Perhaps one of the most striking features of the
attack in Nice are not what occurred in France, but instead how the reaction exemplifies
the selective humanity that we exhibit depending on where terrorism occurs.
The public, politicians, and the media all
rightfully displayed outrage over the string of attacks that have been plaguing
France over the past 18 months, as well as the recent Orlando shooting in the
US, yet the level of outrage and media coverage never reaches the same levels
when terrorism strikes other parts of the world, in particular the Middle
East.
This in turn breeds a skewed perception in the West
that it is a “battle of civilizations” that is being fought. It obscures by omission the fact that most of
the terrorism committed by groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS is perpetuated against
other Arabs in Muslim-majority countries.
This flawed perception then leads to the painting of all Muslim’s as
terrorists, fueling the ignorant racism of calls by the likes of Donald Trump to discriminate against them, completely neglecting the fact that it is Muslims and Arabs
that are on the forefront of this battle sacrificing their lives to rid the
world of the jihadis. It paints a
picture in Western minds that the cause of all of this is an ethereal religious
ideology, or that this is a problem inherent in Arab and Muslim “blood, in
their DNA”, when in reality the extremism is mainly an outgrowth of the
practical imperialism that is arming, training, and financially supporting the
terror groups for purposes of geopolitical expansion, the main driver of which
being the United States.
For example, not many spoke out when just last
week nearly 300
were killed in Baghdad following the detonation of a truck bomb for which
ISIS claimed responsibility. It was the
deadliest attack in the Iraqi capital in years, yet exactly what were the
circumstances that led ISIS to thrive there?
When ISIS declared its existence in Syria in 2014,
it had long been known that the group would push back into its old pockets of
support in the cities of Mosul and Ramadi.
2 years prior in 2012, a vetted Intelligence
Information Report of the DIA was circulated throughout the Obama
administration. It predicted the rise of
ISIS given the support from “the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey” to a Syrian
opposition dominated by “the Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI
(Al-Qaeda in Iraq).” It predicted that
the continued empowerment of these forces would cause deterioration, which
would have “dire consequences on the Iraqi situation”, thus precipitating “the
ideal atmosphere for AQI to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi, and
will provide a renewed momentum under the presumption of unifying the jihad
among Sunni Iraq and Syria.”
Given this information, the US and its allies
increased their support for the Syrian opposition throughout the next two
years. Indeed, it was our “major
Arab allies” that funded the rise of the Islamic State.
This wasn’t a secret however, the Saudi Foreign
Minister himself told John Kerry that the
Islamic State was a Saudi creation, stating to him that “Daesh [Isis] is
our [Sunni] response to your support for the Da’wa” — the Tehran-aligned Shia
Islamist ruling party of Iraq.
During this time the US enjoyed an intimate
relationship with the Saudi’s vis-à-vis their mutual Syria policy, the Saudi’s
provided the weapons and petrodollars for the rebels in exchange for “a
seat at the table” and to say “what the agenda is going to be.” That agenda, according to the 2012
DIA report, was “the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared
Salafist principality in eastern Syria” which was “exactly what the supporting
powers to the opposition want” given their desire “to isolate the Syrian
regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion” from
Iran and into Iraq.
This was confirmed by then head of the DIA, Lt.
Gen. Michael Flynn, who stated that it had been a “willful
decision” for the administration to ignore the intelligence warnings of an
impending Islamic State and to instead continue on with their policy regardless.
This all in turn led to a situation in 2014 in which
ISIS was mobilizing as a potent force, and began to make its push into Iraq.
This imminent push was well
known to US intelligence.
According to high level officials, the US “had
significant intelligence about the pending Islamic State offensive… For the US
military, it was an open secret at the time… It surprised no one.”
In a Senate testimony in 2014 DIA director Flynn
warned that “the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) probably
will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in
2014.”
The US though, did nothing.
According to the WSJ,
“the failure to confront ISIS sooner wasn't an intelligence failure. It was a
failure by policy makers to act on events that were becoming so obvious that
the Iraqis were asking for American help for months before Mosul fell. Mr.
Obama declined to offer more than token assistance.”
Yet there is no need to speculate on why nothing
was done, Obama told us himself.
The strategy was to utilize the ISIS attack as a
means to pressure the Iraqi Prime Minister, in an effort to lead to his ouster. The reason “that we did not just start taking
a bunch of airstrikes all across Iraq as soon as ISIL came in,” Obama
explained, was because “that would have taken the pressure off of Maliki.”
Not long after Maliki stepped down, and Abadi took
his place. ISIS, however, remained a
potent force in Iraq for years to come, paving the way for the attacks last
week, killing upwards of 300, unfortunately only one among many others.
Turning back to France, the continual occurrence of terrorist activity is
intimately tied in with involvement in the Syria crisis.
By 2012 France had “emerged as the
most prominent backer of Syria's armed opposition" and was then "directly
funding rebel groups… as part of a new push to oust the embattled Assad regime.”
This being only months after the DIA had
warned “the Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI (Al-Qaeda in Iraq)”
were “the major forces driving the insurgency.”
And while France justified its involvement through
talk of a “moderate opposition”, the CIA’s point-man, sent to the country
throughout 2012 to meet with the rebels, saw for himself that “there
were no moderates” there at that time.
It was France’s policy of attempting to oust Assad
that directly led to the rise of extremist jihadis inside Syria and Iraq, yet
the media establishment is criminally ignorant to these underlying geopolitical
machinations.
Former MI6 officer Alastair Crooke describes the
situation as
such: “the jihadification of the Syrian conflict had been a “willful”
policy decision, and that since Al Qaeda and the ISIS embryo were the only
movements capable of establishing such a Caliphate across Syria and Iraq, then
it plainly followed that the U.S. administration, and its allies, tacitly
accepted this outcome, in the interests of weakening, or of overthrowing, the
Syrian state.”
He notes that this strategy dates back to the Cold
War, in which “setting the destruction of secular nationalism [was] its
overwhelming priority,” and therefore, “America by default found itself
compelled to be allied with the Gulf Kings and Emirs who traditionally have
resorted to Sunni jihadism as the inoculation against democracy.”
This continued on into the Bush administration: “The
2003 war in Iraq had not brought about the pro-Israeli, pro-American regional
bloc that had been foreseen by the neocons, but rather, it had stimulated a
powerful “Shia Crescent” of resistance stretching from Iran to the
Mediterranean,” causing the Sunni states to be “petrified of a Shiite
resurgence”, and thus necessitating the creation of a Sunni proxy force that
could rival Hezbollah and Iran, which found its realization in al-Qaeda and
ISIS in Syria.
Indeed, Obama and Biden both admitted that they
did not believe in the farce of arming “moderates”, Obama
stating that “When you have a professional army that is well-armed and
sponsored by two large states who have huge stakes in this, and they are
fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as
protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict, the
notion that we could have, in a clean way that didn’t
commit U.S. military forces, changed the equation on the ground there was never
true.” (Emphasis added) Biden bluntly
summarized: “there
was no moderate middle because the moderate middle are made up of
shopkeepers, not soldiers.”
And so “the answer as so often was to move to more
covert means… by increasing the clandestine operations in support of the
opposition including the jihadists.”
Yet this even goes a step further, with the French
authorities tacitly allowing or even encouraging the flow of French nationals
into Syria.
In 2013 Foreign
Policy put out a story noting that upwards of 1,000 European nationals were
travelling into Syria. The headline read
“Hundreds are joining the fight against Assad. Will they return as terrorists?”
The French Interior Minister counted at least 140
French citizens making the sojourn, and while he admitted that “It is a ticking
time bomb,” no actual concern or alarm was raised to do something about it.
“For the time being,” the Minister said, “there is
no legal basis for arresting the European jihadists or barring them from
leaving or entering France.” He further
justified the lack of action by stating that “The fighters in Syria are not
fighting France or Europe; they are fighting against the Assad regime. It’s not against French law to fight in a
war, but it is a crime to participate in a terrorist organization."
Former counter-terrorism officer and Scotland Yard
detective Charles
Shoebridge explains the situation further: “For the first two of the last
three years, countries such as the UK and France did little to stem the flow of
their citizens to an already destabilised Syria and Libya, perhaps believing
these jihadists would serve Western foreign policy objectives in attacking Gaddafi
and Assad for example.”
“Only when domestic intelligence services began to
warn of the dangers of blowback from such people, and when groups such as ISIS
began over the last year to turn against the West in Iraq and Syria for
example, was any real action taken to stop the flow of UK and French citizens
to what, in effect, were largely western policy created terrorist recruiting
and training grounds. By then, as Europe seems increasingly likely to experience,
it was already too late.”
Yet action did not include halting Western
involvement in the Syrian war, which created the threat of terrorism in the
first place, nor did it consist of ending involvement with Turkey, Saudi
Arabia, and Qatar, who are the
principle supporters of the terrorist movements.
Instead, what was done was business-as-usual: a
state of emergency, more lockdowns, infringements on civil liberties and
freedoms, and more aggressive war-posturing which sees the threat of terrorism
as something you can bomb away, while neglecting all of its true sources.
In a detailed analysis by Britain’s leading
international security scholar, Dr. Nafeez
Ahmed notes that President Hollande’s reactive declaration of war “We will
continue striking those who attack us on our own soil” is not solely a reference
to Syria but as well to France’s current military involvement against Islamists
in North Africa.
“Over the last half decade, Islamist militant
factions affiliated to both the Islamic State and al-Qaeda have dramatically
expanded their foothold in North Africa,” Ahmed writes, “spurred by the vacuum
left from the aborted NATO war on Libya.”
The military-security architecture in the region
is led by the United States, under the jurisdiction of AFRICOM.
Yet Ahmed notes that “Intelligence documents… prove
that… the US, British and French were well aware that Algerian military
intelligence had played a double-game, covertly financing al-Qaeda affiliated
militants as a mechanism to consolidate its domestic control, and project power
abroad.” This al-Qaeda threat spilled
over into Mali, “But instead of cracking down hard on Algeria’s
state-sponsorship of Islamist terror, the US and British turned a blind eye,
and the French invaded Mali.”
The French now have a permanent military presence in Mali, first envisioned as a means to rollback the Islamist uprising yet which has instead “seen an intensification of Islamic violence,” and has transformed itself into “a semi-colonial arrangement,” which lends support to brutal government repression that only further exacerbates tensions in the region.
Ahmed notes that “Ongoing secretive operations and
draconian abuses, along with extensive support for repressive regimes, one of
which – Algeria – directly sponsored some of the Islamist factions running riot
across the region, serves to stoke local grievances, but does little to shut
down the terror networks… The US-French support for the region’s repressive
governments, in the name of counter-terrorism, stokes further resentment.”
Yet Dr. Ahmed also points out that in the same way
local grievances in France are as well exacerbated by a similar approach of
expanded state repression. Arbitrary
house searches, the targeting of Muslims based upon religious affiliation
rather than actual evidence, the arbitrary and unjustified closing down of
mosques, all serve to create an environment in which the French government has
“trampled on the rights of hundreds of men, women and children, leaving them
traumatised and stigmatised,” resulting in “already marginalised Muslim
communities in France experiencing routine state abuses.”
What all of this does is strengthen al-Qaeda,
ISIS, and all other extremist elements which depend upon the brutal repression
of Muslims to give legitimacy to their propaganda. Propaganda which states that the West is the
enemy of all Muslims, that in Western countries they will only face repression,
brutality, and abuse, and so therefore must join in the jihad against the
Western enemy, or if not be branded as apostates and live under the torment of
the Western regimes.
The more we respond to terror with further abuses
and more wars, the more the engine that marginalizes disenfranchised
populations will continue making them vulnerable to extremist manipulation.
The major sources of these events can be deduced
and intelligent steps can be implemented to prevent against their occurrence, yet
the reaction taken after each continues to neglect logic and reasoning and perpetuates
actions that exacerbate, rather than mitigate, the problem. At the center of these follies is the persistent
prioritization of acquisitions of power, imperialism, and resource domination that
sideline concerns about terrorism. Often
these pursuits utilize the veiled pretext of “anti-terrorism” to justify their
aims, aims which in fact support the very terror that they claim to
oppose. In Syria, the fight against ISIS
is waged by supporting an al-Qaeda dominated insurgency, while in North Africa counter-terrorism
serves as a pretext for military expansion, increasing the grievances which
lead to more terror.
The predictable result of all of this is more
terror, more wars, more oppression, and more death.
Only when pressure is put on those states,
interests, and agencies to halt their selfish lusting for power will the
terrorism ever truly cease.
