Month: June 2015

Source: The Nation

The fall of Mosul to the so-called Islamic State group (called in Arabic Daesh) on June 10, 2014, startled the world. The spectacle of thousands of Iraqi army troops fleeing the city in the face of black-masked suicide bombers and the Muslim equivalent of biker gangs riveted attention on Iraq again, a country that had receded from the Atlantic world’s consciousness after the US withdrawal late in 2011. A few weeks later, the Daesh leader, who goes by the nom de guerre of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared a caliphate, putting himself forward as a successor of Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II and his successor Sultan Mehmet V, who had also asserted themselves vicars of the Prophet before the Ottoman state collapsed in the maelstrom of World War I and a militantly secular modern Turkish republic abolished the caliphate by act of parliament in 1924. A frisson of terror went through Iraqis at the prospect that the movement might take Baghdad (now largely Shiite) and Erbil (the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government). read more

Source: Truthout

Donald Rumsfeld is this generation’s Robert McNamara.

Over 12 years after overseeing and helping to design the 2003 invasion of Iraq – the former secretary of defense is now re-writing his own role in the invasion.

In an interview with The Times of London, Rumsfeld called the Bush administration’s approach to Iraq “unrealistic.”

He was referring specifically to the Bush administration’s goal of toppling a dictatorship and building a model democracy in the Middle East – and he said, read more

Source: The Guardian Unlimited

The sectarian terror group won’t be defeated by the western states that incubated it in the first place

The war on terror, that campaign without end launched 14 years ago by George Bush, is tying itself up in ever more grotesque contortions. On Monday the trial in London of a Swedish man, Bherlin Gildo, accused of terrorism in Syria, collapsed after it became clear British intelligence had been arming the same rebel groups the defendant was charged with supporting.

The prosecution abandoned the case, apparently to avoid embarrassing the intelligence services. The defence argued that going ahead withthe trial would have been an “affront to justice” when there was plenty of evidence the British state was itself providing “extensive support” to the armed Syrian opposition. read more