ISIS AND THE IMPLOSION OF IRAQ: AN INDICTMENT OF AMERICAN UNILATERALISM.

ISIS AND THE IMPLOSION OF IRAQ: AN INDICTMENT OF AMERICAN UNILATERALISM.

“Al Qaeda’s trainers are proving the truth of bin Laden’s late mentor Shaykh Abdullah Azzam’s assertion that the Koran and the AK-47, together, yield the levels of lethality needed for Islam to triumph.”
Michael Scheuer “ANONYMOUS”, Imperial Hubris – Why the West Is Losing The War on Terror, 2005, page 76.

INTRODUCTION.

I use three prisms through which I see the precipitious tumble of the Middle East’s Levant region into Dante’s Inferno of bloody and murderous terrorism.

The first one is a personal prism.

The first diplomatic tour of duty of the western Middle East (or otherwise known as Levant), including Iraq under Saddam Hussein, which I undertook in September 2000, happened not long after I was promoted to the position of Director for the Levant in the then South African Department of Foreign Affairs, now the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO).

Then I was able to hold discussions with Israeli officials in Tel Aviv and west Jerusalem, was transferred by car to Ramallah, the capital of Palestinian West Bank. After discussions there with Palestinian officials, we drove by car from Ramallah, where South Africa maintains a diplomatic office, to Gaza on land across much of southern Israel, now the target of most of Hamas’s rockets. Following the Gaza visit, it was time to travel to Amman by car, across the river Jordan for further consultations with my Jordanian counterparts. From Jordan I took a road trip to Damascus, the capital of Syria, through much of the eastern province of Syria, for consultations with my Syrian counterparts. We then returned by car to Amman, where we prepared for our very long trip to Baghdad, Iraq’s capital at the time  under the chocking and severe western sanctions. It was a road trip of about twelve hours through much of south-western Iraq, or about the distance by car between Johannesburg and Cape Town. After our stay in Baghdad, we returned by car to Amman, a trip through much of Iraq’s desert Sunni heartland and the Anbar province.

In subsequent, many visits to the Levant between 2001-March 2003, I would often travel from Israel, to Ramallah, to Jordan, to Syria and ultimately to Lebanon, via Lebanon’s Bekaa valley and high mountains hugging Beirut, Lebanon’s beautiful capital, all done by car.

My road travels across the Levant at the time were some of the most beautiful, peaceful, emotional and informative travels I ever did anywhere in the world.

If at any time during these many travels on the road through the Levant I had been threatened with being hit on my face with a stray tennis ball anywhere in the Levant, I would have considered such a hit the most dangerous thing to have ever happened during my three years’ journeys through this ancient, biblical, important and historic region of the world.

As it turned out, I was never threatened by as much as a wayward tennis ball.

So generally peaceful and stable was the Levant at the time.

Remember, this was also a short while before the eruption of the Second Intifida in occupied Palestine.

 During that whole period, I also travelled between Amman, Jordan and Baghdad in Iraq on road no less than six times on various diplomatic assignments. I undertook the long trips by monster American GM 4 by 4 driven by highly experienced and dutiful Jordanian long-haul road drivers.

Not once did we ever become the target of any threat from any quarter during these Amman-Baghdad trips, a very long stretch often taken at night to avoid the searing desert heat of southern and western Iraq in summer.

And whilst visiting Syria several times, I would be driven by car to be shown the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and the UN forces helping to keep peace there. It always struck me as the most peaceful line of divide between two antagonistic countries I ever visited anywhere in the world. And it certainly was in contrast to the tense  De-Militarised Zone between North and South Koreas, which I had visited in June 1989 during the world youth and student festival in North Korea in the same year.

Additionally, I once travelled by car from Damascus to visit the Syrian city of Palmyra, about 150 kilometers north of Damascus, which is an ancient and historical world heritage with Greek and Crusaders monuments. And in Iraq, I would travel by car to Babylon, the city of the biblical Nebuchardnezzar, and Karballah, the holy Shia city in the south, or up to Samara in the north of Baghdad, on my failed trip to Saddam Hussen’s birthplace, Tikrit.

All the trips in Iraq were done on road.

In Lebanon, I often visited the ancient city of Byblos, with its very impressive Crusader castles, stunning beaches and tourist attractions. Again these trips were undertaken on road.

The biggest danger that would face my delegation during the many trips by cars across the Levant would be dare-devil road drivers swaying recklessly to overtake.

Well, all this Middle Eastern idyll changed forever with the March/April illegal USA 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In the very violent, chaotic and anarchic environment of the Levant today, only a very brave man can retrace my car travels throughout the region at the turn of the 21st century..

Dangers abound.

Death stalks the Levant everywhere.

Destruction and wars are the norm.

Civil strife and ancients hatreds are on the loose across the region.

Hundreds of thousands of people have perished.

Entire cities and villages lie in total ruin, the victims of vicious fighting amongst warring combatants of every imaginable stripe.

Iraq has effectively ceased to exist as a unitary state.

Syria can no more hold together as one country.

Lebanon is maintaining its unity through the skin of its tooth.

Palestine’s West Bank is vanishing under the weight of relentless Israeli illegal settlement expansion.

Gaza is being obliterated from the face of the earth through unremitting Israeli land, aerial and naval bombardment.

Egypt’s Sinai peninsula has become the Levant’s terrifying badland.

All this utter destruction of the Levant, following the USA’s invasion of Iraq, has happened in just less than fifteen years since my first visit to the Levant  region in September 2000.

Much of that which took the region’s various and much-admired civilizations thousands of years to build has been wiped off from the face of the earth in less than two decades. It is not even clear if any of the lost civilizational treasures of the region will ever be rebuilt or regained.

Syria lies in complete ruin. Gaza is in hot war with Israel. Lebanon now and again explodes in destructive, civil wars. The West Bank continues to be held in the stranglehold of Israel through its Apartheid Wall and humiliating check-points. Egypt, which used to be a reliable and steady anchor of the whole Middle East, is itself engulfed by unimaginable post-Morsi turmoil. Israel in turn lives in mortal fear of Hamas rockets and wages relentless,  cruel wars against Palestinians of Gaza, in a doomed and futile effort to ensure its own unilateral and one-sided national security and tribal-religious purity.

Above all else, Iraq and Syria lie in complete ruin, with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) threatening to overrun and obliterate much of the two countries as modern nation-states.

 The lights are being switched off across much of the Middle East.

 A night without dawn is descending upon the region.

A starker contrast between the Levant of 2000-March 2003 and now is hard to imagine.

 It is almost like paradise lost.

The second prism through which I view the current bloody state of the Levant is offered by the false, infantile pseudo- optimism about the Levant and the broader Middle East which was once articulated by USA president George W Bush.

In his seminal book, Resurrecting Empire – Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path In The Middle East, Rashid Khalidi, one of the USA’s foremost experts on the Middle East, shares the following quotation from a speech president George W Bush delivered at the American Enterprise Institute on 26 February 2003, just about a month before the illegal and under false pretext American invasion of Iraq under his leadership:

“The nation of Iraq…is fully capable of moving towards democracy and living in freedom…A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region…Success in Iraq could also begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace, and set in motion progress towards  a truly democratic Palestinian state.”

Seen against the background of the complete meltdown and mayhem of the Levant today, especially in light of the implosion of Iraq and the very brutal war waged there by ISIS, in effect “a war of all against all”, George W Bush’s congenital optimism of February 2003 borders on extreme superpower folly. But it was this type of misguided and ill-informed optimism about the Levant which was the crucible within which the George W Bush administration approached its “regime change” illegal invasion against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

The third instructive and frightful prism through which to view the unfolding biblical-scale tragedy and savagery of the Levant today is provided by the 2006 issue of the USA magazine Newsweek.

In its 19 June 2006 Special Report issue, under the cover of the topic “Fighting Zarqawi’s Legacy”, Rod Nordland and Michael Hirsh wrote the following about the killing by USA forces of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI)’s founder and leader, the fearsome Jordanian Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi:

“But Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador in Iraq, can’t help it: he sees a ‘big opportunity’ in the death of Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi. Why? Because Khalilzad knows that jihadists around the world may not encounter Zarqawi’s like again soon, no matter who replaces him. So monstrous a man was Zarqawi – so singularly savage in his methods – that he inspired  almost as much fear among his Sunni confederates as he did in his victims. A terrorist among terrorists, he was always the scariest guy in the room, frightening his Sunni hosts into silence or cooperation  with his unique combination of cruelty and competence: cross Zarqawi and you would die, along with your family , perhaps horribly.”

If in 2006 it was not clear to the USA ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, and the George W Bush administration he represented that “jihadists around the world may not encounter Zarqawi’s like again soon”, well, we today know that the leader of the modern-day Islamic caliphate, or the Islamic State straddling Syria and Iraq, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi makes Abu Mussab Al Zarqawi to look like Mother Teresa, by comparison, in unfathomable terms of “…his unique combination of cruelty and competence.”

Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi is not just “a terrorist among terrorists”, not just “the scariest guy in the room”. He is the Caliph of global terrorism now, and the scariest guy in a mosque in northern Iraq’s large city of Mosul, arguably the jewel in ISIS’s predatory and land-grab crown across Iraq and Syria.

Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and his ISIS have taken the practical definition of medieval and murderous barbarism for theocratic and political ends to a completely new, horrifying levels.

In a moment of great analytical stupidity, Donald Rumsfeld, the former USA Secretary of Defence during America’s invasion of Iraq, once spoke gibberishly and pompously about “a tipping point in Iraq.”

Well, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State (caliphate) across Iraq and Syria, and his ISIS, are the real deal in terms of “a tipping point” in Iraq.

 Surely, Zalmay Khalilzad and the George W Bush administration he represented could not have been more wrong in their faulty prophecies about what awaited Iraq in the future, following the USA invasion of 2003. In fact, in the words of the current USA Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, the Islamic State (caliphate) and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS )  are “…beyond anything we have seen so far.” Meaning they are way, by far, beyond “the unique combination of cruelty and competence” which Newsweek’s Special Report on Abu Mussab Al-Zaeqawi, entitled “Fighting Zarqawi’s Legacy”, detected at the time.

Hard to believe, but following the USA invasion of Iraq in 2003, the hooves of hell have descended upon the Levant region.

Unfortunately the truth is that it is not all that clear that the Obama administration’s handling of the bloody turmoil in Iraq and Syria is any improvement on the poverty of policy and geostrategic thinking which afflicted the George W Bush administration.

Unbelievable though it may seem now, but if the Obama administration in turn mishandles its approach towards dealing with the very dire threat presented to the Middle East and global security by the Islamic State and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) under Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, one day, not in too distant a future, even Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi may appear like Mother Teresa in comparison, when he wil be succeeded by an even more odious terrorist monster.

USA Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel is right that ISIS is “beyond anything we have ever seen”. But that does not mean ISIS is the last word on murderous and insane human brutality and criminal depravity to be evinced by men who purport to uphold some deep religious values and virtues..

Only a selfless and altruistic, and not an egotistic and self-centered, USA leadership of the world, as the sole (for now, and not for long) global superpower, can ensure that the Middle East does not descend even  deeper, further and lower into the pits of Dante’s Inferno.

At the moment, the odds of the USA doing right by the whole world on the Middle East and rising to the occasion in a way that unites and mobilizes  the whole world against the mortal danger of Abu Bakr Al-Baghadadi and his criminal and murderous enterprise, ISIS, do not look promising at all.

 The current USA Obama leadership remains deeply self-absorbed in its own global power fantasies, and is committed enough to collecting the sinful wages of its highly ill-advised incumbent unilateralism.

For now, the USA’s approach to the Middle East remains in equal measure a part of the problem as it is undoubtedly also potentially a part of a long-lasting solution to the challenges of terrorism in the Middle East. The history of George W Bush administration’s entanglements with the Middle East, especially its disastrous Iraq invasion, is a clear demonstration of how a sole (for now, and not for long) global superpower can get things so horribly wrong in the Middle East, with no demonstrable culpability, punishment befitting the crime, or remorse whatsoever, whilst it brushes aside considered but contrarian opinion from elsewhere in the world.

And the large part of the problem regarding the current Obama administration’s involvement in the turmoil of the Middle East is that it continues to use its policies towards the region as a means to try to entrench and strengthen its post-Cold War “unilateral moment” as the only and undisputed superpower which should never brook any challenge by any other emerging power in the future..

This is a very tragic position of the USA.

This is dangerous, pure folly.

CHAPTER ONE.

In his brilliant article “Don’t BS the American people about Iraq, Syria and ISIS”, which appeared on War on the Rock on 20 August 2014, Brian Fishman, the researcher for the New American Century, makes a very valid point that “one cannot credibly argue  that the U.S withdrawal from Iraq in 2010 contributed to the rise of ISIL without also acknowledging that the U.S invasion in 2003 did the same. The former without the latter is a political argument, not a policy position”.

Yet as valid as Brian Fishman’s point about the compelling nexus between the 2003 USA invasion of and the 2010 USA withdrawal from Iraq in 2010 is, in terms of the rise of ISIS and the Islamic State, it still offers an incomplete formulation and at best represents a glass half full. It itself  may in turn be as misleading and dangerous a diagnosis, prescription and prognosis as the argument of those Fishman remorselessly takes his impressive, sharp analytical scalpel to.

The analysis provided by Brian Fishman can only be fully appreciated and be complete when juxtaposed with the other, equally compelling, sharp analysis proffered by Amr Hamzawy and Dina Bishara in one of  the Carnegie Papers (of the Carnegie Endowment) of November 2006, under the title “Islamist Movements In The Arab World and The 2006 Lebanon War”.

In the introduction to their well-grounded, incisive, impassioned Carnegie paper on the Islamists movements of the Middle East, the two analysts wrote:

“The war in Lebanon, mounted by Israel in July 2006 after the kidnapping and killing of Israeli soldiers by Hizbullah and halted by a cease-fire in August, made it necessary for Islamists movements to act in accordance with their ideological reading of the Arab-Israeli conflict as an existential struggle between Muslims and Jews. It also required them to be responsive to anti-Israeli and anti-American sentiment widespread among their broad popular bases. The disproportionate Israeli response to Hizbullah’s initial provocation, especially the high toll of Lebanese civilian casualties, and the American refusal to push for immediate cessation of hostilities outraged Arabs and returned to the forefront the narrative of a grand American-Israeli conspiracy to dominate the Middle East.”

So, the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq must, undeniably, be understood within the context of the terrible and terrifying consequences of the USA’s illegal and deceitful invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the various destabilizing Israeli policies of occupation, settlement expansion and annexation, and punitive Israeli  wars directed against occupied Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians, as well as other Arabs, like Iraqis and Sudanese, especially Israel’s 2006 war against Hizbullah.

Any global strategy to confront and defeat ISIS in Syria and Iraq will have to first contend with this terrible legacy of crimes of the USA and Israeli policies and actions in the Middle East, especially the continuing occupation by Israel of Palestine and in particular the ongoing, horrendous consequences of the unilateral, illegal and under false pretext USA invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Short of this acknowledgement on the part of the USA and Israel, and their assorted and uncritical backers in the European Union (EU), no lasting good will come out of Obama administration’s unilateral military campaigns against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

 If ISIS is a global terrorist threat, it must by necessity be confronted with a united global action, and not unilateralist impulses of a sole superpower masquerading as global effort in the name of the Right to Protect (R2P).

It is interesting that even a close Arab ally of the USA and Israel in the Middle East, such as Egypt is, nurses bitter grievance against both countries. No wonder Egypt hectored and pilloried the Obama administration a few days ago over its abominable handling of the race protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the senseless killing by  a white American cop of the black, African American teenager, Michael Brown.

Matters are not helped by the occasional arrogance of the American administrations towards Egypt, arguably the most important Arab, Sunni and Middle Eastern country. It is sometimes unbelievable how Americans go out of their way to humiliate Egypt in public and for the whole world to see.

A prime example of this American arrogant attitude towards Egypt is provided by president Bill Clinton’s second Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright in her autobiography, Madam Secretary – A Memoir. In it Albright proudly ventilates about the USA’s sole global superpower arrogance at the expense of Egypt’s national and pre-eminent diplomat, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who, as the then United Nations’ secretary general, had sought a second term:

 Albright can hardly camouflage her elbow-in-the-rib-cage glee at the sad fate that befell the veteran Egyptian international statesman, as a result of her direct diplomatic backstabbing and shinnanigans:

“When the Secretary General had been elected in 1991, he pledged to serve a single term…I concluded that if UN-U.S. relations were going to improve, the Secretary General would have to go. That meant a fight. We began with one big advantage. If we didn’t vote for him, he could not win. A secretary general had to receive the votes of each of the five permanent members of the Security Council…The fall of 1996 was consumed by our campaigns to reelect Bill Clinton and to unelect Boutros-Ghali…On November 19, I vetoed a resolution that would have given the the Secretary General a second term. The vote was 14-1 against us…If Boutros-Ghali thought we would flinch at the last minute, he was wrong.”

 With American friends like Madeleine Albright, does Egypt really need Islamic extremists like ISIS as her enemies?

 This shabby treatment the USA administration of Bill Clinton meted out to its most important Arab, Sunni and Middle Easterrn ally recalls the categoric statement by Karel van Wolferen, the renoun Dutch journalist and author of The Enigma Of Japanese Power, that the USA’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been “…complete military disasters.” (Karel van Wolferen’s blog, The Ukraine, Corrupted Journalism and the Atlanticist Faith, 09 August 2014).

 And that is the truth, and nothing but the truth.

 Often it appears as if the USA is hell-bent on destroying secularist and republican governments of the Middle East  in such varying countries as Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Sudan, Palestine, Eritrea, Tunisia and Iraq, all now suffering from contrasting forms of severe domestic and international terrorism as well as civil strife -, whilst it protects oil-rich tyrannical and undemocratic monarchies of the Gulf states, which, like Israel, have been “miraculously” spared the bane of terrorist attacks and ISIS’s murderous rampage.

The USA invasion of Iraq in 2003, the subsequent destruction of the Iraqi state and society, and now the emergence of the Islamic State which encompasses huge parts of Iraq and Syria, under the leadership of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), must be, historically, understood against this background. 

Not unsurprisingly, the current bloody chaos and nihilistic anarchy which have engulfed the Middle East at the current moment bears a close resemblance to the futuristic strategic scenario laid out in rare detail in the Yinon Plan – Israel’s Strategy for the Middle East, which was written  by the Israeli government’s Foreign Ministry official, Oded Yinon, as an article for  Kivunim (Directions), the Journal of the Department of Information of the World Zionist Organisation in February 1982, and which was subsequently leaked to the broader media.

Just last week, Algeria’s president Abdulazziz Bouteflika was quoted by the Middle Eastern Monitor (MEMO) as having, in his address on Algeria’s national day for the Armed Forces,  “…accused western intelligence services of attempting to dismantle Arab countries.” (MEMO took the quote from Al-Ardy Al Jadeed news of 21 August 2014).

Given that Algeria under Bouteflika is such a very close ally of western countries in its fight against its domestic and regional terrorism, the coincidence of his accusation and the ongoing, violent meltdown of Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sinai peninsula and Gaza is too rich to go unnoticed.

CONCLUSION.

Al Qaeda in Iraq and its various manifestations have shown themselves to be incredibly adept at adapting to the ever changing geo-strategic environments in which they are often forced to operate by their powerful opponents, primarily the USA’s overwhelming conventional military power.

From Abu Mussab Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda franchise during the Iraqi Sunnis’ violent resistance to the USA invasion and occupation of Iraq from 2003 to the time of the triumph of the Arab Awakening around 2007, through the bloody battles over Fallujah and other cities of Iraq’s Sunni Anbar province, to the formation of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) as an Al Qaeda franchise, to Abu Muhammed Al-Jalani’s Al-Nusra Front fighting against the Syrian regime of president Bashar Al Assad, right through to the unity between the Islamic State of Iraq and the Jablat Al-Nusra front to form the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) under the leadership of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and its current incarnation in the Islamic State (caliphate), and inclusive of Al Qaeda serving divorce papers on ISIS – these terrorist organisations have displayed amazing adaptability, resilience and an almost unmatched capacity for survivalist metamorphosis within very hostile environs.

The remarkable extent of ISIS’s triumph and ideological metempsychosis in adversity in Iraq and Syria was brought home in highly vivid terms by the recent Business Insider article of Michael B. Kelley and Mike Nudelman entitled “Everyone Who Wants to Destroy ISIS Needs To Know One Hard Truth”. The two authors revealed, amongst other things, that destroying ISIS will require a full-scale war, and not just surgical airstrikes that president Obama has just authorized to protect the Kurdish city of Irbil and to provide humanitarian protection (R2P?) to Iraqi minority communities like the Azidis; that ISIS has gone through many iterations since the USA invasion of Iraq in 2003; that the Islamic State (Caliphate) is basically a “criminal petrostate”, which gets about $12 million a month from extortion and other shady practices and about $1-2 million from selling oil from oil fields it has captured in Iraq and Syria.

It is this access by ISIS to this tremendous source of wherewithal and organizational-military capabilities, matched by “an apocalyptic, end-of-the-world vision” which has impelled the USA’s Chief of the Joint Staff, General Martin Dempsey, to recently characterise ISIS as a formidable and present danger to the USA’s national security. President Barack Obama has in turn described ISIS as “…a cancer whose spread must be contained” and that the group “has no place in the 21st century.”

And it is also this which makes ISIS and its caliphate such formidable direct and immanent threats to global peace and security.

But the surest way to rally international opinion and support for the requesite collective effort to confront and defeat ISIS and its caliphate in Iraq and Syria is certainly not more, but less, USA unilateral impulses and extraterritorial over-reach in international affairs, especially in the Middle East.

On 01 February 1994, two months before South Africa attained its freedom and democracy, Robert Kaplan, one of the foremost American conservatives, Neocon rightwing commentators and “regime change” advocates penned a fascinating article for the Atlantic magazine under the title “The Coming Anarchy.”

 Amongst other things, Kaplan wrote, rather disparagingly, the following about one part of our ancient and beautiful African continent:

“There is no other place on the planet where political maps are so deceptive – where, in fact, they tell lies – as in West Africa…West Africa provides an appropriate introduction to the issues, often extremely unpleasant to discuss, that will soon confront our civilization.”

Well, very wrong, Robert Kaplan.

 Your bad.

 There is in fact such a place on the planet, outside Africa, where political maps are deceptive too – where, in fact, they tell lies. Such a place, far away from West Africa, too provides an appropriate introduction to the issues, often extremely unpleasant to discuss, that are already confronting our entire planetary civilization.

Robert Kaplan, welcome to the 21st century’s first (and possibly not last) Islamic Caliphate, otherwise also known as the Islamic State led by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) under the leadership of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi..

Welcome to the murderous badland of Caliph Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi in the Levant.

Welcome to the vilest, most horrendous, bloodiest and blood-thirsty form of theocratic nihilism and tribalistic, existential apocalypse.

Welcome to the 21st century’s Hell on Earth.

13th Cedia blog
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
24 August 2014

Written by:

Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
Centre for Economic Diplomacy In Africa (CEDIA)
Cedia Email Address: Isaac@cedia.co.za
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