Guardian article slams duplicitous US policy on Middle East

The British newspaper Guardian has slammed the United States’ duplicitous policy on the Middle East, saying “terrorism is in the eye of the beholder."  

In an article, titled Now the truth emerges: How the US fueled the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, Seumas Milne wrote: “Armed opposition to illegal invasion and occupation clearly doesn’t constitute terrorism or murder on most definitions, including the Geneva convention. But terrorism is now squarely in the eye of the beholder.”

“And nowhere is that more so than in the Middle East, where today’s terrorists are tomorrow’s fighters against tyranny – and allies are enemies – often at the bewildering whim of a Western policymaker’s conference call,” he added.

Milne wrote in the article, published on Wednesday, that the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq brought al-Qaeda to Iraq and created other terrorist groups, such as al-Nusra Front and ISIL, which Washington has used to destabilize the Middle East region.

“[T]here was no al-Qaeda in Iraq until the US and Britain invaded. And the US has certainly exploited the existence of ISIS against other forces in the region as part of a wider drive to maintain Western control,” he added.

He went on to say that US and Western habit of playing with terrorist groups was “recalibrated during the occupation of Iraq, when US forces led by General Petraeus sponsored an El Salvador-style dirty war of sectarian death squads to weaken the Iraqi resistance.”

The analyst stated that the practice was “reprised in 2011 in the NATO-orchestrated war in Libya, where ISIS last week took control of Gaddafi’s home town of Sirte.”

Milne said that “US and Western policy in the conflagration that is now the Middle East is in the classic mould of imperial divide-and-rule,” where US forces bomb one set of militants while backing another.

“However confused US policy may often be, a weak, partitioned Iraq and Syria fit such an approach perfectly,” he noted.

The ISIL terrorists, many of whom were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, have seized large parts of territory in Syria and around one-third of the territory of Iraq.

The terrorists are engaged in crimes against humanity in the areas under their control. They have been carrying out horrific acts of violence such as public decapitations and crucifixions against all communities, including Shias, Sunnis, Kurds, and Christians.

“What’s clear is that ISIS and its monstrosities won’t be defeated by the same powers that brought it to Iraq and Syria in the first place, or whose open and covert war-making has fostered it in the years since,” Milne wrote.

“Endless western military interventions in the Middle East have brought only destruction and division. It’s the people of the region who can cure this disease – not those who incubated the virus,” he concluded.

GJH/GJH

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