From Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges’ article:
“From the CIA’s funneling of over a billion dollars to Islamic militants in the 1970s war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union to the billion dollars spent on training and equipping the radical jihadists currently fighting in Syria, the United States has repeatedly empowered extremists who have filled the vacuums of failed states it created.”
…“The radical jihadists… are often deliberately armed and empowered by the U.S. national security apparatus, along with Israel, as a way to pressure and topple regimes deemed antagonistic to Israel and the United States. Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, in audio leaked from a closed meeting with Syrian opposition activists, admitted that the U.S. had used Islamic State (IS) as a tool for pressuring the Syrian government. He also acknowledged that Washington’s complicity in the growth of IS in Syria was the major cause for Russian intervention there.”
…“Israel seeks to create buffer zones between itself and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. It sees its neighbor Syria, because of its alliance with Iran, as a mortal enemy. The solution has been to cripple these traditional enemies by temporarily empowering radical Sunni jihadists and al-Qaida. There are numerous reports of Israel, along with the United States, using its aircraft and military in Syria to aid the very jihadists Washington and Jerusalem claim to want to wipe from the face of the earth.”
…“The corporate state, its legitimacy in tatters, seeks to make us afraid in order to maintain its control over the economic, political and military institutions. It needs mortal enemies, manufactured or real, at home or abroad, to justify its existence and mask its mismanagement and corruption. This narrative of fear is what Antonio Gramsci called a ‘legitimation doctrine.’ It is not about making us safe—indeed the policies the state pursues make us less secure—but about getting us to surrender to the will of the elites. The more inequality and injustice grow, the more the legitimation doctrine will be used to keep us cowed and compliant. The doctrine means that the enemies of the United States will never be destroyed, but will mutate and expand; they are too useful to be allowed to disappear.”
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Thank you, Mr. Hedges!
I’ve been trying to draw attention to Mujaheddin 2.0 for quite some time, myself. Thanks to the essential reporting of multiple-Pulitzer-winner Seymour Hersh (way back in 2007), I had the sense to investigate the origins of the conflict in Syria in its earliest days, long before half-a-million Syrians had been needlessly butchered and 10 million Syrians had been turned into refugees.
In 2012, I created a resource-rich primer on the origins of that wholly unnecessary conflict, shedding light on the manner in which Washington and Riyadh had brutally appropriated Syria’s non-violent “Arab Spring” moment, flooding a nation at peace with suicide-bombing, head-chopping, genocidal Salafists… plunging Syria into years of war and horror.
Two years ago, I documented that Danielle Pletka, the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute’s most prominent public face, has, in fact, admitted that Washington, DC, effectively “subcontracted” its regime-change operation in Syria to Gulf dictatorships — knowing full well that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are the world’s top sponsors of al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups.
In that same blog post, I noted that even The New York Times has reported on ISIS’s use of chemical weapons “at least 52 times” in Syria and Iraq. While the corporate media has endlessly repeated the unproven allegations that Bashar al-Assad has used chemical weapons in this conflict — allegations that have rarely, if ever, been investigated (allegations that President Obama’s top people advised him were unsupported by any “smoking gun” evidence) — they have rarely noted the scores of times that Washington’s foot soldiers in Syria have used such weapons.
Good journalism about the Syrian conflict is rare, indeed… but I’ve been trying for years to bring the best reporting I’ve found to the attention of my readers.