FOREIGN AFFAIRS AS OPERA BUFFA: THE GLOBAL FIGHT AGAINST
ISIS
John Chuckman
There is a forgotten 1933 movie serial called The Three Musketeers in which three
members of the French Foreign Legion are rescued by an American, a young John
Wayne, using the machine gun on his biplane to mow down Arab bad guys
threatening the Legionnaires in the Sahara. What was John Wayne doing flying
around the French Sahara? He had flown over from France to visit his
girlfriend. Why did he have a machine gun mounted on his plane? There wouldn’t
be a story otherwise. Like all such series, it is silly, but it is notable for
a plot which includes a secret organization called the Devil’s Circle led by a
mysterious and evil figure called El Shaitan, someone who wants to destroy the
Legion and, after many false leads, turns out in the last reel to be a western
merchant rather than an Arab.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Substitute al-Qaeda for the
Devil’s Circle, substitute Osama bin Laden for El Shaitan, and substitute the
Mideast for North Africa. John Wayne remains John Wayne, symbol as they used to
say on the voiceover for the 1950s Superman television show, “for the American
way of life.” It does sound as though the script for al-Qaeda was lifted from
the old serial. I’m sure someone at Langley would be able to confirm that. With
all its twists and turns around the identity of El Shaitan, the story would
make a great libretto for an extravagant opera buffa, or a Broadway comedy musical.
Of course, we had indisputable proof years ago, in the
testimony of a former British Foreign Minister and several other significant
world figures, that there was indeed no such organization as al-Qaeda, the Arab
word commonly meaning “hole” or “toilet,” hardly the choice of cutthroats. The
term was a convenient Washington insider shorthand to designate scattered,
unrelated populations of Islamic bad guys, as Washington saw them, lurking in
deserts and on mountain redoubts or maybe even hiding in Western cities, ready
to spring into action at a signal from El Shaitan, I mean, Osama bin Laden. But
the fact that al-Qaeda does not exist, as is the case so many times with facts,
made no impression on Americans, and especially not on their ever-vigilant
press, and certainly had no influence on a lunatic policy called the War on Terror.
Of course, the root cause of 9/11 and so many other acts of
angry, frustrated, and powerless people is America’s embrace of the seemingly
never-ending injustice and brutality of Israel towards millions of Arabs. But
Washington doesn’t deal with hard realities; it is too busy always dealing with
self-created fantasies like al-Qaeda. After all, it is the same in its own
society. Police brutality, corrupt elections, massive abuses of lobbyists,
crying need for reform of a truly sick democracy, massive urban poverty, poor
public education, and a dark and overwhelming military-intelligence influence
are not topics of discussion in America’s government. No, American politicians’
ideas of domestic issues are proposed flag-desecration amendments, The Star Spangled Banner being sung in
Spanish, the role of drones in cities, supplying the nation’s police forces
with surplus armored vehicles and gear from all the nation’s wars, stopping the
flow of poor refuges, especially children, from all the horrors America has
helped create in Central America and Mexico, maintaining the world’s largest
prison population at minimum cost, and paying less taxes.
Well, as al-Qaeda fades into the sunset, we are suddenly flooded
with media noise about an even more bizarre organization called ISIS (or ISIL)
which honorable and honest Western leaders – try not laugh: Obama, Cameron, and
Hollande - insist is ready to attack us in city streets, sabotage power grids,
and poison water supplies if we don’t start bombing the crap out of them in Iraq
and Syria. Some of America’s more bizarre congressmen are also blubbering about
an ISIS invasion from Mexico, calculatingly dragging in paranoid fears over the
widely disliked situation on America’s southern border concerning refugees. What’s
that about Syria? Don’t all the chilling tales of ISIS come from Iraq? Well,
pretty much so, but ISIS is said to be very ambitious. Tales of its growth and
spread resemble lines from the script of a cheap 1950s science fiction film
called The Blob. And besides, Syria
is what the United States really cares about, now that Iraq drags itself around
almost like a veteran with three limbs nearly severed.
We have indisputable proof in the testimony from a certain
former NSA employee, that ISIS is the creation of Mossad and American
intelligence. As with so many of America’s recent ghastly projects in the
Middle East, financing comes from Saudi Arabia, the Saudis having spent the
last 13 years desperately repenting their (still undefined) role in events
around 9/11, even to the point of secretly embracing Israel in their regional
plans and plots. The Saudis remain under great pressure to cough up wads of
cash whenever America now beckons with a new bone-headed project. All the creeps
- various collections of mindless fundamentalists, soldiers of fortune, just
plain opportunists, and CIA thugs - working to overthrow Assad’s government in Syria
also receive their bounty, just as they receive weapons and refuge in Turkey.
ISIS first worked in Syria as just one of several rag-tag armies assembled by
the United States and its helpers to destroy a peaceful nation which has had
the temerity to oppose some of American policy, especially with regard to
Israel. Again, to remind readers, the incident at Benghazi, Libya, involving
the killing of an American ambassador and a great deal of embarrassment for
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was precisely about gathering up violent people
and arms in the wasteland created there and shipping them off to Turkey in
order to create hell in Syria.
But ISIS is just too over-the-top even for opera buffa. Its creation
served several dark aims. First, it serves as a lure for malcontents from many
places, many of its recruits being American or English, drawing them together
at one location. The leadership of ISIS, associated to a certainty with Israel
and the United States, can gather information from these recruits about their
associates or organizations in various countries. Effectively, after doing any
dirty work assigned to them, the recruits are being set up to be killed, either
by American air strikes or by the opponents they face in their work. Few in
ISIS would know who the “undercover cops” are and who the bad guys are to be
used and disposed of like so much toilet paper. The method reflects Israel’s secret
services’ long, ugly use of Palestinians to undermine Palestinians.
Second, ISIS served as a mechanism to topple Nouri al-Maliki,
recently prime minister of Iraq, a figure with whom Washington had become very
unhappy, chiefly owing to his friendliness with Iran, yet another target of the
American/Israeli Axis. Maliki proved lucky compared to most leaders Washington
sets up and with whom it becomes disenchanted: they generally end up as the
proverbial Mafia figures fitted with cement overshoes at the bottom of a river.
Maliki was given a good scare with the advancing blood-curdling hordes of ISIS
and wisely understood it as his cue to exit.
Third, ISIS has served as an excuse to work with the Kurdish
population in Iraq, more or less separately from the national government. This
involves giving weapons and intelligence to Kurds and furthering their de facto
separation from Iraq, thus greatly weakening any future Iraq since the Kurdish
areas have a great portion of the country’s crude oil. After all, the most
basic reason for America’s invasion of Iraq was to eliminate it as even a
potential enemy of Israel. There also have been some mysterious disappearances
of Iraqi crude shipments, which may well have ended up in Israel.
Fourth, the ISIS move back into Syria provides the perfect
excuse for American bombing there, something President Putin of Russia managed
to prevent earlier with some deft statesmanship. America has already warned
President Assad, busy fighting an engineered civil war created by the same
folks who created ISIS, that they will attack his defences if he interferes
with their bombing his country. Incidentally, no one consulted the Syrian government
on any of this, America having already recognized the collection of rabble and
criminals called the Free Syrian Army as legitimate.
American air power and perhaps ground troops, while using
the excuse of fighting ISIS, will attempt to swing the engineered civil war
back in favor of the “rebels,” Assad’s national forces having had considerable
success in defeating them recently. The failure to achieve Assad’s overthrow is
one of the more worrying developments in America’s bloody scheme for a re-birth
of the Middle East, a plan which seeks to surround Israel with a giant cordon
sanitaire, albeit at the cost of more than a million innocent lives. Never mind
death or homelessness, such matters never are never concerns of American policy
except where there is an advantage to be gained. Look at their filthy work in Ukraine,
Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Egypt.
It is of course remotely possible that ISIS, in attempting
to set up “an Islamic state” comprising parts of both Iraq and Syria, has gone
rogue, out of the control of its handlers – that kind of event being called blowback in the dirty intelligence
business – but I think likely it was always in the script. Most ISIS recruits are
destined to die after doing what their handlers told them to do, and along the
way President Assad’s country is to be further destroyed and if possible
reduced to the kind of paraplegic-like nation Iraq has become.
ISIS started as no more than a couple of thousand guys in
pick-up trucks with rifles and grenade launchers. It grew, drawing bizarre
recruits from many countries, as its reputation for ferocity was artificially played
up by the western press. There are after all always and everywhere a fair
number of individuals drawn to violence and dangerous adventure. You might call
its wonderings in Iraq a gestation period for bigger things, the ultimate goal
being an acceptable way to help topple Assad while disposing of a collection of
unwanted people. This all amounts to a giant-scale police entrapment scheme,
something our courts consistently strike down, but this is entrapment played
for keeps on a scale of thousands of lives.
The pick-up truck brigade proved enough to scare off group
after group of well-armed units of the Iraqi army – especially with bags of
loot from the Saudis tossed into tents at night. Of course, gradually, ISIS did
manage to collect some vehicles and tanks left behind by Iraqi forces and
present something more threatening. If you just think about it, how would
unprofessional recruits have the least idea of how to operate sophisticated
weapons? Imagine operating modern tanks or artillery without expert
training? But ISIS has plenty of
undercover experts to train them and make them seem more formidable. The head
of ISIS is a man, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was an American prisoner for a
time. He seems to know America’s greatest pug-ugly senator and roaming
unofficial ambassador for killing, John McCain (judging from a number of photos
on the Internet showing them together), and he is, according to a number of
sources, actually a former Jewish actor named Elliot Shimon, trained by Mossad
for a different kind of theater.
Now we’ve had a crescendo of beheadings supposedly captured
live on video, only each of these is a patent fraud. Even the mainstream press,
the last to discover almost anything worth knowing these days, have now admitted
the first one was a fraud, although not before many columnists and commentators
spewed great quantities of self-righteous outrage on the subject. Not that the
victims probably haven’t died somehow or other, but they were not beheaded by a
mysterious eight-foot British giant dressed in black and armed with a paring
knife. Staged beheadings of course are intended to revolt people and rouse support
for Western governments to act. The real beheadings which occur regularly in
Saudi Arabia - there was a batch of 19 only recently - are never shown on
American news, nor are they even discussed. But a single video of a fake
terrorist beheading is played and replayed and commented on endlessly with
indignation over such horror. And the hundreds of Palestinians, including
children, whom Israel has beheaded with bombs and artillery never make an
appearance on television or rate any commentary.
