Brussels: The latest failure of the West’s ‘war on terror’

Brussels could be called the capital of Europe.

This unglamorous city of Belgium, is home to many of the key institutions of the European Union—the European Commission, the Council of Ministers, and the European Parliament (which also meets in Strasbourg, France). It is known mostly for its high concentration of Eurocrats. Last Tuesday on March 22, shortly after eight o’clock in the morning, hundreds of travellers started running down a ramp outside Brussels Airport, wheeled baggage trailing behind them, amid shattered glass from where smoke was seeping out, as two terrorists detonated their explosive baggage inside the Departures Hall. Inside, amid pools of blood and rubble, there were detached limbs scattered on the floor, while survivors screamed. Many were soaked in blood. Less than an hour later, near the headquarters of the European Commission, there was an explosion inside a metro car as it trundled between the stops at Maelbeek and Schuman. The train screeched to a halt inside the tunnel. Commuters wrenched open the doors and, fearing the attacks may have only begun, those who hadn’t been killed or severely wounded, started running on the tracks. Belgian officials estimate that at least thirty-four people have been killed and more than two hundred have been wounded. Killed by whom? Killed by the Frankenstein monsters the West had created for terrorizing and destabilizing Syria and Iraq. Soon the brutal Takfiri terrorist outfit, which styles itself as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and which had born and nurtured under the watchful of eyes of the CIA and Mossad, claimed responsibility for the terrorist attacks and warned of more to come. So what has happened to the West’s so-called war on terror? Why has it failed to stop the frequency of terrorist attacks in various parts of Europe? Who is winning this unequal terror contest, where on one hand the cowardly terrorists indiscriminately blow people to bits in Europe as well as in Muslim countries, while on the other hand the war machines of the equally dastardly Western powers, wreak vengeance with more deadly attacks on Muslim states, killing innocent people in hundreds of thousands and destroying the infrastructure. The answers are simple; because of the hypocrisy of the West in promoting terrorism in Muslim countries. As Iranian President Hassan Rouhani pointed out: MKO, which is one of the deadliest terrorist outfits and has claimed the life of thousands of Iranians, including a president, a prime minister, a chief justice, many ministers, and several MPs, is allowed to openly maintain its offices in most European capitals and has been taken off from the list of terrorist outfits. Why; because of the unexplained hostility of the West, especially the US towards the Islamic Republic of Iran – the prime victim of terrorism. The West, which enjoys cordial relations with the Saudis and other active sponsors of terrorism, has over the past few years turned a blind eye to the passage provided by Turkey for terrorists of all hues and colours, trekking to Syria. The result has been catastrophic. Chickens are coming home to roost in Europe.

As Ben Taub, writing for the New Yorkers, states: “Today, of the five or six thousand Europeans who have travelled to fight in Syria and Iraq, at least a thousand have returned. Most face no charges; for a successful prosecution, their governments must prove that they joined ISIS, al-Qaeda, or another terrorist group.”

Strange logic indeed, and this does not prevent European states to bow to the US, the Zionists and the reactionary Arab regimes, in labeling Lebanon’s legendry anti-terrorist movement, the Hezbollah, as ‘terrorist’, for defending Syria and Lebanon against these very same terrorist outfits, such as ISIS and al-Qa’eda, which in addition to massacring Muslims, are spilling innocent European blood, as part of the plot to tarnish the image of Islam. Paul Gottinger, an American journalist, is of the opinion that “the callous West has long turned a blind eye to the violence it wages around the world.” He goes on to say: “The attack is tragic, but it shouldn’t be a surprise. To say the West’s ‘War on Terror’ has been an extraordinary failure is inaccurate. In actuality, it is accelerating terrorism.”

In fact, during the 14 years of the ‘War on Terror’, the West has failed to eliminate even one terror organization, yet organizations like ISIS have risen from the ashes of the West’s supposedly counter-terror policy.

Gottinger, referring to the facts that terror attacks have increased by a staggering 65 times since the highly suspicious 9/11/2001 incidents in New York, says this massive escalation in terror really skyrocketed during the US War in Iraq. In 2003 there were 208 terror attacks around the world, but that number had jumped to 11,000 attacks just 2 years later. In the years since, the number of attacks has generally been above 10,000.

According to Gottinger: “It’s tragically fitting that the attack in Brussels occurred just 2 days after the 13th anniversary of the US War in Iraq; the centerpiece of the US ‘War on Terror’, gave rise to ISIS, the very terror organization, which claimed responsibility for the attack in Brussels. Many of the US counter-terror failures have their roots in the colossal disaster that was the US war in Iraq. ISIS exploited the destruction and instability to attract foreign jihadists, gain local support, and create an organizational structure.”

In response to the rise of ISIS, he says, the West has taken its preferred form of action, violence. The US-led coalition has launched almost 11,000 strikes, which have killed over 20,000 mostly civilian people in Syria. This use of force actually fuels resentment among the local population, worsening the crisis and aiding ISIS recruitment. But more violence abroad wasn’t the only response to Brussels the US offered, especially in view of Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump renewing his pledge to ban Muslims from entering the US, and another candidate, Ted Cruz calling for police patrols in ‘Muslims neighbourhoods’.

Based on these irrational responses, it seems the West will be unable to stem the tide of terror in the West, and worse yet, the two major aspects of the West’s so-called ‘War on Terror’, that is, an enormous amounts of violence and the demonization of Muslims, are only recipes for increased terrorism. This means that unless there is a major shift in the West’s counterterrorism policy, the attacks in Belgium are sure to be a taste of what is to come in both Europe and the US.

In his article titled “Imperial Math: Counting the Dead”, Thomas S. Harrington, Professor of Iberian Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, wrote that following the Brussels bomb blasts, Michael Morrell, the former number-two at the CIA, proclaimed that ISIS is “winning” its ongoing confrontation with the US and the countries of Europe. The CIA knows better, since it was the creator, along with the Zionist spying network Mossad and Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi regime, of the Takfiri terrorists.

Harrington commenting on the CIA official’s statement writes: “I am no expert on the metrics employed by military strategists to gauge success in armed conflicts. My guess, however, is that it all boils down to some combination. According to him, first and foremost is the ability to kill the highest possible number of the enemy’s combatants and their presumed supporters, and secondly the ability to inflict the greatest amount of damage and disruption on the social and physical infrastructure of the societies that the designated enemies are from.”

He adds: So let’s see how the scorecard between “us” and the societies where “our enemies” live and/or find their sense of cultural direction, plays out. The figures are culled from various sources readily available on the Internet.

According to Harrington, over the last 15 years Takfiri militants have carried out five major coordinated attacks on US and European targets, including Russia that have led to 4560. When it comes to the matter of destroyed infrastructure and enduring disruptions of daily life in the US and Western Europe, there’s really nothing to report, since the attacks although psychologically terrifying, have done virtually nothing to alter our ability to live and work as we did before. It is true we are now constantly spied on by our own government and subject to ritualized rape at airports, but that’s it. Those of us who had food, fuel, shelter, schools and electricity before the attacks, generally still have all those things now. And very few, if any, people in Europe or the US have been driven out of their homes because of these armed attacks on our societies.

Harrington says, let’s now look at the countries, we are constantly told, are generating an unending supply of people willing to kill us for no apparent reason. How have they done in regard to the attacks carried out on them the US and its allies?

According to Brown University’s Costs of War Study, 92,00 Afghans have been killed since the US in invasion of that country in 2001 and 165,00 Iraqis killed as a result of war in that country since the US invasion of it in 2003. In Pakistan, they estimate 57,000 Pakistanis have been killed since the US began its covert war on that country in 2004-2005. And these are, by the authors’ own reckoning, conservative estimates, while the actual numbers are quite high. In Libya, which was gratuitously destroyed by the US and the Europeans, good statistics are hard to come by, but it appears that some 3,000 people were killed as a direct result of the Allied bombing campaign in 2011, and that several times number have died as a result of the massive sectarian unleashed by the conflict.

How about Syria? There, a foreign-fuelled Civil War was nearing its conclusion in 2013 with a quite probable victory for President Bashar al-Assad, when the US and its accomplices (that is, Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia) decided to intervene in the hope of engineering a bloody and protracted standoff, the long-term goal of which was to insure that Syria is not able to act as a regional counterweight to Israel or Turkey – at least for the next generation. According to the UN, over 250,000 have now died in the war, and almost 75% of those deaths have occurred since the US and its allies got more heavily involved in the conflict in late 2013. In the same 15 year period since 2001, the most important strategic “friend” of the US, that is, Israel, has carried out three assaults (in 2006, 2008-09 and 2014) on the Palestinian enclave of Gaza, killing a total of some 4000 Palestinians. Total Israeli deaths from those assaults, which the West’s corrupt and prostituted media insist on referring to as “wars”, are 95. In 2006, the Zionist entity also assaulted Lebanon – a country, whose lower quarter it had already subjected to military occupation from 1982 to 2000. The result of this attack was 1200 Lebanese dead. The Israeli losses were reportedly 165.

Over the last few years, Saudi Arabia, the medieval dictatorship that arouses nothing but warm ejaculations of fraternal love in Washington and in European capitals has carried out a bloody assault on Bahrain, which killed 90 and shattered the hopes of the long suppressed pro-democratic majority of the Persian Gulf island state. Next Saudi Arabia launched a brutal air war with US-made equipment and logistical guidance on Yemen – attacks which resulted in the death of over 6000 civilians in 2015 alone. Then there is the US-backed coup regime of General Abdul-Fattah as-Sisi in Egypt which, according to Human Rights Watch, carried out the “premeditated” massacre of 817 peaceful protesters on at Rabaa Square in Cairo on 14 August 2013. There’s also the ongoing US-led drone and special forces war on Somalia where at the very least 250 Somalis have perished at the hands of these forces.

And then there is the big one that absolutely no one talks about, but which is the key to truly understanding the current tensions in Francophone Europe, that is, Algeria. True, most of deaths there occurred before 2001, and are thus, strictly speaking, outside the parameters that have governed our exposition to this point. But the fact that the government perpetrators of the majority of these deaths have never been brought to justice, and indeed have officially been shielded from any prosecution, means that the wounds generated by this conflict are still very much with us, especially in France, the North African country’s former colonial master, where very large numbers of Algerians and their French-born children live and work. In 1991, Islamists in Algeria were on their way to an apparent electoral victory in the elections when the US and French-backed government staged a coup. Over the next 15 years, the regime, with US and French support, brutally hunted down anyone and anything connected with the Islamist politics.

Once the conflict got under way, there were, of course atrocities, which generated some 200.000 deaths had its origin in the fact that a social and governmental elite backed by Western powers did not want to allow Algerian democracy to run its course.

All this means how are things washing out for “our enemies” in terms of the second metric for war “success” mentioned in our analysis so far, that is the destruction of physical infrastructure and the widespread disruption of daily life for the majority of the population?

Well, Iraq, Libya Gaza, Somalia, Pakistan and Syria are now widely viewed as completely failed polities where the daily fight to survive, requires almost every ounce of energy that citizens there possess. The same can be said of Afghanistan. While things are perhaps more tolerable there on the level of day- to-day rhythms, Egypt and Algeria and Lebanon are now veritable nests of fear and loathing where people know a few Ill-chosen words can earn you a full lifetime or a or a full death time of trouble.

But CIA’s Michael Morrell, who has all these facts and much more information at his disposal, says “we” are losing the fight against “them”? Could it be that Morrell, an economist by training, is that bad at numbers? No, it’s just that he’s a practitioner of a new and rapidly expanding scientific discipline, known as “Imperial Math” which, by injecting heaping doses of racism and systematic dehumanization into its calculations and equations, consistently concludes that a four digit numbers like 4560 are always greater that ever-rising six and seven digit figures.

AS/AS/ME