{"id":63833,"date":"2015-09-21T12:00:12","date_gmt":"2015-09-21T11:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=63833"},"modified":"2015-09-21T05:55:47","modified_gmt":"2015-09-21T04:55:47","slug":"isis-is-us-the-empire-and-the-evil-genie-it-released","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/09\/isis-is-us-the-empire-and-the-evil-genie-it-released\/","title":{"rendered":"ISIS Is US: The Empire and the Evil Genie It Released"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"isis-510x340<\/a><\/p>\n

Picturing Papal Petrification<\/strong><\/p>\n

14 Sep 2015 – <\/em>The reigning politics and media culture of the United States is not without moments of high comic relief. Three weeks ago, for example, CNN\u2019s Chris Cuomo presented the buffoonish Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump with a bizarre hypothetical situation. What would Trump do, Cuomo asked, if he met the Pope and the pontiff expressed his opinion that capitalism can be \u201ca real avenue to greed, it can be really toxic and corrupt.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump didn\u2019t miss a beat. \u201cI\u2019d say ISIS wants to get you,\u201d Trump said. \u201cYou know that ISIS wants to go in and take over the Vatican? You have heard that. You know, that\u2019s a dream of theirs, to go into Italy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe talks to you about capitalism, you scare the pope?\u201d Cuomo asked<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m gonna have to scare the Pope because it\u2019s the only thing,\u201d Trump said. \u201cThe Pope, I hope, can only be scared by God. But the truth is \u2014 you know, if you look at what\u2019s going on \u2014 they better hope that capitalism works, because it\u2019s the only thing we have right now. And it\u2019s a great thing when it works properly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Funny stuff. It doesn\u2019t get much wackier than that. Forget for now the notion that that capitalism is a wonderful \u201cthing\u201d when it is functioning \u201cproperly,\u201d whatever that means. And never mind whether or not ISIS chiefs dream of claiming St. Peter\u2019s Square for Islamic jihad (maybe they do).<\/p>\n

ISIS as Imperial Blowback<\/strong><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s look instead at Trump\u2019s suggestion that the Pope would do well to stop mouthing off about the profits system because he needs to get under the protective umbrella of the U.S. against the Islamic State. Trump\u2019s balderdash aside, the notion that the U.S. is the leading and true enemy of ISIS is widely assumed across the U.S., thanks in part to the properly working propagandistic mechanisms of dominant U.S. corporate war, election, and entertainment media.<\/p>\n

The notion is false. In reigning US mass media, ISIS is presented as a great cloud of Islamo-extremist evil that mysteriously and shockingly arose out of thin air last year.\u00a0\u00a0Nothing could be further from the truth.<\/p>\n

That ISIS a grisly and terrible threat cannot be seriously doubted. With its horrifying snuff films, its genocidal practices towards Shiite Muslims, Christians, and \u201cpolytheists,\u201d and its arch-reactionary social codes imposed through whippings, limb-chopping, beheadings, stoning, eye-gouging, the shooting of children for minor infractions, and its sexual enslavement of women, ISIS is most definitely extremist and perversely evil.\u00a0The danger has reached critical mass. As Diana Johnstone notes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cArmed by leftover U.S. military equipment in Iraq, enriched by illicit oil sales, its ranks swollen by young Jihadis from all over the world, the Islamic State threatens the people of Lebanon and Jordan, already struggling to take care of masses of refugees from Palestine, Iraq and now Syria. Fear of the decapitating Islamic fanatics is inciting more and more people to risk everything in order to get to safety in Europe\u2026.The Islamic State is truly the horrible enemy caricature of the \u2018Jewish State.\u2019 another political entity based on an exclusive religious identity. Like Israel it has no clearly defined borders, but with a vastly larger potential demographic base.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Whence this stark and borderless evil, driving a massive refugee crisis that has Western media up in moral arms? ISIS is, among other things, a predictable \u201cblowback\u201d consequence of United States wars on Iraq and Syria. Had the United States and its partners in imperial crime not illegally attacked and invaded Iraq in 2003, more than a million people would be alive\u00a0today and ISIS and other al Qaeda offshoots would not be terrifying millions into fleeing the Middle East and North Africa. As the British foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn notes<\/a>, \u201cthe movement\u2019s toxic but potent mix of extreme religious beliefs and military skill is the outcome of the war in Iraq since the U.S. invasion of 2003 and the war in Syria since 2011.\u201d The first war collapsed Iraq state authority and took the lid off the nation\u2019s fierce ethno-religious and sectarian divisions.\u00a0The U.S. fueled those divisions and Sunni uprisings against the corrupt and sectarian Shia government it set up in Baghdad.\u00a0It produced droves of martyrs killed by US \u201cCrusaders\u201d in places like Fallujah, a Sunni city the US Marines targeted for near destruction (replete with the bombing of hospitals and the use of radioactive ordnance that created an epidemic of child cancer and leukemia) in 2004 \u2013 a town ISIS took over last year. Funny how Western media never seemed terribly upset about the millions of refugees created by U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.<\/p>\n

But just as the sectarian war that fed ISIS\u2019s horrific emergence was retreating in Iraq, it was reignited when al Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessor to ISIS, found new soil in which to blossom in neighboring Syria.\u00a0The US, Europe, and their Middle Eastern allies (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates) kept a vicious civil war going against Syria\u2019s Assad regime though it was clear from 2012 on that Assad was not going to fall anytime soon. The US-sponsored war in Syria became the fertile, blood-soaked breeding ground for ISIS\u2019s expansion on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border, something the crooked and incompetent US-backed government in Baghdad was powerless to prevent.<\/p>\n

Other recent U.S. policies have fed the extraordinary growth of extreme jihadism modeled on al Qaeda and ISIS. The US-led NATO bombing of Libya in 2011 helped turn that country into a breeding ground for ISIS and related jihadist movements. Thanks in no small part to Obama\u2019s deadly drone, bomb, and other attacks around the Muslim world (the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize has bombed at least seven Muslim countries so far), the US has helped advance civil war and Sunni, al Qaeda- and ISIS-inspired jihad across the Middle East and North Africa.\u00a0Washington has generated an expansion of Salafist terror and extremism beyond the wildest dreams of Osama bin-Laden, who was irrelevantly killed by Obama\u2019s beloved Special Forces in May of 2011. As Johnstone notes:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe results of this madness are washing up on the shores of the Mediterranean. Images and sentiment have replaced thinking about causes and effects. One photo of a drowned toddler causes a media and political uproar. Are people surprised? Didn\u2019t they know that toddlers were being torn to pieces by U.S. bombing of Iraq, by U.S. drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen? What about the toddlers obliterated by NATO\u2019s war to \u2018free Libya\u2019 from its \u2018dictator\u2019? The current refugee crisis in Europe is the inevitable, foreseeable, predicted result of Western policy in the Middle East and North Africa. Gaddafi\u2019s Libya was the wall that kept hundreds of thousands of Africans from migrating illegally to Europe, not only by police methods but even more effectively by offering them development at home and decently paid jobs in Libya. Now Libya is the source both of economic migrants and of refugees from Libya itself, as well as from other lands of desperation. In order to weaken Sudan, the United States (and Susan Rice in particular)-championed creation of the new country of South Sudan, which is not a country at all but the scene of rival massacres driving more and more fugitives toward unwelcoming countries.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Cold War and Neoliberal Origins<\/strong><\/p>\n

In reality, the United States\u2019 complicity, along with its satellites and allies, in the rise of ISIS, goes back to the late Cold War era. As Cockburn notes in his important book\u00a0The Rise of the Islamic State; ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution<\/a> <\/em>(Verso, 2015), the key moment for the rise of political Sunni jihad was 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and the Iranian revolution turned Iran into a Shia theocracy. In the summer of 1979, the Jimmy Carter White House secretly granted massive military support to fundamentalist tribal groups known as the mujahidin, direct forebears of al-Qaeda and ISIS.\u00a0\u00a0During the 1980s, a critical and remarkably durable partnership was formed between the United States, Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan\u2019s military and intelligence services. This alliance has been a leading prop of US power in the Middle East.\u00a0It has also \u201cprovided a seed plot for jihadist movements, out of which Osama bin-Laden\u2019s al-Qaeda was originally only one strain,\u201d Cockburn notes.<\/p>\n

Among the many fundamentalist Sunnis recruited to fight in Afghanistan by the CIA and Pakistan\u2019s intelligence agency (the ISI) was none other than Osama bin-Laden. A son of the Saudi elite, bin-Laden was the architect of the\u00a09\/11\/2001\u00a0jetliner attacks, a predictable \u201cblowback\u201d from the United States\u2019 longstanding mass-murderous actions and presence (Google up \u201cHighway of Death\u201d and \u201cIraqi children killed by US economic sanctions\u201d) in the Arab and Muslim worlds.\u00a0The al Qaeda attacks on the US \u201chomeland\u201d gave the George W. Bush administration cover and false pretext for the invasion that ironically brought jihadist Sunni rebellion and ultimately ISIS to Iraq (where al Qaeda had no real presence under Saddam). \u201cThe shock of\u00a09\/11,\u201d Cockburn observes \u201cprovided a Pearl Harbor moment in the U.S. when public revulsion and fear could be manipulated to implement a preexisting neoconservative agenda by targeting Saddam Hussein and invading Iraq.\u00a0A reason for waterboarding al Qaeda suspects was to extract confessions implicating Iraq rather than Saudi Arabia in the attacks.\u201d Bad information was precisely the point of the torture!<\/p>\n

The full history of the United States\u2019 role in the creation of ISIS goes back even further. Since the dawn of the Cold War, the United States has lent its considerable power to the defeat of left and secular nationalism across the Middle East.\u00a0\u00a0As the Middle East expert Gilbert Achcar<\/a> noted nine years ago, \u201cwhen Arab nationalism, Nasserism and similar trends began to crumble [under US pressure] in the 1970s, most governments used Islamic fundamentalism [with US encouragement and assistance] as a tool to counter whatever remnants there were of the left or of secular nationalism.\u201d Along with this came the U.S.-led \u201cneoliberal turn of the last quarter century\u201d \u2013 the spread of alienating capitalist and commercial forces and values. \u201cNeoliberal globalization,\u201d Achcar explained, \u201chas brought about the disintegration of the social fabric and of social safety nets.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0This led to widespread social disarray and anxiety, fueling \u201cviolent assertions of \u2018identity,\u2019 extremism or fanaticism\u2026.religious [and\/] or political\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Washington \u201clet [the]\u2026genie out of the bottle\u2026.The combination of their own repression of progressive or secular ideologies and the subjective failure \u2013 the bankruptcy of these ideologies, aggravated by the collapse of the Soviet Union \u2013 left the ground open to the only the ideological channel of anti-Western protest available, which was Islamic fundamentalism\u201d \u2013 itself long \u201ctolerated and even used and encouraged by the local regimes and by the United States,\u201d Achcar wrote.<\/p>\n

None of all this essential historical background makes it into \u201cmainstream\u201d US media and politics culture.\u00a0That makes it impossible for the typical American who relies on that culture for information on world events to respond to the rise of ISIS with anything but clueless surprise and astonished horror of the kind that supports yet more of the same imperial policy that has done so much to create the horrific nightmare.<\/p>\n

Choosing ISIS and the Saudi Kingdom over Assad and Iran \u2013 in the Name of Democracy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thirty-six years after Jimmy Carter decided to arm jihad in Afghanistan, the fanatical ISIS stands as the ultimate armed and dangerous Islamist genie out of the bottle. Who can halt the expansion of its maniacal rule over all of Mesopotamia and beyond? Only the Syrian State headed by Bashar al Assad, with assistance from Russia and the Islamic State\u2019s blood enemy Iran. \u201cThe choice,\u201d Johnstone rightly reminds us, \u201cis not between Assad and \u2018Western democracy.\u2019 The choice is between Assad and the Islamic State.\u201d But the West, with Washington calling the tune, still vows that \u201cAssad must go.\u201d It prefers the spread and contagion of Islamist chaos over the rational resolution of the crisis \u2013 and not just in the Middle East but across Africa. Washington absurdly warns Russia against \u201cescalating the conflict in Syria\u201d by providing Assad military assistance to help Syria fight jihadists. Meanwhile it maintains close relations and undertakes joint military and intelligence operations with its client states Saudi Arabia (the most reactionary government on Earth), Pakistan, and Turkey, all key sponsors of Salafist jihad.<\/p>\n

The U.S. prefers to keep the dark genie out and about like never before. The Empire\u2019s jihad-fueling policy is based on what Johnstone called \u201cthe tacit assumption that civil war would be better for the people of those countries than living under a \u2018dictatorship.\u2019 In practice, however,\u201d Johnston adds, \u201cmost people can get along better without a vote than without a roof over their heads. Or without their heads.\u201d<\/p>\n

Justification and Pretext for What Uncle Sam Does Best<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is na\u00efve to think that all of this madness was unanticipated by the architects and planners of U.S. global policy. Destabilization is Washington\u2019s tool and game in a time when America\u2019s long-lost economic-capitalist hegemony is fading at an ever accelerating pace (China has emerged as the leading foreign economic-developmental force in Africa by far) and U.S. global power relies on military muscle above all. As Eric Draitser notes<\/a>, destabilization \u201cprovides the justification and pretext for expanded US military engagement, precisely what [Washington policy planners] wanted all along.\u201d Military engagement and \u201cblowing shit up\u201d (including whole nations, regions, societies, and civilizations) are what Uncle Sam does best. It also and not just coincidentally consistent with the nuclear-armed US client and ally Israel\u2019s murderous and timeworn Middle Eastern strategy of divide and rule.<\/p>\n

And, as the Pope might well tell The Donald, causing Trump to acknowledge the pontiff\u2019s wisdom perhaps, more military engagement means more profits for high-tech \u201cdefense\u201d (empire) contractors like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin. \u201cThe\u00a0costs of empire,\u201d Noam Chomsky reminded us in 1969<\/a>, \u201care in general distributed over the society as a whole, while its profits revert to a few within.\u201d American state military-Keynesian capitalism, such as it is, goes hand in hand with ISIS \u2013 and the al Nusra Front, Boko Haram, al-Shabab<\/a>, Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Ansar al-Sharia<\/a>, Jemaah Islamiah<\/a>, Abu Sayyaf, Ansar Bayt Al-Maqdis, and all the rest. ISIS et. al. help that capitalism work quite well for America\u2019s corporate masters of war.<\/p>\n

ISIS is US, something Trump seems to have at least partly grasped in his own preposterous, pope-pricking way: \u201cproblems with capitalism? Scare the world with grave threats that require U.S. military power [never mind that U.S. Empire created the threats in the first place]. That\u2019s how to make America great again!\u201d<\/p>\n

Rosa Luxembourg got it right: it was socialism or barbarism. Adding in the problem of climate change, the Pope appears to agree with Istvan Meszaros\u2019 ecological update of Rosa for the warming 21st<\/sup> century: \u201cor barbarism if we\u2019re lucky.\u201d But that\u2019s another essay.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

Paul Street\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0latest book is\u00a0<\/em>They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy<\/a>\u00a0(Paradigm, 2014)<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 counterpunch.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Choosing ISIS and the Saudi Kingdom over Assad and Iran\u2014in the Name of Democracy – Rosa Luxembourg got it right: it was socialism or barbarism. Adding in the problem of climate change, the Pope appears to agree with Istvan Meszaros\u2019 ecological update of Rosa for the warming 21st century: \u201cor barbarism if we\u2019re lucky.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63833\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}