Background to ISIS

General Article
1

Due to the sensationalism and lack of depth from the mainstream media when they discuss ISIS, I thought it would be worthwhile to put together a resource explaining the historical and political context of the current conflict in Syria and Iraq.

A look at the rise of IS and terrorism

The undisputed facts paint a picture far removed from much of the coverage because it exposes the lack of long term thinking from Western powers. Questions about powerful forces within Saudi Arabia and Turkey supporting ISIS whilst being allied with the US, NATO etc need to be answered, but due to other considerations (I.E. oil and weapon sales) are ignored.

2 Likes
2

Thanks for the post, it’s very good.
However I think it can be explained in fewer words: Our leaders want to keep us distracted from the real problems (corruption, tax evasion, poverty) and they create artificial conflicts in order to keep us busy: mocking Russia all the time (in Ukraine for example) and now helping ISIS to grow. So, instead of talking about reducing corruption, we talk about the threats of WW3 and the terrorist threat. Our system is strikingly similar with the system in the “1984” book by George Orwell - google “Ministry of Peace”.

The West never bothered to attack ISIS: oil wells, trucks transporting oil, the West never tried to find who supply them weapons and goods and so on. Only once they attacked the ISIS oil trucks, three days after the Paris attacks.

ISIS members are not Muslims, they are anti-Islamic from at any time. They are Satanic, and not Islamic - http://www.lettertobaghdadi.com

USA never did anything to pressure the Iraq government to reduce corruption and to become capable to track terrorists and their supply routes. While the US leaders hardly approved 0.1 billions $US for exploring the Europa satellite of Jupiter, they could easily find 1,100 billions of $US for financing the “war in Iraq”. George Orwell explains it very clearly: “Ministry of Peace revolves around the principle of perpetual war. Perpetual war uses up all surplus resources, keeping most citizens in lives of constant hardship – and thus preventing them from learning enough to comprehend the true nature of their society.”

3

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”― Carl Sagan

There are some extraordinary claims there and very little evidence.

I wrote the post to put forward the undisputed historical narrative of the region, rather than conspiratorial conjecture. I try to be a skeptic in the classical sense of the word. I need sufficient evidence to back up claims I make and don’t try to fit facts within a pre-conceived narrative, rather I try to allow the facts to create the narrative.

The conflict in the Ukraine is/ was complex and a result of the creation of, and collapse of the Soviet Union (and the political history of the region going back much further). Ethnic Russians moved into Eastern Ukraine whilst it was part of the USSR and made the majority of the population in those regions. The Western regions, dominated by ethnic Ukrainians wanted to get out from under Russia’s influence and join the EU to protect the country from Russia. Politics in the Ukraine is divided between these two broad outlooks. NATO and the EU saw it as a chance to gain influence in another former Eastern Bloc country at the expense of Russia, whilst Russia saw it as an attempt to further isolate it from its former satellite republics. It is old-school power-politics in the aftermath of the Cold War rather than just to ‘keep us distracted from the real problems’.

I already explained the creation of ISIS (with plenty of sources) in the original post. The idea that they aren’t Muslims is a political position based on moderate interpretations of Islam, they are Wahhabist which is not moderate in any way, shape or form, but still an accepted ideology broadly within Islam.

The War on Terror has been used to erode civil liberties and increase the power of the state and military industrial complex, but it is a by-product of convoluted power politics that has been played out for around 100 years, not as a means unto itself.

4

By the contrary, there are plenty of extraordinary evidence.

The fact that the West didn’t bother to attack the oil wells of ISIS is absolutely extraordinary. The same with ISIS’s trucks transporting oil (except once), and the roads used by the said trucks. It is also extraordinary that the West didn’t bother to find the buyers and suppliers of ISIS (who is selling goods like clothes, cars, construction materials, trucks to ISIS?)

The fact that the US government refuses to engage the best specialists in ISIS in order to make a plan for eradicating the group is also extraordinary. It’s not me saying that, it’s Michael Weiss (Daily Beast senior editor): link
There is no U.S. policy to defeat ISIS. Why? Because Barack Obama is very tired. He doesn’t care.
There is a real problem in the way the United States is going about this.
There are lots of people who know exactly what they are doing and know exactly how this organization works, and not a single one of them, so far as I can tell, has been invited to be part of any special task force on countering ISIS.

It’s also extraordinary that the West, who claims to promote democracy and human rights all over the world, supports brutal dictators: - link

(1958) President Eisenhower, in an internal discussion, observed to his staff, and I’m quoting now, “There’s a campaign of hatred against us in the Middle East, not by governments, but by the people.” The National Security Council discussed that question and said, yes, and the reason is, there’s a perception in that region that the United States supports status quo governments, which prevent democracy and development and that we do it because of our interests in Middle East oil. Furthermore, it’s difficult to counter that perception because it’s correct. It ought to be correct. We ought to be supporting brutal and corrupt governments which prevent democracy and development because we want to control Middle East oil, and it’s true that leads to a campaign of hatred against us.

and in 1991: (sorry only 2 links allowed)

The rebelling forces in March 1991 were an alternative, but the US preferred Saddam. There was an Iraqi democratic opposition in exile. Washington refused to have anything to do with them before, during, or after the Gulf War, and they were virtually excluded from the US media, apart from marginal dissident journals. “Political meetings with them would not be appropriate for our policy at this time,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher stated on March 14, 1991, while Saddam was decimating the opposition under the eyes of Stormin’ Norman Schwartzkopf. They still exist. How realistic their programs are, I cannot judge, and I do not think we can know as long as the US remains committed — as apparently it still is — to the Bush adminstration policy that preferred “an iron-fisted Iraqi junta,” without Saddam Hussein if possible, a return to the days when Saddam’s “iron fist…held Iraq together, much to the satisfaction of the American allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia,”

It is also extraordinary that, while spending more than one trillion $US dollars on the war in Iraq, the US did absolutely nothing to reduce the corruption in Iraq. By the contrary, they prefer dubious people in power in Iraq.
With a small tiny fraction of those money wasted, the US could pay some insiders in the Iraq government in order to expose the corruption and to pressure the Iraq government to put clean people in charge of the country’s affairs. The US has a formidable power to pressure Iraq yet it is not using it at all, which is absolutely extraordinary.

The corruption in Iraq played a huge role into the expansion of ISIS and it still does. And the US is doing absolutely nothing about that.

5

This is not a political position, it is the plain reality. ISIS is just a group of criminals who claim they are Muslims. Their actions are anti-Islamic, as explained in the letter to Baghdadi - http://www.lettertobaghdadi.com
The whole Syrian and Iraqi population knows very well that ISIS is not Islamic in any way.

6

(sorry for the double post above, seems I can’t modify it now)

[quote=“Frew, post:3, topic:630”]
The conflict in the Ukraine is/ was complex and a result of the creation of, and collapse of the Soviet Union (and the political history of the region going back much further).
[/quote] Not only that. It is also the result of the West pushing Ukraine into NATO. Ukraine is a very important buffer zone for Russia, and by pushing Ukraine into NATO, Russia is not happy with that, and it is interfering there, just like USA interfered in the Latin Amerincan countries. The fact that there are Russians in Ukraine is just a very convenient pretext for Russia to interfere.
USA treats Mexico and other Latin American countries as buffer zones and doesn’t allow anyone to interfere with that, and Russia is doing the same.

It’s not in the interest of the Europeans to get Ukraine into NATO. The Europeans need Ukraine into the EU, not in NATO, just like Finland - member of the EU, not member of NATO.
But the Western politicians do not care about what is good for their people. They constantly mock and provoke Russia, and it is encouraging an angry reaction from Russia.
The Missile defense sites in Central Europe - placing missiles in Poland and Romania, close to Russia, is just another such provocation.
Sure, Russia is very bad - the state and the mafia are one and the same thing. But the fact that the West is constantly trying to provoke Russia is one more good indication that the Western politicians want to maintain artificial conflicts in order to keep their people distracted from the real issues (corruption, increasing poverty, increasing criminality)

Compare the “Ministry of Peace” of George Orwell with the current situation in the Middle East and Ukraine:

“The Ministry of Peace revolves around the principle of perpetual war. Perpetual war uses up all surplus resources, keeping most citizens in lives of constant hardship – and thus preventing them from learning enough to comprehend the true nature of their society. Since that means the balance of the country rests in the war, the Ministry of Peace is in charge of fighting the war (mostly centered around Africa and India), but making sure to never tip the scales, in case the war should become one-sided. Oceanic telescreens usually broadcast news reports about how Oceania is continually winning every battle it fights, though these reports have little to no credibility.”

Wikipedia Link

7

From the POV of Ukraine, at least those wanting to join the EU, they want to be free of Russian influence and joining NATO is protection from Russian invasion. As we can see from recent history, with Russian forces operating in Eastern Ukraine, is a legitimate concern.

No-one in Latin American countries are particularly happy with US interference and since the US has gotten bogged down in the Middle East, they have been asserting their independence to a much greater degree than was possible during the Cold War. Many socialist leaning governments have been elected since 2000 and as can be seen by Ecuador’s protection of Julian Assange from the US (Sweden and the UK) are happy to stand up to their local Imperial Power. Eastern Europeans are in a similar position in regards to Russia and many want to get out from the Russian sphere of influence too.

I am really not buying the links to 1984 and perpetual meaningless war. The current wars in the Middle East are a result of the messy history of the region, and in particular the US alliance with Saudi Arabia which is purely based on the US addiction to cheaper oil.

Equally the Ukraine etc are a continuation of power politics that pre-date the Cold War and will continue for some time to come.

8

Do the people trying to get into Syria to fight for ISIS think they are Muslims?

What about the combatants themselves?

I am pretty sure they all think they are Muslims. Saying they aren’t is merely an academic exercise which might be true is some sort of esoteric theological sense, but it is not true in the minds of the fighters on the ground.

As I stated in the blog-post ISIS are the intellectual children of Saudi Arabian Wahhabism. Are the Saudi Royal Family Muslim? Considering they run the Hajj every year it would be hard to argue against this.

As a side note, there are a lot of people who call for Islamic ‘Reformation’ as a response to the current wave of radicalism. As argued here.

Wahhabism is probably the closest analogy to the Reformation movement on Northern Europe that altered Christianity. The early Protestants and Puritans weren’t a bunch of fun people and the Christian dogma of these groups still has a heavy influence on Christianity as it is practised in the USA (Puritans etc having fled there to escape the Church of England etc).