In early 1917, during World War I, British general Sir Frederick Stanley Maude led an army of sixty thousand British and Indian soldiers from Basra up the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to Baghdad. His enemy was a Turkish army, some twenty-five-thousand strong, defending a province of what was then a part of the decrepit Ottoman Empire. Maude was hardly a creative campaigner (his troops called him “systematic Joe”), but then his conquest of Mesopotamia wasn’t much of a fight. “The Turkish Army that was recently before us,” he reported to his superiors, “has ceased to exist as a fighting force owing to its casualties, prisoners, demoralization and the loss of a large proportion of its artillery and stores.” Maude led his army into Baghdad on a prancing horse on March 11 and then, in the finest British tradition, issued a proclamation: “We come as liberators, not occupiers,” it said. The Iraqis thought otherwise.

In 1917, Iraq’s tribes began an insurrection that lasted until October 1920. The British responded with a troop surge, then put the war in the hands of its air force, which debated whether to use poison gas on Iraq’s restive villages. Winston Churchill, then his country’s colonial secretary, thought this just the thing. “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas,” he said. “I am strongly in favor of using gas against uncivilized tribes.” The revolt failed (and without the help of poison gas) but the British had learned their lesson, turning administration of the country over to their chosen Arab quisling, Faisal I bin Hussein, and then getting out. Faisal was followed by a succession of relatives, but the country’s real power was Nuri al-Said, a murderer in a three-piece suit. In 1958, a group of Iraqi officers shot the Faisals in the courtyard of their Baghdad Palace, then hunted down Nuri (who’d escaped the capital disguised as a woman) and executed him. Maude’s statue, in Baghdad, was burned.

Thus, Iraq.

* * *

In the late summer of 2002, as American Gen. Tommy Franks’s staff was in the midst of drafting its plan for the invasion of Iraq (what would become known as Operation Iraqi Freedom), Major General Raad al-Hamdani was summoned from his headquarters by Saddam Hussein. Hamdani, an urbane Iraqi Sunni, was the commander of one of Saddam’s elite Republican Guard divisions and among the few military officers the dictator believed he could trust. Hamdani had earned that trust, serving for over twenty-five years in the Iraqi military, fighting in six of his country’s wars, and becoming acknowledged as one of the regime’s most loyal soldiers. He was the Iraqi military’s leading strategist and intellectual. Which is why Saddam enjoyed talking to him. Hamdani was a student of military history, and he would often tell the dictator what he was reading and what it meant.

In the summer of 2002, Hamdani was focused on the World War II battle for the Ludendorff Bridge, which spanned the Rhine River at the town of Remagen. In March 1945, the bridge was the last standing structure across the Rhine, and the Allies were intent on capturing it intact. If the Germans blew the bridge, the Allies knew, it might take weeks to breach Germany’s borders. The Germans knew this too, and so guarded the approaches to the bridge, fighting tenaciously to deny U.S. units positions on the opposite bank. As the Americans approached the bridge, they got a taste of German artillery, ranged in on their positions that now crowded the Rhine’s western bank. At worst, the Germans calculated, they would destroy the bridge at the last minute. The Americans would then be caught on the river’s opposite shore, and would get a taste of more German artillery. In early March, German army engineers had planted explosives on the bridge pillars, stringing the wires leading from the charges into the water and along the bridge’s structure.

Hamdani told this story now to Saddam. And so, he said, the Americans came and the Germans set off their explosives. But the charges failed to detonate and the Americans stormed the bridge. At that moment, Hamdani concluded, Germany was doomed. Saddam heard all of this, then shrugged. So Hamdani explained what he meant. The Americans are coming up those highways from the Kuwait border to Nasiriyah, he said, and they’re going to be aiming for the bridges over the Euphrates River. Or they will come from the southwest. But however they come, he said, they will have to take the bridges over the Euphrates and we will fight for the bridges and push the Americans west, into the desert, where it was harder to maneuver. “When they come,” he said, “we’ve got to blow those bridges.” Saddam waved him off. The Americans aren’t coming, he said. “They don’t like to shed blood, they’ve had their fill of it,” he said. Saddam was confident, certain. Don’t worry, he said, there’s not going to be a war. He was wrong.

Operation Iraqi Freedom started March 19, 2003, with a bombing campaign that targeted Iraq’s political leadership. The bombing was followed at dawn, on March 20, with the ground invasion.

On the right, the I Marine Expeditionary Force aimed for the southern oil fields, with the British 1st Armored Division securing the Faw Peninsula, on the far southeastern part of Iraq, in the IMEF’s rear. On the left, the 3rd Infantry Division (a part of General William Wallace’s powerful V Corps) swung slightly west, then pivoted north. But its key aim point were the bridges across the Euphrates River, just as Hamdani had predicted.

On April 2, Hamdani received word that Saddam wanted to see him in Baghdad. Hamdani was annoyed; his soldiers were fighting and needed him. But he was a good officer and loyal, and Saddam was his commander in chief. When he saw him, Hamdani noticed that Saddam had changed little from the previous summer. But now he had his son, Qusay, at his side, and next to him the head of the army, who was Hamdani’s boss. Saddam asked him to report, so Hamdani summarized the fighting so far. Then he went through his battle plans. The Americans were coming fast from the south, he said, with larger units to the west. Tough fighters. He was going to contest their thrust, then blow the bridges across the river and pummel them with artillery from the other side. The key to his defenses was the al-Qaed Bridge over the Euphrates River, just to the northwest of Nasiriyah. Hamdani was emphatic. We have to blow that bridge, he said.

Saddam heard him out, then shook his head, turning to his son and to the head of the army. The Americans are going to make their major thrust from Jordan and from Turkey in the north, he said, and that’s how they plan to capture Baghdad. You need to redeploy your troops, Saddam said. Pull them out of the line and defend Baghdad from the north. Hamdani looked at the head of the army, but he said nothing. The Americans are right next to me, Hamdani protested, we are fighting them now. Saddam shook his head. Don’t blow those bridges, he said, we’re going to need them. Qusay then spoke. We have plans for the Americans, he said. Three hours later, Hamdani returned to oversee his command, which stretched from Nasiriyah 130 miles to the south.

Later, during his first years in exile in Amman, Jordan, Hamdani would remember this conversation in Baghdad, telling it over and over to the Americans who visited him. He had never liked Qusay, he would contend, because he was bloodthirsty and influenced his father. Not blowing those bridges was his idea, he would say, and it led to the fall of Baghdad. But over the years, and as Hamdani thought about it, he added his own reflections to the story. He thought about the war a lot. There was a reason why Qusay (“God bless his soul,” Hamdani would always add) was at that meeting, and there was a reason why, even in the face of defeat, Saddam still appeared confident. “I think now that Saddam certainly understood the Americans would have their victory,” he said, speaking in Arabic. “He wasn’t a fool. And while he predicted we would win and said this often and convinced many people of it, he knew the truth. The Americans would ride into Baghdad and celebrate their victory. But succeed? They would never succeed. In the end they would do as so many others have done” and as British general Sir Frederick Stanley Maude had done – they would win, and then they would fail. “And he was right,” Hamdani concluded. “You got your victory, and then you failed.”

theamericanconservative.com

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, (AK Press)

Here is a list of the noteworthy, ongoing results of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq beginning in March 2003. (Recall that invasion was denounced by the UN as illegal, based entirely on lies, and—given the U.S.’s hegemonic position in the world, allowing it to act with impunity—the crime’s architects have never punished.)

1) The principal achievement of the war and occupation was the dramatic expansion of the al-Qaeda network that had attacked the U.S. on January 11, 2001. An al-Qaeda franchise was established in Iraq for the first time, playing a key role in the Sunni “insurrection” against the occupiers and their Shiite allies, then expanding across the border into Syria where it split into the al-Nusra affiliate and its even more savage rival, ISIL. Iraq also served and serves as a training ground for jihadis now operating from Iraq to Libya and beyond.

2) The invasion and its consequences encouraged the cause of Kurdistan, an imagined state straddling Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The Kurds are the largest stateless people in the world, victims of British and French colonialists who divided the region between them after World War I. After the Gulf War of 1991, the U.S. established a “no-fly” zone over northern Iraq to discourage Baghdad from deploying troops in the region. Iraqi Kurdistan had already obtained a degree of autonomy before the invasion but the status became official under the occupation and a referendum for independence is likely to pass soon. This would infuriate Iraq and perhaps provoke Turkey’s intervention. As it is, the autonomous region is locked in struggle with Baghdad over territorial claims and control over oil fields.

3) The invasion destroyed the Iraqi state, causing it to fracture into three: Kurdistan, the Sunni zone in the west, and the Shiite-majority areas around Baghdad. The Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein had been extremely repressive and brutal. But it had maintained order; discouraged religion in politics; protected the Christian and other religious minorities; promoted women’s rights; imposed no dress code; enforced a criminal code modeled after the Napoleonic (not the Sharia); licensed rock n’ roll radio stations, allowed the brewing of beer and its sale etc. The Shiite-led regime boosted into power by the occupation has reversed much of this. (A bill to ban the production and sale of beer was just passed by Parliament last week.) But the regime’s power does not extend into much of Anbar Province, ISIL still governs Mosul, and again, Kurdistan has become autonomous.

4) Because Shiites are the majority in Iraq (60%), and dominate Iran next door; and because the leaders of Shiite parties have studied in Iran or lived their in exile and are sympathetic to Iran’s mullah-led regime; and because the U.S. was forced by peaceful mass protests to allow elections and the emergence of Shiites as the leaders of the country, Iran’s power and influence in the region has expanded dramatically.  (Apparently no one in the State Department thought about that.) Since Iran has not attacked another country in centuries — but was savagely attacked by Saddam Hussein in 1981, sparking a long war killing over half a million people — and since Iran’s friendliness to its neighbor, one of the few Arab countries in which its co-coreligionists hold power, is entirely natural, one can ask why anyone might be alarmed by this. But it does alarm some, the leaders of Saudi Arabia, that crucial U.S. Arab ally governed by Wahhabi Sunnis, most of all.

5) The invasion produced a regional power struggle between Sunni Islamists on the one hand, and their Shiite (and other) enemies on the other. This is often portrayed as a contest between Saudi Arabia (whose government-backed clerics condemn Shiites as heretics, and who fear the prospects for rebellion in Saudi Arabia’s own oppressed Shiite minority) and Iran, depicted as the protector of Shiites in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen etc. (The so-called “Shiite Crescent” extending from Iran to Hizbollah-controlled areas of Lebanon in fact embraces states and movements that have little in common with the Islamic Republic of Iran. But they are all targeted by the medieval regime in Riyadh which tars them all with the Iranian brush.) The Saudis were keen advocates for a U.S. strike on Iran (on the false pretext of a nuclear threat); are major supporters of al-Nusra in Syria and have funded ISIL as well, preferring such Islamist forces to the secular if Alawite-led Syrian regime; and are bombing the hell out of Yemen with active U.S. and British assistance under the false pretext that the Shiite Houthi “rebels” are agents for an expanding Iran. These things would not be happening, had the U.S. not ripped the lid off Pandora’s box in Iraq in March 2003.

6/ The invasion has produced friction between the U.S. and its important NATO ally Turkey (which has the second largest military in the alliance). Turkish war planes are bombing Kurdish YPG (People’s Protection Units) militia in Syria who constitute the U.S.’s most reliable allies, producing U.S. protests (which the Turks ignore, arguing straight-faced that the YPG are just as terrorist as ISIL). The Turks warned before the invasion of Iraq that it would likely produce regional instability. But Ankara would have allowed the U.S. to attack from Turkish soil if Turkish forces as part of the “coalition of the willing” could be stationed around Mosul, once part of Turkey—the idea being to contain Kurdish nationalism.

Fortunately the parliament rejected the deal. But the predicted instability has occurred. The Arab Spring of 2011 in Syria was not directly connected to the Iraq invasion, but gave the U.S. the opportunity to pontificate that “Assad has lost legitimacy,” demand his immediate resignation, and bankroll the armed opposition including the Kurds. The fact that U.S. efforts to find and recruit Syrian Arab forces as allies—who are not in bed with al-Nusra—to topple Assad have failed so dismally binds the Pentagon ever closer to forces that Turkey wants to wipe out. (The conflict and contradiction are embarrassing to Washington. Oh, by the way, did you notice that the Turkish foreign minister just announced that Turkey would invade Iraq if it “felt threatened”?)

Having declared in 2011 that Bashar al-Assad must go, the U.S. was faced in 2014 with the horrible embarrassment of ISIL (that toxic fruit of its Iraq invasion) winning lightening victories from Raqqa to Fallujah, obliterating the Sykes-Picot line dividing Syria and Iraq. The now-Syria based terrorists were approaching Baghdad. So now the U.S. having withdrawn all troops in Iraq was back in action, bombing to prevent such a disaster. And it started bombing ISIL positions in Syria (although with far less efficacy than the later Russian efforts) in league with a list of largely reluctant allies dragooned into formal membership in what Washington likes to call a “coalition” to make its unilateral program for the region sound like the will of what they like to call “the international community” regardless of how many key nations that imagined “community” includes.

The U.S. command that Assad step down was made in the summer of 2011. Turkey’s President Erdogan, hitherto a friend and even mentor of the Syrian leader, opportunistically took up the U.S. demand and demanded his resignation. And Ankara itself began to interfere big-time in the neighboring country it once dominated, targeting Kurds more than anyone else. Since the U.S. relies on these allies, how could there not be a sharp conflict here?

7/ The invasion of Iraq and aftermath resulted in four million Iraqi refugees fleeing the country as of 2007. Hundreds of thousands have poured into Europe, alongside people displaced by U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Libya, and by the turmoil in Syria exacerbated by U.S. actions, producing a massive continent-wide crisis. Many Europeans aptly blame the deluge on the U.S., pointing to the U.S.’s paltry record of admitting refugees from the Middle East and complaining of strained national resources to handle the humanitarian catastrophe. (Another embarrassment.)

* * *

This is all what Buddhists call “karmic retribution” for past acts. Or what the Hebrew prophet Hosea referred to when he said “Those who sow the wind reap the whirlwind.” Or what the CIA meant when it invented the term “blowback.” It’s all heading towards something, unless decent people stop it.

But when I watch people like Michael Moore line up behind the foremost advocate of war in U.S. politics, joining (consciously, philosophical) amoral thugs hell-bent on maintaining and expanding the empire when it’s in a stage of precipitous decline, I am not optimistic. Not only will she win, but she will rival Dick Cheney as a cold-blooded latter-day Cold Warrior, cynically exploiting fear and stupidity to try to bring Russia to its knees.

Hillary doesn’t recognize any of these seven points, which to recapitulate are:

– US actions have greatly strengthened al-Qaeda

– US actions have encouraged Kurdish nationalism (with unpredictable ramifications)

– The US through its vicious illegal actions has destroyed the modern Iraqi state

– US actions have solidified ties between Iran and Iraq’s majority Shiite community, strengthening a country still targeted for “regime change”

– The invasion of Iraq and the regime change there exacerbated the historical Sunni-Shiite divide, and encouraged Saudi Arabia as the ultra-Islamist protector of the shrines to redouble its efforts to support extremist Sunnis everywhere in the region

– The results of the invasion place Turkey and the U.S. at loggerheads over the question of Kurdish nationalist movements in both Iraq and Syria

– US interventions in the Middle East and North Africa since 2001 have produced a massive refugee crisis, inflicted mainly on Europe

She does not acknowledge that George W. Bush’s invasion (that she so passionately endorsed, fully exposing her Valkyrie soul, was criminaland not somebody’s well-meaning “mistake”). She doesn’t have any analysis of the Kurdish question. (She is not—as sometimes alleged by supporters—a “policy wonk” but a lazy intellect who doesn’t know jack-shit about the real world.)

She has never expressed regret for the horrific destruction of Iraq, nor given any attention to the plight of its women, who were (as she surely knows) much better off under Saddam Hussein. (To acknowledge that would be to suggest that sometimes U.S. imperialism favors misogynist Islamists over relatively progressive secularists, for its own pragmatic empire-building purposes. She can’t mention that publicly.)

She deals with the rise of Iran—made inevitable by the U.S. invasion of Iraq—by doubling down on her crude clueless Iran rhetoric, which rests on the assumption—repeatedly debunked by U.S. intelligence agencies—that Iran might pose a nuclear weapons threat. She doesn’t understand the history of the Sunni-Shiite divide; I believe she rolls her eyes in irritation that these people have these differences so hard to understand, impeding the Exceptional Nation’s ability to straighten everything out by bombing, and conquering, and making people die. She doesn’t understand anything about the history of the Kurds and their fate in the region.

She feels no guilt at all about her orchestration of the ruin of Libya. She sees no reason to link her own actions to the flooding of Europe with refugees fleeing terror. But she will probably be the next president, with fellow shieldmaidens Michele Flournoy (as “secretary of defense”) and Victoria Nuland or Samantha Power (as secretary of state).

Never acknowledging what happened yesterday, never able to absorb historical lessons, determined to maintain and expend its global hegemony (just as that becomes absolutely impossible to do, because other nations rise too, and great nations like Spain and Britain actually get humbled over time), the U.S. under Clinton will likely head methodically towards  a showdown with Russia. She wants so badly, to show she can do it. She’ll do it for women, everywhere, to show how strong a woman can be.

And then there will be a sudden strange change in your environment. As you wonder what’s going on you’ll be painlessly vaporized, on account of Hillary’s passion to topple Assad, or forcibly reintegrate the Donbass into Ukraine.

The brilliance of the 2003 invasion will be clarified as never before in that bright blast, as Hillary—a very strong woman—cackles in the background from her bunker about how she came, saw, and a million died.

The long-awaited official Chilcot report into Britain’s involvement in the Iraq War – the UK’s most controversial military engagement since the end of the Second World War – was finally published on July 6.

The report is named after Privy Councillor Sir John Chilcot, who has chaired the investigation, which has taken place for the last seven years into the United Kingdom’s decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003. It covers political decisions made between 2001 and 2009 relating to the run-up to the UK’s intervention, the military action itself, and the aftermath of the conflict.

The paper of 2,6 million words in total (four times the length of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace) says, 2003 Iraq intervention was «unnecessary», the war was not the «last resort» and Saddam Hussein, the dictator ruling Iraq at the time, was «no imminent threat». Great Britain chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair presented the case for war in 2003 with «a certainty which was not justified» based on «flawed» intelligence about the country’s supposed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The decision for the UK to take charge of four provinces in south east Iraq was taken «without a formal ministerial decision» and without ensuring that the UK had the capability it needed. Planning for post-war Iraq was «wholly inadequate». The report says the legality of the war can only be decided by an international court. Indeed, the conflict in Iraq was followed by a period of diplomacy in which the UK was unable to secure United Nations authorization for military action. This sequence of events gave rise to debates about whether the war was even legal.

Scottish National Party (SNP)’s Alex Salmond says, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair should be taken to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for involving the country in the 2003 invasion of Iraq if an inquiry reveals that Blair made a secret commitment to Washington to support the war.

A number of lawmakers want to use the impeachment procedure to hold Blair to account for his role in the invasion of the Arab country.

By the time British combat forces left in 2009, 179 British troops, almost 4,500 American personnel and more than 100,000 Iraqis had been killed. The intervention put an end to the reign of dictator Saddam Hussein but failed to bring stability to the region once he was removed. Today, Iraq is one of the most troubled nations on Earth.

According to Amnesty International’s report, the international terrorist organization Islamic State (IS) is the direct result of the US-led invasion of Iraq.

The origin of IS can be traced directly to the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The report states that «following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent fall of President Saddam Hussein, a number of insurgent armed groups composed largely of Sunni men emerged in opposition to the occupying forces and the Shi’a-dominated Iraqi government».

Tony Blair himself has said he was sorry for the «mistakes».

It’s worth to remember that the mistake drove the wedge into the West’s unity. NATO was not unanimous. Those days Russia was on the same side of the fence with France and Germany – the states strongly opposed to the Iraq war. «Punish France, ignore Germany, forgive Russia». That was the pithy summary of American policy towards Europe attributed to then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in the spring of 2003, during the peak of the transatlantic bust-up over Iraq.

The inquiry is not a court of law and nobody is on trial. The key point of the report is to identify «lessons that can be learned», so governments can act accordingly in future. When speaking to the BBC on the eve of its release, Chilcot told that individuals and institutions would be criticized.

Mr Chilcot is right about the need to learn the lessons. Indeed, few recall that David Cameron led Britain into one war in Libya that overthrew Gaddafi, but was disastrous for most Libyans. Without this conflict, the flows of refugees from Libya would not be rushing to Europe today. On August 29, 2013 Cameron lost the vote which would have opened the door to British military intervention in Syria. It would have had an effect only if it had turned into a Libyan-type air campaign to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad. There is every reason to believe that jihadist movements would have filled the vacuum and Syria would have descended even deeper into chaos. Still a smaller scale British intervention there is taking place right now.  

The operation is proceeding despite the fact that some time ago the Prime Minister said he ruled out having boots on the ground in Syria.

And it’s not Great Britain only; the lessons should be learned by all, especially the US, who was in the driving seat leading the 2003 invasion.

The United States fought in Iraq for nine years. With the exception of the war in Afghanistan, it was America’s longest combat engagement ever: longer than the American Civil War, the two World Wars, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Any country that enters into a war emerges from it changed but not the United States. 

US Democratic presidential front-runner, Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State, takes no responsibility for Islamic State’s rapid gains in Libya in the wake of the American-led «coup-by-air» to remove Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. President Obama, who caved in to Hillary’s pressure to oust Gaddafi in 2011, is now thinking about going back into the country, as he has into Iraq (with the war against the Islamic State in Syria to boot), to clean up the previously US-made mess. 

It happens against the background of the continuing messes in Afghanistan and Iraq – the states where the US and its NATO allies got bogged down in «nation-building».

America is presently waging wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia and the US military is itching to expand the activities in Libya.

The lesson of Iraq must be remembered when it comes to Syria. The 2003 invasion of Iraq influences the position of Russia on the conflict. For Moscow the issue is not sympathy for Syrian President Assad, economic interest or the access to the Tartus naval base. Russia is certain that if continued crushing of secular governments in the Middle East is allowed just because the US and its allies such as the UK support «democracy», it will lead to such destabilization that will overwhelm all, including Russia. It’s therefore necessary for Moscow to resist, especially as the West itself experiences increasing doubts. Besides, Russia is in Syria upon the invitation of the Syrian government, while the US-led coalition, including the UK, is not. Without the authorization of the United Nations, coalition’s military involvement in the Syrian conflict is illegal just like the 2003 Iraq invasion was. The lessons of the 2003 invasion tell us the overthrow of the Syrian government may plunge the country into the same chaos as Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. An international effort coordinated with the Syrian government and based on the authorization of the UN is the way to manage the conflict. Acting in accordance with the international law, not in violation of it, would show that the US and the UK – the countries responsible for the 2003 intervention – are serious about learning at least some of the lessons in question – something the Chilcot report is calling for.

President Obama, who withdrew the bulk of U.S. troops from Iraq, leaving a few U.S. military trainers and even more civilian security contractors, stated during a June 12 meeting with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott that Iraq will need «more help» from the United States. Observers of the current jihadist-led Sunni offensive in Iraq reason that Obama will deploy armed drones to deal with the insurgency, just as he has done in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Mali, and Syria…

Obama also said, «We have a stake in making sure that these jihadists are not getting a permanent foothold in either Iraq or Syria.» Yet, it was Obama’s provision of military assistance to the Syrian rebels trying to topple President Bashar al Assad from power in Damascus that allowed victories of insurgent forces of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant («al Sham») (ISIL or «ISIS») over their erstwhile allies, the Al Nusra Front and its Al Qaeda cadres, to capture Western-supplied weapons from Al Nusra and establish bases of operation inside Syria from which to launch their assault on Iraqi cities. 

The rise of a Sunni Islamic caliphate between Syria and Iran is the product of the covert «evil alliance» between Israeli right-wing nationalists of Likud and the settlers’ parties and the jihadist-supporting Saudis and Qataris. The covert deals struck between Mossad and the Saudi Mukhabarat General Intelligence, all with a «wink and a nod» from John O. Brennan, the Saudiphile director of the Central Intelligence Agency are no longer clouded in secrecy. It has always been the desire of the regimes in Riyadh, Doha, and Jerusalem to bring about the fall of the Shi’a-led government of Iraq, the pro-Iranian Alawite-led government of Syria, and ultimately the government of Iran.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s «Pottery Barn» rule, which warned the previous administration that if it invaded and occupied Iraq, it would own the country, has come true. However, thanks to the incompetent National Security Adviser products of misguided U.S. racial and gender «affirmative action» programs in the Bush and Obama administrations – namely Drs. Condoleezza Rice and Susan Rice, respectively — the U.S. not only «owns» Iraq, but also Libya, Yemen, and the mess that now ensues in Syria and may plague Lebanon if the name «Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant» is any indication of the ultimate territorial ambitions of the rising caliphate. The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and an Islamist government in Tunisia was also a result of the neocon-Israeli plan, hatched with the House of Saud, to destabilize every Arab country that had been governed by governments with pan-Arab Socialist or Nasserite roots.

There have been enough meetings between Israeli Mossad chief Tamir Pardo and Princes Muqrin and Bandar, the two former heads of Saudi intelligence, to prove that when it comes to destabilization of Arab countries, Israel has no better friends in the Middle East than the House of Saud. The new head of Saudi intelligence, General Youssef al Idrissi, reportedly maintains the close contacts of his predecessors with Mossad and the current offensive by Sunni jihadists against the pro-Iranian Shi’a-led government in Baghdad is made to order for the palates of the Saudis and Israelis, both of whom are opposed to the Obama administration’s emerging détente with Iran.

Al Qaeda and the various «Al Qaeda» branches in Syria, Yemen, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa that Riyadh finances and controls have never threatened Israel as much as they have the United States, Western European countries, and secular Arab governments. For example, it was Israeli operatives in and around the World Trade Center and Muslim sympathizers of the Taliban in New York and New Jersey, who were tipped off in advance about the September 11, 2001 attack by reputed Al Qaeda terrorists and consequently arranged to be absent from the area that fateful morning. 

ISIL, which is said to be leading the jihadist forces in Iraq, is said to be so extreme that Al Qaeda broke relations with it. Of course, the late British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook wrote, before his untimely death, that «Al Qaeda» was merely a CIA database of jihadist mercenaries and Arab weapons dealers for hire. In the Middle East, one should beware of mirages and it suits the powers in Jerusalem and Riyadh to convince the world that they would never be the covert manipulators of ISIL. This Judeo-Wahhabist state support for terrorism is all carried out with the blessing of the CIA’s Brennan, whose career began and remains mired in the darkest sewers of the CIA’s Clandestine Service.

Of course, there would be a vastly different situation in the Middle East had the United States ignored the machinations of the neocons and their Israeli puppet masters and permitted not only Saddam Hussein and his Ba’ath Socialist Party to stay in power in Iraq but also supported Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi and Syria’s Assad against Salafist and Al Qaeda rebels. 

The offensive against Baghdad and the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki bears a striking resemblance to the Al Qaeda and Salafist campaign against Qaddafi in Libya and the subsequent uprising against Assad in Syria. The United States and the Saudis and Qataris provided weapons to Al Qaeda and Salafist rebels in eastern Libya, all with the blessing of the Israelis and their propaganda mouthpieces like Bernard-Henri Levy, the French Zionist interlocutor between Binyamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem and the Al Qaeda forces in Benghazi. Western weapons and those captured from Qaddafi’s arsenals were then shipped to Syrian jihadists who took up arms against Assad. The Syrian jihadists immediately linked up with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia (AQIM) and ISIL, two Saudi creations. The combined army of ISIL, Al Qaeda/Al Nusra Front defectors, and former Iraqi officers in Saddam’s army and Republican Guard, using bases inside Syria, launched their invasion of Iraq. 

ISIL forces are storming into one Iraqi town after another in American-supplied desert- camouflaged Humvees, all captured from Iraqi military bases, with the black and white jihadist flag waving above them. The jihadists have also captured American-supplied helicopters from Mosul airport and another airbase in east Samarra. 

Obviously, the Saudis and Israelis are not keen on the jihadists tangling with the Kurds who not only deployed their peshmerga military forces to ensure the jihadists did not take control of any Kurdistan territory in northern Iraq but also captured critical oil installations in Kirkuk.

America broke Iraq. It broke Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Egypt. The Middle East would be a much safer and saner region had the United States and its insidious neocons allowed Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, and Bashar al-Assad to deal with the Saudi and Israeli instigators of terrorism and violence. Rather than Islamic emirates and caliphates popping up in eastern Libya, Syria, and Iraq, the Middle East should still have Baath Party governments in Iraq, Syria, and the former People’s Democratic Republic of [South] Yemen, and the Socialist Jamahiriyah should still remain supreme in Libya. Yes, and we should all miss Saddam Hussein…