Understanding Islamic Fundamentalism

Islamic Fundamentalism frightens the West and that fear has motivated a fierce retaliation deploying more weapons and inflicting more slaughter. But in not understanding what drives the jihadists the military strategies may be making matters worse, observes ex-U.S. diplomat William R. Polk.

By William R. Polk

The Arabic word used for Fundamentalist Islam is salafiyah. Though it is now usually associated with revolutionary Islamists, native Arabic speakers usually translate it as “reactionary.” But the concept is far more complex. The word salafi in classical Arabic means a person who stands both in the rearguard and in the vanguard — Arabic delights in such contrasts.

The logic of the apparent paradox was brought out by the teachings of jurisconsults, experts on the law, from the beginning of the “impact of the West.” In the Eighteenth Century, they began to search for means to protect their civilization. Some argued that “real” strength was not gained by copying the practices of the West but had to be derived from fundamentals as laid out in the Quran and elucidated in the practices of the Prophet and his intimate circle (the Hadith).

Sayyid Qutub, a philosopher of Islamic Fundamentalism.

Weakness, they believed, came from the innovations and perversions that encrusted Islamic thought and Islamic society in the long dark ages of decline of  its power and civilization.

The movements of “purification” were inspired by such men as the Arabian Ahmad ibn Abdul Wahhab, the Algerian/Libyan Muhammad bin Ali al-Sanusi, the Sudanese Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi, the Iranian activist Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani and the Egyptian theologian Muhammad Abduh.

In a fundamental aspect, their teachings and movements resembled those set off in northern Europe by Luther and Calvin. These Christians and Muslims shared a belief in the absolute authority of the unalterable word of God as presented in the original texts. Their task was to go back to discover the “pure” message and lead their followers to implement it. However much they differed, both the Muslims and the Protestants were in this sense salafis. 

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The Battle for Iran, 1953: Re-Release of CIA Internal History Spotlights New Details about anti-Mosaddeq Coup

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f You Were An Iraq War Critic, You're Probably Not Being Asked To Go On TV

WASHINGTON -- Kent Conrad’s phone hasn’t been ringing very much over the past few weeks, as Iraq, and the debate over America's future in the country, has once again dominated the news.

The architects of the Iraq war are back in TV studios and on op-ed pages, as are journalists and pundits who promoted the Bush administration’s ultimately bogus case for invading. But Conrad, a former senator who was one of only 23 to vote against authorizing the war in October 2002, hasn’t heard from CNN, MSNBC or any other TV outlet. "Not once," he said, when asked if anyone in the press had reached out regarding the current crisis in Iraq.

In an email to The Huffington Post, Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat, offered two possible explanations. The first, he said, is “simply the incompetence of the media.” The second is "the shrillness of those trying desperately to rewrite history to cover their own devastating failures."

Despite catastrophic misjudgments -- that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, that U.S. forces would be greeted as liberators, that the war would pay for itself with oil revenues -- the Iraq war boosters keep getting booked, while those politicians and journalists who were skeptical of the Bush administration's “slam dunk” case for war remain largely on the sidelines.

McClatchy’s Jonathan Landay, who was part of the Knight Ridder team that produced what is widely regarded as the best pre-war reporting, has only been invited to discuss Iraq's unraveling on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” a media criticism program. Landay, who just returned from a 10-day reporting trip in neighboring Syria, hasn’t heard from any cable news or Sunday public affairs shows.

Landay views the decision to book former Vice President Dick Cheney and former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz as a cynical attempt at getting “clicks and eyeballs.” Though Cheney and Wolfowitz “got things so disastrously wrong,” he said, the media gives them platforms “to create controversy, and that controversy will be enhanced by whatever they say, irrespective of whether it's accurate or not.”

According to liberal watchdog Media Matters, Cheney, Wolfowitz, former presidential envoy to Iraq Paul Bremer and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol have made 16 TV appearances in less than two weeks.

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Iraq: The things warmongers said

Iraq is in turmoil - with ISIS controlling large areas of the country - but the truth is that it's been in turmoil since the illegal 2003 invasion.

2013 was Iraq's bloodiest year since 2008, but as I wrote here members of the elite political class and warmongers in the West weren't interested.

Iraq post-invasion had become the greatest non-news story of the modern era. The people who could not stop talking about Iraq in 2002/3 and telling how much they cared about ordinary Iraqis were strangely silent. Instead they were devoting their energies into propagandizing for another Middle Eastern military'intervention', this time against Syria.

Now that Iraq is back in the western news headlines again, with calls for 'intervention' to counter ISIS, it's worth bearing in mind what the architects of the Iraq war and the cheerleaders for it said in the lead up and during the invasion about the 'threat' from Saddam's WMDs and how toppling a secular dictator would help the so-called 'war on terror' and bring peace and security to the region.

Do we really want to take these people's advice on what'we' should do now in Iraq? Up to a million people have been killed since the illegal invasion and as critics predicted at the time, the war led to enormous chaos and instability and boosted radical Islamic extremism. By their own words, let the warmongers be damned.

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Yet these same war mongers, masters of war, and war profiteers are on news outlets daily.

Their stupidity, ignorance, arrogance, and lies should not be condoned, they should be shunned.

They belong in an 8X8 cell, not in a news room.

Blowback, payback, call it what you will.

But place the blame where it belongs.

The Neocons and their fellow travelers the liberal intetventionists are to blame for the hell that is about to be unleashed.

Oh, and do not forget to blame ourselves.

We allowed them to shock and awe in our name.

We are also guilty.

Tao Dao Man

Fear and loathing at Hotel Babylon By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE Fear and loathing at Hotel Babylon By Pepe Escobar So now a huge Hardcore Sunnistan stretches all the way from the suburbs of Aleppo to Tikrit and from Mosul to the Jordanian/Iraqi border - the same one that dissolved in 2003 when Shock and Awe turned into Mission (Un)Accomplished. In an eerie echo of Dick Cheney's army's footprints reverberating in the sands of Anbar province, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and their coalition of the willing (jihadis, Islamists, Ba'athists and tribal sheikhs) now pose as the "liberators" of Iraqi Sunnis from the clutches of an "evil" Shi'ite majority government in Baghdad. In addition, ISIS also controls the PR wars. Here, a jihadi details how any sort of possible Washington "kinetic" involvement will be interpreted as an unholy alliance between the Empire and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki against the underdogs. From a Sunni perspective, it's down with Iraq's Counter-terrorism law; down with de-Ba'athification (with the ascent of neo-Ba'athist Jaysh Rijal al-Tariqa al-Naqshbandia - JRTN, led by former Saddam honcho Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri); down with the Interior Ministry in Baghdad going after Sunni politicians; down with protests being crushed. At the same time, it's the return of the US-sponsored Sahwa (Sons of Iraq) - who fiercely fought al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2007, the mother of ISIS - and the return of assorted Shi'ite militias (Muqtada al-Sadr not only repelled the new wave of US "military advisers" - that's how it started in Vietnam - but also warned that his own badass Men in Black will "shake the ground" fighting ISIS.) The mid-2000s are the new normal; it's gonna be militia hell all over again. Mesopotamia, we got a problem. Neo-Ba'athists want nothing but a secular Iraq run by Sunnis, Saddam-style (rather former neocon darling Ahmad Chalabi.) ISIS wants a Caliphate extending all across the Levant under Sharia law. Something's got to give. What will give will be the Iraqi nation itself - the balkanized, protracted (intended) consequence of the 2003 invasion and occupation, finally transmogrified into Jihad Central. READ MORE

Israel’s Existential Threat by ANDREW LEVINE

Israel’s Existential Threat » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

When Barack Obama won in 2008, there was a chance that the worst excesses of the Bush-Cheney era would finally be ended.  Instead, we have just gotten more of the same, and worse.

Even the old malefactors are still at it.  Some six years into the Age of Obama, they are finally recovering their stride.

Witness, for example, the unreconstructed neoconservatives who are still around causing trouble.  Our media give them a platform, and so they keep at it.  Remarkably, members of the Bush and Cheney families – reprobates all – are still at it too, and still drawing media attention.

But, by now, everyone else who gives the matter a moment’s thought realizes that starting the Iraq War was a colossal mistake.

Almost every decision the United States made in waging it was wrong-headed too; and it only got worse when the Obama administration took up where its predecessor left off.

In time, Obama did wind down overt combat operations; after seven years, there was little point in keeping them going.

But, by outsourcing most of the killing, his administration only continued the war and occupation in a different, less conspicuous, guise.

The ploy worked for a while because the United States was able to buy off most (evidently, not all) opposition, and because Obama kept the Iraqi government afloat with American taxpayers’ dollars.

And, on the home front, Obama was able to fool most of the people most of the time because, as per usual, the media didn’t do its job.  Having been notoriously gung-ho since even before the Iraq War began, the media lost interest as soon as the murder and mayhem began to subside.

Because they couldn’t just ignore what was going on, they therefore took the lazy way out: repeating what the State and Defense Departments told them.

But now, thanks mainly to American ineptitude, the situation on the ground is changing.   Suddenly, the occupation structure America contrived over the past decade is crumbling – along with the Iraqi regime itself.  Sunni jihadists are on the march, and Shia militias are reconstituting.  Civil war is brewing.  Arguably, it has already begun.

How ironic that what the Americans put in place is now being replaced by what George Bush and Dick Cheney told the world the U.S. invaded Iraq to prevent: the establishment of a terrorist safe haven in the heartland of the Middle East!

Iraq is not the only country in peril.  The Syrian civil war has already spilled over to its neighbor, and vice versa – putting the regional state system established after World War I in jeopardy.

For all this and more, American bungling is largely at fault.  Bush and Cheney hadn’t a clue what they were getting into and neither they nor their successor were any better prepared to deal with the situation their machinations had conjured into being.

The question now is how to keep the instability they created in bounds.

Will it spill over into the entire region – into Lebanon, for example?  Will it destabilize Jordan?   Egypt is already deeply in turmoil.  What will be the effect on it?

The one sure thing is that Israel will finally be facing a genuine existential threat.

Even if the threat can be confined just to its Syrian border, that will be more than enough; an out of control regional war waged by bitterly opposed parties who agree only on their hostility to the Israeli state comes as close as one can imagine to putting the seemingly impregnable security Israel provides its Jewish citizens in peril.

Benjamin Netanyahu has been crying wolf for so long that it has become his nature.  Now he is about to get what he has been bleating about; and neither he, nor those who think like him, are going to like it one bit.

The consequences of the Bush-Obama Iraq War are coming due.  One of those consequences – not the most dire, but certainly the most ironic – is that Israeli panic mongering will soon be overcome by events, putting Israel itself at more risk than it has ever been.

Be careful what you wish for – indeed!

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The Neo/Zio/Cons wanted and got regime change in Iraq.
Now what ¿¿ 

Tao Dao Man

Obama’s True Foreign-Policy ‘Weakness’

Special Report:  President Obama has shied away from confronting Washington’s neocons who continue to exercise undue influence at think tanks, on op-ed pages and even inside Obama’s administration. With the new Iraq crisis, Obama’s timidity is coming back to haunt him, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

A favorite neocon meme about President Barack Obama is that he is “weak” – because he failed to bomb Syria, bomb Iran, sustain the U.S. occupation of Iraq and start a full-scale economic war with Russia over Ukraine. But an alternate way of looking at Obama is that he is weak because he has failed to face down the neocons.

Since the start of his presidency, Obama has let the neocons and their “liberal interventionist” allies push him into militaristic and confrontational policies – even as he is criticized for not being militaristic and confrontational enough. There was the futile “surge” in Afghanistan, the chaotic “regime change” in Libya, excessive hostility toward Iran, intemperate demands for “regime change” in Syria, and hyperbolic denunciations of Russia for its reaction to U.S.-backed “regime change” in Ukraine.

Prominent neocon intellectual Robert Kagan. (Photo credit: Mariusz Kubik, http://www.mariuszkubik.pl)

The end result of all this U.S. “tough-guy/gal-ism” has been to get a lot of people killed without actually improving the lot of the people in the countries where the neocon-driven policies have been applied. In each of those cases, a more pragmatic approach to the political and strategic concerns represented by those crises could have saved lives and averted economic pain that only has fed more disorder.

Yet, Obama remains hypersensitive to criticism from well-placed and well-connected neocons. As the New York Times reported on June 16, Obama shaped his foreign policy speech at the West Point graduation in May to deflect criticism from a single neocon, Robert Kagan, who had penned a long and pedantic essay in The New Republic urging the projection of more U.S. power around the world.

In the essay, “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,” Kagan “depicted President Obama as presiding over an inward turn by the United States that threatened the global order and broke with more than 70 years of American presidents and precedence,” wrote the Times’ Jason Horowitz. “He called for Mr. Obama to resist a popular pull toward making the United States a nation without larger responsibilities, and to reassume the more muscular approach to the world out of vogue in Washington since the war in Iraq drained the country of its appetite for intervention.”

As part of Obama’s effort to deflect this neocon critique, “the president even invited Mr. Kagan to lunch to compare world views,” Horowitz reported.

Kagan apparently sees himself as a vanguard for a new wave of U.S. interventionism, teamed up with his brother Frederick who devised the two “surges” in Iraq in 2007 and Afghanistan in 2009. Robert Kagan is also married to Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European affairs who helped promote the February “regime change” in Ukraine.

According to the Times article, the husband-and-wife team share both a common world view and professional ambitions, Nuland editing Kagan’s articles and Kagan “not permitted to use any official information he overhears or picks up around the house” – a suggestion that Kagan’s thinking at least may be informed by foreign policy secrets passed on by his wife.

Though Nuland wouldn’t comment specifically on Kagan’s attack on President Obama, she indicated that she holds similar views. “But suffice to say,” Nuland said, “that nothing goes out of the house that I don’t think is worthy of his talents. Let’s put it that way.”

Counting on Hillary Clinton

Kagan also has hopes that his neocon views – which he prefers to call “liberal interventionist” – will have an even stronger standing in a possible Hillary Clinton administration. After all, not only did Secretary of State Clinton promote his wife, Clinton also named Kagan to one of her State Department advisory boards.

According to the Times’ article, Clinton “remains the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring their hopes.” Kagan is quoted as saying: “I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. …  If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue … it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”

Though Obama personally advocates a more multilateral approach to foreign policy – including ”leading from behind” as one aide famously explained – the President allowed the neocons to retain great influence inside his own administration.

After winning the election in 2008, he opted for a “team of rivals” approach that put the hawkish Hillary Clinton at State, retained Republican Defense Secretary Robert Gates and kept George W. Bush’s high command, including neocon-favorite Gen. David Petraeus.

That fateful decision meant Obama never asserted personal control over his foreign policy, in part, because Gates, Petraeus and Clinton formed a kind of iron triangle to promote neocon strategies. In his memoir Duty, Gates said he and Clinton agreed on most issues and could push them in the face of White House opposition because “we were both seen as ‘un-fireable.’”

For instance, they teamed up in support of the ill-conceived Afghan “surge” of 2009 – which was devised by neocon theorist Frederick Kagan who sold this “counterinsurgency” plan to Gates. The “surge” led to another 1,000 or so U.S. deaths and many more Afghans killed without changing the trajectory of that ill-fated war. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Is Hillary Clinton a Neocon-Lite?”]

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America’s Blunderbuss Wars

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This chart shows which countries produce the most electricity from renewable energy

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The Pan-Asian Anchor: In Iraq, ISIS Channels Mao

The Pan-Asian Anchor: In Iraq, ISIS Channels Mao

I still want to know where they got these trucks. :-)

How Far Can American Exceptionalism Go?

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Global conventional oil reserves sufficient for just 53 years- BP analysts

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Moqtada al-Sadr: Iraqi Shia groups rally in show of power

Thousands parade across country after powerful cleric Moqtada al-Sadr calls on supporters to turn out in force.

Thousands of Shia Muslims are taking part in rallies across Iraq vowing to protect their religious sites in a show of power that had been called for by influential Shia leader Moqtada al-Sadr.
The largest rally took place in the northern Baghdad suburb of Sadr City, where hundreds of men dressed in combat fatigues and carrying assault rifles marched in military formation.
Sadr is believed to have command of more than 10,000 fighters, most of whom have volunteered to fight alongside Iraqi security forces against Sunni rebels led by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group.
Al Jazeera's Imran Khan, reporting from Baghdad, said Sadr was keen to emphasise that his fighters would only serve as a defensive force to protect Baghdad, but there are fears of a reestablishment of the Mahdi Army, which was disbanded in 2008.
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Keeping Iran as a Bogeyman

Despite the disastrous Iraq War, the neocons never stopped pushing for violent “regime change” in any country that gets in their way – or Israel’s. Now, neocons are getting downright hysterical over possible U.S. cooperation with one old target, Iran, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar notes.

By Paul R. Pillar

Many participants in the debate on U.S. policy in the Middle East have a lot invested in maintaining the idea of the Islamic Republic of Iran as a bogeyman forever to be feared, despised, sanctioned and shunned – and never to be cooperated with on anything.

The lodestar for this school of advocacy is the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, who proclaims to us nearly every day that Iran is the “real problem” underlying just about everything wrong in the region, and who adamantly opposes anyone reaching any agreement with Tehran on anything.

Iranian women attending a speech by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. (Iranian government photo)

Netanyahu does not want a significant regional competitor that would no longer be an ostracized pariah and that will freely speak its mind in a way that, say, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, with the other equities they have in Washington, cannot. He does not want the United States to come to realize that it need not be stuck rigidly to the side of — and always defer to the preferences of — “traditional allies” such as Israel and that it can sometimes advance U.S. interests by doing business with those who have worn the label of adversary.

And of course the more that people focus on the “real problem” of Iran, the less attention will be devoted to topics Netanyahu would rather not talk about, such as the occupation of Palestinian territory.

For those in Washington who wave the anti-Iranian banner most fervently, the waving is not only a following of Netanyahu’s lead but also a filling of the neoconservative need for bogeymen as justification and focus for militant, interventionist policies in the region.

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William Rivers Pitt | They Belong in Prison, Not on TV

William Rivers Pitt | They Belong in Prison, Not on TV

From left: former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former Secretary of State Condleeza Rice, former vice president Dick Cheney attend the opening ceremony of the George W. Bush Presidential Library, April 25, 2013. (Photo: Stephen Crowley / The New York Times)

I wrote my first article on the folly of an Iraq invasion in August of 2002. There are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I argued. There are no 9/11 connections in Iraq. There is no al Qaeda presence in Iraq, because Saddam Hussein was notorious for hanging Wahabbists from the nearest available light pole. An invasion would tear the country apart, explode sectarian tensions, and plunge the region into chaos.

Neither I nor the world knew at that time that George W. Bush and Tony Blair had decided four months earlier that the deal was going down no matter what. Neither I nor the world knew at that time that a decision had been made one month earlier to ensure that "intelligence and facts" would be "fixed around the policy" of invasion. I stayed on the no-invasion beat for the next seven months, writing dozens of articles and a book, as the world watched millions of people take to the streets in an attempt to stop something that was, as it turns out, inevitable.

Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Condolleeza Rice, and of course, George W. Bush, piled the sandbags high and deep around a decision that had already been made. We know they have these weapons, we know where they are, we don't want the evidence to be a mushroom cloud, plastic sheeting and duct tape, 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11. Save for 23 bold souls, a craven Senate caved to the pressure and delivered the Iraq War Resolution to the Bush administration, and in late March of 2003, the skies over Baghdad glowed orange as the city was turned into a bowl of molten fire.

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Major US church votes to sanction Israel

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Asia Times Online :: ISIS: Burn, Men in Black, burn by Pepe Escobar

Asia Times Online :: Burn, Men in Black, burn

By Pepe Escobar 

Let's cut to the chase. As in chasing that Zara outdoor summer collection, complete with state of the art assault rifles, brand new white Nike sneakers and brand new, unlimited mileage white Toyotas crossing the Syrian-Iraqi desert; the Badass Jihadis in Black. 

Once upon a (very recent) time, the US government used to help only "good terrorists" (in Syria), instead of "bad terrorists". That was an echo of a (less recent) time when it was supporting only "good Taliban" and not "bad Taliban". 

So what happens when Brookings Institution so-called "experts" start blabbering that the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) is

really the baddest jihadi outfit on the planet (after all they were cast out of al-Qaeda)? Are they so badass that by warped newspeak logic they're now the new normal? 

Since late last year, according to US government newspeak, the "good terrorists" in Syria are the al-Qaeda spinoff gang of Jabhat al-Nusra and (disgraced) Prince Bandar bin Sultan, aka Bandar Bush, the Islamic Front (essentially a Jabhat al-Nusra multiple outlet). And yet both Jabhat and ISIS had pledged allegiance to Ayman "the doctor" al-Zawahiri, the perennial gift that keeps on giving al-Qaeda capo. 

That still leaves the question of what Men in Black ISIS, the catwalk-conscious beheading stormtroopers for a basket of hardcore tribal Sunnis and Ba'ath party "remnants" (remember Rummy in 2003?) are really up to.

We interrupt this desert catwalk to announce they will NOT invade Baghdad. On the other hand, they are busy accelerating the balkanization - and eventual partition - of both Syria and Iraq. They are NOT a CIA brainchild (how come Langley never thought about it?); they are in fact the bastard children of (disgraced) Bandar Bush's credit card largesse. 

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Iran's Important Role in the Future of the Middle East

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Modern rock didn’t start with Dylan or the Beatles. It started with Zeppelin.

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WikiLeaked Doc Reveals Wall Street Plan for Global Financial Deregulation | Common Dreams

WikiLeaked Doc Reveals Wall Street Plan for Global Financial Deregulation | Common Dreams

Will Iran Play the Crimea Card in Iraq?

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Interactive Time-Lapse Map Shows How the U.S. Took More Than 1.5 Billion Acres From Native Americans

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Nine Nations Have Nukes — Here's How Many Each Country Has

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Israel is on the list.
And as you can see Iran is NOT.
N/Korea does not have a delivery system.

So stop listening to the fear and war mongers.

Only one country has used nukes. And you know who that is..

Tao Dao Man 

The Pan-Asian Anchor: Zen Masters on the Battlefield (Part I)

The Pan-Asian Anchor: Zen Masters on the Battlefield (Part I)

'Iraq' Is Still Arabic for 'Vietnam' | Common Dreams

'Iraq' Is Still Arabic for 'Vietnam' | Common Dreams

When George W. Bush and the neocons launched their war in Iraq, critics coined the slogan, "'Iraq' is Arabic for 'Vietnam.'" The point was obvious: Another long quagmire of a war in an inhospitable foreign land would lead once again to nothing but death, suffering, and defeat for America.

That was back in 2003 and 2004, when the parallel was to the Vietnam war of 1965 - 1973.

To see why "Iraq" is still Arabic for "Vietnam" we have to turn the historical memory dial back just a few more years, to 1962 and 1963. That was when John F. Kennedy struggled with the same dilemma now facing Barack Obama: How much, if it all, should we get involved militarily to help a corrupt leader who stays in power by terrorizing his political enemies?

Here's what JFK told interviewers in September, 1963, about South Vietnam under President Ngo Dinh Diem: "I don't think ... unless a greater effort is made by the  Government to win popular support that the war can be won out there."

Here's what Barack Obama told reporters on June 13, 2014: "Iraq’s leaders have to demonstrate a willingness to make hard decisions and compromises on behalf of the Iraqi people in order to bring the country together. ... and account for the legitimate interests of all of Iraq’s communities, and to continue to build the capacity of an effective security force."

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Understand Iraq’s Impact On Global Oil In Four Easy Charts

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Wealthy Clintons Use Trusts to Limit Estate Tax They Back

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I would not pay 2 cents to hear either one of these cretins speak a single word.

If their lips are moving they're lying.

Tao Dao Man

Asia Times Online :: Obama broods over an Iraqi odyssey By M K Bhadrakumar

Asia Times Online :: Obama broods over an Iraqi odyssey

[Heart of Empire] | The Long Shadow of a Neocon, by Andrew Cockburn | Harper's Magazine

[Heart of Empire] | The Long Shadow of a Neocon, by Andrew Cockburn | Harper's Magazine

Zalmay Khalilzad ©© Gage Skidmore (Flickr)

As jihadists everywhere celebrate their stunning victories in Mosul and Tikrit, as well as the abject retreat of the United States from Afghanistan, we can only hope that they accord due credit to a man who was indispensable to their success. Now an obscure businessman seeking crumbs from the table as an “international consultant,” Zalmay Khalilzad was in his day an imperial envoy sent by the United States to decree the fates of Afghanistan and Iraq. His decisions, most especially his selection of puppet overseers to administer the conquered lands, were uniformly disastrous, contributing in large degree to the catastrophes of today. To be sure, many others among the neocon clique and their liberal-democrat interventionist allies deserve a place on the jihadist honor roll of useful idiots, but few contributed as much as Khalilzad, the Afghan-born former academic who selected Hamid Karzai and Nuri al-Maliki as suitable leaders for their respective countries.

Initially promoted up the ranks of the national-security clerisy by Albert Wohlstetter, the dark eminence of neoconservative theology who also mentored neocon godfather Richard Perle, Khalilzad found a useful niche in such company as the only Muslim any of them knew, ready to spout their militarist nostrums at the flutter of a grant check. I myself got an early intimation of Khalilzad’s tenuous grasp on military reality in 1981, when he assured me in all seriousness that the Afghan mujahideen were enjoying great success in disabling Soviet tanks by thrusting thick carpets into their treads. During the administration of the elder Bush, he worked in the Pentagon under Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby. In 1992 he wrote the initial draft of the Defense Planning Guidance, which became an iconic neoconservative text.

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HERE is more on Kahlilzad, the shadow behind the curtain. 

The Responsibility of Intellectuals Redux: Humanitarian Intervention and the Liberal Embrace of War in the Age of Clinton, Bush and Obama by Jeremy Kuzmarov

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This is long, but well worth the read.

Connect the dots folks.

Wake the EFF UP.

ISIS - ISIL Trucking in Iraq

Hell of a convoy they got going there.
Think they are going camping?
Nice trucks to be cruising through the desert with.
Maybe they are gonna do some 4 wheelin? 


Where did they get these trucks? 
Did they buy them at an authorized dealership?
Did they save their money and pay cash?
Are they on a 60 month payment plan?
Did they steal them?
Do they have a drivers license?
How about insurance? Think they have that?

Answer to all of the above is obviously NO.

These guys are not affiliated with A/Q.
Even A/Q thinks they are too radical.
The MSM should stop trying to make that Neocon connection.

These fundamental Islamists are indoctrinated mercenaries.
They are well trained, organized, mobile,  and well funded.

Always follow the money.
Or should I say the Saudi Wahabbist Riyal.

Tao Dao Man