charlie and his socialite friend plus a CIA officer with a touch of PTSD who did it on their own. This idea is totally false. The USA gave Afghan jihadists weapons before the Soviet invasion, and it was Carter and Brzezinski’s intent that the Soviets would invade. Carter then called the Soviet Afghan invasion, “the most serious threat to peace since the Second World War.” Perhaps we miscalculated Carter’s capacity for deviousness.
The USA was in turn duped by General Zia who ran Pakistan during most of the Soviet occupation. Pakistan gave every indication of playing the USA for the money and supplies, and not intending to really fight the Soviet Union effectively. Just as the USA has paid out billions to Pakistan in our current Afghan war, we dropped about $2.5 billion in payments, weapons and supplies into Pakistan. Americans never understand baksheesh economies that run by bribery and guile. We are such naïve bumpkins about that as a people.
After switching our support to the Northern Alliance because they really wanted to fight, the USSR abandoned Afghanistan nine years after their initial invasion. Pakistan’s ISI then supplied materials to the Taliban that were paid for and delivered years before by the USA that the ISI had stored in warehouses. Other warlords, like General Rashid Dostum and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, destroyed upwards of 1/3 of the capital, Kabul, killing yet more civilians. In Kabul during this time, hillbilly fighters were reported to drag men out of their cars downtown and rape them in the middle of the day. Girls were taken and raped, shamed forever. Into this the Taliban stepped to restore order with Sharia law. Afghanistan was fairly westernized for a couple of generations by then, but public executions in the soccer stadium generated compliance. Osama bin Laden made his way to Afghanistan from Sudan and helped with reconstruction.
The word “Taliban” means a religious student. It would be like naming a Christian militia, “Seminarians”. The Taliban came in as the “good guys” to restore order, supported by Pakistan. They did restore order. The Taliban abhor the Tajik’s practice of bacha bazi, or raping boys and young men.
Islamists and the problem of corruption
Done with Carter and Brzezinski’s sneaky gambit to destabilize the USSR that left a million dead and 3 million injured Afghan pawns in the game, the USA abandoned Afghanistan to its own devices. Benazir Bhutto was democratically elected in Pakistan just before the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and some estimates say as much as 10% of the gross national product of Pakistan was squirreled away in Dubai by the Bhuttos. By contrast, Islamists come into office as, “the clean government people,” as most recently happened in Turkey with Erdogan. The non-Islamists I spoke to who vote for them argue that at least Islamists have a moral code to live by, and something must be done. While Islamists are not as clean as they claim, the Islamist president of Turkey, Mr. Erdogan, does make a show of it.
Kosovo and Russian repudiation of America as savior
The Yugoslavian civil war of 1992–1995 included the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995. It is largely unknown in the West that Ottoman Muslims conducted a much larger massacre of Serbs in Belgrade in 1906 than Srebrenica. That is not an excuse, but it does promote understanding. From 1996, Osama bin Laden funded the Kosovo Liberation Army in Yugoslavia and had a top lieutenant command it. The KLA conducted ethnic cleansing operations against Serbs in Kosovo with significant success. Serbia decided on a policy of forced deportation of the Muslim population because they provided aid and comfort to the KLA insurgency.
Russia played rope-a-dope with President Clinton in Kosovo. How this happened is that Yevgeny Primakov visited President Milosevic prior to the USA’s Kosovo campaign. To the Western press, Primakov said he tried to talk sense into Milosevic. But on arrival in Moscow, Primakov announced that he was going to reconstruct the eastern bloc alliance and Serbia was its first signatory. I learned this because I was on the phone to a Russian friend — a homicide detective — who saw it live on TV as we talked. It is worth noting that Milosevic backed down in response to threats from Madeline Albright five times before defying her after meeting with Primakov. And Russia ran the blockade for the entire campaign, supplying fuel and supplies to Serbia.
In 1996, a man in a park in Naberezhnye Chelny, Russia, kissed me on both cheeks and demanded I thank Ronald Reagan for breaking the old regime. A few years later, in response to the USA led bombing of Kosovo, the Moscow chapter of Physicians against Nuclear War wrote to Boris Yeltsin asking him to stop nuclear disarmament and reinstate the policy of mutually assured destruction. Russian public opinion swerved from quite pro-American to beating a few people to death thought to be Americans. Vladimir Putin’s win appeared to be what the Kremlin intended.
USA foreign policy from 1996 to 2001 gave analysts whiplash. Just two years prior to 9–11, the USA allied with Osama bin Laden in Kosovo, and both were being used by the Kremlin to manipulate public opinion in Russia. That strange historical alliance of the USA with Al-Qaeda is weirder because Al Qaeda formally declared war on the USA in 1996. Yes, folks, Bill Clinton flogged NATO into Kosovo on the side of Osama bin Laden’s insurgent army just two years after Osama’s Al-Qaeda delivered a formal, written declaration of war on the USA. We certainly found out that Osama really meant his declaration of war and wasn’t placated by our gesture in the least. A fanatic like Osama bin Laden (just like the current ISIL leadership) can’t commit heresy by accepting infidel friendship. They are encouraged by their religious ideology to lie to infidels and use this to gain advantage though.
Islamist strategy — the Carter gambit redux by Obama and Hilary Clinton
Nobody needs to be told that Al-Qaeda struck the Twin Towers on 9–11–2001, but we do need reminding that a previous attempt occurred on February 26, 1993. It’s important because it shows how persistent the Islamists are in their religio-political fanaticism. We also need to be hit over the head with a baseball bat in order to realize that — just as Jimmy Carter baited the USSR into a war in Afghanistan — Osama bin Laden baited the USA into war on the same bloody ground, with similar goals in mind.
We Americans tend to think that we were in control when we decided to go to war, not recognizing that Al-Qaeda wanted to draw us into that war. The idea Al-Qaeda had is that foreign soldier’s boots on the ground are heresy to Islam, and so all good Muslims would rise up and fight. With polls showing Osama bin Laden’s popularity at 90% or better, the Al-Qaeda leadership appeared to believe it would be instant and dramatic. That didn’t happen exactly as planned, but it has worked reasonably well and the game isn’t over. They overplayed their hand somewhat, but their overall estimation of the dimwittedness of the American colossus was spot on. I believe that we’re blinded by our ideas of the separation between church and state, and so we presume everyone else must agree if only we get to have a little chat. We just don’t understand the power of religious fanaticism because we really don’t have it here. So-called fanatics in the USA are pale shadows of real fanaticism.
In the USA, the general thinking is that we handled business reasonably well in Afghanistan (if not Iraq.) But by 2009, the Taliban had backed up a 20,000 man Pakistani army to within 90 miles of Islamabad, the capital. It was only then that Pakistan’s government asked the USA to crank up the drone war. Without it, Pakistan probably would have fallen to the Taliban. That would have given them all the makings of nuclear weapons that Pakistan has. One interpretation of the Taliban/Al-Qaeda strategy in Afghanistan is that their goal all along was to take over Pakistan to get control of nuclear weapons. (And secondarily, to bleed the USA dry like the USSR was.) We of the West tend to discount the strategic thinking of opponents who don’t look like us. The press and our pundits tend to have very short time horizons, short memories, and both left and right think the Islamists are too stupid to be worthy opponents. But, while blundering in some ways, these Islamists think in terms of decades in the context of centuries, and no single person ultimately matters — just the goal. We think we “got bin Laden” and that this actually mattered. It was nothing. Osama bin Laden is now a martyr, a kind of saint to flog others to carry on. In other words, by killing Osama, we helped the opposition a bit. I am quite sure that our intelligence analysts know this and made it clear to the White House.
“I believe that the establishment of the Khilafah [sic] will be the trigger that will push the Western governments to purge their lands of Muslims. Personally, I would be happy when that day comes. Happy for the establishment of Allah’s deen on Earth, and inshallah I will be at the gates welcoming Muslims thrown out of the West to their new homes under Allah’s cool shade. What is happening today as far as the battles being fought between the West and the Muslims — be that Mujahideen or inocent civilians — is certainly a preliminary to the fullscale war between the West and Islam after the establishment of the Khilafah state.”
- Anonymous Islamist via Farooq Khan, February, 2001.
Regime change in Iraq PNAC I
The PNAC Iraq war was a bizarre event in American foreign policy. We took a well managed, stable situation, and spent trillions turning it into an historic gain for the Ayatollahs of Iran, our supposed enemy. As our army attacked Afghanistan, I listened to a party of military brass in Moscow toast to our getting in Afghanistan what they did, until they ran out of vodka. The keystone cops incompetence of L. Paul Bremer running the occupation of Iraq, flying in the face of all sound advice, was astonishing. The Maliki government that followed continued the policy of oppressing the Sunnis of Iraq started by Bremer.
Yes, the Shia of Iraq have quite valid beefs with the Sunni-Baathists who ran Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Shia lived under the oppression of Sunni rule for nearly 1000 years. Iraq contains Karbala the place where Sunni Islam’s ancestors murdered the last of Mohammed’s favorites. But the Maliki government turned the new Iraq army into a dumping ground for connected locals who made L. Paul Bremer seem like brilliantly effective. I can say from personal experience that for truly mind-blowing management abominations one must go to the Middle East or Central Asia.
Regime change in Syria, PNAC II and the rise of ISIL
ISIL isn’t just an Islamist movement. The Sunni sheiks of Iraq and former Baathist armed forces allied with them because they had little choice. Ask yourself what the whites of the American south would have done after our civil war if they had been blocked from jobs and systematically oppressed for 15 years by government totally dominated by former slaves with a grudge? That’s Iraq today — a mutual hatred and contempt society. Those ex Baathist armed forces guys provide ISIL with infrastructure and make the trains run on time. The Islamists play the role of the point of the spear. It’s an uneasy alliance, and neither side exactly trusts the other. This explanation is oversimplified, and it is based on incomplete information. But the Sunnis of Iraq could sit where they were and accept being the new second-class citizens of Iraq, oppressed into menial jobs and crime as they had oppressed Shia. Or, they could strike out and make a new nation. They chose the latter.
However, the rise of ISIL, and the opportunity for Iraq’s Sunnis didn’t happen in a vacuum. The Obama administration wanted regime change in Syria, which was a Hillary Clinton project and just happens to be another piece of the PNAC doctrine that got us into Iraq. So in 2011, we decided to back the “rebels” — those wonderful freedom fighters against Assad. The major media fell into lockstep behind that. Common wisdom was that Syria would fall by the end of 2011. It’s now 2021 and Syria hasn’t fallen. One of the primary generals that fights for Assad’s regime is a Sunni, but a secular one more along the lines of El Sisi in Egypt. The backing by the USA of anti-Assad forces, plus US inaction and collaboration with the extremist Muslim states of the Arabian Peninsula (Qatar, Saudi Arabia), was backing ISIL and Al-Qaeda. The White House knew this without a doubt in 2012 as this report shows.
Al Qaeda — Iraq (AQI):
A. AQI is familiar with Syria. AQI trained in Syria and then infiltrated into Iraq.
B. AQI supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning, both ideologically and through the media….
C. AQI conducted a number of operations in several Syrain cities under the name Jaish al Nusra (Victorious Army), and one of its affiliates.
D. AQI, through the spokesman of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), ABU Muhammad al Adnani, declared the Syrian regime as the spearhead of what he is naming Jibha al Ruwafdh (Forefront of Shiites) because of its (the Syrian Regime) declaration of war on the Sunnis. Additionally he is calling on the Sunnis of Iraq, especially the tribes on the border regions (between Iraq and Syria) to wage war against the Syrian regime, regarding Syria asn an infidel regime for its support ot the infidel party Hezbollah and other regimes he considers dissenters like Iran and Iraq. — August 12, 2012, DOD “Secret/NOFORN” White House briefing document obtained by FOIA.
Then, there is an email released by Wikileaks that shows that Hillary Clinton was aware and counting on Al Qaeda in Syria fighting “on our side” in Syria.
Journalists in the US accept the idea that Bashar Assad is the “bad guy” and repeat calls for his removal as a given with few exceptions. However, any objective look fails to find much reason beyond the usual democracy shibboleths, and even then it requires studious ignorance of history. A review shows that Hafez Assad became president in Syria during a time of Muslim Brotherhood terrorism, the same wave of Islamist terrorism that assassinated Anwar Sadat. Islamist fundamentalist terrorism is not new in the least. Not the bombs, nor assassinations, it’s just new on our soil.
Hafez appears to have pretended to be a good jihadist to get into power in Syria with the blessing of the Muslim Brotherhood. But once in power, he got rid of the Islamists and forged a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, secular government based around Arabist socialism, the Ba’ath party. He did it in the context of Islamists bombing, assassinating, and attempting to assassinate army and government officials along with civilians and the president. Wafa Sultan describes Islamist insurgents breaking into her classroom at her university with firearms, targeting her professor. It is never mentioned here in the USA that Hafez Assad bent over backwards to placate and bring Muslim Brotherhood terrorists into the political process. Hafez released Islamist prisoners toward the end. Their response was just like Osama bin Laden’s was to Bill Clinton’s alliance with the Al-Qaeda backed KLA in Kosovo. There can be no peace with infidels nor heretics. Perhaps the USA will only get really serious when the Islamists graduate to assassination of the USA’s presidents and members of congress as they did in Egypt and Syria.
Bashar Assad took over and his rule was fairly uneventful until the uprising[1]. One can argue against the son of Hafez Assad taking over, but if you do that, then you must also argue the Saudi royal family, the rulers of Oman, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan are equally illegitimate. To say any one of them must be overthrown for autocratic dictatorial rule means they all should be overthrown.
Bashar Assad made a few critical mistakes though. His regime is quasi-secularist which makes him hated by the religious fanatics who run the Gulf States. His regime is not run for Sunni domination, and that makes them hate him even more. To the fundamentalist salafis who run Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc. Syria is a far greater danger to them than Israel is.
Israel is a largely secular example of democracy in the middle of the Muslim world. Israelis are economically better off than their neighbors, despite being locked in unending conflict. (A large part of this is the huge payments the USA provides Israel every year.) But no Arab Muslim ruler believes that his people will look to Israel and want to become them, because Islam declares Jews to be underpeople, who are supposed to be under the boot of Islam or dead. This blinds most Muslims in the Middle East to accepting that Israel is doing so well because of merit.
But Syria? Syria is an example of a nation that is run by secular principles, one that has worked rather well for most of its people aside from the war. That is a beacon that the common people of the Muslim world can look to and see that their dictatorships and “royal famlies” are not needed. And they have elections. Syria is an example to the nations around it.
Bashar Assad allied with Iran and helped Hezbollah. Bashar Assad, like Hafez, has also been unwilling to let go of the Golan Heights, largely, I think, because it is a hot-button issue in his country. Consequently, he got on the bad-guy list of Israel’s ruling Likud, and I believe that put him on the USA’s bad-guy list. With Saudi Arabia also desperate to see non-Sunni secular government ended, this presented a united front in Washington, DC between the USA’s primary allies in the region.
Syria also allied with Iran, a neighboring nation, probably out of pragmatism, and Iran has been a declared enemy since the Carter administration. In addition, Syria allied with the Russian Federation, again out of pragmatism. The old guard cold-warriors in the USA found this is impossible to forgive. Poles and Ukrainians were a key part of the cold war because they were the people who understood Russian culture and language at the close of WWII and through the 1960’s cold war peak. Make no mistake, those imports to give us capability to spy and analyze the USSR were WWII war criminals. Now their children have grown up and allied with those who want a new war with Russia. That old guard’s views of the world are visible sometimes in Stratfor missives such as this one about a greater Poland and Ukraine after the fall of Russia. Some of those ideas would be screamingly funny if they weren’t giving evidence of what they want in the context of a current civil war fomented in Ukraine. Those Poles and Ukrainians descended from our cold war imports want to take over western Russia, and reinstate borders not seen for 500 years. Their view is that anybody allying with Russia is the enemy.
It’s true that the Syrian government’s ruling coalition didn’t arise democratically in a Kumbaya Western sense. That “democracy is the only way” is a favorite fantasy of Western thinkers who believe that as soon as it is presented, “the people” will embrace democracy and dance in the street like Disney characters. No government in that region arose and maintains itself democratically. Not one. No nation in the Gulf has democracy, except in name. They are all dictatorships. The Saudi royal family need their own private underground roads to be safe. Egypt and Turkey have never been true democracy, they have democratic forms, kept in line by military secularists.
But just because a nation isn’t democratic doesn’t mean we can’t measure each nation by how it fits with our values. The Assad regime in Syria is light-years closer to American values than anybody opposing them. The same is true of the el-Sisi government in Egypt. There is no other way to govern except capitulation to the Islamist fundamentalists of the Muslim Brotherhood. All of the opposition in the Middle East are fighting to install Sunni religious dictatorship of one flavor or another. Those are Islamists. They are not really our friends in any sense. They are simply using us and our naivete to move their program ahead.
Somehow, Western journalists and politicians decide that Syria should be held to a different standard than everyone else and nobody questions it. And that is how the Obama administration spent almost 8 years trying to find the “nice good rebels” who would fight ISIL and Assad. Fighters we backed literally ate the heart and liver of enemies. That the United States government actually had a policy to find the “nice good rebels” and back them, is a resounding declaration of incompetence and incomprehension of that situation, or perhaps even outright corruption of the presidency. I don’t say that lightly.
Fast forward to 2021, and the Biden administration has reinstated the policy of backing ISIS/ISIL/Al Qaeda in Syria. Remember that shows that Hillary Clinton was aware and counting on Al Qaeda in Syria fighting “on our side” in Syria. This is what we have become.
Regime change in Libya — PNAC III and the expansion of ISIL
Similarly, the successful campaign against Moammar Qaddafi in Libya made another stronghold for Islamists to take over part of that nation. That stronghold is becoming the next Caliphate. There really was virtually no difference between the Bush administration and the Obama administration on foreign policy except the size of military involvement, and the attitude of media stories on those adventures. Obama got a pass and paeans to his statesmanship. And nobody, anywhere, has attacked the policy that Cheney put in place, which outsources logistical support for boots on the ground for the first time in American history. Since Cheney’s virtual presidency the military-industrial complex requires hot war, with troops in the field to feed its appetite. Before Cheney, it only required weapons systems be built.
The not so Arab Spring
The extreme naiveté of the USA press also shapes our foreign policy. The so-called Arab Spring that generated a media feeding frenzy in 2010 uncorked Islamists. Egypt narrowly missed becoming an Islamist Sharia state only because Abdel Fattah el-Sisi took over, and we still have journalists on “our side” decrying that and imprisonment of journalists in Egypt. Nobody mentions what those journalists, paid by Qatar, are doing to foment Islamist revolution in Egypt, and to “spread the good word” of radical fundamentalist Islam. El-Sisi said it very clearly — “Islam is the problem.” He grew up there as a Muslim. Perhaps we should pay attention to his assessment.
The “Arab Spring” was stopped by other Muslim nations who saw what was really happening. The Arab Spring was, in fact, a complete fiction coined by provincial New Yorker journalists who interpreted everything through a filter of leading edge Western humanist values and shibboleths about democracy. They also wanted to find a real world use case example to trumpet for Twitter and social media taking over the world. What we found out is that other cultures really do have different values — radically different. Those New York journalists leapt on the story to portray it as the victory of the internet’s social media over despotism. All of it was pure fiction, or perhaps better said, mass delusion.
Rise of Islamist Turkey, a disquieting alliance
In 2017 Erdogan began working a slow-motion Islamist coup in Turkey. The signature in Turkey that the so-called coup that tried to overthrow Erdogan was an agent provacateur action is that he and everyone around him operated like clockwork. It was way too smooth, far too neat, and the story that Gulen was behind it came right away. I have made a study of how governments react to real emergencies versus arranged ones. In real emergencies, governments screw up a lot. I observed a number of such events and one gets to know the signs.
Contrast Turkey’s smooth handling of their “coup” to the way our State Department handled the emergency of Edward Snowden. First we asked Hong Kong authorities in China to help us get him, which was ridiculous. Would we help China get a rogue intelligence agent of theirs who was found on the island of Okinawa after he spilled everything about China’s program? Not a chance.
China reacted predictably. After getting what they could from Snowden, the punted him to Russia to avoid confrontation with us. Second, we revoked Snowden’s passport, but Hong Kong wasn’t about to let this problem child stay just because his passport was canceled. When Snowden landed in Russia with an invalid passport, that gave the Russians a gift from the gods of intelligence agencies! Under international law, Russia was entirely justified in keeping him in no-man’s-land — forever. I’ve been in that area of Sheremetyevo. After a few weeks, I understand why Snowden would make a deal to get out. We handed Russia the keys to holding him and squeezing him! Snowden wasn’t some hard-core soldier ready to go to prison for decades.
So now Snowden is ensconced in the one nation on earth capable of protecting him — the only such nation where he will blend in everywhere. You couldn’t be sure of spotting Snowden at 5 feet on the streets of Russia. Contrast this with Snowden in Ecuador. We have major assets in Ecuador. And in Ecuador, everywhere Snowden went he would stand out like an orange-topped white flag, a giant among smaller brown people.
The Snowden incident is how a real emergency gets handled by a government. Screwup piles on screwup, as top-dogs scared for their jobs, or full of a sense of self-importance, ignore their underlings and show exactly how out of touch and lacking in the good sense god gave a celery stick they really are. No response to a real coup runs like clockwork. Real coup response tends to be a blundering, squawking, cluster of demented boobery which, when it survives, does so by accident, good luck, and sometimes the intelligence of a few “boots on the ground”. Amusingly, we saw that in the USA on Jan 6, 2021, although that “insurrection” was more of a tailgate party of stoners than any serious intent. Had it actually been planned well, and executed efficiently, things would have become a cluster-you-know-what of epic proportions.
Looking at Turkey, Erdogan has consolidated his grip on Turkey’s military. In April of 2017, Erdogan won a plebiscite to give himself greatly expanded powers in Turkey. He is now a virtual dictator. Russia is probably moderating him.
Summation — Buffoonery, corruption, ignorance and disinterest
Quite seriously, the USA is a nation that has installed a series of foreign policy buffoons from the President down to nearly every single member of his cabinet, secretary of state, and secretary of defense since the turn of the 21st century. Prior to this at least half were kindly describable as irresponsible fools. Those presidential buffoons have been abetted and guided by a press corps that has proven that it is, if anything, even more provincially clownish and incompetent to fulfill its duty as the 4th branch of government than those the press purports to report on. The Trump administration’s bizarre antics raise clownish incompetence to a new level entirely[2]. But don’t imagine for a second that Democrats are better. They are not [3]. Biden proved this immediately upon taking office, ordering a restart of the policy of convenience toward a highly dubious goal, that allies us with our mortal enemies in Syria — ISIL & Al Qaeda. From anyone else than a president, it would be treason. It is up to Congress to decide if treason applies to a president.
So we see that the USA continues to pour gasoline on the Islamist fire. I believe this has been done out of corruption, venality, ignorance, short-term expediency, and sheer hubris. Saudis gave gifts exceeding $100 million to a single US SecDef after he left office. On the low end, another SecDef got a Jaguar as a gift. Such gifts are not illegal, but still amount to a legal form of ‘bribery after the fact’. The Obama administration continued in Carter’s footsteps of short-term expediency with support of the overthrow of Qaddafi in Libya and arming of Islamist rebels against Assad in Syria. I shed no tears for Qaddafi, but he did keep a lid on the Islamists.
I think we Americans, left, right, and libertarian, just don’t think much of it could actually matter to us at home. I think our leadership thinks the same. That’s why the Obama administration has conducted itself with apparent disinterest for how it exacerbated ISIL, with a big “Ho-hum, who cares?” When our terrorists committed genocide against the Yazidi and took the daughters as sex slaves, nobody in America really cared. The mainstream media didn’t report that these people were being massacred and enslaved because they were primarily Sharfadin, with some Christians — no. Nor did it report that the Obama administration gave them aid and support and did not stop. As far as the Obama administration was concerned, “Those people didn’t vote for us.” Those people being Christians with enough moxie to get upset about it. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that as long as they got away with it they didn’t care.
Our journalism corps also failed studiously to mention that the USA was supporting, aiding, and protecting those ISIL and Al Qaeda extremists. Obama and Hilary Clinton knew. They were the people that decided to do this. That is what I mean when I say our leadership are buffoonish, corrupt, and irresponsible.
Similarly, on the far side of dissent, Edward Snowden spoke of “a few disorganized Arabs” who couldn’t matter as part of his justification for his exposures of NSA secrets. That remark of his prompted me to call Mr. Snowden, “the boy who lived in a closet.” Those “few disorganized Arabs” have taken over land nearly the size of Texas in Syria-Iraq. They still control much of Pakistan and Afghanistan, another area of similar size, and came close to taking over Pakistan after conquering, then losing, Afghanistan. During the longest war in American history, our military admitted the Taliban controlled 10% of Afghanistan’s population, and we were looking to exit without a win for a decade. Islamists fought the US Army quite effectively using guerrilla warfare. And in August of 2021, the Taliban took Kabul. The fictional government of Afghanistan evaporated without a fight after more than $20 trillion.
Folks, the middle east is quite unlike the not-very-mean-streets of San Francisco or New York. It is a medieval world where religious fundamentalism that hasn’t existed in the West since the Spanish Inquisition is in charge. I mean that literally. Everything exists inside Islam, and the most advanced country of our alliance executes people for witchcraft. There is no other context than Islam. Apostasy means death. Executions for witchcraft and blasphemy as well as other matters like adultery are routine. Islam has two major factions, Sunni and Shia. It has quite a few minor factions, small ethnic groups and sects. There are countries where the grip is weaker such as Egypt. There are nations that maintain a relatively benevolent rule. But Islam is the sea within which everything floats or drowns.
Journalists in America are an astonishingly provincial and mostly a rather stupid breed. I remember this guy coming through a city in Central Asia. He presented himself as an Asia and Middle East expert. I set him up with people who knew what was happening in the country and the politics of the area. The meeting over dinner was appalling in the way that scenes in a Seth Rogen movie are. He flatly denied any interest whatsoever in hearing a word from anybody at that table because, he grandly declared, he had interviewed some beggars on the street. He instructed us, looking down his nose, that those people knew better than anyone in this room. Then, he asked two questions — what kind of video games did people play, and — what was their view on homosexuals. That was it. There were moments I wondered if he might be killed before he left. I apologized to everyone for this clownish performance. This is all too often what journalism fields to “get the story”. So, we get the kind of babbling that misleads our nation so wildly.
About this article: I wrote this article over more than a decade, based on materials and observations dating back 20 years. This is part I of a work in progress that cannot be really finished. It is time to make the public aware of the history that produced our current world, the ludicrous “War on Terror” in which we systematically support the people we claim to fight, and the machinations of our politicians, most of whom could care less about any of it.
1 I use “uprising” here only because it is necessary to communicate with most Americans who hear and read this word relative to Syria. But with an estimated 360,000 foreign fighters invading the country of Syria, to overthrow it, helped by the USA and the UK, and help from Iraq’s former armed forces, the correct word is invasion, not uprising. Syria has held on. Good for them.
2. Mr. Trump threatened North Korea, and later it was revealed that the carrier group he said was off shore, ready to pounce, was actually 1,000 miles away and headed for exercises far to the south. As a result, he utterly lost the ‘showdown’ with Kim Jong Un. Trump is revealed to be a blowhard without a clue to both North Korea and China. Stand by for more antics by North Korea. North Korea’s function for China (and Russia) is to distract the USA so that the USA doesn’t have the ability to concentrate forces against either China or Russia. He is fulfilling his role with excellence. Some have speculated that the mis-location of the carrier group 1000 miles away heading away from Korea could be deliberate insubordination by the Joint Chiefs of Staff against a president some believe suffers from senile dementia. The generals know quite well that the outcome of a battle with North Korea would almost certainly mean the obliteration of American presence in the Pacific Rim, and the ascension of China, with China and Russia occupying the Korean Peninsula, and China occupying Japan. In addition, it would probably be the end of that carrier group.
3 Mr. Biden ordered ships into the Black Sea for the first time in three years. Then he ordered a 40 ship fleet, then rescinded that order. Notably, Chinese naval ships were near the West Coast of the USA at the time of round two. A couple of months later, Mr. Biden revived that order, and little has been heard since. Biden is a cold war dinosaur dedicated to the downfall of Russia and China. The situation reminds me of the scene in the Lord of the Rings where Wormtongue has the ear of the king in his dotage.
