As much as I hate to see all of the suffering in the Middle East caused by these guys and our cupability in creating the environment (or worse) for their existence, I am afraid it is too late to do anything about it that would not cause more suffering and damage to our already nefarious meddling reputation therefore only further fertilizing the crops of terrorism.

The American fear-mongering machine is about to scare us back into war again

Today al-Qaeda-type movements rule a vast area in northern and western Iraq and eastern and northern Syria, several hundred times larger than any territory ever controlled by Osama bin Laden. It is since bin Laden’s death that al-Qaeda affiliates or clones have had their greatest successes, including the capture of Raqqa in the eastern part of Syria, the only provincial capital in that country to fall to the rebels, in March 2013. In January 2014, ISIS took over Fallujah just forty miles west of Baghdad, a city famously besieged and stormed by US Marines ten years earlier. Within a few months they had also captured Mosul and Tikrit. The battle lines may continue to change, but the overall expansion of their power will be difficult to reverse. With their swift and multipronged assault across central and northern Iraq in June 2014, the ISIS militants had superseded al-Qaeda as the most powerful and effective jihadi group in the world.

These developments came as a shock to many in the West, including politicians and specialists whose view of what was happening often seemed outpaced by events. One reason for this was that it was too risky for journalists and outside observers to visit the areas where ISIS was operating, because of the extreme danger of being kidnapped or murdered. “Those who used to protect the foreign media can no longer protect themselves,” one intrepid correspondent told me, explaining why he would not be returning to rebel-held Syria.

This lack of coverage had been convenient for the US and other Western governments because it enabled them to play down the extent to which the “war on terror” had failed so catastrophically in the years since 9/11. This failure is also masked by deceptions and self-deceptions on the part of governments. Speaking at West Point on America’s role in the world on May 28, 2014, President Obama said that the main threat to the US no longer came from al-Qaeda central but from “decentralized al-Qaeda affiliates and extremists, many with agendas focused on the countries where they operate.” He added that “as the Syrian civil war spills across borders, the capacity of battle-hardened extremist groups to come after us only increases.” This was true enough, but Obama’s solution to the danger was, as he put it, “to ramp up support for those in the Syrian opposition who offer the best alternative to terrorists.” By June he was asking Congress for $500 million to train and equip “appropriately vetted” members of the Syrian opposition. It is here that there was a real intention to deceive, because, as Biden was to admit five months later, the Syrian military opposition is dominated by ISIS and by Jabhat al-Nusra, the official al-Qaeda representative, in addition to other extreme jihadi groups. In reality, there is no dividing wall between them and America’s supposedly moderate opposition allies.

An intelligence officer from a Middle Eastern country neighboring Syria told me that ISIS members “say they are always pleased when sophisticated weapons are sent to anti-Assad groups of any kind, because they can always get the arms off them by threats of force or cash payments.” These are not empty boasts. Arms supplied by US allies such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar to anti-Assad forces in Syria have been captured regularly in Iraq. I experienced a small example of the consequences of this inflow of weapons even before the fall of Mosul, when, in the summer of 2014, I tried to book a flight to Baghdad on the same efficient European airline that I had used a year earlier. I was told it had discontinued flights to the Iraqi capital, because it feared that insurgents had obtained shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles originally supplied to anti-Assad forces in Syria and would use them against commercial aircraft flying into Baghdad International Airport. Western support for the Syrian opposition may have failed to overthrow Assad, but it has been successful in destabilizing Iraq, as Iraqi politicians had long predicted. (...)

The ISIS shock doctrine « Steve Niva/The Immanent Frame

(...) This novel blending of doctrinal orientations and prescriptions from both the Salafist tradition of Islam and twentieth century communist and leftist traditions of revolutionary warfare, updated for the information age—a hybrid combination of divine law given by God and the allegedly universal laws of revolutionary politics and warfare—has led some observers to see ISIS as an incongruous comingling, more contradiction than consequence.

Some like Brian Fishman, for example, cast doubt on the compatibility of blending these two traditions—“Che Guevara warmed over for jihadis”—while Hussein Ibish highlights the ideological contradiction between communist and Salafist ideals, in a useful article accusing ISIS of plundering Mao’s playbook. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues that despite their claims to religious purity, ISIS actually embodies a very modern form of nihilism in which their zealous embrace of brutality even up to their own violent self-destruction reveals a lack of true conviction or faith, making them, in his words, a “disgrace to true fundamentalism.”

But rather than constituting a lack or contradiction, it may be the case that the hybrid doctrine at the root of ISIS simply reflects what Navid Karmani in an earlier discussion of al-Qaeda calls the “explosive synchronicity of non-synchronous elements” in a world where no space remains untouched by hypermediated and globalized information-age capitalism. Like other many other syncretic actors in contemporary global society, both violent and not, ISIS has taken “isolated features from one’s own tradition” and “combined them with foreign as well as with modern elements, images and structures of thought” to construct a tradition “combined with borrowings from a past which isn’t even their own, plus elements which are completely and utterly contemporary.” Paraphrasing Karmani, the hybrid doctrines of ISIS may actually represent a form of belief and action that can spring up anywhere today, given a set of violent conditions and grievances to work with.

In this sense, then, the search for the doctrinal roots of ISIS must also locate its origins in what Alireza Doostdar refers to as the “ecology of cruelty” in Iraq over the past decade resulting from the neoconservative Bush administration’s implementation of what Naomi Klein has described as its own “Shock Doctrine”: exploiting the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks—wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters—to impose unpopular policies. Klein contends that the Bush administration adopted a year zero strategy when invading Iraq that deliberately collapsed the Iraqi state and society and created what Naji would term “zones of savagery” that it sought to “manage” through the likes of Paul Bremer, Ahmad Chalibi and the U.S. military. But as Klein observes, this strategy “has transformed Iraq into the mirror opposite of what the neocons envisioned: not a corporate utopia but a ghoulish dystopia, where going to a simple business meeting can get you lynched, burned alive, or beheaded.” More than any text or doctrinal tradition, this is the fertile ground that is at the root of the shocking doctrines of ISIS.

50 shades of Daesh

The Islamic State is expanding beyond its base in Syria and Iraq to establish militant affiliates in Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt and Libya, American intelligence officials assert, raising the prospect of a new global war on terror.

Intelligence officials estimate that the group’s fighters number 20,000 to 31,500 in Syria and Iraq. There are less formal pledges of support from “probably at least a couple hundred extremists” in countries such as Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Yemen, according to an American counterterrorism official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential information about the group. (...)

New and improved! Buy now! 

13-year-old Who Said “We Dream About Drones” Gets Killed By Drone

“They tell us that these drones come from bases in Saudi Arabia and also from bases in the Yemeni seas and America sends them to kill terrorists, but they always kill innocent people. But we don’t know why they are killing us,” Mohammed said in his interview with the Guardian.

“In their eyes, we don’t deserve to live like people in the rest of the world and we don’t have feelings or emotions or cry or feel pain like all the other humans around the world,” he added.

 RichardPrins wrote: 
That was an interesting story. 

Terrorist or freedom fighter?
Lost in Syria
A troubled Army vet clandestinely joined the fight against Assad. Then an adventure turned into a tragedy.

 ScottFromWyoming wrote: 
The simple / easy messages are the most effective at gaining a mass of nodding followers. It's even better if it answers any slight pang of guilt of misgiving over the problems.  Unfortunately, it's almost always wrong as well. The "truth" will almost always be served with an asterisk.

 islander wrote: 
My sister's not political at all; not sure how most of her kids wound up so pro-military. Anyway, her daughter posted:

Step 1: Watch American Sniper.
Step 2: Dry your eyes. 
Step 3: Thank a Vet.

then someone commented:
Step 4: shake head wondering how anyone can possibly think Chris Kyle is anything but the greatest hero of our time

---

Oh, I'm shaking my head all right.  

 islander wrote: 
Agreed. He's the very same sort of monster that kills for the Taliban, Al Queda, etc. He just worshiped a different god and flew a different flag.

 miamizsun wrote: 
I really wanted to. But after seeing the reviews and the divisive hype that followed, I think I'll be skipping it. The book glossed over many of the real problems and glorified some messed up stuff all on it's own. It looks like the movie skipped the few redeeming parts of the book and re-envisioned the message altogether (and for the worse). 

Chis Kyle was a monster, but we made him.  The universe sent another monster to adjust the ledger, but in the end we all lost. The telling (and re-telling, and selective interpretation) of the story has only taken us further from a positive path.  Only when the space aliens arrive to eat/enslave us all will we have a powerful enough enemy to unite mankind. By then it will probably be too late. 

 Red_Dragon wrote: 
i haven't seen american sniper

but from what i've heard it's heavily edited

 miamizsun wrote: 
Not sure about the American Sniper analogy, but it is a powerful nine minutes.

Confusion Through Sand from ornana films on Vimeo.

 

 

This short does in 9 minutes what "American Sniper" tried to do in 2 hours.

This is a must see for all Americans to fully realize just what we are doing to our young men and women in the service.  The psychological impossible situations we are putting them through needs to be brought to light regarding the true futility and horrors of war and its effects on those who are forced to participate:

It would seem the plot of Platoon is the shocking norm more than an anomaly for our troops.   

Video: Shouts of 'Allahu Akbar' at French Magazine Shooting

 

breaking stuff

 

**Warning: Some of these videos are extremely graphic.**

 

edit: looks like some of the video has been taken down (already)

(WikiLeaked) CIA analysis: ‘high-value targeting’ had limited effect against Taliban - The Washington Post

ISIS truck: