Daesh,
Creature of the West
By Pepe Escobar
March 27, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Sputnik
" - James Shea, Deputy Assistant
Secretary of Emerging Threats at
NATO – now that’s a lovely title –
recently gave a talk at a private
club in London on the Islamic State/Daesh.
Shea, as many will remember, made
his name as NATO’s spokesman during
the NATO war on Yugoslavia in 1999.
After his talk Shea engaged in a
debate with a source I very much
treasure. The source later gave me
the lowdown.
According to Saudi intelligence,
Daesh was invented by the US
government – in Camp Bacca, near the
Kuwait border, as many will
remember — to essentially finish
off the Shiite-majority Nouri al-Maliki
government in Baghdad.
It didn’t happen this way,
of course. Then, years later, in the
summer of 2014, Daesh routed the
Iraqi Army on its way to conquer
Mosul.
The Iraqi Army fled. Daesh
operatives then annexed ultra-modern
weapons that took US instructors
from six to twelve months to train
the Iraqis in and…surprise! Daesh
incorporated the weapons in their
arsenals in 24 hours.
In the
end, Shea frankly admitted to the
source that Gen
David Petraeus,
conductor of the much-lauded 2007
surge, had trained these Sunnis now
part of Daesh in Anbar province
in Iraq.
Saudi
intelligence still maintains that
these Iraqi Sunnis were not
US-trained – as Shea confirmed –
because the Shiites in power
in Baghdad didn’t allow it. Not
true. The fact is the Daesh core –
most of them former commanders and
soldiers in
Saddam Hussein’s
army — is indeed a US-trained
militia.
True to form, at the end of the
debate, Shea went on to blame Russia
for absolutely everything that’s
happening today – including Daesh
terror.
Mr. Sykes and Monsieur Picot, you’re
dead
Now let’s go back to the
proclamation of the Daesh Caliphate
in June 29, 2014. That was
choreographed as a symbolic
abolition of the Sykes-Picot border
that split the Middle East a century
ago. At the same time, abandoning
the option of a military push
to take Baghdad, Daesh chose
to regionalize and internationalize
the fight, creating their own
transnational state and denouncing
regional states as “impostors”. All
that coupled with the amp up of any
chaos strategy capable of horrifying
Western public opinion.
For large swathes of a Sunni Arab
audience, this was powerful stuff.
Daesh was proclaiming themselves,
in a warped manner, as the sole real
heir of the different Arab Springs;
the only totally autonomous regional
movement, depending exclusively
on its own local base, made up of
numerous Bedouin tribes.
But how did we get here?
Let’s go back once again – now
to Iraq in the 1990s,
during the Clinton
era.
The strategic logic at the time
spelled out an instrumentalization
of UN resolutions — with Washington
de facto controlling Iraq’s oil,
manipulating the price as a means
of pressure over trade competitors
much more dependent on Iraqi oil
such as China, Japan and selected
European nations.
9/11
turned this state of affairs upside
down – leading to the 2003 neocon
ideological stupidity and subsequent
amateurism managing an occupation
in total ignorance of history and
the ultra-complex dynamics
between the Iraqi state and society.
Saddam Hussein was the de facto last
avatar of a political arrangement
invented by imperial Britain
in 1920. With the invasion and
occupation, the Iraq state
collapsed. And the Cheney regime had
no clue what to do with it.
There was no Sunni alternative. So
Plan B, under major pressure
by Shiites and Kurds, was to give
voice to the majority. The problem
is political parties ended up being
religious and ethnic parties. The
partition of power, Lebanese-style —
Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds – turned
out to be a dysfunctional
nightmare.
Between 2005 and 2008, this American
attempt to rebuild the Iraqi state
yielded a horrendous confessional
civil war between Sunnis and
Shiites. The Sunnis lost. And that
largely explains the subsequent
success of Daesh in creating a “Sunniland”.
The US occupation-Arab Spring love
affair
Now
let’s turn to the Syrian version
of the
Arab Spring
in February/March 2011. Initial
protests against Assad’s iron rule
were peaceful – multi-communitarian
and multi-confessional. But soon
anti-Alawite rancor started
to radicalize a significant part
of the Sunni majority.
As historian Pierre-Jean Luizard, a
specialist in Iraq, Syria and
Lebanon at the French CNRS reminds
us, Syria was the favorite land of Hanbalism
– a most conservative branch
of Sunni Islam that highly
influenced the emergence of Wahhabism
in the Arabian Peninsula. That
implies a virulent anti-Shiism. Thus
the emergence among the Syrian armed
opposition of multiple Salafi-jihadi
groups, most of all Jabhat al-Nusra
– a.k.a. al-Qaeda in Syria.
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Meanwhile, Assad fine-tuned a
message to the West and his own
Sunni bourgeoisie oscilating
between allegiance and dissidence;
it’s me, or chaos. Chaos ensued,
anyway; horrendous structural
violence, all-around institutional
decrepitude, total territorial
fragmentation.
So it’s fair to argue that both US
occupation and the Syrian Arab
Spring ended up producing the same
result. With some differences;
in Iraq, Daesh enjoys the (silent)
support of a majority of Sunni
Arabs. In Syria, Sunnis are divided;
Daesh may rule the desert — Bedouin
culture, but it’s Jabhat al-Nusra
that captured significant Sunni
support in big urban centers such
as Aleppo. In Iraq, the borders
between the three large communities
– Sunni, Shiite, Kurd – are more or
less frozen. In Syria, it’s a
never-ending jigsaw puzzle.
What happens next is a mystery. The
de facto independence of Iraq
Kurdistan may solidify. The Baghdad
government may increasingly
represent only Shiites. Yet it’s
hard to see Daesh consolidating its
control of Sunni Iraq – not with the
ongoing Battle of Mosul.
Blowback rules the wilderness
of mirrors
It’s
easy to dismiss Daesh as the apex of
barbarian
cultural idiosyncrasies. Even
wallowing in gruesomeness, Daesh has
been able to project a universalist
dimension beyond its Sunni Arab
Middle Eastern base. It’s like the
clash of civilizations playing in a
wilderness of mirrors. Daesh
amplifies the clash not between East
and West, or the Arab world and the
Atlanticist hegemon, but mostly
between a certain (warped)
conception of Islam and assorted
infidels. Daesh “welcomes” everyone,
even Catholic Europeans while
persecuting Arab infidels and bad
Muslims.
It’s no wonder the Caliphate — a
concrete utopia on the ground –
finds an echo among young lone
wolves living in the West. Because
Daesh insists on the colonial
Franco-British – and then
neocolonial American — history
of Muslims being trampled upon by a
dominating, infidel West, they
manage to channel a diffuse
sentiment of injustice among the
young.
Everyone – US, France, Britain,
Russia, Iran — is now at war with Daesh
(Turkey only half-heartedly, as well
as the House of Saud and the GCC
petrodollar gang; for them this not
a priority.)
But this is a war without a serious
political long-term perspective. No
one is discussing the place
for Sunni Arabs in an Iraq dominated
by the Shiite majority; how to put
the Syrian state back together; or
whether private donors to Daesh
from Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and
the Emirates will simply disappear.
The encirclement of Raqqa and the
re-conquest of Mosul will mean
absolutely nothing if the causes of Daesh’s
initial success are not addressed.
It starts with the West’s
mission civilisatrice as the
cover story for unbounded colonial
domination, and it straddles the
methodical, inexorable, slow motion
American destruction of Iraq.
Blowback will continue to reign
over the wilderness of mirrors; an
attack near the British Parliament
by a knife-carrying lone wolf
“soldier answering “its call”
killing four people mirrored by US
jets bombing a school near Raqqa
killing thirty-three civilians.
Petraeus may have trained them
in the deserts of Al-Anbar. But most
of all that rough beast, slouching
towards Camp Bacca to be born, bore
the touch of a Western mind.
