Democrats helped cultivate the barbarism of Daesh (1)

Both the U.S. political parties, despite their blaming of each other are criminally involved in the breeding of terrorists and spread of terrorism in order to destabilize the Muslim World.

The following is part one of a two-part article on this subject for the ‘Antiwar’ site by journalist Jonathan Cook, titled: “Democrats helped cultivate the barbarism of Daesh”.

There is something profoundly deceitful in the way the Democratic Party and the corporate media are framing President Donald Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria.

One does not need to defend Trump’s lawless actions or ignore the dangers posed by the departure from northern Syria of the (uninvited) U.S. forces to understand that the coverage is being crafted in such a way as to entirely overlook the bigger picture.

The problem is neatly illustrated in this line from a report by the British daily ‘The Guardian’ of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s meeting this week with Trump, who is described as having had a “meltdown”. Explaining why she and other senior Democrats stormed out, the paper writes that “it became clear the U.S. president had no plan to deal with a potential revival of the terrorist outfit Daesh in West Asia”.

Let’s pull back a little, and not pretend – as the media and Democratic Party leadership wish us to – that the last 20 years did not actually happen. Many of us lived through those events. Our memories are not so short.

Daesh didn’t emerge out of nowhere. It was entirely a creation of two decades of U.S. interference in West Asia. And I’m not even referring to the mountains of evidence that U.S. officials backed their Saudi allies in directly funding and arming Daesh – just as their predecessors in Washington, in their enthusiasm to oust the Soviets from the region, assisted the so-called jihadists who went on to become the al-Qaeda terrorists.

No, I’m talking about the fact that in destroying three key Arab states – Iraq, Libya and Syria – that refused to submit to the joint regional hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Israel, Washington’s local client states, the U.S. created a giant void of governance at the heart of West Asia. They knew that that void would be filled soon enough by religious extremists like Daesh – and they didn’t care.

You don’t have to be a Saddam or Mu’ammar Qadhafi apologist to accept this point. You don’t even have to be concerned that these so-called “humanitarian” wars violated each state’s integrity and sovereignty, and are therefore defined in international law as “the supreme war crime”.

The bigger picture – the one no one appears to want us thinking about – is that the U.S. intentionally sought to destroy these states with no obvious plan for the day after. As I explained in my book “Israel and the Clash of Civilizations”, these haven’t so much been regime-change wars as nation-state dismantling operations – what I have termed overthrow wars.

The logic was a horrifying hybrid of two schools of thought that meshed neatly in the psychopathic foreign policy goals embodied in the ideology of neo-conservatism – the so-called “Washington consensus” since the suspicious events in New York on 9/11/2001.

The first was Israel’s long-standing approach to the Palestinians. By constantly devastating any emerging Palestinian institution or social structures, Israel produced a divide-and-rule model on steroids, creating a leaderless, ravaged, enfeebled society that sucked out all the local population’s energy. That strategy proved very appealing to the neoconservatives, who saw it as one they could export to non-compliant states in the region.

The second was the Chicago school’s Shock Doctrine, as explained in Naomi Klein’s book of that name. The chaotic campaign of destruction, the psychological trauma and the sense of dislocation created by these overthrow wars were supposed to engender a far more malleable population that would be ripe for a U.S.-controlled “color revolution”.

The recalcitrant states would be made an example of, broken apart, asset-stripped of their resources and eventually remade as new dependent markets for US goods. That was what George W Bush, Dick Cheney, and Halliburton really meant when they talked about building a New West Asia and exporting democracy.

Even judged by the vile aims of its proponents, the Shock Doctrine has been a half-century story of dismal economic failure everywhere it has been attempted – from Pinochet’s Chile to Yeltsin’s Russia. But let us not credit the architects of this policy with any kind of acumen for learning from past errors. As Bush’s senior adviser Karl Rove explained to a journalist whom he rebuked for being part of the “reality-based community”: “We’re an empire now and, when we act, we create our own reality.”

The barely veiled aim of the attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria was to destroy the institutions and structures that held these societies together, however imperfectly. Though no one likes to mention it nowadays, these states – deeply authoritarian though they were – had well-developed welfare states that ensured high rates of literacy and some of the region’s finest public health services.

As for the eruption of the insurgency that erupted in Syria in 2011, did it start as a popular struggle for liberation from the government in Damascus? Was it a sectarian insurgency by those who wished to see Sunni and Shi’a Muslims clashe with each other? Was it driven by something else: as a largely economic protest by an underclass suffering from food shortages as climate change led to repeated crop failures? Or are all these factors relevant to some degree?

Let us set these issues aside. Anyway, it is irrelevant to the bigger picture I want to address.

The indisputable fact is that Washington and its clients in the Persian Gulf wished to exploit this initial unrest as an opportunity to create a void in Syria – just as they had earlier done in Iraq, where there were no uprisings, nor even the WMDs the U.S. promised would be found in Baghdad and that served as the pretext for Bush’s campaign of Shock and Awe.

The limited acts of sabotage in Syria quickly turned into a much larger and far more vicious war because the Persian Gulf states, with U.S. backing, flooded the country with proxy fighters and arms in an effort to overthrow the government of President Bashar al-Assad and thereby weaken the influence of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the region. The events in Syria and earlier in Iraq gradually transformed the terrorists of al-Qaeda into the even more barbaric, more nihilistic extremists of Daesh.

After Rove and Cheney had had their fill playing around with reality, nature got on with honoring the maxim that it always abhors a vacuum. Daesh filled the vacuum Washington’s policy had engineered.

The clue, after all, was in the name. With the U.S. and Persian Gulf states using oil money to wage a proxy war against Assad, Daesh saw its chance to establish a state inspired by a variety of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabist dogma. Daesh needed territory for their planned state, and the Saudis and U.S. obliged by destroying Syria.

This barbarian army, one that murdered other religious groups as infidels and killed fellow Sunnis who refused to bow before their absolute rule, became the West’s chief allies in Syria. Directly and covertly, we gave them money and weapons to begin building their state on parts of Syria.

Again, let us ignore the fact that the U.S., in helping to destroy a sovereign nation, committed the supreme war crime, one that in a rightly ordered world would ensure every senior Washington official faces their own Nuremberg Trial. Let us ignore too for the moment that the U.S., consciously through its actions, brought to life a monster that sowed death and destruction everywhere it went.

The fact is that at the moment President Assad called in Russia to help him, the battle the U.S. and the Persian Gulf states were waging through Daesh and other proxies was lost. It was only a matter of time before Assad would reassert his rule.

From that point onwards, every single person who was killed and every single Syrian made homeless – and there were hundreds of thousands of them – suffered their terrible fate for no possible gain in U.S. policy goals. A vastly destructive overthrow war became instead something darker still: a neoconservative vanity project that ravaged countless Syrian lives.

ME