... Well, it’s interesting that he talked about boots on the ground. Yes, I agree: You need boots on the ground. The question is, who is going to wear those boots? John McCain assumes it’s going to be American troops. American troops have already tried to defeat, you know, the ancestor of the Islamic State, which was al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. There’s a very dangerous game going on here, both from Hillary Clinton, from the Republicans, from Tony Blair. They want to make the case that the Islamic State is a child of the Syrian war. They want to deny the fact that the Islamic State has its roots fundamentally in the destruction of the Iraqi state by the American invasion in 2003. You know, it’s very easy to destroy a state. It took the Iraqi people over a hundred years to build institutions; that was destroyed by the Americans in an afternoon. Once you destroy the state, you create a vacuum. For the first time on Iraqi soil, one saw al-Qaeda groups come in, and that was in 2004, when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was a Jordanian militant, comes into Tal Afar and creates al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. You know, even bin Laden found him to be a bit unpalatable, because he was deeply sectarian and extraordinarily violent. The Americans tried to crush al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, but by 2006, despite the big surge, despite the bombing of Fallujah, Ramadi—you know, names that the American public now are quite familiar with—despite the razing of these cities, the Islamic State was born in 2006. It’s not yesterday’s creation. This was a product of the Iraq War. ... --- Vijay Prashad in a very educational interview with Amy Goodman, Democracy Now, Monday, August 25, 2014 ...
Posted on: Tue, 26 Aug 2014 16:17:37 +0000
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