ISIL is the Pentagon's fault!

[Hard_Rom]

And Obama made the situation worse by ignoring the warning signs and his inaction. Like his comment this morning that ISIS is contained.

Politicians declare Victory and the end of combat early many times in history. Just because Obama was not the saviour you all hoped for. He is better than most. Militarily ISIL should be contained. But that is just one theater of close to conventional warfare.

I doubt rampant ISIL threat in Africa will get near as much media attention as ME.

 

[JackLuis]

Politicians declare Victory and the end of combat early many times in history. Just because Obama was not the saviour you all hoped for. He is better than most. Militarily ISIL should be contained. But that is just one theater of close to conventional warfare.

I doubt rampant ISIL threat in Africa will get near as much media attention as ME.

Meanwhile our troops are continuing to fight the Afghani to the tune of $Millions a day! Special Ops in Syria, how much will that ultimately cost?

The Pentagon reported the Syrian Rebels had been trained for ~$500 Million and maybe a dozen are still fighting ISIL. How big a rat hole do they have over there anyway and why do we have to fill it with $???

 

[JackLuis]

Now the truth emerges: Here’s how the US fueled the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq

http://www.rawstory.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/The-Iraq-War-300x161.jpg​

The sectarian terror group won’t be defeated by the western states that incubated it in the first place

The war on terror, that campaign without end launched 14 years ago by George Bush, is tying itself up in ever more grotesque contortions. On Monday the trial in London of a Swedish man, Bherlin Gildo, accused of terrorism in Syria, collapsed after it became clear British intelligence had been arming the same rebel groups the defendant was charged with supporting.

The prosecution abandoned the case, apparently to avoid embarrassing the intelligence services. The defence argued that going ahead with the trial would have been an “affront to justice” when there was plenty of evidence the British state was itself providing “extensive support” to the armed Syrian opposition.

That didn’t only include the “non-lethal assistance” boasted of by the government (including body armour and military vehicles), but training, logistical support and the secret supply of “arms on a massive scale”. Reports were cited that MI6 had cooperated with the CIA on a “rat line” of arms transfers from Libyan stockpiles to the Syrian rebels in 2012 after the fall of the Gaddafi regime.

Clearly, the absurdity of sending someone to prison for doing what ministers and their security officials were up to themselves became too much. But it’s only the latest of a string of such cases. Less fortunate was a London cab driver Anis Sardar, who was given a life sentence a fortnight earlier for taking part in 2007 in resistance to the occupation of Iraq by US and British forces. Armed opposition to illegal invasion and occupation clearly doesn’t constitute terrorism or murder on most definitions, including the Geneva convention.

A revealing light on how we got here has now been shone by a recently declassified secret US intelligence report, written in August 2012 , which uncannily predicts – and effectively welcomes – the prospect of a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria and an al-Qaida-controlled Islamic state in Syria and Iraq. In stark contrast to western claims at the time, the Defense Intelligence Agency document identifies al-Qaida in Iraq (which became Isis) and fellow Salafists as the “major forces driving the insurgency in Syria” – and states that “western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey” were supporting the opposition’s efforts to take control of eastern Syria.

Raising the “possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality”, the Pentagon report goes on, “this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran)”.

Wait until Trump learns of Obama's coddling of ISIS!

 

[The_Trouvere]

How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen

Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs [“From the Shadows”], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

Brzezinski: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
http://www.counterpunch.org/1998/01/15/how-jimmy-carter-and-i-started-the-mujahideen/

The Soviets did not need to accommodate President Carter and the CIA by becoming involved in a war that eventually contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union. For reasons of their own, they choose to do so. Nevertheless, if the CIA had not destabilized the government of Afghanistan is is doubtful that the Taliban, which has been more dangerous to American interests, would have ever come to power.

In 1953 the CIA, under orders from President Eisenhower, helped to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran.

Blame for the mess in the Mid East can be fairly evenly distributed between Republican and Democrat leadership. Nevertheless, if the United States had left Iran and Afghanistan alone, the situation in the Mid East would almost certainly be less volatile.

 

[Hard_Rom]

And even further back.

Read Winston Churchill's accounts of punitive reprisal attacks in the Swat Valley!

Imperial powers dividing of ME in willy nilly fashion to suit their ends not the occupants of the ME.

How does one go from being a heroic mujahidin resistance fighter going up against the might of Soviet Russia to a Taliban terrorist?

The old Imperial powers and the new ones blew many many chances to assist other less developed nations become developed and prosperous.

Hard to blame some illiterate goat herder from some far away country high in the mountains for the world's problems.

 

[JackLuis]

But the U.S.’s own once-secret documents strongly suggest U.S. complicity as well, albeit inadvertent, in the rise of ISIS, as powerfully demonstrated by this extraordinary four-minute clip of Al Jazeera’s Mehdi Hasan with Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency:

An Insider view of the development of ISISL.