Wednesday, October 01, 2014

A Bomb and ISIS Show

Despite the ongoing air attacks of the Empire and its Gulf Vassals, it appears the ISIS Caliphate forces are advancing on Baghdad. Meanwhile, Iraqi helicopter pilots "mistakenly" directed food and ammo drops to ISIS forces, rather than their own. These supposedly inept and inexperienced pilots were trained by the Empire. Draw your own conclusions...
Cartoon by Jeff Danziger (source)
There is a thick fog of disinformation out there concerning this "Islamic State", ISIS, ISIL, Caliphate, or whatever it is. A week ago, we had to suffer through the Emperor personally chairing the UN Security Council meeting on the greatest-ever-threat of Islamic-but-unrelated-to-Islam terrorism, complete with calls for criminalizing volunteers who fight in foreign wars - so long as they fight against the Empire, anyway. Empire's proxies, clients and quislings are obviously exempt.

Yet it should be intuitively obvious to the casual observer that ISIS arose from the fertile soil of Imperial support for a rebellion in Syria against the Assad government, launched back in 2011. For all the talk of "moderates" and "democrats for human rights," it was the jihadists who had the will and skill to use those planeloads of arms the Empire provided via Croatia and Jordan.

There are even some who claim that the Imperial government created ISIS deliberately. If true, it wouldn't be the first time: Zbigniew Brzezinski boasted of setting off the Afghan jihad in order to provoke a Soviet intervention. But I am loath to give the Imperial government any more credit than it actually deserves. Having witnesses its appalling incompetence in a range of affairs on a daily basis, why would anyone believe it is somehow a genius international manipulator?

More likely, this is all perception management again. ISIS arose from the idiotic policy of backing the jihadists in Syria (and in general), but hey - we can spin it as a retroactive justification of the Iraq invasion, and a fresh new terrorist threat that will justify new strip-searches and snooping while making Barack the Blessed look more presidential. A win-win!

Spin, that's how all of this works. On one hand, acts of puppetry like the Kiev coup or the Hong Kong protests are presented as "spontaneous", while on the other hand, genuine disasters, blowbacks and fiascoes stemming from Empire's ignorant belligerence are spun as parts of some brilliant grand strategy - thus furthering the illusion that the Atlantic Empire is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-competent, though in reality it is none of those things.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Excellent article. I doubt the Empire has an exit strategy from this "Long War on Terror". It also does not seem to be affected by who is in the chair, a democrat or republican. Can it be that it became their permanent foreign policy?

CubuCoko said...

I think it is. "Perpetual war for perpetual peace," someone called it - a natural conclusion based on the premise that the U.S. is secure behind its oceans, and that war is something that can be waged elsewhere, at someone else's expense (and at great profit to the military-industrial complex and the imperial political establishment). Now, we're seeing that premise being blown apart almost on a daily basis, but those who stand to profit from it are willfully blind to reality, so...