Escalation Is Escalation Is Escalation: Lesson of Viet-Nam War

By William Boardman, Reader Supported News

17 November 15

 

When will we decide to get off the terrorism merry-go-round?

he attacks in Paris have already created yet another distorting lens through which Western nations view reality darkly. The tragedy on the ground in the city of light is real enough, but the greater tragedy is the greater reality of assuming that the politics of endless war is some sort of answer to the vicious circle it creates and perpetuates. The impulsive rush to war is also a rush to ignore history and context: French colonial control of Syria ended less than 70 years ago, French bombing of Syria is intensifying. 

And then there’s Yemen. 

Yemen is a key to understanding the perverse puzzle of the Middle East morass. Yemen embodies the collective savagery that American policy unintentionally promotes and spreads.

“Yemen” is a word that went unuttered in the Democratic debate November 14, when all the participants shied away from taking a hard look at very hard realities. Do the candidates and the reporters not understand the significance of Yemen? Are the candidates leery of too many voters beginning to understand Yemen? To understand Yemen is to understand that there is no candidate for president taking a loud and principled stand against the US-supported illegal war in Yemen, a war led by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf state allies who commit atrocities, war crimes, and crimes against humanity on a daily basis, horrendous acts of war that make Paris look like a picnic. 

To understand Yemen is to understand the insane contradictions of US policy that is based on irreconcilable assumptions and goals. To understand Yemen is to understand that the US cannot succeed with its current policy in the Middle East. To understand Yemen is to understand that the US and its Western allies no longer have a meaningful stake in a conflict that has no decent purpose. 

Yemen is where the Saudis and their allies are waging a merciless, criminal war against one side of the civil war there, the Houthis. The US helps the Saudis bomb and kill mostly civilians, while enforcing the naval blockade that prevents Yemenis from leaving the kill zone in greater numbers. The Houthis are fighting both Al Qaeda and ISIS, which together control most of the country but a minority of the population. So the Saudis are fighting on the side of ISIS in Yemen at the same time they have all but stopped fighting against ISIS in Syria. All of this makes a perverse sort of sense from the Saudi perspective, since the Saudis have spent decades nurturing the Wahhabi version of fundamentalist jihadism that has now flowered as ISIS, the Islamic State. 

Why is endless US war on non-threatening countries not a campaign issue? 

Given continuing US military escalations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, as well as presumably other, more covert places, the wonder is that there’s still no opposition in the streets or much of anywhere else to the endless wars of the Bush legacy. Almost as wondrous is that the endless warlords like Dick Cheney and his unindicted co-conspirators aren’t cheering on the present president for loyally executing their mindless folly as he extends Bushian madness to the point of achieving the first military quagmire of global scale. At any given moment the US has Special Forces operating in a hundred countries, give or take, having carried out operations in at least 147 countries this year.   

Years later, as the world approaches Orwell’s 1984 totalitarian vision of all-war-all-the-time, mainstream reporters (like those at the Democratic debate) not only fail to illuminate reality, they fail even to probe it. Is it not of interest that the US carries the burden of the Orwellian nightmare almost alone? Of the three superpowers of Orwell’s imagination, Russia and China continue to be reluctant to match the “exceptional” US drive toward military hegemony over the planet. Europe also continues to be an unreliable permanent warrior state and Latin America is pretty much all hopeless when it comes to war. 

This cannot be a state of things that our candidates for president have not noticed. Among Republicans, the tendency is to call for more war anywhere, to double down on failure and make it worse as soon as possible. Among Democrats there is some presentiment of caution, or at least some desire not to make it worse any faster than “necessary.” No one is yet saying that making it worse is NOT necessary. Serious reporters, if there were any, would be asking all candidates to explain why they think this futile, destructive, irrational status quo is OK by any standard of reason and decency. 

Why NOT get out of Afghanistan? 

Why NOT get out of Iraq? 

Why NOT get out of Libya and Syria and a hundred other countries? 

When it comes to the US air war on the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq, most of our allies are already getting out of harm’s way. They are abandoning the fight against ISIS even though ISIS presents a far more imminent threat to most of them than it ever will to the US. Saudi Arabia, the Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and the rest of the international criminal coalition are much more interested in bombing even more defenseless Houthi rebels in Yemen, according to a lengthy front page report in the November 8 New York Times.

If Saudi Arabia and its allies don’t much care about bombing ISIS, why on earth is the US doing it? We know from experience, now long experience, that bombing doesn’t work militarily and is a disaster politically, as it creates more enemies than it kills. We know that the defeat of ISIS will require ground troops in large numbers, and there are those who want those troops to be American. But why should American troops rush to the defense of the Saudis and their allies when they are not rushing to their own defense? Why should the US continue to enable the Saudi coalition’s crimes against humanity? The Saudi-led onslaught in Yemen deliberately targets hospitals now (as the US did in Afghanistan). And the US continues to support the criminal war on Yemen. 

Why isn’t there a single presidential candidate even wondering out loud why the US doggedly pursues a failed policy that costs billions of dollars, a failed policy that keeps thousands of US troops in bases in the region (10,000 in Qatar alone) protecting dictatorships, a failed policy in support of forces that commit crimes against humanity with as much zeal as their enemies? 

Democratic candidates appear to be in almost deliberate denial 

Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders opened the debate with explicit promisesto rid the world of ISIS and its ilk. Martin O’Malley seemed to imply as much. Both Clinton and Sanders assumed American leadership of the continued war on terrorism, though both presumed that leadership would be at the head of a significant coalition. Clinton expressed the inherent contradiction between leading and coalescing when she said: “But it cannot be an American fight.” Clinton elaborated that:   

… we will support those who take the fight to ISIS. That is why we have troops in Iraq that are helping to train and build back up the Iraqi military, why we have special operators in Syria working with the Kurds and Arabs so that we can be supportive. But this cannot be an American fight, although American leadership is essential. 

This sounds like a good description of “leading from behind,” which is what the US said it was doing in Libya, which is now in chaos. “Leading from behind” is an oxymoron. “Leading from behind” is a euphemism for something like: you fight on the ground, we’ll provide some low-risk air support, and if it turns out well, we’ll take the credit, otherwise it’s on you. 

O’Malley somewhat incoherently disagreed with Clinton: “This actually is America's fight. It cannot solely be America’s fight. America is best when we work in collaboration with our allies. America is best when we are actually standing up to evil in this world.” This ignores those allies who have abandoned the fight against ISIS. It also ignores the reality that these same “allies” are committing evil in Yemen. 

Sanders edged closer to an honest assessment of reality than the other two when he acknowledged that “the disastrous invasion of Iraq, something that I strongly opposed, has unraveled the region completely. And led to the rise of Al Qaeda – and to – ISIS.” Sanders argued that, having unleashed the cascading destabilization of the Middle East since 2003, the US has some responsibility to try to mend that. Sanders explained his approach: “the United States cannot do it alone. What we need to do is lead an international coalition which includes – very significantly – the Muslim nations in that region are going to have to fight and defend their way of life.” So far, that is a fantasy possibility. And if the fantasy continues, what should be the consequences?

CBS moderator skillfully helps candidates avoid critical issues

Hearing Sanders make his very challenging formulation, CBS moderator John Dickerson then translated Sanders’ “disastrous invasion” into a “disastrous vote” for war in Iraq. Then Dickerson twisted that into a false attack on Clinton who, in any event, admits her vote and the invasion were both mistakes. In response to Dickerson’s failed food fight sally, Sanders responded: “I don't think any sensible person would disagree that the invasion of Iraq led to the massive level of instability we are seeing right now…. I think that was one of the worst foreign policy blunders in the modern history of the United States.” Clinton gave a fuzzy response, but she did not disagree. 

A little later, Sanders returned to the challenging idea that Dickerson had tried to avoid:

… here’s something that I believe we have to do as we put together an international coalition, and that is we have to understand that the Muslim nations in the region – Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Jordan – all of these nations, they’re going to have to get their hands dirty, their boots on the ground. They are going to have to take on ISIS.

This is a war for the soul of Islam. And those countries who are opposed to [jihadi] Islam, they are going to have to get deeply involved in a way that is not the case today. We should be supportive of that effort. So should the UK, so should France. But those Muslim countries are going to have to lead the effort. They are not doing it now.

Sanders was saying that the emperor has no clothes, and he was right. He was also assuming that there are Muslim nations actually opposed to “radical Islam,” which is a trickier proposition. Saudi Arabia in particular has played a double game for decades, promoting jihadi fundamentalism through their Wahhabi evangelism around the world. The Saudis have troops fighting in Yemen, fighting the Houthis who are fighting ISIS. The Saudis have no troops in Syria fighting ISIS, which the Saudis have armed and supplied over the years, directly and indirectly, as have Qatar, Turkey, the US, and others.

Turkey is almost as much of a problem as Saudi Arabia, because Turkey has long been at war with the Kurds. The Kurds have turned out to be the most effective ground force fighting ISIS, and the US is supporting the Kurds with special forces on the ground and bombing ISIS from the air. The US bombers fly out of Incerlik air base in Turkey, the same base from which Turkish bombers fly to bomb the Kurds. It should surprise no one that the most effective fighters against ISIS are the Kurds, who are also a stateless, persecuted minority in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran.

Since the Saudis are in Yemen to fight the phantom of Iranian power that is not there, imagining a coalition with both of those countries is a stretch. Including Jordan in that coalition is almost irrelevant, since Jordan will be lucky to survive no matter how this all turns out. Clinton, in response to Sanders, focused correctly (but evasively) on the efforts Jordan has already made. She agreed that “Turkey and the Gulf Nations have got to make up their minds,” but she never let the words “Saudi Arabia” cross her lips. Dickerson then turned the discussion to the safer subject of Libya. Saudi Arabia was safely forgotten in the debate, and Yemen remained down the memory hole, outside the “reality” of presidential politics.   

Leadership: Plunge in militarily? Or try a more rational strategy?

The conventional wisdom across much of the US political spectrum (narrow as it is) is some version of “America must lead the attack on ISIS.” This a reflexive visceral response, not carefully thought out or well-considered. Given the results of American “leadership” since 2001, what sense does it make to have more of the same? After 9/11, the Saudis got a free pass out of the country and in 2015 they are still not reliable allies, so what does “American leadership” actually mean in practice? Having been secretary of state for four years, Clinton is still saying things like “We’ve got to reach out to Muslim countries,” as she said in the debate. Have we not been reaching out, even when she was secretary? Has our reaching out been half-hearted or misconceived? Have Muslim countries been unresponsive? Have they played the US for fools? Clarity is absent here, in part because the US has failed to grasp the nettle of Saudi machinations. 

O’Malley and Clinton remain committed to traditional “American leadership” that often leads to regime change and killing on a grand scale, but rarely produces anything more stable and safe for the populations we supposedly help than a brutal police state (i.e., Iran, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, etc.). “We are at war with violent extremism,” Clinton said at the debate, with no apparent awareness that she was saying nothing meaningful, that she was saying little more than “we are at war with war,” or that we will use violent extremism to counter violent extremism. Insofar as American leadership can be helpful in the world, it needs to be reconceived with much less self-involvement and irrational fear (“ISIS is coming to Peoria!”) and a whole lot more attention to the actual realities on the ground.

Sanders begins to hint at this when he talks about Muslim nations getting their hands dirty, although he’s still too vague. In a real sense, Muslim nations already have very dirty hands with their dictatorships and police states and brutality and support for jihadis and endless internecine Muslim versus Muslim ethnic cleansing. All this predates “American leadership,” but American leadership fosters more chaos and dictatorship wherever it goes. In recent years, after supporting its dictator, American leadership has largely ignored Tunisia, and Tunisia, for now, is a healthy, developing democracy.

The implied, unstated logic of the Sanders position is that if Muslim states go on preferring to attack each other (Yemen), then the US should not be part of it. Offering American leadership to those who won’t be led is really stupid and we have a record of 14 years of stupidity and failure to support that assessment.

Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic is not a good iceberg policy

President Obama almost surely doesn’t look at the militarized foreign policy of his administration and see success. If he’s honest, he has to see a growing wasteland in the metastasizing cancer caused by the toxic Bush years. To judge by the president’s military escalations in assorted Bush administration wars, he appears to be responding to the Cheney gang’s demand for more war, more torture, more random killing of innocents, and just plain more cold-blooded toughness. At least we know that’s a sure way to keep jihadi forces growing. 

In a move all too reminiscent of early US moves and evasions in Viet-Nam more than 50 years ago, the president has ordered a team of some 50 special operations forces to be the first sustained US boots-on-the-ground in Syria. The White House went out of its way to avoid calling this escalation an escalation. The cadre of presidential candidates has gone out of its way to offer no hint of objection. The media have mostly gone out of their way to avoid asking any pointed questions. (Democracy Now! is among the honorable exceptions.)

Maybe it was too complicated for mainstream media, since Dickerson didn’t ask about the move during the debate. The new Special Forces deployment is headed to Kurdish areas of Syria, since the Kurds have been the most (and only) effective ground force fighting ISIS. US planes flying from the US airbase Incirlik in Turkey have bombed ISIS in support of the Kurds. Turkish planes from the same base have bombed the same Kurds, even though Turkey is supposedly a US ally against ISIS, even though Turkey also supplies ISIS with support.

So the failure of the American political system sustains an absurdity, which is not an entirely a new condition. But here, the silence in response to the escalation of absurdity is not merely itself another absurdity, it is an especially corrupt failure of those who would be our next commander in chief. This escalation of Special Ops “advisors” won’t make any difference militarily. Politically, on the other hand, this small escalation makes the next escalation that much easier, and the one after that easier still, until US involvement is totally out of hand.

And now the Paris attacks make further escalations harder to resist, if not politically inevitable and politically all but impossible to oppose. But opposition must arise from somewhere if we are ever to break out of this spiral of violence that has led only downward for more than a decade.

Confronting the enormity of American policy is too much to expect from presidential candidates, although it’s what they should do. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, a Marine veteran of Iraq and a Democrat from Hawaii, made the case in a perfectly straightforward way that is as true after Paris as it was before – the roots of American policy are corrupt:

Few Americans know of the absurd contradictions of our foreign policy in Iraq and other places over the past few decades, yet I found that many Iraqis and Syrians knew the history well. The United States, through covert support of the Iraqi Ba’ath in the 1960’s and 1970’s, sponsored Saddam’s rise to power as a way to combat perceived communist influence and populist national movements in the Middle East. Throughout that time, the CIA-supported Ba’ath engaged in “cleansing campaigns” which involved door-to-door death squads offing Washington’s enemies based on questionable lists provided through covert liaisons.

Rep. Gabbard is just as clear-headed about ISIS, which she identifies as “a monster the United States helped to create:

As if the absurdity of the task of a renewed Iraq campaign mandated by the “gods” in Washington weren’t enough, we will now bomb ISIS locations in Syria while increasing the training and equipping of Syrian rebels. If there are military members and veterans out there, still not conscious that “there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor,” then I suggest watching the above video. The video gives insight into the Sisyphean task ahead of us as a nation: a never-ending cycle, old-yet-new, already set up for futility and failure.

Too much truth has not been the traditional path to the White House. But too little truth, as we have seen too often, makes the achievement bitter and pointless. The problem is to put peace on the table in a way that is hard to oppose without seeming to be a monster. And there is an easy approach. Withdraw US support for Yemen, withdraw US support for killing civilians, withdraw US support for a criminal war in which hospitals are routine targets, withdraw US support for the endless crimes against humanity to which the US continues to be an accomplice, withdraw that support and let the nexus of deceit and death begin to unravel. 

---

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

From Pol Pot to ISIS: The Blood Never Dried

By John Pilger, CounterPunch

17 November 15

 

n transmitting President Richard Nixon’s orders for a “massive” bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, “Anything that flies on everything that moves”. As Barack Obama wages his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and Francois Hollande promises a “merciless” attack on that the rubble of Syria, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger’s murderous honesty.

As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery – including the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields – I am not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again. A telling example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who had much in common with today’s Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). They, too, were ruthless medievalists who began as a small sect. They, too, were the product of an American-made apocalypse, this time in Asia.

According to Pol Pot, his movement had consisted of “fewer than 5,000 poorly armed guerrillas uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty and leaders”. Once Nixon’s and Kissinger’s B-52 bombers had gone to work as part of “Operation Menu”, the west’s ultimate demon could not believe his luck. The Americans dropped the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on rural Cambodia during 1969-73. They leveled village after village, returning to bomb the rubble and corpses. The craters left giant necklaces of carnage, still visible from the air. The terror was unimaginable. A former Khmer Rouge official described how the survivors “froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told… That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over.” A Finnish Government Commission of Inquiry estimated that 600,000 Cambodians died in the ensuing civil war and described the bombing as the “first stage in a decade of genocide”. What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot, their beneficiary, completed. Under their bombs, the Khmer Rouge grew to a formidable army of 200,000.

ISIS has a similar past and present. By most scholarly measure, Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the deaths of at least 700,000 people – in a country that had no history of jihadism. The Kurds had done territorial and political deals; Sunni and Shia had class and sectarian differences, but they were at peace; intermarriage was common. Three years before the invasion, I drove the length of Iraq without fear. On the way I met people proud, above all, to be Iraqis, the heirs of a civilization that seemed, for them, a presence.

Bush and Blair blew all this to bits. Iraq is now a nest of jihadism. Al-Qaeda – like Pol Pot’s “jihadists” – seized the opportunity provided by the onslaught of Shock and Awe and the civil war that followed. “Rebel” Syria offered even greater rewards, with CIA and Gulf state ratlines of weapons, logistics and money running through Turkey. The arrival of foreign recruits was inevitable. A former British ambassador, Oliver Miles, wrote, “The [Cameron] government seems to be following the example of Tony Blair, who ignored consistent advice from the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6 that our Middle East policy – and in particular our Middle East wars – had been a principal driver in the recruitment of Muslims in Britain for terrorism here.”

ISIS is the progeny of those in Washington, London and Paris who, in conspiring to destroy Iraq, Syria and Libya, committed an epic crime against humanity. Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, ISIS are the mutations of a western state terror dispensed by a venal imperial elite undeterred by the consequences of actions taken at great remove in distance and culture. Their culpability is unmentionable in “our” societies, making accomplices of those who suppress this critical truth.

It is 23 years since a holocaust enveloped Iraq, immediately after the first Gulf War, when the US and Britain hijacked the United Nations Security Council and imposed punitive “sanctions” on the Iraqi population – ironically, reinforcing the domestic authority of Saddam Hussein. It was like a medieval siege. Almost everything that sustained a modern state was, in the jargon, “blocked” – from chlorine for making the water supply safe to school pencils, parts for X-ray machines, common painkillers and drugs to combat previously unknown cancers carried in the dust from the southern battlefields contaminated with Depleted Uranium. Just before Christmas 1999, the Department of Trade and Industry in London restricted the export of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever. Kim Howells, parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Blair government, explained why. “The children’s vaccines”, he said, “were capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction”. The British Government could get away with such an outrage because media reporting of Iraq – much of it manipulated by the Foreign Office – blamed Saddam Hussein for everything.

Under a bogus “humanitarian” Oil for Food Programme, $100 was allotted for each Iraqi to live on for a year. This figure had to pay for the entire society’s infrastructure and essential services, such as power and water. “Imagine,” the UN Assistant Secretary General, Hans Von Sponeck, told me, “setting that pittance against the lack of clean water, and the fact that the majority of sick people cannot afford treatment, and the sheer trauma of getting from day to day, and you have a glimpse of the nightmare. And make no mistake, this is deliberate. I have not in the past wanted to use the word genocide, but now it is unavoidable.” Disgusted, Von Sponeck resigned as UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq. His predecessor, Denis Halliday, an equally distinguished senior UN official, had also resigned. “I was instructed,” Halliday said, “to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults.”

A study by the United Nations Children’s Fund, Unicef, found that between 1991 and 1998, the height of the blockade, there were 500,000 “excess” deaths of Iraqi infants under the age of five. An American TV reporter put this to Madeleine Albright, US Ambassador to the United Nations, asking her, “Is the price worth it?” Albright replied, “We think the price is worth it.”

In 2007, the senior British official responsible for the sanctions, Carne Ross, known as “Mr. Iraq”, told a parliamentary selection committee, “[The US and UK governments] effectively denied the entire population a means to live.” When I interviewed Carne Ross three years later, he was consumed by regret and contrition. “I feel ashamed,” he said. He is today a rare truth-teller of how governments deceive and how a compliant media plays a critical role in disseminating and maintaining the deception. “We would feed [journalists] factoids of sanitised intelligence,” he said, “or we’d freeze them out.” Last year, a not untypical headline in the Guardian read: “Faced with the horror of Isis we must act.” The “we must act” is a ghost risen, a warning of the suppression of informed memory, facts, lessons learned and regrets or shame. The author of the article was Peter Hain, the former Foreign Office minister responsible for Iraq under Blair. In 1998, when Denis Halliday revealed the extent of the suffering in Iraq for which the Blair Government shared primary responsibility, Hain abused him on the BBC’s Newsnight as an “apologist for Saddam”. In 2003, Hain backed Blair’s invasion of stricken Iraq on the basis of transparent lies. At a subsequent Labour Party conference, he dismissed the invasion as a “fringe issue”.

Here was Hain demanding “air strikes, drones, military equipment and other support” for those “facing genocide” in Iraq and Syria. This will further “the imperative of a political solution”. The day Hain’s article appeared, Denis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck happened to be in London and came to visit me. They were not shocked by the lethal hypocrisy of a politician, but lamented the enduring, almost inexplicable absence of intelligent diplomacy in negotiating a semblance of truce. Across the world, from Northern Ireland to Nepal, those regarding each other as terrorists and heretics have faced each other across a table. Why not now in Iraq and Syria? Instead, there is a vapid, almost sociopathic verboseness from Cameron, Hollande, Obama and their “coalition of the willing” as they prescribe more violence delivered from 30,000 feet on places where the blood of previous adventures never dried. They seem to relish their own violence and stupidityso much they want it to overthrow their one potentially valuable ally, the government in Syria.

This is nothing new, as the following leaked UK-US intelligence file illustrates:

“In order to facilitate the action of liberative [sic] forces… a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals [and] to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria. CIA is prepared, and SIS (MI6) will attempt to mount minor sabotage and coup de main [sic] incidents within Syria, working through contacts with individuals… a necessary degree of fear… frontier and [staged] border clashes [will] provide a pretext for intervention… the CIA and SIS should use… capabilities in both psychological and action fields to augment tension.”

That was written in 1957, although it could have been written yesterday. In the imperial world, nothing essentially changes. In 2013, the former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas revealed that “two years before the Arab spring”, he was told in London that a war on Syria was planned. “I am going to tell you something,” he said in an interview with the French TV channel LPC, “I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria… Britain was organising an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer Minister for Foreign Affairs, if I would like to participate… This operation goes way back. It was prepared, preconceived and planned.”

The only effective opponents of ISIS are accredited demons of the west – Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and now Russia. The obstacle is Turkey, an “ally” and a member of Nato, which has conspired with the CIA, MI6 and the Gulf medievalists to channel support to the Syrian “rebels”, including those now calling themselves ISIS. Supporting Turkey in its long-held ambition for regional dominance by overthrowing the Assad government beckons a major conventional war and the horrific dismemberment of the most ethnically diverse state in the Middle East.

A truce – however difficult to negotiate and achieve – is the only way out of this maze; otherwise, the atrocities in Paris and Beirut will be repeated. Together with a truce, the leading perpetrators and overseers of violence in the Middle East — the Americans and Europeans – must themselves “de-radicalise” and demonstrate a good faith to alienated Muslim communities everywhere, including those at home. There should be an immediate cessation of all shipments of war materials to Israel and recognition of the State of Palestine. The issue of Palestine is the region’s most festering open wound, and the oft-stated justification for the rise of Islamic extremism. Osama bin Laden made that clear. Palestine also offers hope. Give justice to the Palestinians and you begin to change the world around them.

More than 40 years ago, the Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia unleashed a torrent of suffering from which that country has never recovered. The same is true of the Blair-Bush crime in Iraq, and the Nato and “coalition” crimes in Libya and Syria. With impeccable timing, Henry Kissinger’s latest self-serving tome has been released with its satirical title, “World Order”. In one fawning review, Kissinger is described as a “key shaper of a world order that remained stable for a quarter of a century”. Tell that to the people of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the other victims of his “statecraft”. Only when “we” recognise the war criminals in our midst and stop denying ourselves the truth will the blood begin to dry.