Articles by Alastair Crooke

We found 7 results.


Entering a Major Regional Re-set: The Syria Outcome Will Haunt Those Who Started This War
Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation – TRANSCEND Media Service, 21 Jan 2019

14 Jan 2019 – The Middle East is metamorphosing. New faultlines are emerging, yet Trump’s foreign policy ‘hawks’ still try to stage ‘old movies’ in a new ‘theatre’.

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The Metaphysics to Our Present Global Anguish
Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation – TRANSCEND Media Service, 27 Aug 2018

20 Aug 2018 – The American millenarian ‘myth’, then and now, was (and is), rooted in the fervent belief in the Manifest Destiny of the United States, ‘the New Jerusalem’, to represent humanity’s best hope for a utopian future. This belief in a special destiny has been reflected in a conviction that the United States must lead – or more properly, has the duty to coerce – mankind toward that future. Pre-Socratic values: For the Ancients, the very notion of ‘man’, in that way, did not exist. There were only men: Greeks, Romans, barbarians, Syrians, and so on. This stands in obvious opposition to universal, cosmopolitan ‘man’.

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You Can’t Understand ISIS If You Don’t Know the History of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia (Part 1)
Alastair Crooke – The Huffington Post, 17 Apr 2017

Those who would not conform to this view should be killed, their wives and daughters violated, and their possessions confiscated, he wrote. On the one hand, ISIS is deeply Wahhabist. On the other hand, it is ultra radical in a different way. It could be seen essentially as a corrective movement to contemporary Wahhabism.

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You Can’t Understand ISIS If You Don’t Know the History of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia (Part 2)
Alastair Crooke – The Huffington Post, 17 Apr 2017

“In political and financial terms, the Saud-Philby strategy has been an astonishing success. But it was always rooted in British and American intellectual obtuseness: the refusal to see the dangerous ‘gene’ within the Wahhabist project, its latent potential to mutate, at any time, back into its original a bloody, puritan strain. In any event, this has just happened: ISIS is it.”

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How the US Armed-up Syrian Jihadists
Alastair Crooke – Consortium News, 3 Oct 2016

29 Sep 2016 – The West blames Russia for the bloody mess in Syria, but U.S. Special Forces saw close up how the chaotic U.S. policy of aiding Syrian jihadists enabled Al Qaeda and ISIS to rip Syria apart, explains ex-British diplomat Alastair Crooke.

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You Can’t Understand ISIS If You Don’t Know the History of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia
Alastair Crooke – Huffington Post, 8 Sep 2014

“Those who would not conform to this view should be killed, their wives and daughters violated, and their possessions confiscated,” Abd al-Wahhab wrote.

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Syria: The Strategy Has Backfired
Alastair Crooke – The Guardian, 30 Sep 2013

What a curious turn of events: from the very brink of a military intervention in Syria that might have precipitated a wider regional conflagration, we have moved to one of those rare “points of inflection” over Iran which seems fecund with potential possibilities, including a solution in Syria.

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