Nafeez Ahmed ISIS

Trump’s Middle East Foreign Policy is a Disaster Waiting to Happen

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Today’s post will focus on Trump’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia, a revolting spectacle which I could barely bring myself to follow. It all started Saturday morning as I tried to enjoy a beautiful day with my growing family and parents who were in town for a visit. My day was more or less ruined upon witnessing the appalling scene of Trump and his top advisors dancing with the rulers of the terrorist sponsoring state of Saudi Arabia while clutching swords. I’m sorry for doing this to you, but in case you missed it…

– From last month’s piece: America Has Become a Total Joke

The main thing we learned from Trump’s grotesque, orb clutching spectacle of a visit to the 9/11-funding absolute monarchy of Saudi Arabia, was that our demented President essentially green-lighted the Saudis to do whatever the heck they want in the Middle East. Considering Saudi Arabia is effectively being run by a 30-something princeling with sociopathic tendencies, absolutely nothing good can come of this. While Obama’s foreign policy in the Middle East was an unmitigated humanitarian and geopolitical disaster, it appears Trump’s doing his best to one up his predecessor.

Saudi Arabia is the most dangerous entity in the Middle East, and the writing’s been on the wall for a long time. In fact, German intelligence warned about it back in 2015. As The Telegraph reported:

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Epic Foreign Policy Fail – Most Iraqis Think the U.S. Government Supports ISIS

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My belief is, we will, in fact be greeted as liberators.

– Dick Cheney on NBC’s Meet the Press, March 16, 2003

The fighters there insist there have been no strikes by the Americans at all. “We’d be better off without them,” said 1st Lt. Murtada Fadl, who is serving with the Iraqi elite forces in Baiji. He said that the only air support had come from the Iraqi air force and that he wishes the government would ask the Russians to replace the Americans.

“The image of the U.S. was damaged in the region, so they created Daesh in order to fight them and restore their image,” said Mohammed Abdul Khaleq, a journalist for a local TV station who was drinking coffee in a cafe favored by writers, most of whom said they agreed.

– From the Washington Post article: Iraqis Think the U.S. is in Cahoots With the Islamic State, and it is Hurting the War  

The Iraq War will go down as the single greatest foreign policy blunder in U.S. history. It is simply the unmitigated disaster that keeps on giving.

To recap, the people who the U.S. government supposedly “liberated,” now hate Americans so much that most of them are convinced the U.S. is in cahoots with ISIS. Not that you could blame them for coming to this conclusion, considering the indisputable role the U.S. government played in the creation of ISIS.

From the post: Additional Details Emerge on How U.S. Government Policy Created, Armed, Supported and Funded ISIS

Telling Hasan that he had read the document himself, Flynn said that it was among a range of intelligence being circulated throughout the US intelligence community that had led him to attempt to dissuade the White House from supporting these groups, albeit without success.

Despite this, Flynn’s account shows that the US commitment to supporting the Syrian insurgency against Bashir al-Assad led the US to deliberately support the very al-Qaeda affiliated forces it had previously fought in Iraq.

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So Who’s Really Sponsoring ISIS? Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Other U.S. “Allies”

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Mass surveillance at home and endless military projection abroad are the twin sides of the same coin of national security, which must simply be maximized as much as possible. 

Conspicuously missing from President Hollande’s decisive declaration of war however, was any mention of the biggest elephant in the room: state-sponsorship.

A senior Western official familiar with a large cache of intelligence obtained this summer told the Guardian that “direct dealings between Turkish officials and ranking ISIS members was now ‘undeniable.’”

ISIS, in other words, is state-sponsored — indeed, sponsored by purportedly Western-friendly regimes in the Muslim world, who are integral to the anti-ISIS coalition. Which then begs the question as to why Hollande and other Western leaders expressing their determination to “destroy” ISIS using all means necessary, would prefer to avoid the most significant factor of all: the material infrastructure of ISIS’ emergence in the context of ongoing Gulf and Turkish state support for Islamist militancy in the region.

There are many explanations, but one perhaps stands out: the West’s abject dependence on terror-toting Muslim regimes, largely to maintain access to Middle East, Mediterranean and Central Asian oil and gas resources.

– From the excellent Nafeez Ahmed article: NATO is Harbouring the Islamic State

With the way the French government’s cracking down on the civil liberties of its own citizens, you’d think the general public was supporting and funding ISIS as opposed to the French government allies who actually are.

As an example, we learn the following from ArsTechica:

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