The so-called Islamic State organization was primarily a
bogeyman encouraged by the western powers. I’ve been saying this for the
last four years.
I asserted, as a former
soldier and war correspondent, that IS would collapse like a wet paper bag if
proper western ground forces attacked their strongholds in Syria and
Iraq. This week, the western powers and their local satraps finally took
action and stormed the last IS stronghold at Raqqa. To no surprise, IS
put up almost no resistance and ran for its miserable life.
The much-dreaded IS was never
more than a bunch of young hooligans and religious fanatics who were as
militarily effective as the medieval Children’s Crusade.
In the west, IS was blown up
by media and governments into a giant monster that was coming to cut the
throats of honest folk in the suburbs.
IS
did stage some very bloody and grisly attacks – that’s what put it on the
map. But none of them posed any mortal threat or really endangered
our national security. In fact, the primary target of IS attacks
has been Shia Muslims in the Mideast. American Raj: America ...
Many of the IS attacks in North America and Europe were done by
mentally deranged individuals or were initiated by under-cover government
provocateurs, such as the 1993 bombing of New York’s World Trade Center.
IS was notorious for falsely taking credit for attacks it did not commit.
Other ‘lone wolf’ attacks
were made by Mideasterners driven to revenge after watching the destruction by
the US and its allies of substantial parts of their region. Think Iraq,
Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, parts of Pakistan, and the murderous
brutality of Egypt’s-US backed regime.
IS appears to have been
shaped by western intelligence in an effort to duplicate its success with the
Afghan mujahidin in the mid 1980’s that helped defeat the Soviet Union.
CIA, Pakistani and Saudi intelligence, and Britain’s MI-6 recruited some
100,000 volunteers from across the Muslim world to wage jihad in
Afghanistan. I observed this brilliant success first hand from the ranks
of the mujahidin.
The western powers, led by
the US, sought to emulate this success in Syria by unleashing armies of
mercenaries, disaffected, unemployed youth, and religious primitives against
the independent-minded regime of President Bashar Assad. The plan nearly
worked – at least until Russia, Iran, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement
intervened and reversed the tide of battle.
The canard promoted in the
west that IS was a dire military threat was always a big joke. I said so
on one TV program and was promptly banned from the station. I’m also the
miscreant who insisted that Iraq never had weapons of mass destruction and was
consequently blacklisted by a major cable TV news network.
The
CIA cobbled together two small armies, one of Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, and
the other of Iraqi mercenaries. Both were directed, armed, equipped and
financed by Washington. Shades of the British Empire’s native troops
under white officers. The Kurds and Iraqi Arabs are now in a major
confrontation over the Kirkuk oil-rich region. War at the Top of the ...
Raqqa and Mosul were so close to western forces that they were
merely a taxi ride away. But it took three years and much token bombing
of the desert before a decisive move was made against IS. Once the US-led
campaign against Damascus failed, the crazies of IS were no longer of any use
so they were marked for death.
Like Fallujah in Iraq and
Mosul, Raqqa was flattened by US air power, a stark message to those who would
defy the American Raj. The ruins of Raqqa, the IS capital, were occupied by
US-led forces. This historic déjà vu recalled the dramatic defeat by
British Imperial forces at Omdurman in September 1898 of Sudan’s Khalifa and
his Islamic dervish army.
The remnants of IS had melted
into the Euphrates Valley and the desert. They will now return to being
an irksome guerilla group with very little combat power. Anti-western IS
supporters still cluster in Europe’s urban ghettos and will cause occasional
mayhem. A few high-profile attacks on civilians may be expected to show
that IS is still alive. But none of this is likely to influence the
course of events. IS’s rival, al-Qaida, is likely to resurface and lead
attacks to drive the west out of the Mideast.
The Islamic State bogeyman
was very useful for the western powers. It justified deeper military
involvement in the Mideast, higher arms budgets, scared people into voting for
rightwing parties, and gave police more powers. By contrast, these
faux Muslims brought misery, fear and shame on the Islamic world. We are very
well rid of them. And it’s about time.
Eric Margolis [send him mail]
is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new
book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the
Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website.
Copyright © 2017 Eric Margolis
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