War drums

A few weeks ago, I would not have called this bad news...

Americans overwhelmingly view Islamic State terrorists as a serious threat to vital U.S. interests and, in a significant shift, widely support airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

I once published a post arguing that, since we created ISIS, we have an obligation to clean up the mess.

But I now think that anything this Administration tries to do in that part of the world will only lead to a larger mess. What bugs me is this propaganda campaign designed to convey the lie that Bashar Assad of Syria created ISIS. Men and women of good will must keep hammering home the truth:

Assad did not create ISIS. We created ISIS as a weapon against Assad.

The current propaganda barrage reminds me of the 2002 effort to convince the public that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. That particular triumph of mendacity truly inspired awe: A CBS New poll published (if memory serves) on September 17, 2001 held that only three percent of the American public blamed the tragedy on Saddam. A year later, the vast majority of the American populace accepted the "Saddam did it" lie.

Have Americans wised up since then? Not really.

To the best of my knowledge, no polling exists to tell us whether the public believes the lie that Assad created ISIS. The neo-neocons are relying on America's continual inability to sort out who is who in that part of the world.

Most Americans would be stunned to learn that Bashar Assad is a secular dictator who has protected Syria's Christians. Most Americans simply will not believe you if you tell them that we have armed, trained and funded the Islamic whackadoodless who have burned churches and viciously murdered all non-Sunnis.

We are the jihadis. There would not be a powerful jihadist movement in Syria right now if we had not wanted one to materialize. ISIS is our baby.

And quite an evil baby it is. It certainly seems to have gotten out of our control -- just as Osama Bin Laden, a former American ally, got out of our control.

I would support any action to bring ISIS down -- if I felt that we could trust this administration to do the right thing in the right way. But how can we?

The fact that this administration (and its allies in Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia) created ISIS is bad enough. What is worse is the fact that the responsible parties now refuse to admit that they did what they did. This administration still pushes the false narrative that ISIS somehow created itself, that it was not funded by nations allied with the US, that ISIS is financed purely by petty theft and bank robbery, and that ISIS came by all that made-in-America weaponry "by accident."

The more we hear such fabrications, the more convinced I become that any actions we take will only create more heartache.

In the all-important question of war and peace, how can we place our trust in people who continually lie?

If you want to get closer to the truth, I suggest listening to Syrian Girl. She is featured in the video above (recorded some six months ago) and in the interview embedded below (recorded more recently). This blog will have a lot more to say about her.

At this point, I must make an embarrassing confession.

When I first tried to watch the very important video embedded at the bottom of this post, her words didn't really register -- for the same reason that so many people couldn't follow what Virginia Madsen said in the prologue to Dune. The sight of certain faces can interfere with the proper functioning of one's ears. Odd how that happens.

So I converted this interview to an MP3 file and followed her argument without any distracting visuals. You know what? She's brilliant.

And she's right. Perhaps not about everything, but about most things. 

Yes, I know that she has been getting a lot of publicity from Alex Jones, whom I detest. To be honest, that irritating alliance is the main reason why I've hesitated to mention her in these pages before. But in the end, the AJ factor simply doesn't matter: Syrian Girl is still brilliant, and still right.

(Yes, I know her real name. Right now, let's use her nomme-de-YouTube.)

In the video below, she makes many good points, including this one: In the Bush era, America did everything it could to foment a Shia-Sunni divide in Iraq. The reason for that strategy should be obvious: A house divided against itself cannot stand -- and cannot unite against an invading army. The American people went into that war in the naive belief that we were going to create a secular democracy; in fact, we encouraged sectarianism, fundamentalism and religious violence.

There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq until we created it. Inadvertently or intentionally, we gave birth to that monster.

ISIS grew out of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

The proposed war against ISIS would be supportable if it were, in fact, a war against ISIS -- and nothing more. But the only way to prosecute such a war would be to form a temporary partnership with both Iran and Assad's government, much as we had to form a temporary partnership with Stalin in order to combat Hitler. Alas, that is simply not going to happen.

It seems likely that a war against ISIS is going to be used as a pretext for a war to bring down Assad. Obama's war against ISIS will serve the very end that ISIS wants.