[Peace-discuss] The Powers Behind The Islamic State

[David Johnson via Peace-discuss]

  The Powers Behind The Islamic State

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Educate! <http://www.popularresistance.org/category/educate/> Iraq 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/iraq/>, ISIS 
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By The Real News, www.therealnews.com 
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August 25th, 2014
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JESSICA DESVARIEUX, TRNN PRODUCER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm 
Jessica Desvarieux in Baltimore. We're continuing our coverage of the 
ongoing turmoil in Iraq. Now with the rise of the extremist group the 
Islamic State, the drums of war in Iraq are beating louder and louder in 
the mainstream press.

I'm pleased to welcome our guest, Nafeez Ahmed, to help us put things in 
perspective. Nafeez is a best-selling author, investigative journalist, 
and international security scholar who writes regularly for /The 
Guardian/. He has a new novel out called /Zero Point/, which he says 
anticipated the Iraq crisis that's going on right now. Thanks for 
joining us, Nafeez.

NAFEEZ AHMED, JOURNALIST, THE GUARDIAN: Thanks, Jessica.

DESVARIEUX: So, Nafeez, there's ISIL, there's ISIS, there's the Islamic 
State--IS some people are calling it. But they're all the same group, 
right? Can you sort of give us a sense of the evolution of this 
extremist group and how they get started?

AHMED: Well, the origins of the group come from militant groups 
affiliated to al-Qaeda that are operating in Iraq and Syria. And that's 
where it gets murky, because, as we know, these groups were kind of 
engaged in all kinds of militant activity fighting the Assad regime. 
They were also active in responding to U.S. occupation after the 2003 
invasion. So there's a mix of different actors involved.

So in Iraq we had elements of even the Ba'ath party and ex-Saddam 
supporters who were actually--according to many reports, they were being 
recruited by these al-Qaeda militants. And in Syria we had this 
increasing kind of--the borders of separation between the Iraqi troops 
and the Syria groups, it became increasingly much more porous, because 
they were fighting back and forth, they were crossing borders.

And what makes it more murky is how these groups really became as kind 
of virulent and kind of influential as they have, which is really the 
kind of--you know, you follow the money. And you follow the money, we're 
looking at the involvement of the Gulf states, which have really 
empowered these groups over time and increased their ability to operate. 
They've increased their arms, logistical trading. So we've had the 
Saudis engaged in funding these groups in Syria.

DESVARIEUX: Do we have proof of this?

AHMED: We have absolute proof. I mean, it's really a matter of public 
record. It's come out from--you've got a range of different forms of 
evidence, from documents produced by Westpoint military analysts to 
investigative reports by journalists on the ground writing for 
publications like /The New York Times/, /Washington Post/. So it's very 
clear. And we've had semiofficial and official confirmations from the 
CIA, from people in the State Department, other people in the Pentagon, 
even from British officials that have been involved in coordinating the 
Gulf states and supplying these kinds of virulent groups that we know 
are affiliated to al-Qaeda to basically topple Assad.

And that's obviously had a direct blowback effect in Iraq, because these 
very same groups that were being supported are now streaming across the 
border, and they've now formed this kind of breakaway group, which is 
styled off as ISIS or ISIL or whatever and now have called themselves 
the Islamic State. And what makes it really more disturbing is, going 
deeper into that evidence of the role of the Saudis and the Qataris and 
Kuwait, which has been confirmed by various different sources, is really 
the way in which the U.S. and the U.K. have overseen that process. And 
that's something which isn't so much acknowledged in the mainstream, 
that actually Britain and the United States were involved in knowingly 
kind of facilitating the support to these groups, despite knowing their 
links to al-Qaeda calling back as early as 2009.

DESVARIEUX: Wow. How did they support these groups?

AHMED: So we had--you must remember the big batch of files that was 
obtained by WikiLeaks from the private intelligence company Strategic 
Forecasting, Stratfor.

DESVARIEUX: Yes.

AHMED: So that batch of files contains some really interesting 
correspondence, including correspondence where some senior executives at 
Stratfor were describing meetings that they had had with senior Pentagon 
officials and senior U.S. army officials where those officials openly 
described how U.S. special forces and British special forces had been 
operating in Syria long before the kind of major, major civil unrest 
that kind of really broke out, and they had been operating in kind of 
supporting these groups. And it was very clearly stated by these 
officers at the time--and the emails are there, people can check them 
out, and I've written about them in some of my /Guardian/ articles and 
some of my other articles elsewhere--that they quite explicitly said 
that this is about destabilizing the Assad regime from within. They had 
even explored the possibility of airstrikes on targets. But the favored 
policy was using these groups as a proxy force to destabilize Assad's 
regime.

DESVARIEUX: Remind us again: why do they want to destabilize Assad so badly?

AHMED: So there's a lot of different kind of ways of looking at this, 
and I think it's difficult to kind of pinpoint which one is necessarily 
the most important one. But one of the ones that I focused on is the 
role that Assad has played in kind of cozying up to Russia, allowing 
Russia to kind of develop a foothold in the region. And that's kind of 
tied to this increasing pipeline geopolitics in the region. So you've 
got this interesting kind of geopolitical jockeying over pipelines 
running across Syria from this field that is a kind of disputed field 
that Iran has access to and also Qatar has access to. Now, the exact 
border of that field is a little bit disputed, and both Iran and Qatar 
have been trying to kickstart ways to get that field into production. 
The pipelines would cross Syria and they would basically, ideally, 
supply Europe. It's a very ambitious project.

Some people have raised lots of questions about whether these projects 
are really just pipedreams, in a sense. You know, are they viable, 
really, given the politics of the region? And this kind of stuff has 
been going on for years. They've been discussing these kind of ideas. 
But there was definitely real efforts to get these projects kind of off 
the table. So Iran signed a memorandum with Syria. Qatar had been having 
real negotiations with Saudi and Turkey and other countries. So these 
were kind of two competing pipeline routes. And, obviously, the U.S. 
favored the one which would involve Qatar and it wasn't very happy with 
the one that involved Iran and kind of would favor Russia. The United 
States has for long time wanted to ensure that it kind of sidelines 
Russia and Iran in all of these various pipeline projects. So when Iran 
signed this kind of memorandum with Assad, that was kind of considered 
like a major kind of strategic setback, and something kind of needed to 
be done.

And apart from that, there were also many other--there was generally 
other kind of geopolitical issues apart from the fact that Russia has a 
military base there. There's also issues such as the role that Assad has 
played in relation to the Middle East conflict, the support that they've 
provided to Hamas, their relationship with the Iranians, and that whole 
general thing. So there's this general perception of Syria being this 
part of the so-called axis of evil in a way. You know. So the whole 
pipeline thing kind of accelerated that fear, I think, and made them 
want to do something. And they had a lot of indications that with 
different crises that Syria is going through domestically--economic 
crisis, there was a widespread drought due to climate change that was 
accelerating--and we even have State Department cables, also leaked by 
WikiLeaks, where literally we have State Department officials talking 
about how there is going to be civil unrest in Syria very soon, very 
likely, because of food prices and the strain on food due to these 
droughts and due to the effect on farmers. So they knew something was 
going to kick off in Syria. They knew that there was going to be 
popular--kind of popular uprising of some kind. And it seems that they 
planned to kind of exploit that, to get some of these jihadist guys in 
there, hijack that movement, direct it in a way that they felt that they 
could control. But, of course, as we've seen, it's kind of gone out of 
control.

DESVARIEUX: It is out of control. And, I mean, I actually have been 
personally affected by some of this, because I shared on the program 
earlier than I lost my friend, Jim Foley. He was a journalist who was 
covering the Syrian conflict. And these men who beheaded him--let's not 
mince words here--they're not good guys. I mean, these are extremists, 
fanatics that are distorting Islam to rise to power. And there are going 
to be folks out there who are going to say, you know what, Nafeez, we 
need to figure out a way to stop these guys. You know, we're hearing 
more aggressive language by politicians saying that we--possibly even 
boots on the ground, things of that nature. So there's sort of this 
impulse to use aggression in order to combat some of this. What would 
you say to folks like that based on the context?

AHMED: Well, the first thing, I think that is very important to grasp: 
the role that our governments have played in fomenting the crisis that 
we see. The rise of ISIS was kind of predictable, and it's something 
that some analysts--analysts have warned about civil war in Iraq for 
years. I guess the accelerated nature of what we're seeing, most people 
haven't anticipated that, but it was predictable. And when we look at 
the way in which we've been funding some of these groups, it's kind of 
ironic that we have the very same people now calling for boots on the 
ground, calling for a response, are the same people that have been very 
loud in their support for arming some of the most virulent of elements 
of these rebel groups. And even though the Obama administration, for 
instance, has given a lot of lip service, saying that we only want to 
fund, you know, the kind of moderate rebels and so on and so forth--but 
the Obama administration has actively coordinated the financing that has 
come from the Gulf states to the very types of groups that they 
historically have always favored, which is the most virulent jihadist 
al-Qaeda affiliated organizations. So there is a contradiction here in 
what we're being told now and the way in which policymakers have kind of 
created this crisis and now not taken responsibility for this crisis.

And there is an argument to be made, I think--and it's unclear to--you 
know, I wouldn't put this forward as a kind of a firm interpretation of 
what's happening, 'cause I think there are many different actors and 
many different interests at play, but if we look at some of the reports 
that we've had over the last few years of the plans for the region, 
there are certainly elements in the Pentagon of a neoconservative 
persuasion who have seen the rise of this kind of group in a way as a 
boon to reconfigure the Middle East. Now, the evidence for that comes 
from a range of quite credible sources. So one of the sources I looked 
at was a publicly available RAND report that was published a couple of 
years. It was commissioned by the U.S. army. And it was a kind of a 
thought piece. It was a policy briefing. It was looking at policy 
options for the United States in essentially reconfiguring the Middle 
East and exploring how to counter terrorism. But those policy options 
were pretty Machiavellian in some ways, very, very--I mean, obviously 
there were strategic calculations and the overarching objective, 
ostensibly, was countering terrorism. But what they proposed to do was 
very worrying. There were various there was a range of scenarios that 
were explored. One of them was divide-and-rule, openly talking about 
empowering Salafi jihadists to some extent in order to kind of weaken 
Iranian influence, openly talking about empowering, using the Gulf 
states, because they have access to the petroleum resources, so using 
them to kind of funnel support to these groups that would eventually 
create kind of like a vortex of intra-Muslim conflict that would get 
terrorists and extremists on different sides fighting each other, that 
would weaken all of them and allow U.S. interests and Israeli interests 
to kind of consolidate their own kind of security while these guys are 
fighting amongst themselves.

So here we see, you know, when you have these kind of very shortsighted 
geopolitical kind of concepts about how to obtain a victory against 
counterterrorism, you can kind of see where it leads you up this really 
dangerous garden path, thinking that we're going to solve this problem 
by funding these groups. So if we look at what's happening now, look at 
how this funding has happened, and we look at the RAND reports, for 
example, you get a pretty clear indication that some of that policy 
seems to have been at play to some extent. How far it's gone and to what 
extent no one can know. It's speculation. But that's what worries me, 
that you've got this kind of hubris that we can do this, we know what 
we're doing. It's the same hubris that we saw with the neocons after 
9/11, pre-Iraq War, post-Iraq War, the same hubris of running in to the 
Middle East, reconfiguring the region.

You know, another piece of evidence that I thought was quite disturbing 
that I've written about the past was the 2005--these maps from 2005 in 
the arms /Armed Forces Journal/, where a senior adviser to the Pentagon 
responsible at that time for kind of future planning in kind of warfare 
was proposing that the Middle East be broken up along ethnic and 
religious lines to create a more peaceful Middle East. So again you see 
this thread of thinking which--again, it's imperial hubris, really, to 
think that--you know, whether it's kind of motivated by good reasons or 
not, it's the same kind of colonial mentality we saw with the British, 
that we'll go in, we'll redraw the borders, we'll kind of tame the 
savages. So I'm concerned that that's the kind of mentality that we've 
seen. So talking about military intervention and boots on the ground now 
in that context is very worrying, because are we seeing that our 
interests are actually being kind of merged with that kind of imperial 
hubris?

DESVARIEUX: Yeah. But, Nafeez, then what do we do? Because some people 
are saying, these groups are out of control, you're just going to get 
more chaos, more people are going to die. What do you do? In this 
situation, how do we handle this?

AHMED: This is a difficult question, because when you're faced with that 
juggernaut of a military-industrial complex that we don't quite 
understand, it's very opaque, and we don't know where they're going, we 
don't know how they're fomenting things, it's difficult to say what the 
answer is. The answer is certainly not to very simply just put boots on 
the ground and start blowing people up, because we've done that. We did 
that in Falluja. We do not have our militaries--and I'm talking about 
the British military, the U.S. military--we do not have a great track 
record of doing counterinsurgency war. When we do counterinsurgency war, 
we tend to demonize the entire civilian population. And what's happening 
now in Iraq is the Islamic State has gone into Iraq, the so-called 
Islamic State has gone into Iraq in the context of a repressive 
U.S.-backed regime, which was presided over by Maliki, which basically 
has pursued very ethnic sectarian policies. It's overseen mismanagement, 
economic mismanagement, mismanagement of oil production and all kinds of 
stuff. And that's really created this groundswell of opposition to, 
obviously, the U.S., obviously to the existing government. It's created 
disillusionment with the existing political process. And that's given, 
you know, that's created the recruiting sergeant, really, for these guys 
to come in. So you go to somewhere like Falluja, and they've been 
[incompr.] we've not seen it in the mainstream press, but they've 
been--long before ISIS came in or the Islamic State came in, we had 
uprisings in Falluja.

DESVARIEUX: Yeah, definitely, definitely. We covered that here. But then 
what do we do, Nafeez? I mean, I'm going to push you on this a little bit.

AHMED: So what to do?

DESVARIEUX: Yeah.

AHMED: On the one hand, I think the first thing is, do we--in terms 
of--like, we need to cut off the source. So there's been a lot of press 
reports about the Islamic State have basically got in and they've looted 
cities and they've got loads of money and they're kind of self funding, 
and I've got no doubt that they were looting cities and they've boosted 
their economic power. But the fact is is that what's been kind of 
suppressed by that kind of what--I would say kind of somewhat banal 
reporting, which actually has relied on some questionable anonymous 
sources, what they've not looked at is that money trail which is coming 
from the Gulf states.

We have abundant evidence, the U.S. military has abundant evidence--the 
State Department's been tracking this for years, so has the FBI--we know 
very well where the funding is coming from. That funding is coming from 
the Gulf states. We have not moved to stop that funding. Since 9/11, 
there have been political obstacles, bureaucratic obstacles, and 
intelligence officials, very sincere guys who've been tracking this have 
been complaining that we've been blocking that for political reasons, 
blocking real action to cut that down. So the regulatory mechanisms to 
sort that out have been--they're not being pursued. And that's on the 
British scene, on the American scene, on the European scene. So that 
needs to be done. Where's the will to stop that? And why has it not 
being stopped? If wedon't stop these guys, why are we not doing that? So 
that raises a fundamental question: if we're not willing to cut off the 
source of funding for these kind of movements, that raises questions 
about what we're doing. So that would be the first step, I would say.

Second step, I would say we need to be looking at how to make Iraqi 
democracy genuinely robust. At the moment, our interests are in focusing 
on accessing the oil. I mean, that's literally what our reconstruction 
has been all about. It's been about folks protecting the oil industry, 
getting that oil production going, playing off the Kurds against the 
Maliki government, and so on and so forth, trying to facilitate American 
contracts, getting production to kind of kickstart overall to many 
different oil companies, whether they're American or not, so that we can 
get oil prices down. That's been the focus. It's not been about the 
Iraqi people. It's not been about democracy and participation. If we can 
enfranchise the existing population and play that slightly long-term 
game, then we can cut off ISIS's support, and they won't be able to have 
that juggernaut of power and support, 'cause it's that--guerrilla 
warfare needs the civilian population to kind of begin to start 
supporting them. If we can cut that off, I think we can really sort 
things out in Iraq. But, again, the will to do that isn't there. It's 
very shortsighted.

The airstrikes, a lot of analysts point have pointed out that the 
airstrikes we've had have not really been about even dealing with the 
humanitarian crisis in Iraq. It's been about--very narrowly focused on 
protecting our interests in the Kurdish oil region. So, again, if that 
intervention's going to be on the table, we need to be looking at how 
that intervention is couched and what are the interests of that 
intervention. Is this really going to be about sorting out the 
population of Iraq and taking responsibility for the mess that we've 
created and doing something about it? Or is this another shortsighted, 
narrow-interested kind of operation? So if we want to talk about that 
debate and people are going to talk about it, that's what it should be 
about, really.

DESVARIEUX: Yeah, and that's a debate we want to keep here at The Real 
News. Nafeez Ahmed, thank you so much for joining us in the studio.

AHMED: Thanks.

DESVARIEUX: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

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