Isis cannot be beaten as long as there is civil war in Syria
BY PATRICK COCKBURN
CounterPunch • SEPTEMBER 11, 2014
A letter printed at the bottom of this article was emailed by a friend soon after her neighbourhood in Mosul was hit by Iraqi airforce bombers. This was some hours before President Barack Obama explained his plan to weaken and ultimately destroy Isis, which calls itself Islamic State, by a series of measures including air attacks. The letter illustrates graphically one of the most important reasons why American air power may be less effective than many imagine.
I started out today writing a short essay on my views about this new war, then came across this, with which I agree. It makes my main point: You would think after 11 years of war in the Islamic world, we would learn something about the culture and how to work with it. Apparently not. I think one really has to ask now: Cui bono? Who benefits?
Never bet on another man’s game,” my father loved to say. It’s a lesson Barack Obama never learned, especially in his military strikes against Islamic State.
Islamic State, or ISIL, has only one way to keep the support of Iraq’s Sunni tribesmen and former Baathist supporters of Saddam Hussein. The blood-thirsty ‘fools of God” need to be seen defending their people against a Western invasion, which is precisely what Obama gives them.
He plays the role they purposely provoked with their brutal beheadings, summary executions, and sickening use of mass rape to keep their fighters happy. He becomes the foreign, Christian crusader defiling a Muslim land, and he does it in company with Iranian as well as Iraqi Shiites, whom Islamic State despises as heretics, and with the blessing of Sunni Arab leaders it correctly sees as outrageously corrupt.
In other words, the more jihadis Obama kills, the more Sunnis that Obama recruits to their ranks. Not a winning strategy.
Missing from the chorus of outrage, however, has been any acknowledgement of the integral role of covert US and British regional military intelligence strategy in empowering and even directly sponsoring the very same virulent Islamist militants in Iraq, Syria and beyond, that went on to break away from al-Qaeda and form ‘ISIS’, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or now simply, the Islamic State (IS).
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In other words, US forces will pursue public legitimacy through conventional social welfare while simultaneously delegitimising local enemies by escalating intra-insurgent violence, knowing full-well that doing so will in turn escalate the number of innocent civilians “caught in the crossfire.” The idea is that violence covertly calibrated by US special operations will not only weaken enemies through in-fighting but turn the population against them.
I've used BigMarker a few times now and it seems really reliable. Great that you can use it to actually sell seats for your webinars and they just take a very small percentage.
Both beheading videos are questionable. Both were probably made by the same people following the same script and using the same format. I find it strange that the second video was distributed to subscribers of SITE before ISIS itself had the video made public. A SITE analyst had discovered the video on a filesharing site.
In both videos you don't see the actual beheadings which is uncommon for many other jihadi beheading video's. The two video's have become the trigger for the Obama speech in which he announced a new war. To me it is not clear at all why these two videos became ‘ trigger events' as there are execution video's almost on a weekly basis which are much more gruesome. Maybe it was because of the fact that the victims were allegedly well known US and Israel journalists. Phi Beta Iota posted the item by two US students showing how easy it is to produce a beheading video that looks quite genuine.
This is why the U.S. has second rate internet. Third rate compared to countries like Korea. This is a classic monopolist move to block competition and keep prices high and service poor. Only citizen action is going to stop this. You need to get involved. It's just that simple, we all need to get involved. Only 57,1% of Americans voted in the last Presidential and that was one of the largest percentages in ! years. That means in our best years over 42% of those eligible don't vote.
Janice Bowling, a 67-year-old grandmother and Republican state senator from rural Tennessee, thought it only made sense that the city of Tullahoma be able to offer its local high-speed Internet service to areas beyond the city limits.
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She viewed the network, which offers speeds about 80 times faster than AT&T and 10 times faster than Charter in Tullahoma according to advertised services, as a utility, like electricity, that all Tennesseans need.
