I mentioned last night that President Obama is being criticized from all sides — including by some of his former national security advisors — for his failure to heed the intelligence available to him about ISIS. He was warned of what was happening several years ago, when it would have been much easier to achieve a military solution to what is now called the Islamic State.
The following discussion on Fox News concerns what Mr. Obama knew, and when he knew it. These analysts omit a crucial aspect of situation, however — one that would explain the president’s reluctance to act in a timely fashion against ISIS. It’s entirely plausible (and even probable) that the Islamic State was deliberately created by Western intelligence services in collusion with Qatar as an instrument for toppling the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Clever fellows, those boffins at MI6 and the CIA!
Their plan has backfired, however, as any expert in Islamic law (Major Stephen Coughlin, for example) could have told them it would. The nascent Islamic State sucked up Western funding and armaments, growing and growing, until it metastasized into an engine of brutality and horror the likes of which have not been seen in the region for centuries. The Dr. Frankensteins in our governments long ago lost the ability to control ISIS. Unwittingly or not, they unleashed a satanic monster upon the world.
But there is an understandable reluctance to abandon a long-term project that cost so much money and showed so much promise. Hence the dilatory behavior of President Obama and his closest advisors over the two years or so since they received their first warnings about what their brilliant, inspired strategy had wrought.
Here’s the Fox report:
One more point: Western political leaders may be surprised and dismayed by what they managed to create in ISIS, but I’m not so sure that Qatar is. As far as Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani is concerned, everything may well be proceeding exactly as planned.
Hat tip: Vlad Tepes.
Western politicians are promoting islam in their own countries, so it is unimaginable even inconceivable that they want to destroy their own creation.
What they need to do is to abjectly win their hears and minds.
The majority of terrorist groups in the past 50-60 years are creatures of some State or another’s intel agencies. Intel agencies need a reason to exist even if they have to create the reason themselves.
The Covert Origins of ISIS
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oMjXbuj7BPI
Anyone remember the CIA and and the Taliban? Obama and his predecessors must have short memories.
It seems that things must get worse, far worse, before they get better, and it will be up to the “grassroots” people to make it better.
Patrick Poole, writing at the PJ Tatler, is singularly unable to understand the deep strategy behind the administration’s support of groups allied with ISIS in Syria and why the administration would help the enemy:
As the Obama administration struggles to address the threat from ISIS and plans to go to Congress in coming weeks to up its commitment against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, multiple media reports indicate that the US-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) is operating openly with ISIS and other designated terrorist groups. And yet financial and military support for the FSA is the keystone to the administration’s policy in Syria.
Poole cites a litany of sources to suggest that the boundary between the FSA and ISIS was a nebulous one. He adds, “As if more evidence were needed, it should be noted that American journalist James Foley, who was beheaded by ISIS several weeks ago, reportedly came into ISIS custody when the FSA-aligned Dawood Brigade that kidnapped and held Foley pledged allegiance to ISIS and delivered him to ISIS as a token of their submission.”
However that may be, it’s simple-minded concepts like “enemy” that are the problem. Poole simply cannot think except in these categories [irony alert]. Now in wartime, alliances of convenience and games of double-cross are unavoidable. Factions often enter into temporary arrangements with people they will later fight. Yet Poole is right to observe the essential shapelessness of the administration’s policy. He can’t tell Who’s On First and lights on the problem that neither Drum nor Beauchamp can come to grips with.
http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/09/03/writing-on-the-wall/?singlepage=true
I can’t tell if you missed the irony in Fernandez’s piece, which pokes fun at claims by Dem. apologists that Obama has a strategy to defeat ISIS but it’s too sophisticated for most of us — the people who think in terms of “enemies” — to understand.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/08/does_isis_have_blackop_backers_.html
This regime of ours has done the impossible… The situation they have allowed to happen is actually making me root for Bashar Assad. Right now that SOB is the closest thing to a moderate with any military capability in Syria.