Tomgram: Patrick Cockburn, How to Ensure a Thriving Caliphate | TomDispatch - 0 views
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Why Washington’s War on Terror Failed The Underrated Saudi Connection By Patrick Cockburn [This essay is excerpted from the first chapter of Patrick Cockburn’s new book, The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising, with special thanks to his publisher, OR Books. The first section is a new introduction written for TomDispatch.] There are extraordinary elements in the present U.S. policy in Iraq and Syria that are attracting surprisingly little attention. In Iraq, the U.S. is carrying out air strikes and sending in advisers and trainers to help beat back the advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (better known as ISIS) on the Kurdish capital, Erbil. The U.S. would presumably do the same if ISIS surrounds or attacks Baghdad. But in Syria, Washington’s policy is the exact opposite: there the main opponent of ISIS is the Syrian government and the Syrian Kurds in their northern enclaves. Both are under attack from ISIS, which has taken about a third of the country, including most of its oil and gas production facilities.
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But U.S., Western European, Saudi, and Arab Gulf policy is to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, which happens to be the policy of ISIS and other jihadis in Syria. If Assad goes, then ISIS will be the beneficiary, since it is either defeating or absorbing the rest of the Syrian armed opposition. There is a pretense in Washington and elsewhere that there exists a “moderate” Syrian opposition being helped by the U.S., Qatar, Turkey, and the Saudis. It is, however, weak and getting more so by the day. Soon the new caliphate may stretch from the Iranian border to the Mediterranean and the only force that can possibly stop this from happening is the Syrian army. The reality of U.S. policy is to support the government of Iraq, but not Syria, against ISIS. But one reason that group has been able to grow so strong in Iraq is that it can draw on its resources and fighters in Syria. Not everything that went wrong in Iraq was the fault of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, as has now become the political and media consensus in the West. Iraqi politicians have been telling me for the last two years that foreign backing for the Sunni revolt in Syria would inevitably destabilize their country as well. This has now happened.
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By continuing these contradictory policies in two countries, the U.S. has ensured that ISIS can reinforce its fighters in Iraq from Syria and vice versa. So far, Washington has been successful in escaping blame for the rise of ISIS by putting all the blame on the Iraqi government. In fact, it has created a situation in which ISIS can survive and may well flourish.
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Patrick Cockburn is a columnist with a long-time focus on the Mideast. In my opinion, his articles tend mightily to omit facts that might cause him to be viewed by western foreign policy establishments as "radical" or a "conspiracy theorist." So in this piece, we see Cockburn omitting crucial facts to allow him to employ a "never blame on conspiracy that which can be attributed to incompetence" view of U.S. policy in the Mideast. So this is a "doddering fools" over-simplistic view of U.S. policy on Iraq and Syria. An example: He portrays Al-Qaeda as "an idea rather than an organization and this has long been the case." That blithely shutters the eyes to the fact that "Al-Qaeda" translates literally as "the register" and in fact began as a Franco-U.S. registry of Islamic fighters willing to be deployed to Afghanistan to make war against its Soviet occupiers. Al-Qaeda in fact is a U.S. creation and the U.S. has been working hand-in-hand with various Al-Qaeda groups ever since. But this Cockburn report is still damning in that he does identify some of the major defects in U.S. official propaganda.