The U.S. Empire and ISIS:
A Tale of Two Death Cults
“Obama is a flame-thrower, a fire-spitter, a
pyromaniac on a mission to incinerate
humanity’s capacity to resist – a vision
shared by the jihadist death cults.”
By Glen Ford
February 20, 2015 "ICH"
- "BAR"
- President Obama is a master of military
supply and demand. His operatives and allies
supply jihadists with enough weapons,
financing and, in the case of Libya, a
Euro-American air force, to plunge vast
tracts of Africa and Asia into bloody chaos,
thus creating a demand for intervention by
the planet’s only “indispensable” nation:
the United States. It’s a diabolical formula
for fomenting hell on earth, driven by a
simple logic: Since the U.S. is superior to
the rest of the world ONLY in military
terms, Washington finds its ultimate
advantage in turning the whole world into a
battlefield. U.S. imperialism in terminal
decay sees no salvation except through
global war.
Of necessity, Obama is a
flame-thrower, a fire-spitter, a pyromaniac
on a mission to incinerate humanity’s
capacity to resist – a vision shared by the
jihadist death cults America has incubated
for the past four decades.
ISIS, the Islamic State,
begat by Al Qaida, which was begat by Saudi
Arabia, Pakistan and the U.S. in
Afghanistan, now declares sovereignty over
portions of Libya, having occupied much of
Syria and Iraq and planted the black flag in
southern Yemen and the suburbs of Paris,
where its token presence is enough to drive
millions of Europeans into a decrepit
Crusader palsy. A subcontinent of thieves
who have plundered the planet for half a
millennia vow to send the dark Others back
to “their own countries” – as if Europe had
not stolen these African and Asian homelands
long ago. In the end, however, what Europe
will send is more weapons to the jihadists,
mimicking Uncle Sam.
“Boko Haram has proven
quite useful to the consolidation of U.S.
military dominance in West Africa.”
This week, as happens
every year, France, Britain, Italy and other
piratical European states join the U.S.
Africa Command’s military Flintlock
exercise, designed to deepen African
militaries’ dependence on western weaponry,
training and finance. Chad, a client state
of both Washington and Paris, is the nominal
host of the exercise – as if any of the
African participants could actually say No
to an imperial proposal. The Flintlock
maneuvers have converged with a regional
military offensive against Boko Haram, the
northern Nigerian jihadists that have gained
so much ground since the U.S. and NATO
turned Libya over to the tender mercies of
Arab jihadists, in 2011. Libyan weapons
flooded south across the Sahara desert,
bringing instability to the vast Sahel
region – which is like honey to the Pentagon
bee. The U.S. military has announced that it
will “share communications equipment and
intelligence” with the
five nations preparing to battle Boko
Haram around oil-rich Lake Chad – imperial
double-speak for putting the Americans in
charge of the command-and-control mechanisms
of the armies of Chad, Nigeria, Niger,
Cameroon and Benin. Boko Haram has proven
quite useful to the consolidation of U.S.
military dominance in West Africa.
Meanwhile, the jihadist
rampage has come full circle in Libya, where
both ISIS and Al Qaida have multiple
strongholds. Jihadist “ultras” are most
deeply entrenched in Derna, a port city east
of Benghazi that accounted for the most
jihadists killed or captured in Iraq during
the American occupation. When U.S. and NATO
finally destroyed Muammar Gaddafi’s forces
after seven months of bombing, hundreds of
jihadists were sent to Syria, hoping to
repeat the process against President Bashar
al-Assad. Many have since returned to Libya,
bringing the black flag of the Islamic State
with them.
“Libyan weapons flooded
south across the Sahara desert, bringing
instability to the vast Sahel region – which
is like honey to the Pentagon bee.”
Egyptian dictator Abdel
Fattah el-Sisi, a supporter of one of three
rump “governments” in Libya, bombed ISIS
targets in Derna after the decapitation of
21 Egyptian Coptic Christian migrant
workers. The atrocity, combined with a
declaration of allegiance to ISIS by some
Islamic rebels on Egypt’s Sinai peninsula,
prompted el-Sisi to call for the U.S.-led
coalition against ISIS to put Libya on its
bombing list – an invitation from the
world’s most populous Arab nation for the
U.S. to extend the scope of its military
operations to Egypt’s western border.
Jihad is truly a blessing
for U.S. imperial objectives – but there is
nothing coincidental about it. The U.S.
installed jihadists in power in Libya,
leading directly to the destabilization of
vast lands to the South, which in turn
facilitated the U.S. Africa Command’s
mission to militarily dominate the
continent. The U.S.-led jihadist proxy war
against secular Syria was the incubator for
ISIS, providing the U.S. with a new portal
into Iraq, an excuse to operate openly in
Syria, and now a possible chance to re-enter
Libya cloaked as a savior from the jihadist
hordes that the U.S. armed, financed and
empowered only four years ago.
ISIS has been such a boon
to U.S. war-fomenting strategy, Obama has
been emboldened to demand that Congress give
him three years of virtually unlimited,
renewable powers to reboot the War on
Terror. Like George Bush before him, Obama
refuses to put geographic limits on the
scope of his crusade against ISIS and its
“associates.” The world is his live-fire
chessboard, he can call the pieces by
whatever name he wants, and make up the
rules along the way. Every move is
calculated to lead to greater militarization
of relations among nations and peoples,
because the military is America’s strongest
suit – in fact, its only suit.
The truth is, the rulers
of the United States are as much a death
cult as the Islamic State, although U.S.
imperialism is infinitely more dangerous.
Let us do our best to send them both to
their respective Paradises.
BAR executive editor Glen
Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com