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War, War, War See other War, War, War Articles Title: Washington Opened The Gates Of Hell In Iraq: Now Come The Furies The late, great critic of the American Imperium, Chalmers Johnson, popularized the salient concept of blowback. That is, the notion that if you bomb, drone, invade, desecrate and slaughtercollaterally or otherwise a people and their lands, they might find ways to return the favor. But even Johnson could not have imagined the kind of blowback coming ferociously Washingtons way now. Namely, the mayhem being visited on much of Iraq by American tanks, armored personnel carriers, heavy artillery, anti-aircraft batteries and other advanced weaponry that has fallen into the hands of the very jihadist radicals that have been the ostensible target of Washingtons entire multi-trillion war on terrorism. No question about it. The ISIS terrorists are winning against the hapless Iraqi military and even the formidable Kurdish peshmerga fightersusing some of the most lethal arms that the US military-industrial complex could concoct. Yes, that wasnt supposed to happen. During the bloody years after George W. Bush declared mission accomplished the Iraqis were ostensibly provided the arms and training to provide for their own defense. The American occupation, therefore, was really not all that. Instead, it was actually an exercise in nation-building that would bequeath to the people Washington had liberated a self-governing democracy equipped with the means to insure internal order and external security. Washington politiciansincluding President Obamagave endless speeches about that. You can look them up! Except
except
.Iraq was never a nation. At least the Ottomans knew that you dont put Shiites, Sunni and Kurds in the same parliament or police force, and most certainly not the same army! By contrast, it was the British and French foreign offices which in 1916 drew the Sykes-Picot boundaries and created the historical illusion that a nation called Iraq actually existed. And it was their successors in the west which installed a series of corrupt and brutal rulers, including kings, generals and Saddam Hussein himself, who maintained an always tentative and frequently blood-soaked semblance of governance within these artificial borders. Then came the neo-cons who for no discernible reason of national security could not leave well enough alone. By god, they were going to have regime change, a stable supplier of 6 million barrels of oil per day, and a stalwart ally armed to the teeth on the very doorstep of the Axis-Of-Evil; that is, the Iranian Shiite theocracy which happened to be religious kin to the single largest block of the Iraqi population. What these fools did was to open the gates of hell. The end result of Washingtons 20-year campaign to liberate Iraq, beginning with the first gulf war and followed by the devastating trade sanctions of the 1990s and the brutal desecrations of Bush IIs shock and awe and all the military mayhem which followed, was to aggravate, widen and mobilize all of the latent ethnic and religious conflicts and enmities that had been bottled up for decades inside the Sykes-Picot illusion. Now the furies have come. Ironically, the bloodthirsty ISIS is comprised of fighters who were first enabled by the misbegotten Bush maneuver known as the surge; then armed and trained by the CIA for the campaign against Assad; and now brandish the best weapons that any ramshackle jihadist group ever had. And yet Americas peace President is sending the bombers back in because there is a humanitarian crisis involving a religious sect no American has ever heard of, stranded on a mountain top that has nothing to do with the security and safety of the citizens of Lincoln NE and Spokane WA. Has not the American war machine turned the entirety of Mesopotamia and the Levant into a humanitarian crisisof which this is only a tiny manifestation? Isnt it time to at least stop fueling the blowback? Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top Page Up Full Thread Page Down Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Ada (#0)
The national security reason might be discernible to David Stockman, but we all know that it was ISRAEL's national security that motivated the neocons to promote "regime change" thereby creating chaos and mayhem in Muslim nations. i.e. they'd fight each other instead of Israel
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