ISIS & the psycho-nightmare of US Middle East “policy”
by BlackCatte
The US are trying to salvage the remnants of their comic-book Syrian narrative, hiding behind the transparent diversionary claim the Russians are bombing “non-ISIS rebels”, hoping, forlornly no one will be smart enough to realise this essentially means “al Qaeda/al Nusra”, and amounts to an admission the US is working with the group they used to claim were the embodiment of evil.
Not just working with, but defending hysterically. Watching Ashton Carter at the podium issuing barely concealed threats of retribution to another nuclear power, it’s hard to comprehend that he’s doing this because Russia dared to bomb the alleged perpetrators of 9/11.
Naturally the tame western media aids and abets this bankrupt storyline, but they can’t save it. It’s garbage, and even after the spinners have finished spinning, it still looks like garbage. But the lie has to be maintained, even while it becomes increasingly obvious no one believes it, because the alternative is impossible to contemplate.
The collapse of the “we’re bombing the bad guys” narrative doesn’t just completely unravel the accepted reality of what is going down in Syria, it opens up numerous other worm-filled cans. Questions inevitably proliferate that go far beyond current events. How long has Washington been funding al Qaeda while declaring them enemies? How routine is false narrative like this? How blurred is the distinction between real and pretend? How many people is it acceptable to kill in fuzzy semi-pretend-war with pretend-enemies who may still die? How much of our current world view is contaminated with someone’s convenient fiction and message-laden fantasy?
Where on the spectrum of reality does ISIS belong? That multi-million dollar oil-exporting & antiquity-smuggling “Caliphate”. With $2 billion dollars in bank accounts the CIA can analyse but not freeze. ISIS with a convoy of oil trucks 2km long the US air force can’t bomb. ISIS with the “slick and sophisticated media department” that turns out high quality, professional, recruitment vids and films of real or not so real violence. ISIS, “gaming Twitter” with their official app, available through Google Play store for three months, until public outrage closed it down. ISIS, the designer terrorists, with their brand-saturation logo, and their endless stream of slick promo pics, often in matching trucks. ISIS, taking time out to Photoshop Twitter pix even in the midst of “battlefield setbacks” in their “desert strongholds”.
That ISIS/Islamic State/al Qaeda/al Nusra, or whatever new name we want to use, were to some extent packaged and marketed as designer fear porn seems beyond doubt. Nothing else explains their unparalleled success as media-manipulators or their immunity to any kind of retribution. It’s possible a lot of the guys in the ubiquitous promo pics never did anything more violent than pose with a black flag or an assault rifle. But some of them apparently did a lot more than that. They didn’t just take the money and fight either. They tortured people. En masse. On film.
Where was the line drawn? When we are being told in the MSM that British SAS forces “dressed up as ISIS” in order – allegedly – to destroy “IS equipment”, we can see that line is getting blurry at best. How many of those iconic ISIS pictures are “real” ISIS, and how many are western force “dressed up”, or obliging actors doing a bit of propaganda? Where did agitprop “theatre” become western soldiers running round waving ISIS flags? When did they both meld into proxy warriors gone out of control and making snuff films? Was there a line at all? Did the western backers who supplied the trucks and gave the SAS those fake flags also pay for the orange jump suits, the burning cages, the decapitation knives? Did they know what they were doing?
How deep and nasty is the psycho-nightmare of US Middle East “policy”?
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Ah yes.. the alleged perps of 9/11.. clever werent they? too clever perhaps?
Great work, BlackCatte. This, and your piece on the phony fairy tales about the sources of ISIS s wealth, are spot on. Tracks what I’ve been saying in
“Good al-Qaeda’s” Air Force: The United States Is At War With Syria and America, ISIS, and Syria: We have to bomb the jihadis in order to save them,, but you went much further in your analysis of ISIS financing. I noticed the NYT picked up the thread right after your piece, with an artilce on the Toyotas. And now even the NYT is calling Obama’s latest strategy of pouring weapons into “untrained” jihadis “hallucinatory.”
[…] http://off-guardian.org/2015/10/09/isis-the-psycho-nightmare-of-us-middle-east-policy/ […]
A rather good demonstration of the intolerable cognitive dissonance we are meant to absorb:
http://bit.ly/1MpEEpa
Excellent article. So here’s how I view the whole thing.
In the Middle East, the US policy beginning with George W. Bush has been the Neocon policy, articulated in the document “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” published in 2001 by the Project for a New American Century. The stated goal was to overthrow Iraq, Syria and Iran (pretty much in that order) and to have American “boots on the ground.” Well, we all know how Iraq turned out. Obama came into office with the Neocon strategy in shambles and Syria already in the Neocon cross hairs. Obama tried to extricate the US from this failed policy (I use failed in the sense of failed from the point of view of narrow nationalist American business interests). It was a failure because it put Iran in an alliance with Iraq, giving Iran more influence in the region, and it destroyed the Iraqi state, creating a vacuum for the rise of terrorist armies like ISIS and Al Qaeda/Al Nusra. The policy toward Syria threatened the same outcome.
The US policy in Syria was conflicted. On the one hand, the US was arming groups to overthrow Assad. Yet these groups were overwhelmingly terrorist groups rather than the “moderate opposition” who the US was purportedly arming. So in fact, the US, Turkey and others were arming and facilitating radical Islamic terrorists to overthrow Assad. Had the US not learned the lesson of post Soviet Afghanistan, or maybe, as some would contend, they knew it well and wanted to repeat it? One of these groups, ISIS, had transformed into a legitimate threat with its own territory and incipient state.
Russia had been warning the US for at least a year that it would take action in Syria, but it didn’t because it first needed to get an agreement on Iran’s nuclear weapons potential. Once the agreement was signed and it became clear that the US Congress did not have enough votes to stop it, Russia and Iran were ready to act. Russia, Iran and Iraq (with Syria as the silent partner) made an agreement to fight ISIS. That agreement meant that Assad would be supported in power in order to keep the Syrian state from collapsing and resulting in the same chaos that had enveloped Iraq.
The Neocons saw their policy being rapidly rolled back. They had hoped to keep Iran isolated and weak until the Neocons had finished with Syria. But the nuclear agreement ended that. While Obama still hoped for a pie-in-the-sky democratic government replacing Assad as the best way to defeat ISIS (not recognizing or being willing to admit that terrorism in Syria is not an internal response to Assad but a foreign intervention to overthrow him) it had been obvious for some time that a vacuum of power following Assad’s departure would be the mistake you don’t want to repeat. So, while Obama is trying to figure out how to get out of the mess that the Neocons put the US in, he can’t do it without completely eviscerating the Neocon strategy, whether he wanted to or not.
It has also been understood for quite a while that Iran was really a US ally in defeating ISIS and it was willing to put troops on the ground. And into all this steps Putin. He makes the alliance with Iran and Iraq and Syria, and begins to take action. The tricky part for Obama is his reluctance to move on his own (perhaps justified by his need to deal with his internal opposition) which lead to him losing face when Putin began to act. Second, if you are going to support Assad, that means you can’t be supporting the “moderate” opposition while you are attacking ISIS. So Putin bombs the people the US has been supporting. And now the US has formally “temporarily” abandoned its opposition to Assad in favor of an alliance against ISIS et al. This all makes practical good sense if your goal is to defeat ISIS. Syria has an army in place that is motivated to fight. Iran is willing to put boots on the ground, too. But for the Neocons, this is a HUGE defeat. It means that Iran now is the major foreign player in Iraq and will become even more influential than it already is in Syria. Russia keeps its warm water port in Syria. And Putin/Russia, not Obama/America, becomes the leader who has taken the bull by the horns. The “New American Century” has lasted only 15 years, coincidentally, exactly as long as the “Thousand Year Reich.”
[…] Source: ISIS & the psycho-nightmare of US Middle East “policy” […]
[…] Source: ISIS & the psycho-nightmare of US Middle East “policy” […]
ISIS is insane and so are its creators in the USA.
Reblogged this on Mothman777's Blog.
I try to refrain from making comments like this below articles like this one which stand on their own merits, but there is a large bull elephant trashing the sofa, and daubed on his flank is ‘911’.
For those who have put the time into studying the events themselves, and wading through the bullshit (both official and unofficial) to arrive at a conclusion beyond reasonable doubt; for those people the situation in Syria, and Iraq have been quite transparent from the very beginning.
I contest that we cannot truly understand the nature of the political and military forces shaping our world, nor the extent of social manipulation employed in our current parallel media realities, without coming to grips with the truth about 911.
Sorry, I know it is uncomfortable, divisive and still taboo, and that the dissenting ‘Left’ are still hobbled by outmoded filters and excessive idolatry, but somehow this defining event needs to be faced up to if we want to end this madness. It is the psychology of trauma that can only be resolved by re-visiting.
It appears that they have hired Disney Land to write this stuff either that or they better change their supplier. Yesterdays news gets wrapped in todays fish.
They should have hired Disneyland because they at least could have done a more convincing job. It has always been the cheapest and most transparent fiction to some.
….. this because Russia dared to bomb the alleged perpetrators of 9/11. … even after the spinners have finished spinning, it still looks like garbage.
Looks like your 911 connection is also spun garbage. An Arab in a cave in Afghan shutting down the 1/3T$ US air defenses with his laptop then sending his 22 L pilots to drop 3 TWRs, the Twins being carried off overnight in 4hrs instead of taking 4 years.. unless of course you refer to the perps of 911 as the rogue US Govt.
Agreed, it was Israel’s mosad that were cheifly responsible for 9/11. Of course also added and abetted by our government, our media (run by Jews) and most of our institutions. W54 Pitt nukes among a whole slew of planning and scripting for our media.
Let’s keep clear of the race-based comments. Critiquing Israel is fine. Talking about “Jews” is not. “Jews” does not define a single entity of anything but race. Jewish people differ as much in their loyalty and affiliations as non-Jewish people. Some are wealthy and powerful, some are not. The division that matters is between the 1% of super-rich agenda-makers and the 99% of everyone else. What race any of them belong to is immaterial.
Hear hear!
Jew-baiting and Jew-hating needs to be rooted out and not tolerated within the Russophile discussion world.
Exhibit A: The invaluable and addictive Anatoly Wasserman . Who is about as Jewish as they come, but a fierce Russian patriot, who always has something incisive to say.
Seconded! Jews are not a ‘race’, but racism is created by people who want to divide humans into categories. There is no purpose to racism other than hatred. Let’s not fall for it.