This is an EXCELLENT read...best read yet on the latest Middle East crisis.
A long read...but well worth reading. Balanced (he attacks Bush, Obama, the Saudis, and the military industrial complex), and informative.
It is all worth reading, but here are a few excerpts:
"A couple weeks ago Saudi Arabia was warning against U.S. action against ISIL (ISIS, Islamic State) arguing that it would be perceived as a pro-Shiite intervention in a Sunni-Shiite conflict. Saudi Arabia is of course the land where the Prophet Mohammed lived, and the House of Saud sees itself as the guardian of the holy sites of Mecca and Medina. It is a bastion of Sunni orthodoxy; the Sharia is rigidly enforced. There are punitive stonings and beheadings. Women must wear the abaya and are forbidden to drive. Saudi Arabia was one of the very few countries that recognized and supported the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. In short, it has much in common with ISIL. Much of ISIL’s funding comes from private Saudi sources and “charities.”
George “Dubya” Bush gleefully destroyed the Iraqi state. He smashed a state in which Christians served in high posts, women attended college and felt free to leave their heads uncovered, rock n’ roll blared from radios, liquor stores operated legally, and there was even a gay scene. He replaced it with an occupation run by clueless cowboys literally marching around Baghdad in cowboy boots, issuing orders—most notably the orders of dissolution of the Baathist Party and the Iraqi Army.
The Sunnis violently resisted the Occupation. The Shiites, sensing opportunity, stood by looking sullen, then in response to Ayatollah al-Sistani’s call, mounted peaceful protests, demanding elections. After the Abu Ghraib torture photos scandalized the world, the U.S. was forced to allow elections for an Iraqi advisory body, dominated by Shiites, and to return sovereignty to a now-Shiite led regime in 2009. Meanwhile a Sunni-Shiite civil war broke out. The U.S. had opened a Pandora’s Box of ethnic strife, which continues. It is the gift that just keeps on giving.
Abu Musad al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian free-lance terrorist, decided to establish an Al-Qaeda branch in Iraq. He found ample support among the Sunnis of Anbar Province. His group was largely chased out during the U.S. “surge” of 2007, but found a home in Syria. In 2011, during the ill-fated “Arab Spring,” a pro-democracy, anti-corruption protest movement erupted in Syria. Obama announced that President Bashar Assad must resign. (Why? Here was another secularist, another Baathist, presiding over another country where women dress in Western fashions, go to college, drink beer and listen to rock n’ roll—a country striving for a normalized relationship with the U.S. but spurned by the State Department due to its opposition to Israel, which illegally occupies its Golan Heights, and due to its alliance with Iran).
While the Syrian Foreign Ministry has actually welcomed U.S. strikes against ISIL in the country, the president (and the Russians) have said they would be viewed as attacks on the Syrian state if not coordinated with Damascus. John Kerry rules such cooperation out, declaring Assad’s regime (despite the recent multiparty election, in which Assad received 88% of the votes) “illegitimate.” He further spurns a French suggestion that Iran be invited to a conference in Paris on Sept. 15 to discuss an international response to ISIL. Kerry, in his wooden way, responds: “The United States does not cooperate, militarily or otherwise, nor does it have any intention in this process of doing so, with Iran.”
(The Iranian deputy foreign minister retorted that the Paris meeting “has a selective guest list and is just for show.”)
Thus the U.S., waging war on regional secularists like Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad, thereby provoking sectarian war, declares it can defeat anti-Shiite Sunni extremism relying on Sunni allies (including the Shia-phobic, Sharia-implementing, adulteress-stoning Saudis) and European crusaders, plus (maybe) some Sunni Turks—alongside the mostly Sunni Kurdish peshmerga, Iraqi Shiite militias, and the so far embarrassing Iraqi Army. And at the same time it plans to build some reliable puppet force to topple Assad and (largely in response to Israeli demands) maintain pressure on Iran to end a non-existent nuclear weapons program or face bombing. The plan is patently unworkable and doomed.
“We will not be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq,” declares Obama (as though some external force had once hauled a reluctant U.S.—kicking and screaming—into the last war). But he has indeed announced a campaign of indefinite bombing of Iraq and Syria, and now his spokesman Josh Earnest declares,“In the same way that we are at war with al-Qaeda and its affiliates around the globe, we are at war with ISIL.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/15/ ... ia-divide/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
This should be required reading for anyone involved in decision making regarding the area.
