GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR, TAKE 2

We’re approaching another 9/11 anniversary, and while some of the victims’ names begin to literally fade away, I feel as if I’m living with a family member who is not only an arsonist hell-bent on setting the neighborhood ablaze — our house included — but who is also a fire truck salesman.

Who could have guessed that the US would more-or-less announce yet another life-or-death struggle with a terrorist organization that has popped into the nation’s radar almost like magic, and has the motivation as well as capability to attack the Homeland in a spectacular way?

We’re now watching the US Global War on Terror, Part Two – The ISIL Chapter. President Obama’s latest shift in objective to destroying ISIL, rather than containing the terror group, only proves that ISIL has been viewed as a disposable enabler to a grander American scheme.

I alluded to this “How in the world did ISIL get here?” thought when I wrote about them a few weeks ago, but I’ll spend more time with the topic today.

Post-9/11 American intelligence may not have every square inch of the Middle East and Central Asia covered, but there’s a sufficient number of satellites and ground-based intelligence assets in place where nine goats could not have an orgy in a desert without some US agency capturing the moment on high-definition video or through hired eyes, so how can no one notice the transformation of al-Qaeda in Iraq to ISIL — an oil-dealing, multi-million dollar-earning terrorist enterprise whose growing caliphate footprint is currently the equivalent of the distance between New York City and Richmond, Virginia?

ISIL has been taking over oil fields, beginning with Syria, since 2012. Who’s buying the oil? Who cared about who was buying the oil? Did Team Obama – or the fictitiously intelligent Homeland Security maven, Congressman Peter King – see any of this activity and fail to be alarmed by it? Where and how did ISIL get its seed capital and weapons?

What did the US think after learning that its buddies Saudi Arabia and Qatar – through wealthy, private donors – have been financing these terrorists Syrian rebels? Of course the Saudis deny the accusations.

Sounds crazy, right? Well, read this and then explain to me how Qatar and Saudi Arabia could possibly determine which jihadists, other than ISIL, were supposed to get weapons to fight in Syria’s civil war? The US was aware of this issue the entire time.

The truth is that Saudi Arabia and Qatar didn’t seem to care that their $1 billion-plus violent Syrian regime change investment went to terrorists. Remember when Saudi intelligence head, Bandar bin Sultan, gave Russia President Vladimir Putin that gangster-style “Offer you can’t refuse”? Putin refused, by the way.

When ISIL began fighting in Syria to topple Bashar al-Assad’s regime in 2011, the embattled Syrian leader told the world that the rebels in his country are not your typical Arab Spring hipsters with iPads as popularized in Egypt, but are in fact terrorists.

Why didn’t Assad’s revelation change the US calculus in supporting the rebels? We all know by now that the US didn’t have an effective means of figuring out the difference between the The Good Syrian Rebels Who Can Have a Gun, and The Bad Rebels. Shoot, an American general and a Syrian rebel commander went on record with that admission.

Speaking of weapons, have you noticed how these ISIL rebels were able to efficiently operate US tanks and other American machinery abandoned by the Iraqi army without any apparent training or learning difficulty? Just a random observation…

My point is obvious: The US watched ISIL’s growth and did nothing because overthrowing Assad and crippling Iran were more important to the US than the emerging homeland threat presented by ISIL.

That brings us back to fire trucks. The homeland security industry is set to make another worldwide fortune, from military organizations to paranoid small-town police departments…

song currently stuck in my head: “love is” – roy ayers