{"id":50723,"date":"2016-01-03T16:39:19","date_gmt":"2016-01-03T23:39:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=50723"},"modified":"2016-01-03T16:39:42","modified_gmt":"2016-01-03T23:39:42","slug":"military-responses-a-global-danse-macabre-americas-incestuous-relationship-with-isis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2016\/01\/03\/military-responses-a-global-danse-macabre-americas-incestuous-relationship-with-isis\/","title":{"rendered":"Military responses = a global \u2018danse macabre\u2019! America’s Incestuous Relationship with Isis . . ."},"content":{"rendered":"

by Selvam Canagaratna\u00a0Courtesy Island<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

January 4, 2016, 12:47 am<\/span>
\n“She had all the best things wrong with her \u2013 incest, insanity, drug addiction, bulimia, alopecia: you name it. All the perfect stuff for a memoir. She\u2019s so lucky.”\u2013 Peter Cameron, author.<\/p>\n

The Paris attacks, wrote Tom Dispatch founder, Tom Engelhardt, left him not knowing whether to rant or to weep. “They were clearly acts of calculated provocation meant to reshape our world in grim ways. Worse yet, their effectiveness was pre-guaranteed because, as has been true since 9\/11, the leaders of such terror groups, starting with Osama bin Laden grasped the dynamics of our world, of what makes us tick and especially what provokes us into our own barbarous acts, so much better than our leaders, our militaries, or our national security states have understood them.”<\/p>\n

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“Here in a nutshell is what bin Laden grasped before 9\/11,” wrote Engelhardt: with only modest millions of dollars and a relatively small number of followers, he and his movement couldn\u2019t hope to create the world of their fervid dreams. If, however, he could lure the planet\u2019s \u2018sole superpower\u2019 into stepping into his universe, military first, it would change everything and so do his work for him. And indeed an operation mounted for an estimated $400,000 to $500,000, using 19 dedicated (mostly Saudi) followers armed only with paper cutters, did just that!<\/p>\n

In the past 14 years of failed wars and conflicts of every sort, American military power, aided and abetted by the Saudis, the British, the French, and other countries on a case-by-case basis, essentially fractured the Greater Middle East, noted Engelhardt. “It helped create five failed states \u2013 Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen \u2013 worlds in which terror groups could thrive and in the chaos of which they could attract ever more recruits.”<\/p>\n

To continue to grow, ISIS and the various al-Qaeda groups needed the US and its allies to lend them, as Tom puts it with refreshing candour, “an eternally destructive hand to further smash the worlds around them”! So in response to the Paris attacks, President Francois Hollande\u2019s bombastic promise that France “would lead a war which will be pitiless” was just what, in Tom\u2019s considered view, the terror doctor himself had ordered, in keeping with the growing pressure in Washington for a \u2018big military response\u2019 to the Paris attacks.<\/p>\n

The first French reprisal air strikes against ISIS\u2019s Syrian \u2018capital\u2019, Raqqa, were indeed launched within two days.<\/p>\n

Wrote Engelharadt: “All of this is like manna from heaven for the Islamic State, the more \u2018pitiless\u2019 the better. After all, that group\u2019s goal, as they claim in their magazine and online, is “the extinction of the gray zone” in our world.<\/p>\n

“In other words, they seek the sharpening of distinctions everywhere, meaning the opening of abysses where complexity and interaction once existed. Their dream is to live in a black-and-white world of utter religious and political clarity (and calamity), while engaging in what American pundits like to term a \u2018clash of civilizations\u2019. And \u2013 what a joy for the Islamic State! \u2013 Republican presidential candidates are already responding to the Paris attacks, as Marco Rubio put it, “This is not a grievance-based conflict. This is a clash of civilizations . . . And either they win, or we win.”<\/p>\n

Jeb Bush tried valiantly to offer his meaningless two-cents\u2019 worth: “This is an organized effort to destroy Western civilization and we need to lead in this regard. The answer, of course, is war.” [A fall-back to the same old tried-and-failed Bush-Cheney \u2018doctrine\u2019, as readers will surely recall!]<\/p>\n

But various Republican candidates are also now calling for only accepting Syrian Christians as refugees in the US, prompting Engelhardt\u2019s pertinent comment: “You can\u2019t be more black-and-white than that.”<\/p>\n

In the European context and with the destruction of those \u2018gray zones\u2019 in mind, the Paris attacks should also be considered the Islamic State\u2019s first foray into the politics of the 2017 French presidential campaign, Engelhardt reminded readers. “Think of those mass killings as a wholehearted endorsement of the extremist candidate Marine le Pen, whose poll numbers were already on the rise even before the attacks, and her anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant National Front Party. She is now, in effect, ISIS\u2019s chosen candidate, the one most likely to go after gray zones. In the process, of course, pressure on France\u2019s large, and increasingly isolated Muslim population will only increase.”<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, in the wake of the Paris attacks, Konrad Szymanski, the European Affairs Minister for Poland\u2019s new far-right government, declared his country was unlikely to abide by recently negotiated European Union quotas on accepting refugees from the Greater Middle East. “We\u2019re only going to see more of this in the post-Paris world,” commented Engelhardt. “With the assistance of ISIS and other jihadist groups, the elimination of such gray areas in Europe could, in the end, help crack the EU open, while pushing France\u2019s Muslims into an even worse situation, which would mean more potential recruits for groups like the Islamic State.” In other words, the Paris attacks and other similar acts represent, in Engelhardt\u2019s view, “a potential horn of plenty.”<\/p>\n

At this point, Engelhardt made an exceptionally perceptive observation: “The relationship between that ever-more powerful \u2018shadow government\u2019 in Washington and the Islamic terrorists of our planet is both mutually reinforcing and unnervingly incestuous. Both, of course, emerge as winners when the \u2018gray zones\u2019 begin to disappear.<\/p>\n

“When Paris is hit, after all, law enforcement agencies in the US instantly increase their \u2018alert levels\u2019; the FBI heightens surveillance of Americans under investigation for apparent ties to the Islamic State; and, while local law enforcement \u2018vigilance\u2019 rises even in places like Niagara Falls, New York.”<\/p>\n

In Los Angeles, post-Paris, extra patrols were typically sent “to \u2018critical sites\u2019 and [the city\u2019s police department was] monitoring the ongoing situation, even though it said there were no known threats.”<\/p>\n

The lack of obvious threats is, of course, beside the point when American \u2018safety\u2019 is at stake! In the meantime, the road toward a more locked-down, secretive, governmentally intrusive, less democratic world is being well paved.<\/p>\n

Engelhardt suggested that readers think of this as a kind of global danse macabre in which ISIS attacks \u2013 eight committed guys spread death, chaos, panic, and alarm in our world at next to no cost at all. In response, Washington and its allies engage in a big-budget version of the same, including intensified air campaigns which will, of course, end up taking out civilian targets and infrastructure. American bombs and ISIS weaponry and booby-trapped houses will insure that those towns would end up largely uninhabitable wrecks, littered with corpses and the mere skeletons of buildings.<\/p>\n

Similarly, plans by the US to bomb the Syrian oilfields under the control of ISIS reflect a strategy that is guaranteed to further wreck the infrastructure of the region. This will help ensure that, no matter what happens to ISIS, \u2018Syria\u2019 or any state structure like it will be no more. In fact, says Engelhardt, such acts of destruction, largely from the air, have been taking place across the Greater Middle East since 2001. Though unsuccessful, it has only helped create a zone of failed and increasingly fragile states, uprooted populations leading skeletal lives in haunted lands that also become the hunting grounds for extremists of every sort.<\/p>\n

“A dance of death indeed,”<\/p>\n

concludes Tom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Selvam Canagaratna\u00a0Courtesy Island January 4, 2016, 12:47 am “She had all the best things wrong with her \u2013 incest, insanity, drug addiction, bulimia, alopecia: you name it. All the perfect stuff for a memoir. She\u2019s so lucky.”\u2013 Peter Cameron, author. The Paris attacks, wrote Tom Dispatch founder, Tom Engelhardt, left him not knowing whether […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-forum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50723\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}