The US is complicit in the birth, care, and feeding of ISIS, and Hillary Clinton and President Obama can take most of the credit, or blame, depending on how you feel about ISIS. (There were some in our government who thought ISIS would be a good thing. See “Secret Pentagon Report Reveals US ‘Created’ ISIS As A ‘Tool’ To Overthrow Syria’s President Assad,” SLL, 5/24/15.) From Justin Raimondo, at antiwar.com:
When Ivy Ziedrich, a nineteen-year-old college student, approached Jeb Bush on the campaign trail and zinged him with “Your brother created ISIS!” the media ate it up and the video went viral. Ms. Ziedrich, a member of the College Democrats, talks very fast, and she managed to utter the following diatribe before Jeb could get in a word edgewise:
“You stated that ISIS was created because we don’t have enough presence and we’ve been pulling out of the Middle East. However, the threat of ISIS was created by the Iraqi coalition authority, which ousted the entire government of Iraq. It was when 30,000 individuals who are part of the Iraqi military were forced out. They had no employment, they had no income, yet they were left with access to all the same arms and weapons. Your brother created ISIS!”
Poor Jeb! Being even less informed than his ambusher, he could only “respectfully disagree” and reiterate the neocon party line: if only we’d kept more troops in longer ISIS wouldn’t have coalesced. “You can rewrite history all you want,” he said, with a sigh, “but the simple fact is we’re in a much more unstable place because America pulled back.”
The media homed in on this incident because they’re still blaming Bush and the Republicans for the Iraq war, while ignoring the key role played by Democrats – Hillary Clinton and her husband come to mind – in ginning up that disaster. So in that sense Jeb is correct when he says they’re rewriting history, albeit not quite in the way he imagines.
Ms. Diedrich is wrong about ISIS: the idea that its foot soldiers are mostly former members of the Iraqi military is unlikely, although there are some former officers in the higher echelons. The vast majority of its fighters have been recruited from throughout the Middle East (and Europe) from the ranks of radical Islamists. More importantly, the Islamic State metastasized in Syria, not Iraq, and this is the key in assigning responsibility.
While the Bush administration made plenty of noises about going into Syria, this turned out to be mostly bluster. It took the Obama administration to launch this folly, and they did it by creating a proxy army, the “moderate” Islamists of the Free Syrian Army, ostensibly in order to overthrow Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad. A newly revealed classified document uncovered by Judicial Watch gives us a glimpse into how this effort was inextricably intertwined with the real history and origins of the Islamic State (formerly known as ISIS).
A Defense Intelligence Agency analysis of the Syrian civil war, dated August 12, 2012, starts out by drawing the battle lines, noting that the “major forces driving the insurgency” are “the Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq]” and are being supported by “the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey.” Russia, Iran, and China are said to support the Assad regime. The war won’t unseat Assad, but will develop, predicts the memo, into a “proxy war.” In order for the West to win that war, the author recommends setting up “safe havens under international sheltering, similar to what transpired in Libya when Benghazi was chosen as the command center for the temporary government.”
Safe havens for al-Qaeda and its allies – just what the doctor ordered!
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2015/05/26/isis-an-inside-job/
To continue reading: ISIS: An Inside Job?
