Investigation journalist Jeremy Scahill sat down with MSNBCs Ari Melber on Thursday to discuss President Obamas announced plan to escalate the U.S. military campaign against the group known as the Islamic State and offered a damning assessment of the administrations strategy by saying that not only is the militant group (also known by the acronym ISIS) the product of failed military adventurism but that continued attempts to bomb al Qaeda-like groups out of existence simply creates a cycle of blowback that is self-defeating and counter-productive. Scahills analysis of the current situation—including his criticism of the Obama administrations so-called counter-terrorism strategy which he argues has exacerbated, not decreased, the problem of extremism in places like Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen—paints of a picture in which wars and conflict across the Middle East, south Asia, and large swaths of Africa will continue to claim lives and enrich the military-industrial complex while pushing political stability ever further from being attainable. Now I think theres the potential for huge blowback here, Scahill said of Obamas plan to launch airstrikes—including possible carpet bombing—against targets in Syria. I also think that ISIS is, in part, the product of blowback from the Bush era and the Obama era. Scahill continued: What I think were going to end up seeing [in Syria] is the end result of the disaster that Obama inherited, not just from Bush, but from his own first term. Scahill reminded the audience that though former President Bush had bombed Yemen only once (that we know of), but but President Obama has dramatically increased the number of airstrikes in Yemen and Pakistan, ratcheted up the covert war in Somalia, and otherwise expanded the sphere of the U.S. so-called counter-terrorism operations. President Obama, for all the criticism he gets from Dick Cheney, argued Scahill, is actually far more effective at the war games—so to speak—than the neocons were, because hes able also to sell it to the liberal base.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 23:47:04 +0000