Islamic State, America's Fault?

[scally]

[video=youtube_share;o6kdi1UXxhY]

[TheCholulaKid]

Here's a better, more detailed version of events:

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p02gyz6b/adam-curtis-bitter-lake

[CHAPEL END CHARLIE]

The temptation to blame 'somebody else' for your own failings is always there of course, there might even be some truth in it occasionally. However, there comes a point in time when both individuals and societies have to take responsibility for their actions. If you find yourself beheading helpless captive who has never done anybody any harm, or destroying priceless historical monuments in the name of religion, then methinks you have to take a long hard look at yourself and what you are doing before blaming somebody else.

 

It seems to me that the British Empire can't be held responsible any longer for every single border dispute than happens anywhere in Africa. Similarly, you can't blame those who negotiated the Versailles Treaty back in 1919 for the horrors of Austwitz-Birkenau a quarter of a century later - put yourself in their shoes and ask how could they have possibly known?

 

We can play the 'blame game' forever I suppose and where will it get us? If you want to blame the US for the rise of Islamic extremism then you might as look further back and say that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 started a 'ball rolling' that has just never stopped ever since. And if Communism is to blame, well then perhaps we should take a close look at Karl Marx then ...

 

So let's just blame the Germans for everything then and be done with it.

[Verbal]

A travesty of 'investigative journalism'. It's garbage.

 

For more reliable is Patrick Cockburn, whose new book on ISIS is just out. ISIS in Syria and ISIS in Iraq have differing origins. In Iraq its leadership is largely ex-Saddam lieutenants. These always have been spectacularly brutal individuals. The only difference now is that the burnings, shootings, crucifixions, stonings, and all manner of other tortures of methods of murder are being photographed and glorified, whereas before, under Saddam, the victims were done away from cameras. In Syria, ISIS grew out of a small Islamist grouping supported by donations from the Arab peninsula. It received a shot in the arm when Assad released the most dangerous Islamists in his jails to go and fight the moderate Syrian oppositionists. ISIS in Syria thereafter spent all its time fighting the moderates not Assad.

 

Cockburn's reporting involved actually going to Syria and Iraq, of course, and he's spent decades writing about and travelling within the most contested parts of the Middle East. So old fashioned...

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Rise-Islamic-State-Revolution/dp/1784780405

 

I was also amused by the quote in that YouTube clip from the 'anti-war' spokeswoman in dangerous downtown Los Angeles, proclaiming that under Saddam Iraq was 'not a particular hell hole if you were a religious minority.' Tell that to the Kurds (a religious and ethnic minority) who's families were gassed to death in a genocidal attack Halabja. Preposterous - and an insult to the thousands of dead from those gassings and from the many other thousands of victims of Saddam's murderous and vengeful rampages through the Shia south after the first Gulf War.

[pap]

Of course it's America's fault.

 

ISIS operate on formerly stable territory, "freed" from that stability by Western-led intervention, such as Iraq or Libya.

 

They wouldn't get to operate in those countries if either Saddam Hussein or Gadaffi were in power, and certainly wouldn't be able to flog Iraqi oil on black markets.

 

Fair play, the UK and France mostly acted bi-laterally on Libya, but general US policy in the region was the enabler.

 

I doubt we'll ever find out full details of various countries' involvement with ISIS, but a simple answer to the OP is "yes". It is America's fault, because no other country is pursuing a foreign policy which involves invading countries on the other side of the world, and no other country has been as much of an enabler for what ISIS now has.

[Verbal]

Of course it's America's fault.

 

ISIS operate on formerly stable territory, "freed" from that stability by Western-led intervention, such as Iraq or Libya.

 

They wouldn't get to operate in those countries if either Saddam Hussein or Gadaffi were in power, and certainly wouldn't be able to flog Iraqi oil on black markets.

 

Fair play, the UK and France mostly acted bi-laterally on Libya, but general US policy in the region was the enabler.

 

I doubt we'll ever find out full details of various countries' involvement with ISIS, but a simple answer to the OP is "yes". It is America's fault, because no other country is pursuing a foreign policy which involves invading countries on the other side of the world, and no other country has been as much of an enabler for what ISIS now has.

 

The problem wasn't the invasion. The problem was the decades of support for a regime that operated as a vast criminal enterprise and was every bit as violent as ISIS is now - plus some. Such vast levels of corruption and sectarian and ethnic violence created the puritanical reaction, just as Cromwell was the creation of the corruption of the Catholic Church.

[pap]

The problem wasn't the invasion. The problem was the decades of support for a regime that operated as a vast criminal enterprise and was every bit as violent as ISIS is now - plus some. Such vast levels of corruption and sectarian and ethnic violence created the puritanical reaction, just as Cromwell was the creation of the corruption of the Catholic Church.

 

What a load of crap.

 

Sectarian divisions were stoked up by the occupying forces following the invasion. I know you've made a few propaganda films for the SAS and the British government. Did you ever do the one where two SAS members were caught by Iraqi coppers, dressed as Arabs, driving a car with a load of bombs in the back?

 

It's a shame if not. The tale has a rousing conclusion, with the valiant British forces rolling over an Iraqi police station to get their faux-insurrectionists back.

 

http://johnpilger.com/articles/return-of-the-death-squads-iraqs-hidden-news

[Verbal]

What a load of crap.

 

Sectarian divisions were stoked up by the occupying forces following the invasion. I know you've made a few propaganda films for the SAS and the British government. Did you ever do the one where two SAS members were caught by Iraqi coppers, dressed as Arabs, driving a car with a load of bombs in the back?

 

It's a shame if not. The tale has a rousing conclusion, with the valiant British forces rolling over an Iraqi police station to get their faux-insurrectionists back.

 

http://johnpilger.com/articles/return-of-the-death-squads-iraqs-hidden-news

 

Are you on drugs? I can't make head nor tail of this post. It's just plain weird.

 

In any case, it's understandable that you and ISIS want to gloss over the huge damage done by American support for the Saddam regime, which intensified massively with the war that broke out with Iran one year after the Iran hostage crisis.

 

If, for example, you ask the Kurds, they'll give you some idea of what the implications for them were in Halabja and elsewhere of the Americans supporting every damned thing Saddam did. But that means nothing to you, does it?

 

And it was only when Saddam thought he'd been given the nod by the Americans that he rolled into Kuwait in 1990. It wasn't until that invasion that American attitudes to Saddam really changed. But by then it was too late. With the end of the first Gulf war Saddam went on a murder spree throughout the South, killing hundreds of thousands of Shia who'd been encouraged by Bush Snr to rise up against the regime. With that, the sectarian bitterness, already ramped up by the huge human of the Iran-Iraq war, went into overdrive. The US invasion in 2003 was the tail end of that depressing story, not the beginning.

[pap]

Your point is that ISIS wasn't enabled by the invasion of the once-stable countries that they make their home in. That it was US support of Saddam that enables ISIS now? Let's roll with that a little, shall we? Would ISIS exist if the US were still supporting Saddam?

 

It was the destruction of Saddam's regime, not support of it, which enabled ISIS.

 

You're not a moron, but you'll continue to look like one if you keep being contrary for contrary's sake.

[Verbal]

Your point is that ISIS wasn't enabled by the invasion of the once-stable countries that they make their home in. That it was US support of Saddam that enables ISIS now? Let's roll with that a little, shall we? Would ISIS exist if the US were still supporting Saddam?

 

It was the destruction of Saddam's regime, not support of it, which enabled ISIS.

 

You're not a moron, but you'll continue to look like one if you keep being contrary for contrary's sake.

 

You're utterly discredited with your own words. You actually think Iraq was 'stable' before the invasion? The hippy-dippy Saddam presiding over his adoring subjects while he poured Sarin over their children? The Iran-Iraq war never happened? The Kurds weren't facing liquidation? Not a single Shia suffered torture or death after the end of the 1990 war?

 

As I say, it's a narrative pushed hard by you and ISIS for your own reasons but it's a shockingly bad, wilfully ignorant 'understanding' of history, to put it mildly.

[pap]

You're utterly discredited with your own words. You actually think Iraq was 'stable' before the invasion? The hippy-dippy Saddam presiding over his adoring subjects while he poured Sarin over their children? The Iran-Iraq war never happened? The Kurds weren't facing liquidation? Not a single Shia suffered torture or death after the end of the 1990 war?

 

As I say, it's a narrative pushed hard by you and ISIS for your own reasons but it's a shockingly bad, wilfully ignorant 'understanding' of history, to put it mildly.

 

Stable in the sense that you had a single point of contact, borders were defined, internal security largely achieved, a member of the UN, bound by international law on pain of international sanction. Iraq, like Libya, was stable, had a coherent command structure and internal security. I know Libya supplied the IRA back in the day, but neither country was a haven for assorted extremists that both devolved into after Western "help".

 

You can line-item atrocities if you want, just as you can with many dictatorships, including some of those that we support. The rest? Strawman stuff not discussed before and not worth discussing now, and further insults.

 

All I'll say is that you devote a lot of time to someone you consider his stupid/ignorant/whatever-it-is-this-lunchtime inferior. Almost all of it, in fact.

 

I'm sure bletch could back that up with paperwork or something.

[tpbury]

Stable in the sense that you had a single point of contact, borders were defined, internal security largely achieved, a member of the UN, bound by international law on pain of international sanction. Iraq, like Libya, was stable, had a coherent command structure and internal security. I know Libya supplied the IRA back in the day, but neither country was a haven for assorted extremists that both devolved into after Western "help".

 

You can line-item atrocities if you want, just as you can with many dictatorships, including some of those that we support. The rest? Strawman stuff not discussed before and not worth discussing now, and further insults.

 

All I'll say is that you devote a lot of time to someone you consider his stupid/ignorant/whatever-it-is-this-lunchtime inferior. Almost all of it, in fact.

 

I'm sure bletch could back that up with paperwork or something.

 

Well Pap,

 

On what grounds should 'we' ever intervene on the line item atrocities?

[pap]

Well Pap,

 

On what grounds should 'we' ever intervene on the line item atrocities?

 

"We", as in us unilaterally, or bi-laterally with the French or the US, shouldn't intervene at all.

 

"We", as in the international community, represented by organisations like the UN, should attempt to intervene on the grounds of international law.

[tpbury]

Hmm. Attempt, as in sanctions? Think our friend Saddam was sanctioned when he did over his population (cf Verbal). Obviously it takes oil money to take action, but you do appear to sanction (nb word with two meanings) ****ty behaviour of dictators so long as 'us' westerners don't have to deal directly with the consequences.

 

I recall the BBC(?) film 'The March' or some such, when misery and poverty and anger was presented to us on our doorstep. I really don't see how the 'sustainable' misery Saddam et al provided could have really been sustained in order to fit in with your point of view. Something like ISIS would surely have arisen, even if the first targets would have been the dictators. And if the dictators had won, 'we' wouldn't have had to have worried.

 

I do think your view on the legality of time line atrocities is blinkered, though I don't believe you are yourself. There is a real problem with global wealth distribution and all this shiet is the consequence.

 

What's the answer to that?

[Wes Tender]

There is a real problem with global wealth distribution and all this shiet is the consequence.

 

What's the answer to that?

 

Perhaps they could take a leaf out of our book politically and introduce their own Mansion Tax proposals.

[Verbal]

Stable in the sense that you had a single point of contact, borders were defined, internal security largely achieved, a member of the UN, bound by international law on pain of international sanction. Iraq, like Libya, was stable, had a coherent command structure and internal security. I know Libya supplied the IRA back in the day, but neither country was a haven for assorted extremists that both devolved into after Western "help".

 

You can line-item atrocities if you want, just as you can with many dictatorships, including some of those that we support. The rest? Strawman stuff not discussed before and not worth discussing now, and further insults.

 

All I'll say is that you devote a lot of time to someone you consider his stupid/ignorant/whatever-it-is-this-lunchtime inferior. Almost all of it, in fact.

 

I'm sure bletch could back that up with paperwork or something.

 

The achilles heel of the more extreme fringe of the anti-war movement is its tendency to whitewash dictators, as you do here, and as that rather foolish individual does in the OP's youtube link. I understand the impulse: paint the world as populated by good and evil and no shades in between. The worst of it is it paints monsters like Saddam and Gaddafi as passive actors, having no control over their fate or that of their countries. Unfortunately, the world is complex than that, and there are shades of grey, not just black and white.

 

I was against the invasion in 2003, and in fact was on the anti-war march in London that winter. But I was also at university with a number of Kurdish students - my university took a lot of them because of its reputation in engineering - who did not come back alive from Iraq. Saddam's regime was efficient at two things: the looting of public funds on a truly epic scale, and the running of one of the world's most efficient torture and murder machines. Gaddafi's regime was little different: the fearful abuse was on an industrial scale. They just did privately what ISIS does publicly to people; otherwise, absolutely no difference.

 

To proclaim the Saddam regime - with its involvement in a trench war with Iran which was extensively fought with chemical weapons, its attempt at chemical genocide of the Kurds, its elimination of the march Arabs, its murderous rampage through the Shia south after 1990, its assassination squads roaming the streets of Europe - as 'stable' is indefensible.

 

Similarly with Gaddafi - whose inventiveness with sadistic torture techniques, practised on hapless victims including young girls tortured for sexual gratification; whose assassination squads also killed wherever they pleased (and I'm not just talking about Yvonne Fletcher); whose theft of public and oil revenues was legion - to portray him as a shining beacon of 'stability' requires a deeply warped morality.

 

So a suggestion: try very hard not to see the world in terms of heroes (for you: Putin, Assad, Gaddafi, Saddam) and villains (anything western), and try to imagine that world as being just a little more complex and nuanced than you're prepared to allow. I would welcome an anti-war movement that was candid about this complexity, but it's nowhere near that yet. At its wilder fringes are those like you who become de facto apologists for such brutal regimes, because they can't accept that the world is populated by any other than the modern cliche equivalent of cowboys and indians.

[pap]

The achilles heel of the more extreme fringe of the anti-war movement is its tendency to whitewash dictators, as you do here, and as that rather foolish individual does in the OP's youtube link. I understand the impulse: paint the world as populated by good and evil and no shades in between. The worst of it is it paints monsters like Saddam and Gaddafi as passive actors, having no control over their fate or that of their countries. Unfortunately, the world is complex than that, and there are shades of grey, not just black and white.

 

I was against the invasion in 2003, and in fact was on the anti-war march in London that winter. But I was also at university with a number of Kurdish students - my university took a lot of them because of its reputation in engineering - who did not come back alive from Iraq. Saddam's regime was efficient at two things: the looting of public funds on a truly epic scale, and the running of one of the world's most efficient torture and murder machines. Gaddafi's regime was little different: the fearful abuse was on an industrial scale. They just did privately what ISIS does publicly to people; otherwise, absolutely no difference.

 

To proclaim the Saddam regime - with its involvement in a trench war with Iran which was extensively fought with chemical weapons, its attempt at chemical genocide of the Kurds, its elimination of the march Arabs, its murderous rampage through the Shia south after 1990, its assassination squads roaming the streets of Europe - as 'stable' is indefensible.

 

Similarly with Gaddafi - whose inventiveness with sadistic torture techniques, practised on hapless victims including young girls tortured for sexual gratification; whose assassination squads also killed wherever they pleased (and I'm not just talking about Yvonne Fletcher); whose theft of public and oil revenues was legion - to portray him as a shining beacon of 'stability' requires a deeply warped morality.

 

I'm not seeing things in terms of heroes and villains, nor am I trying to whitewash dictators. In an ideal world, international crimes would be detected, tried and enforced equally. I'm not condoning anything that these dictators have done. The Libyan torture techniques in particular sound horrific. The West is not even handed in its pursuit of international law, nor is it above dealing with unsavoury regimes when it suits.

 

Our government was prepared to do business with Libya. We did business with Iraq, back in the 1980s when Saddam was our mate and we were whispering "Invade Iran, Invade Iran" in his ears. The US gave Iraq biological and chemical weapon tech during the war. They used it against the Iranians, and again against the Kurds. We've got our own historical part to play in the plight of the Kurds, when we drew lines over bits of the Ottoman Empire and left them scattered in nation states that didn't want them.

 

We do business with nasty and oppressive regimes now, so let's not pretend that we're imbued with some moral rectitude that makes us better. We sell oppressive regimes weapons for use against their own people. We'll hypocritically condemn Russia for its newly enacted "can't teach kids a homosexual lifestyle" law in our media, but say fúck all about our mates in Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality itself carries the death penalty, and they'll also kill you for sedition, sorcery and apostasy. Amongst other things.

 

If we are what we say we often purport ourselves to be, people that praise and fight for liberty, then I think we need to exercise those values in an even-handed and fair way, and not turn a blind eye when a country with a terrible human rights record happens to be oil rich and compliant. The West's enemies charge it with hypocrisy, and they're not wrong. That doesn't mean that people like Putin are automatically right. He has his own agenda, just as anyone else does.

 

So a suggestion: try very hard not to see the world in terms of heroes (for you: Putin, Assad, Gaddafi, Saddam) and villains (anything western), and try to imagine that world as being just a little more complex and nuanced than you're prepared to allow. I would welcome an anti-war movement that was candid about this complexity, but it's nowhere near that yet. At its wilder fringes are those like you who become de facto apologists for such brutal regimes, because they can't accept that the world is populated by any other than the modern cliche equivalent of cowboys and indians.

 

When making a plea to see the nuances and shades of grey in the world, it's probably best not to create your own Axis of Evil in the process.

[View From The Top]

 

If we are what we say we often purport ourselves to be, people that praise and fight for liberty, then I think we need to exercise those values in an even-handed and fair way, and not turn a blind eye when a country with a terrible human rights record happens to be oil rich and compliant. The West's enemies charge it with hypocrisy, and they're not wrong.

 

Yep.

[toofarnorth]

There is a very full history lesson on the origins of ISIS and essentially the rise wahabism in Bitter Lake on the iPlayer. It apprently relates back to a US oil deal with Saudi Arabia post WW2.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p02gyz6b/adam-curtis-bitter-lake

[Verbal]

Our government was prepared to do business with Libya. We did business with Iraq, back in the 1980s when Saddam was our mate and we were whispering "Invade Iran, Invade Iran" in his ears. The US gave Iraq biological and chemical weapon tech during the war. They used it against the Iranians, and again against the Kurds. We've got our own historical part to play in the plight of the Kurds, when we drew lines over bits of the Ottoman Empire and left them scattered in nation states that didn't want them.

 

We do business with nasty and oppressive regimes now, so let's not pretend that we're imbued with some moral rectitude that makes us better. We sell oppressive regimes weapons for use against their own people. We'll hypocritically condemn Russia for its newly enacted "can't teach kids a homosexual lifestyle" law in our media, but say fúck all about our mates in Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality itself carries the death penalty, and they'll also kill you for sedition, sorcery and apostasy. Amongst other things.

 

If we are what we say we often purport ourselves to be, people that praise and fight for liberty, then I think we need to exercise those values in an even-handed and fair way, and not turn a blind eye when a country with a terrible human rights record happens to be oil rich and compliant. The West's enemies charge it with hypocrisy, and they're not wrong. That doesn't mean that people like Putin are automatically right. He has his own agenda, just as anyone else does.

 

You're now saying pretty much exactly what I was saying earlier in this thread! What took you so long? To sum up: you have to look at the history of the relationship between the West and Saddam, Gadaffi, et al., and NOT see the 2003 invasion as somehow the 'cause' of all that's rotten in Iraq and Syria, but rather the endpoint. Aside from the fact that Syria has a different recent history but the same problem as Iraq - they both are blighted by ISIS - there is a deeper history to all this rooted in the actions and reactions of vastly corrupt and violent dictators, Western interference, Salafist puritanism, and so on.

 

You still need to understand your Sykes-Picot, which you've got wrong, but I'll let it slide in the knowledge that you're slowly seeing the historical light.

 

As to your charge of the West's hypocrisy, that I'm afraid is still pretty weak. We're all hypocrites of one kind another - it's an essential part of the human condition. Here's some reading you won't do on that - David Runciman on how to choose which hypocrite you're next led by, for whom you'll hypocritically vote.

 

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8605.html

[pap]

You're now saying pretty much exactly what I was saying earlier in this thread! What took you so long? To sum up: you have to look at the history of the relationship between the West and Saddam, Gadaffi, et al., and NOT see the 2003 invasion as somehow the 'cause' of all that's rotten in Iraq and Syria, but rather the endpoint. Aside from the fact that Syria has a different recent history but the same problem as Iraq - they both are blighted by ISIS - there is a deeper history to all this rooted in the actions and reactions of vastly corrupt and violent dictators, Western interference, Salafist puritanism, and so on.

 

You still need to understand your Sykes-Picot, which you've got wrong, but I'll let it slide in the knowledge that you're slowly seeing the historical light.

 

As to your charge of the West's hypocrisy, that I'm afraid is still pretty weak. We're all hypocrites of one kind another - it's an essential part of the human condition. Here's some reading you won't do on that - David Runciman on how to choose which hypocrite you're next led by, for whom you'll hypocritically vote.

 

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8605.html

 

I'm saying nothing of the sort. I'm simply putting meat on the bones of your points, something you seem unable to do with any degree of relevance.

 

You can bang on about US support as much as you want. It was the US acting as aggressor in an illegal imperialist invasion and the píss-poor post-planning that created the power vacuum that now allows ISIS to thrive.

 

I can understand you wanting to deny that. You tub-thumped for this new phase of Western aggression. It's natural.

[Coxford_lou]

Are you on drugs? I can't make head nor tail of this post. It's just plain weird.

 

In any case, it's understandable that you and ISIS want to gloss over the huge damage done by American support for the Saddam regime, which intensified massively with the war that broke out with Iran one year after the Iran hostage crisis.

 

If, for example, you ask the Kurds, they'll give you some idea of what the implications for them were in Halabja and elsewhere of the Americans supporting every damned thing Saddam did. But that means nothing to you, does it?

 

And it was only when Saddam thought he'd been given the nod by the Americans that he rolled into Kuwait in 1990. It wasn't until that invasion that American attitudes to Saddam really changed. But by then it was too late. With the end of the first Gulf war Saddam went on a murder spree throughout the South, killing hundreds of thousands of Shia who'd been encouraged by Bush Snr to rise up against the regime. With that, the sectarian bitterness, already ramped up by the huge human of the Iran-Iraq war, went into overdrive. The US invasion in 2003 was the tail end of that depressing story, not the beginning.

 

Hi Verbal,

 

I'm interested in your view on this. Dare I ask what your take on Tony Blair is during this period? I ask as someone interested in the successes and failures of 'humanitarian intervention' intentions during that period.

 

Thanks.