Reaping the Whirlwind of Western Support for
Extremist Violence
By Chris Floyd
November 14, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - We, the West,
overthrew Saddam by violence. We overthrew Gadafy by violence. We
are trying to overthrow Assad by violence. Harsh regimes all — but
far less draconian than our Saudi allies, and other tyrannies around
the world. What has been the result of these interventions? A hell
on earth, one that grows wider and more virulent year after year.
Without the American crime of aggressive war
against Iraq — which, by the measurements used by Western
governments themselves, left more than a million innocent people
dead — there would be no ISIS, no “Al Qaeda in Iraq.” Without the
Saudi and Western funding and arming of an amalgam of extremist
Sunni groups across the Middle East, used as proxies to strike at
Iran and its allies, there would be no ISIS. Let’s go back further.
Without the direct, extensive and deliberate creation by the United
States and its Saudi ally of a world-wide movement of armed Sunni
extremists during the Carter and Reagan administrations (in order to
draw the Soviets into a quagmire in Afghanistan), there would have
been no “War on Terror” — and no terrorist attacks in Paris tonight.
Again, let’s be as clear as possible: the hellish
world we live in today is the result of deliberate policies and
actions undertaken by the United States and its allies over the past
decades. It was Washington that led and/or supported the quashing of
secular political resistance across the Middle East, in order to
bring recalcitrant leaders like Nasser to heel and to back corrupt
and brutal dictators who would advance the US agenda of political
domination and resource exploitation.
The open history of the last half-century is very
clear in this regard. Going all the way back to the overthrow of the
democratic government of Iran in 1953, the United States has
deliberately and consciously pushed the most extreme sectarian
groups in order to undermine a broader-based secular resistance to
its domination agenda.
Why bring up this “ancient history” when fresh
blood is running in the streets of Paris? Because that blood would
not be running if not for this ancient history; and because the
reaction to this latest reverberation of Washington’s decades-long,
bipartisan cultivation of religious extremism will certainly be more
bloodshed, more repression and more violent intervention. Which
will, in turn, inevitably, produce yet more atrocities and upheaval
as we are seeing in Paris tonight.
I write in despair. Despair of course at the
depravity displayed by the murderers of innocents in Paris tonight;
but an even deeper despair at the depravity of the egregious
murderers who have brought us to this ghastly place in human
history: those gilded figures who have strode the halls of power for
decades in the high chambers of the West, killing innocent people by
the hundreds of thousands, crushing secular opposition to their
favored dictators — and again, again and again — supporting, funding
and arming some of the most virulent sectarians on earth.
And one further cause of despair: that although
this historical record is there in the open, readily available from
the most mainstream sources, it is and will continue to be
completely ignored, both by the power-gamers and by the public. The
latter will continue to support the former as they replicate and
regurgitate the same old policies of intervention, the same old
agendas of domination and greed, over and over and over again —
creating ever-more fresh hells for us all to live in, and poisoning
the lives of our children, and of all those who come after us.
Chris Floyd is an award-winning American
journalist, and author of the book, Empire
Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Regime. For
more than 11 years he wrote the featured political column, Global
Eye, for The Moscow Times and the St. Petersburg Times in Russia. He
also served as UK correspondent for Truthout.org, and was an
editorial writer for three years for The Bergen Record.
http://www.chris-floyd.com/
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