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'ISIS was born of Western intervention'

By Askia Muhammad -Senior Editor- | Last updated: Oct 2, 2014 - 5:41:39 PM

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In this Sept. 23 photo released by the U.S. Air Force, a formation of U.S. Navy F-18E Super Hornets leaves after receiving fuel from a KC-135 Stratotanker over northern Iraq, as part of U.S. led coalition airstrikes on the Islamic State group and other targets in Syria. U.S.-led airstrikes targeted Syrian oil installations held by the militant Islamic State group overnight and early Sept. 25, killing nearly 20 people as the militants released dozens of detainees in their defacto capital, fearing further raids, activists said. Photo: AP/Wide World photos

Confusion, trouble plague Obama’s air strikes, war in Middle East

WASHINGTON - In what has become a tireless effort to win converts to this country’s schizophrenic Middle East policy which in the end seems to only benefit Israel, President Barack Obama acknowledged Sept. 28 that U.S. intelligence officials “underestimated” the threat posed by the radical war machine calling itself “Islamic State” and they overestimated the Iraqi army’s capacity to defeat the militant group.

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The president said in an interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes” that the militants went “underground” after being squashed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq and regrouped under the cover of the U.S.-instigated Syrian civil war.

“During the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swaths of the country that are completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos,” Mr. Obama said.

As the president and Vice President Joseph Biden worked tirelessly from private, bi-lateral meetings with leaders of Islamic countries attending the UN General Assembly meeting in New York City, through his address to the 44th annual banquet of the Congressional Black Caucus, the analysis of the administration strategy took two, predictable forms. Conservatives, neo-cons, and various war hawks, often aligned with arms manufacturers and military suppliers, complained that Mr. Obama’s plan is not vigorous enough. While progressive voices pointed out that no matter how robust the military response, it cannot solve what is a political-ideological conflict.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) questioned the president’s strategy to destroy the militant group. Mr. Boehner said on ABC’s “This Week” that the U.S. may have “no choice” but to send in American troops if the mix of U.S.-led air strikes and a ground campaign reliant on Iraqi forces, Kurdish fighters and moderate Syrian rebels fails to achieve that goal. “These are barbarians. They intend to kill us,” Mr. Boehner said. “And if we don’t destroy them first, we’re going to pay the price.”

Former Ohio Congress member and 2012 Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich flat out opposes further U.S. military involvement. He opposed the 2003 war strategy of President George W. Bush which overthrew the stable government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who had never attacked or threatened this country, based on lies that president told the American people and the world. America’s president said the Iraqi leader had “weapons of mass destruction” which threatened the United States. No such weapons were ever found.

The resulting chaos, as Mr. Obama admitted on “60 Minutes,” laid the groundwork for the current radical uprising. “Nothing better illustrates the bankruptcy of the Obama administration’s foreign policy than funding groups that turn on the U.S. again and again,” Mr. Kucinich wrote for the Huffington Post, “a neo-con fueled cycle of profits for war makers and destruction of ever-shifting ‘enemies.’

“The fact can’t be refuted,” Mr. Kucinich continued “ISIS was born of Western intervention in Iraq and covert action in Syria. This Frankenstein-like experiment of arming the alleged freedom-seeking Syrian opposition created the monster that roams the region. ISIS and the U.S. have a curious relationship—mortal enemies that, at the same time, benefit from some of the same events. The U.S. is being played.”

The president and vice president meanwhile met with a galaxy of leaders of Muslim countries, in and around the UN General Assembly session and the world climate summit. Mr. Obama met at the Waldorf Astoria with Egyptian President Abdul Fattah el SiSi, telling reporters before the session that “he looked forward to a constructive dialogue that will include all kind of issues among them Israeli Palestinian conflict, Libya, Syria and ISIL.”

On his way back to Washington from the UN session, President Obama spoke briefly by telephone from Air Force One with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan according to the White House Press Office, “praising the work Turkish authorities and local groups, together with the UN, are doing to care for the massive influx of refugees flowing into Turkey, including tens of thousands this week alone.”

Mr. Biden stayed behind for two days at the United Nations where he met privately with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, telling reporters before the meeting that the two countries share “enormous common interests” in combating terrorists, according to the White House pool reporter present. Mr. Biden also met with Iraqi President Fuad Masum, as well as with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declaring to reporters that the American efforts have been “a great success.”

But the war will do nothing to improve U.S. domestic security, while simply draining resources needed to address the needs of people in this country, former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich said in a Facebook statement. “The war we have just commenced against ISIS, which our generals say will last ‘many years,’ will cost us hundreds of billions of dollars and many lives.

“Yet our politicians in Washington say we don’t have enough money to extend unemployment insurance to more than 26 percent of jobless Americans, that we cannot afford better schools, we cannot rebuild our crumbling roads and bridges and water systems, we don’t have the wherewithal to ensure that every American receives adequate health care, we cannot lift almost a quarter of our children out of poverty, we are unable to make higher education affordable to all. They are wrong. It is impossible for America to be strong and secure in a dangerous world unless all Americans are strong and secure in this ever more dangerous economy,” Mr. Reich said.

“Syria’s civil war can be resolved but not through military victory by the Free Syria Army, the Baathist regime (currently in power), Al-Nusra, Self-Administration Zones, or ISIL,” Michael Beer, director of Nonviolence International, which maintains contact with Kurdish and Christian communities in the north of Syria said in a statement released in Washington by the Institute for Public Accuracy. “None of these five groups is likely to obtain a military victory against the other four. So why are so many countries sending in weapons and bombing Syria?

“The Syrian people are suffering displacement by the millions, and hundreds of thousands dead and wounded. Not only are Syrians witnessing lots of foreign weapons pouring in, but foreign fighters from all over the world. Syria has increasingly become a proxy war by some of the neighboring states, including Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Iran,” said Mr. Beer. A prominent Islamic scholar agrees.

“ISIS was a fraudulent group from the beginning,” Dr. Sam Hamod, former director of the Islamic Center in Washington told The Final Call. “It is headed by a man, or men, who are not of the area, whose Arabic accents are not local or regional. There were pictures on the Internet and elsewhere of (ISIL leader Abu Bakr al) Baghdadi being feted in Tel Aviv. He’s been known to be involved with Israel. Some actually believe he is a Mossad agent, because as you know, many of the Israelis speak Arabic very well.

“We knew there was something wrong immediately. He claimed to be from Iraq, etc. The thing is that his accent and the way he speaks Arabic, it sounds like a learned Arabic from the book. It’s not someone who grows up native, because the accent is different. The accent in Iraq and Lebanon and Syria is very similar, with slight differences, but his is much more a learned, formal Arabic that he would have learned from a class in Arabic, so he’s not a native of the area,” Dr. Hamod continued.

“The other thing is that many of the people around him have been found to be Chechens, and others who come from outside, and may not even be Muslims, or they are just people who are mercenaries. So the problem we have with this whole group, whoever they call themselves, they obviously are not Muslims, and there’s no such thing as an Islamic state because there has to be a meeting of all the ulemaa (scholars) around the Muslim world to ever declare a caliphate or an Islamic state.

“So all of these things that they claim, show—that if anyone has knowledge about Islam—that this is obviously not true, in any way, in terms of the accent of the man speaking, where he comes from or where he is, as well as the group that follows him. Some (people) who were there have been attacked by this group, and they are killing Sunni, and Shia, and Christians and Jews. So obviously they are not aligned to anybody but chaos.

“This is actually a group that is bent on chaos. So obviously they were funded by some people, and I’m sure, the funding came from very rich Wahabis, as well as Israel and the United States, because they wanted to have more chaos, and of course so is Turkey involved.

“They’re trying to overthrow the governments in Syria and Iraq because they are Shia. And the ultimate goal obviously would be to overthrow Syria and finally attack Lebanon to attack Hezbollah, and then ultimately to attack Iran, they’ll try to isolate Iran. So this thing is not something that came out of nowhere, but it is unfortunately a combination of Israeli position to make chaos and destroy Middle Eastern powers, and the old Sunni thing about trying to kill Shia. So, it’s a mixture of a lot of bad things right now.

Neither does Dr. Hamod sing the praises of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “We’ve got to be careful, we really don’t know who (President Obama) is attacking at this point because he would like to see Assad overthrown, but again, Assad is not a good guy, but he’s a thousand times better than these Wahabis, jihadis, salifists, and this ISIS group.”

The contention by Dr. Hamod and others that this radical so-called “Islamic” front was created by Western interests is widely known among Arab scholars. “Missing [from the outrage over ISIS’s actions] has been any acknowledgement of the integral role of covert U.S. and British regional military intelligence strategy in empowering and even directly sponsoring the very same virulent Islamist militants in Iraq, Syria and beyond, that went on to break away from al-Qaeda and form ‘ISIS,’ the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or now simply, the Islamic State,” writes Nafeez Ahmed, an investigative journalist who writes for The Guardian and other outlets. He recently wrote an article “How the West Created the Islamic State.” It is he said a familiar “divide and rule” tactic.

“Since 2003, Anglo-American power has secretly and openly coordinated direct and indirect support for Islamist terrorist groups linked to Al-Qaeda across the Middle East and North Africa,” said Mr. Ahmed, who is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, and author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization. His just published novel, Zero Point, predicted a new war in Iraq to put down an Islamist insurgency against the regime of former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. “This ill-conceived patchwork geo-strategy is a legacy of the persistent influence of neoconservative ideology, motivated by longstanding but often contradictory ambitions to dominate regional oil resources, defend an expansionist Israel, and in pursuit of these, re-draw the map of the Middle East,” Mr. Ahmed wrote.

Other Islamic observers agree that only the Israelis benefit from the current U.S. policy and the actions of U.S. Arab allies in the region. “The coalition of Arab monarchs that (President) Obama put together is technically at war with Israel, except for Jordan,” PBS-TV producer Jamal Dajani, who is Palestinian, said in a social media statement.

“Yet not a single country has sent airplanes to defend the children in Gaza. In 2010, Israel sent up to 29 assassins to the UAE (United Arab Emirates) using fake and stolen passports to kill one Palestinian; all the UAE could do was complain.

“UAE pilots have flown missions over Libya, Iraq and now Syria. Saudi pilots bombed Houthis in Yemen. Qatari pilots helped enforce the NATO-imposed no-fly zone over Libya. Jordan is everywhere, from sending military advisors to Libya and Iraq, to housing a large contingency of CIA agents to monitor Syria, Lebanon and other countries.”

Yet, Mr. Dajani observed, “The ‘coalition of the willing’ has never been willing to confront Israel, except in lip service.”

And while the territory now being fought over includes the area which encompasses the ancient kingdom of Babylon, those involved in the conflict are hastening the downfall of the “modern Babylon,” which is in the West, according to the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan.

“Babylon, the jewel of kingdoms, the pride and glory of the Babylonians, will be overthrown by God like Sodom and Gomorrah. She will never be inhabited or lived in through all generations; there, no nomads will pitch their tents, there, no shepherds will rest their flocks. But desert creatures will lie there, jackals will fill her houses; there the owls will dwell, and there the wild goats will leap about. Hyenas will inhabit her strongholds, jackals her luxurious palaces. Her time is at hand, and her days will not be prolonged,” Minister Farrakhan stated in a Facebook status update Sept. 27, quoting Biblical scripture: Isaiah 13:19-22.

“This is not referring to actual animals. It refers to people with the characteristics of the animals mentioned. A hyena is a nocturnal wild dog that attacks in packs, and when it is referring to a human being, it is a person who performs dishonest or base deeds as the follower or accomplice of another.

“This is how America does when they want to wage war on others. They assemble what is euphemistically called a ‘coalition of the willing’ to attack any nation in order to depose any leader who stands in the way of their global ambitions,” the Muslim leader stated.