TERROR, IN THE NAME OF LIBERTY

Remember when I began to drop strong hints almost a year ago about Islamic State’s curiously sudden rise and its violent annexation of land in Iraq and Syria?

I felt my hunch back then about ISIL being disposable jihadists was justified:

… [I]ntelligence 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…?

Exactly three years and three days ago, a US Defense Intelligence Agency report—released this past spring—made some predictions in which a 2015 lens view would destroy many of your beliefs about President Obama working towards a peaceful resolution to this “Arc of Chaos.”

Read the heavily readacted report here (or source doc), but allow me to crystallize two themes from this study before moving on.

First, the US government’s boys, the Syrian so-called “rebels,” have been supported by Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), better known today as Islamic State or ISIL, since the beginning of the Syria civil war.

Second, Team Obama knew that AQI was morping into ISIL, and would create a caliphate stretching from eastern Syria to western Iraq, but chose to do nothing about this threat.

Here’s a bonus: the same report predicted that AQI-ISIL would come back to the Iraqi regions from where it was forcibly removed—namely Mosul and Ramadi—to unify its Sunni jihad and destabilize Iraq as well as Syria.

Several blogs jumped all over this story since late spring but for right or wrong reasons, I waited for an additional source to verify the existence of this smoking gun.

Lieutenant-General Mike Flynn, the Defense Intelligence Agency head who wrote the now-infamous report, recently appeared on Al-Jazeera to acknowledge the report’s existence—and to share some other eye-openers. You can fast-forward to the 8:50 mark for ISIL, but the entire show is worth watching:

Armed with the report, its acknowledgement by the head of the agency that wrote the report, Team Obama’s desire for regime change in Syria, America’s coordination of arms transfers to groups that support the Syrian jihadists’ efforts to enable this regime change and America’s current air strikes within Syria, what should a more realistic mainstream media headline about America’s activities in Iraq and Syria look like?

How about:

ISLAMIC STATE COUNTS ON US AIR POWER TO STRENGTHEN HOLD IN REGION

Or:

US JOINS AL-QAEDA AND ISLAMIC STATE TERRORISTS TO TOPPLE SYRIAN GOVERNMENT

Or perhaps:

US AWARE ITS MIDEAST WAR POLICY WOULD LEAD TO ISLAMIC STATE BIRTH

Or we can simply say:

US RESPONSIBLE FOR MUCH OF THE BLOODSHED IN SYRIA AND IRAQ

Let’s break down the implications of what the US is doing.

America pouring money into Afghanistan’s future jihadists during the 80s and 90s to repel the Soviet occupation and then walking away, only to begrudgingly harvest the fruit of this neglect in the form of War on Terror 1.0, is an irresponsible act at minimum.

But to repeat the Afghan tragedy today by allowing a terrorist organization to annex land by force and become a rogue state today, only to lead a military campaign to dismantle this state should be considered much more than irresponsible.

Speaking of Afghanistan, ISIL is there, as well.

Worse than yelling “FIRE” in a crowded movie theater, these actions are more like pouring gasoline on the theater’s floor and lighting a match before screaming…

song currently stuck in my head: “breaking these chains (ezel classic remix)” – saliva commandos feat. michelle rivera