The Crime of the Century

I read Patrick Cockburn's The Rise of Islamic State (2015) over the weekend. I've had a copy of the book for several months, but what motivated me to pick it up on Saturday and dig in -- it's a quick read -- was a story in The New York Times by Catherine Porter, "Canada Struggles as It Opens Its Arms to Victims of ISIS," about how refugee agencies in Canada have been overwhelmed by 1,200 Yazidis who were victims of ISIS.

This seems to me to be the crime of the century, the whole Timber Sycamore fiasco of the Obama administration -- the covert war against Syria which uses Al-Qaeda-type groups, as Cockburn prefers to call them, of which ISIS was one, which is to say, Salafi jihadists financed by the Gulf monarchies, as proxies.

As Glen Ford noted last week in "Going Down With the Bad Ship U.S.A.":

“Do you realize now what you’ve done?” Vladimir Putin demanded of the Americans, at the United Nations, in 2015. “It is hypocritical and irresponsible to make loud declarations about the threat of international terrorism while turning a blind eye to the channels of financing and supporting terrorists, including the process of trafficking and illicit trade in oil and arms. It would be equally irresponsible to try to manipulate extremist groups and place them at one's service in order to achieve one's own political goals in the hope of later dealing with them or, in other words, liquidating them.”

“The U.S. and its junior partners could only project power in the region through an alliance with Islamic jihadist terror.”

Washington’s jihadist strategy has rapidly unraveled ever since. The empire was unmasked in the world’s most public forum, revealing the utter depravity of U.S. policy and, more importantly, the weakness of Washington’s position in the region. The mighty fortress of global capital, the self-appointed defender of the world economic “order,” was revealed as, not just in collusion with head-chopping, women-enslaving, sectarian mass-murdering terrorists, but militarily dependent on the very forces it claims to wage a twilight, “generational” battle to destroy. The U.S. has been spouting The Mother of All Lies, and most of humanity knows it. Deep down, most Americans suspect as much, too.

I read Cockburn's book on ISIS hoping that he would document the links between foreign intelligence agencies and the Salafists. He does, but not in an exhaustive or explicit fashion. He simply asserts that foreign intelligence agencies play an outsize role in Al-Qaeda-type organizations. He mentions the "moderate rebels" canard, which is where pro-Western opposition militias were dummied up to act as pass-throughs for sophisticated weapons, like anti-tank missiles, to the jihadists.

It is all appalling, and the devastated, traumatized Yazidis that Canada is dealing with are just one example. How about the European refugee crisis? The devastated cities of Iraq and Syria? The hundreds of thousands of dead?

What is the appropriate punishment for this covert war? With the Vietnam War at least there was the spectacular humiliation of a super power defeated militarily by a people's army; that acted as a check on U.S. hubris for a decade. So far there has been nothing of the sort in Syria.

The U.S. cannot risk another such defeat in a global environment where the Washington Consensus is shattering and the Dragon and the Bear are on the rise.

So jihadist proxies are what it is going to have to be for the foreseeable future: contrived chemical weapons attacks, punitive U.S. cruise missile strikes, and Salafi foot soldiers.

The defeat of the YPG/YPJ Kurdish militia at the hands of the Turkish Army and its FSA re-branded remnants of ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra is both a blessing and a curse for the United States. A blessing because the Syrian Kurds have been exposed as critically dependent on U.S. air power. The battle for Kobani that  the YPG/YPJ won against ISIS, handing the caliphate its first significant battlefield defeat the fall of 2014, and which marks the end of Cockburn's book, appears in retrospect to have been singularly dependent on the U.S. Air Force. And a curse because the retreat from Afrin deflates the myth of the Syrian PKK's martial prowess, much as ISIS's attack on Iraqi Kurdistan dealt a blow to the peshmerga, a blow which I don't think it ever recovered.

The U.S. is stymied. It is in this environment that a major blunder could be made. (See Bill van Auken's "Threat of US attack on Syria grows amid fall of 'rebel' stronghold." The best thing I've read on the war in Syria in a while.)

The one hope I harbor is that though U.S. elites are out of touch, they are not so out of touch to think they can embark on another major military escalation in the Middle East without there being a punishing political correction.

The problem here though is that the Democrats are just as hawkish as the GOP now.