The carnage in Paris last week, combined with mass civilian deaths from a bomb in Beirut and the loss of 224 innocent lives from the bombing of a Russian civilian airliner are adding up to an extension of the horny hand of ISIS, the so-called “Islamic State,” that has the whole world wondering where they’ll strike next and how horribly.
The waves of fear that this operation is now radiating to Europe and the U.S. are beginning to resemble the jitters of the post-9/11 world and the extraordinary extra-constitutional laws that were passed in a U.S. in that frame of mind.
Now, the talk domestically is about the justification for severe prejudice and discrimination against Syrian refugees and Islamic peoples, generally, in the name of security. It is a very sad state of affairs.
What is this madness that has suddenly swept across oceans and continents? It is a terrible reality to confront that this is the work of the American military industrial complex, pushing the world toward the perpetual war that was launched in the aftermath of 9/11 but stalled when President Obama was elected in 2008 and again in 2012.
The president has waged a relentless and courageous inside war against these merchants of death, but they have caused the most recent escalation by this evil force in our world, the emergence of ISIS in the summer of 2014.
Now, Russian President Putin has called for cooperation with the U.S., the French and other nations to wipe out ISIS, and in case you haven’t noticed, the U.S. response to this has been tepid, at best. For good reason: ISIS is a child of the American military industrial complex, which is where blame needs to be assigned for the fear, chaos and death that is now sweeping the globe.
This operation began in its most recent iteration with the unprovoked invasion of Iraq in 2003 that was intended to render that nation as the “51st American state,” riddled with U.S. military bases and infrastructure. The neo-cons behind this genuinely thought that when President Bush declared “mission accomplished” a couple months after the invasion that it was.
But never mind the years of subsequent murder, misery and horror that was inflicted on an innocent Iraqi population from this, these neo-cons running the Bush administration remained confident that even as the process degenerated into an untenable situation for America, militarily, that they could reap the benefits of long-term destruction of that region for their doctrines and policies of perpetual war.
Every step of the way, even as President Obama put the brakes on this ugly scenario, Republican leaders fueled the flames of war and aggression in the U.S, led by Senator John McCain, their presidential nominee in 2008, Senator Lindsey Graham and the “Star Wars Bar” array of crazed GOP presidential candidates now stumbling all over each other for attention.
While it is generally well known that al Qaeda’s origins lay with the U.S. arming of the Afghani Mujahadeen against the Soviets in the early 1980s, more recently the arming by the CIA of the so-called Free Syrian Army has set up a conveyor belt for weapons to run quickly into the hands of ISIS, a group that grew gradually, at first, out of the ungovernable chaos in Iraq and found its way into the good graces of the CIA when they first postured themselves in opposition to Syrian President Assad.
Lo and behold, now you have figures such as former Defense Secretary Leon Paneta in the U.S. declaring that the war with ISIS could drag on for 30 years, just what the military-industrial complex wants, and in which context the effective abrogation of any residues of participatory democracy will surely occur.
Fear is the biggest weapon of this ISIS, which appears equipped with tools for a level of terrorist chaos in Western cities like we’ve never seen before.
The only way this can be stopped at this point is for President Obama to ally with President Putin to bring it all to a decisive and crushing end. Both leaders have their reasons for wanting to accomplish this for their respective nations’ security.
