I take issue with the assertion that this has been going on for 75 years. In 1941, Europe was embroiled in a war that stretched from the shores of England to Byelorussia (now called Belarus), the Ukraine and Russia, and from Norway to North Africa. Japan had started the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Despite the bombing of U.S.S. Panay in 1937, the United States was not at war in 1941, and only went to war because the Japanese Empire attacked the United States. The current militaristic situation is a result of the so-called cold war, when the United States stayed in arms in order to confront the Soviet Union after May, 1945. American involvement in Korea and Vietnam can reasonably be said to have derived directly from that continuing confrontation, and the geo-political paranoia it fostered.
There is no correlation between the cold war and our miseries in the middle east, however. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1978, some Americans looked for ways to exploit the situation. (The cold war, after all, was not over.) Al Qaeda, which means “the base,” was founded by a militant Egyptian army officer who actually despied the U.S. But as usual, the bright boys at Central Intelligence knew none of that, and wouldn’t have cared anyway. Central Intelligence has always left the dirty work to proxies, and that seemed a perfect set-up. We gave them stinger missiles to attack Soviet air craft, and they were originally our buddies.
The United States was not at war from 1973 to 1990, despite provocations by other countries. That began to change with the election of that clown Reagan. The cowboy in the White House couldn’t resist trying his hand at military adventurism. He sent U.S. troops to Lebanon in 1983 and invaded the island of Grenada that same year. He bombed Libya in 1986. That was also the era when we sent aid to Al Qaeda and to the righ-wing Contras in Nicaragua. The neo-conservatives, a movement which began in the 1970s, were prominent in the Reagan administration. Richard Cheney was Secretary of Defense in the administration of the first George Bush, and oversaw the invasion of Panama and the Persian Gulf War. With the election of Clinton in 1992, the neo-cons were out of power. In 1997, several former Reagan administration employees (including Dan Quayle) and Richard Cheney, as well as many others, founded The Project for a New American Century, which advocated global military dominance by the Untied States, among a host of other idiotic ideas. With the election of the second George Bush, they were back in the saddle. In 1997, they had sent an open letter to Bill Clinton calling for the invasion of Iraq. But once in power, they had to move more carefully. The lesson of the coalition the elder Bush had used in the Gulf War was not lost on them, but they were pretty ham-handed. They got their invasion, though.
A barely literate Jordanian jihadi who had fought in Afghanistan soon founded Al Qaeda in Iraq, that was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Ironically, although Zarqawi promoted war by Sunnis against Shi’ites, the majority in the Iraqi population, tribal chieftains in Anbar province aided American efforts to get Zarqawi, forming an organization called Sons of Iraq, a Sunni organization. Zarqawi was killed in a targeted bombing of a safe house in 2006. That ought to have been the end of the story. But in 2010, an Iraqi Sunni extremist calling himself Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi took over Al Qaeda in Iraq. He was soon repudiated by Al Qaeda because of his determination to exterminate Shi’ites, even though Al Qaeda is a Sunni fundamentalist organization. That was when he created Islamic State in Iraq, from which ISIS derives. It has been reported just today that al Baghdadi has been killed in a coalition air strike.
History is not as simple as journalists would make it. Journalists are the bottom feeders of the literary world, and are usually the last to know about reliable information. Muslim terrorists are not the all-powerful monsters that the papers would have you believe. Al Qaeda bombed American embassies in East Africa because Clinton and baby Bush left American troops in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War. There was also an attempt to bring down the world trade center with a truck bomb in 1993, before the September 11th attacks finally succeeded. ISIS has squandered in resources, including men, in an incoherent and ineffective military campaign that has wandered all over Syria and Iraq. There is no doubt that they are very proficient at killing unarmed prisoners as well as women and children. They are far less competent at well-organized military operations. Most of the fighting on the ground against ISIS is carried out by Iraqi security forces, as their army is called and Shi’ite militias—both trained and lead by Revolutionary Guard officers from Iran. But it would be bad press to admit that. Increasingly, analysts are saying that ISIS is less and less able to recruit young Muslims to their cause. I really don’t accept doomsday scenarios about Muslim terrorists. Certainly they’re the source of much misery and strife, but they’re not invincible, and their operations succeed because of poor security or cowardly attacks on civilians. Were the West not addicted to petroleum, none of this would be happening.
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