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.
The US anti-Assad strategy in Syria, in other words, bolstered the very al-Qaeda factions the US had fought in Iraq, by using the Gulf states and Turkey to finance the same groups in Syria. As a direct consequence, the secular and moderate elements of the Free Syrian Army were increasingly supplanted by virulent Islamist extremists backed by US allies.
It should be noted that precisely at this time, the West, the Gulf states and Turkey, according to the DIA’s internal intelligence reports, were supporting AQI and other Islamist factions in Syria to “isolate” the Assad regime. By Flynn’s account, despite his warnings to the White House that an ISIS attack on Iraq was imminent, and could lead to the destabilization of the region, senior Obama officials deliberately continued the covert support to these factions.
Not that the reality of Iraqis thinking the U.S. is allied with ISIS is anything new. For example, read the following from the post, Accusations Emerge That the U.S. Is Aiding ISIS – The Latest “Conspiracy Theory” Circulating in Iraq, published in March:
But that enmity for the United States circulates beyond the militias that once fought U.S. soldiers, surfacing also in parliamentary debates and Iraqi media reports and even at the highest ranks of the national armed forces that the United States is aiding.
“Everybody knows that the Americans are dropping supplies to Daesh,” said Brig. Gen. Abed al-Maliki, a senior Iraqi army commander based in the city of Samarra, about 80 miles north of Baghdad, using another term for the Islamic State.
What’s more, he said, during some of the fiercest fighting around Samarra last year, U.S. Special Operations forces dropped behind enemy lines to assist Islamic State militants.
“They came in with parachutes, and they were helping to bomb the city,” he said.
U.S. airstrikes against the Islamic State, he contended, are probably just a cover for efforts to support the group.
“It’s just a show,” he said, sitting in the city’s army command headquarters. “If the Americans want to finish something, they will finish it. If they wanted to liberate Iraq, they could.”
That was then. This is now.
From the Washington Post:
BAIJI, Iraq — On the front lines of the battle against the Islamic State, suspicion of the United States runs deep. Iraqi fighters say they have all seen the videos purportedly showing U.S. helicopters airdropping weapons to the militants, and many claim they have friends and relatives who have witnessed similar instances of collusion.
Ordinary people also have seen the videos, heard the stories and reached the same conclusion — one that might seem absurd to Americans but is widely believed among Iraqis — that the United States is supporting the Islamic State for a variety of pernicious reasons that have to do with asserting U.S. control over Iraq, the wider Middle East and, perhaps, its oil.
“It is not in doubt,” said Mustafa Saadi, who says his friend saw U.S. helicopters delivering bottled water to Islamic State positions. He is a commander in one of the Shiite militias that last month helped push the militants out of the oil refinery near Baiji in northern Iraq alongside the Iraqi army.
The Islamic State is “almost finished,” he said. “They are weak. If only America would stop supporting them, we could defeat them in days.”
Iraqi officials complain that their task is hampered by what is universally perceived as the lackluster U.S. response to the threat posed by the Islamic State.
“We don’t believe the Americans support Daesh,” said Naseer Nouri, spokesman for the Ministry of Defense, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “But it is true that most people are saying they do, and they are right to believe that the Americans should be doing much more than they are. It’s because America is so slow that most people believe they are supporting Daesh.”
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.
Yet Dick Cheney is still invited on mainstream media to talk foreign policy.
Just another day in the…
In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
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A while back when I read that Iraqi soldiers would abandon their weapons and run away when confronted by ISIS fighters, I wondered why they would do that. One plausible explanation that I surmised was that they didn’t see any benefit to themselves that was worth fighting for. If the Iraqi soldiers concluded that the country wasn’t being run for their benefit, why should they risk being injured or captured and killed by ISIS soldiers? By this time they would have seen that the spoils of war were going to their military leaders and their foreign backers. They were on the ground there and could see through all the bullshit that was being fed to the world press and duly reported. If the Americans think it’s worth fighting for, let them go and do the fighting. After all, it’s their corporations that will benefit from all the chaos that has resulted from their invasion of Iraq.