By Eric Margolis
October 22, 2017
The so-called Islamic State
organization was primarily a bogeyman encouraged by the western powers.
I’ve been saying this for the last four years. I asserted, as a former
soldier and war correspondent, that IS would collapse like a wet paper bag if
proper western ground forces attacked their strongholds in Syria and
Iraq. This week, the western powers and their local satraps finally took
action and stormed the last IS stronghold at Raqqa. To no surprise, IS
put up almost no resistance and ran for its miserable life. The much-dreaded IS was
never more than a bunch of young hooligans and religious fanatics who were as
militarily effective as the medieval Children’s Crusade.
In the west, IS was blown
up by media and governments into a giant monster that was coming to cut the
throats of honest folk in the suburbs. IS did stage some very
bloody and grisly attacks – that’s what put it on the map. But none
of them posed any mortal threat or really endangered our national
security. In fact, the primary target of IS attacks has been Shia
Muslims in the Mideast. Many of the IS attacks in
North America and Europe were done by mentally deranged individuals or were
initiated by under-cover government provocateurs, such as the 1993 bombing of
New York’s World Trade Center. IS was notorious for falsely taking credit
for attacks it did not commit.
Other ‘lone wolf’ attacks
were made by Mideasterners driven to revenge after watching the destruction by
the US and its allies of substantial parts of their region. Think Iraq,
Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, parts of Pakistan, and the murderous
brutality of Egypt’s-US backed regime.
IS appears to have been
shaped by western intelligence in an effort to duplicate its success with the
Afghan mujahidin in the mid 1980’s that helped defeat the Soviet Union.
CIA, Pakistani and Saudi intelligence, and Britain’s MI-6 recruited some
100,000 volunteers from across the Muslim world to wage jihad in
Afghanistan. I observed this brilliant success first hand from the ranks
of the mujahidin.
The western powers, led by
the US, sought to emulate this success in Syria by unleashing armies of
mercenaries, disaffected, unemployed youth, and religious primitives against
the independent-minded regime of President Bashar Assad. The plan nearly
worked – at least until Russia, Iran, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement
intervened and reversed the tide of battle.
The canard promoted in the
west that IS was a dire military threat was always a big joke. I said so
on one TV program and was promptly banned from the station. I’m also the
miscreant who insisted that Iraq never had weapons of mass destruction and was
consequently blacklisted by a major cable TV news network.
The CIA cobbled together
two small armies, one of Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, and the other of Iraqi
mercenaries. Both were directed, armed, equipped and financed by
Washington. Shades of the British Empire’s native troops under white
officers. The Kurds and Iraqi Arabs are now in a major confrontation over
the Kirkuk oil-rich region.
Raqqa and Mosul were so
close to western forces that they were merely a taxi ride away. But it
took three years and much token bombing of the desert before a decisive move
was made against IS. Once the US-led campaign against Damascus failed, the
crazies of IS were no longer of any use so they were marked for death.
Like Fallujah in Iraq and
Mosul, Raqqa was flattened by US air power, a stark message to those who would
defy the American Raj. The ruins of Raqqa, the IS capital, were occupied by
US-led forces. This historic déjà vu recalled the dramatic defeat by
British Imperial forces at Omdurman in September 1898 of Sudan’s Khalifa and
his Islamic dervish army.
The remnants of IS had
melted into the Euphrates Valley and the desert. They will now return to
being an irksome guerilla group with very little combat power.
Anti-western IS supporters still cluster in Europe’s urban ghettos and will
cause occasional mayhem. A few high-profile attacks on civilians may be
expected to show that IS is still alive. But none of this is likely to
influence the course of events. IS’s rival, al-Qaida, is likely to
resurface and lead attacks to drive the west out of the Mideast.
The Islamic State bogeyman
was very useful for the western powers. It justified deeper military
involvement in the Mideast, higher arms budgets, scared people into voting for
rightwing parties, and gave police more powers. By contrast, these
faux Muslims brought misery, fear and shame on the Islamic world. We are very
well rid of them. And it’s about time.
No comments:
Post a Comment