Islamic extremist terrorism didn’t just pop up overnight because it was a natural outgrowth of the Muslim religion. Islamic terrorism is the result of really bad colonialist, money-grubbing meddling by the West in the hopes of keeping rich Western mitts on those big ol’ oil fields under Arab lands. The foreign policies of the West destabilized the region and fertilized the socioeconomic soil around extremist roots, and now innocent Westerners and Arabs alike are forced to deal with the bitter harvest they we, as individuals, had little to no control over.
Remember my post on how America and Great Britain overthrew the democratically elected secular leader of Iran in order to put in a puppet government and get rich of Iranian oil, which was direct cause of the rise of theocracy and extremism in Iran? Well, we didn’t learn our lesson and stop there. In the 1960s we armed Kurdish “insurgents” (terrorists) to overthrow the Iraqi government, which was leaning toward socialism and was sitting on huge oil reserves.
“According to Western scholars, as well as Iraqi refugees and a British human rights organization, the 1963 coup was accompanied by a bloodbath. Using lists of suspected Communists and other leftists provided by the C.I.A., the Baathists systematically murdered untold numbers of Iraq’s educated elite — killings in which Saddam Hussein himself is said to have participated. No one knows the exact toll, but accounts agree that the victims included hundreds of doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military and political figures.”
In short, we put Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party in charge of Iraq. Here’s a picture of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Hussein, our new bestie in the Middle East.
In the 1980s the USA, churned up by the cold war against communism, continued to play empires in the Middle East and Central Asia. Ronald Regan’s administration tasked the CIA to do it covertly, since most Americans would have been appalled to know the stuff that we were doing for “freedom”. That’s how we wound up selling arms to Islamic terrorists in Iran to fund theoretically anti-communist terrorists in South America, AKA the Iran-Contra affair. The Iranians decided to use those weapons to try to take over Iraq. So the CIA sent MORE aid and arms (including chemical weapons and banned weapons of mass destruction) to the Ba’athists in Iraq, to keep the guys we had sold weapons to in Iran from getting out of hand.
But then Iraq, assuming that we were totally okay with them attacking other countries since we had funded them and given the weapons for so long, invaded Kuwait. This was a no-no, since Kuwait was an American and anti-communist ally. So we launched the Gulf War to fight off the monster of our own making, Saddam Hussein. We won, in that Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, but lost in terms of long-term damage to the health of our troops who fought there.
Now, George Herbert Walker Bush, the POTUS during the Gulf War, had been the head of the CIA in the 1970s and was well aware that taking out Hussein entirely was a bad idea. You see, the creation of the Ba’athist was such a slaughter that Islamic extremism had surged in the area and only a ruthless, evil monster could suppress the growing movement. Saddam Hussein was that ruthless, evil monster. Thus, Bush the Elder unwisely embargoed the hell out of Iraq but wisely left Hussein in office. People tend to forget that Bush the Elder was a very smart man in terms of Realpolitik.
However, Bush the Elder’s economic policies – which extended Reaganomics – caused enough internal economic havoc in the US that he lost the election. Sadly, many voters (especially rising far right in the GOP) blamed this loss on Bush being a “wimp”, and thought Bush’s wimp status was the result of not “finishing the war” by ousting Hussein. Even though absolute nutter hawks like Dick Cheney knew invading Bagdad was a bad idea in 1991, they turned on Bush and decided that the Enemy was Iraq, and if Iraq could be defeated the GOP would be triumphant again.
From the movement George W. Bush Jr, colloquially known as Dubya, sorta won the Presidential election in 2000, he and his VP Dick Cheney and the rest of his administration were determined to invade Iraq and end Saddam Hussein. Then 9/11 happened. The director of the CIA at the time warned Bush:
According to ex-CIA head George Tenet and Cofer Black, then chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, they called an emergency meeting with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on July 10 of 2001 saying they had evidence that an attack on the U.S. was imminent and that it would be “spectacular.” Beginning in May of 2001, Tenet and Black launched an initiative called “the Blue Sky paper” and pitched it to Bush’s national security team. The CIA called for a joint CIA and military campaign to end the Al Qaeda threat by “getting into the Afghan sanctuary, launching a paramilitary operation, creating a bridge with Uzbekistan.” According to Tenet, the Bush administration said they wanted to back-burner the plan. “And the word back,” claims Tenet, “‘was ‘we’re not quite ready to consider this. We don’t want the clock to start ticking,’” meaning they didn’t want a paper trail.
I guess Dubya was too busy thinking about Iraq to believe there was a credible threat from Al-Qaeda, whom we funded when they were the Mujahadeen fighting the USSR in Afghanistan and were still funding Afghani terrorists to fight the “war on drugs”. The terrorist attack of 9/11 became the perfect excuse to invade Iraq, even though the terrorists were Saudis and there was no connection between the Taliban and Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda hated Saddam Hussein and had no ties to Iraq.
So to war we went, and in spite of Bush declaring “mission accomplished” the whole thing turned into Vietnam Part II for the USA.
Operation Iraqi Freedom turned Iraqi into a hellish quagmire from which we could not escape, and from whence ISIS/ISIL, whom we shall refer to as Daesh since it is insulting to them, arose from the ashes of the failed war to go on a massive killing spree.
“the risk of an Islamic State-level militant expansion was clear back in 2003, after George W. Bush had ordered a U.S. invasion of Iraq on the basis of sketchy evidence. Saddam Hussein had at that point effectively controlled Iraq for more than 30 years. First tasting great power as the country’s intelligence and internal security chief, Hussein invested heavily in making Iraq a police state, with loyal, well-trained agents of his Baath Party government as numerous in the country as conspiracy theories about their activities. He also focused on making his army a formidable force, appointing Sunni Arabs — members of his own sect of Islam and a minority in Iraq — to leadership positions. Hussein’s rule forced those soldiers and officials to become even closer to the despot, because they, like many other people in the centralized quasi-socialist state that was Iraq, were reliant on government salaries, subsidies and favor.
Then an American came to Baghdad and told all those well-trained, well-armed men that their services would no longer be required. Or allowed.
Just over 12 years ago, George W. Bush appointed L. Paul Bremer to run Iraq. Bremer was given massive powers and a mandate to turn Iraq into a GOP dream: a free-market-loving, America-backing Muslim state that would stand as a shining beacon in the Middle East.
Bremer quietly left the country 14 months later, handing over power to an interim government in which 85 percent of Iraqis, at the time, said they lacked confidence. Much of their discontent had to do with Iraq’s security problems, which U.S. officials told The Washington Post were exacerbated by Bremer’s decision to disband the Iraqi army.
One of the men who lost his job was, according to a major recent report by the German magazine Der Spiegel, a key architect of the Islamic State.
Der Spiegel last month published a story based on captured documents that appear to belong to the Islamic State. Those documents discuss a man known to the militants as Haji Bakr. His real name — the name by which he was known when he served in Saddam Hussein’s air force intelligence services — was Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi.”
Haji Bakr had a ready made army of would be terrorists – the Islamic extremists that Hussein’s government had been suppressing and could suppress no longer.
As a result of the failed second Gulf War and the rise of Daesh, millions of Iraqis and Syrians are fleeing those countries for safer lands. The governments that created this mess don’t want them. The citizens of the countries that created the “migrant crisis” don’t want them.
The cost massive mistakes in the Middle East is presented in the form of orphans and desperate migrants, and we don’t want to pay the bill.