Sunday, April 05, 2015

Best Thing I've Read On ISIS

It's run by Saddam's old gang from the Baath party.  The best bit:

Rayburn questions whether even some of the foreign volunteers realise the extent to which they are being drawn into Iraq’s morass. Some of the fiercest battles being waged today in Iraq are for control of communities and neighborhoods that have been hotly contested among Iraqis for years, before the extremists appeared.

“You have fighters coming from across the globe to fight these local political battles that the global jihad can’t possibly have a stake in.”

Speaking of Old Saddam, he's looking downright gentlemanly these days.  My tribute to him can be found here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

ISIL is a creation and manifestation of the United States government designed to justify the oppression of Muslims in America and the world. This fictitious creation is used to justify the U.S.colonization of the worlds oil supply and to inflict fear into the American people that further justifies racial profiling against Muslims and justifies the obliteration of civil liberties.

jrkrideau said...

Sit down and have a nice cup of tea Jeremy.

I would agree that ISIS is a creation of the USA but not a deliberate one.

It is the rather predictable result of US incompetence [See Afganistan-Taliban] touted as official policy.

Disbanding the entire Iraqi Army, firing all or, almost all, the Iraqi civil service, and then proceeding to aribtaritly arrest (& often shoot) Iraqis, very much it would appear at random, and then torture the captives is not the best way to win the hearts and minds of the populace.

Combined with what appears to be complete cultural insensitivity[1], to be kind, it oftens sounded more like complete bigotry and prejudice it is hardly surprising a few Iraqis might feel a bit annoyed.

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.

1. An apparently minor but serious issue was that reportedly US troops usually addressed any adult Iraqi male as 'hadji'. Since one earns title of 'hadji' by completing the Hadj, that is, the pilgrimage to Mekka, just about every time it was used, it probably was interpreted as an insult to the person's religion since there would not be 'that' many hadji even in Iraq.