The US’ Unauthorised Air Strikes in Syria: Against or Favouring Wahhabism and the Islamic State?
Global Research, September 30, 2014
Url of this article:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-us-unauthorised-air-strikes-in-syria-against-or-favouring-wahhabism-and-the-islamic-state/5405351
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-us-unauthorised-air-strikes-in-syria-against-or-favouring-wahhabism-and-the-islamic-state/5405351
Since
the night of September 22/23, US fighter planes have been carrying out
strikes with missiles and drones against targets in and around Raqqah,
the city in the Northern part of Syria where are located the
headquarters of ISIS’ self-proclaimed ‘Islamic state’. Four of the US’s
Middle Eastern allies are known to be taking part in these aerial
strikes. They signify not just an extension in the warfare the US had
previously launched against ISIS positions in Northern Iraq, but herald a
decisive break with President Obama’s past efforts to wind down and
bring to an end the US’s involvement in Middle Eastern wars. Once again,
as when the US had started its aggression for the overthrow of the
Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussain (2003), – the current air strikes are
clearly illegitimate.
They have neither been authorized by the Syrian government, nor by the UN’s Security Council.
Although the start of the bombardments inside Syria was preceded by
efforts to craft a broad international coalition at meetings held in
Great Britain (NATO), in France and in Saudi Arabia some of the US’s
European allies have expressly stated that the bombardments of Syrian
targets lack a legal basis. Meanwhile, leading spokespersons of the US’s
Military Industrial Complex, such as army chief Dempsey and Defense
Secretary Hagel, have speculated on an another imperial ground war,
aimed at dislodging ISIS from Syria and Iraq.
To
bring out the fact that the US’s war on ISIS is controversial from the
beginning, it is useful to look at the nature of Middle Eastern
governments that have committed support to the US. Towards recruiting
participants for its war plans, gaining logistical support and financial
backing, the US in the first part of September held a meeting in
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where 10 countries took part. In an editorial
published in the US’s most respectable daily on the very day the air
strikes over Syria started, the coalition resulting from this Saudi
meeting was described as ‘the unlikeliest of coalitions!’ This in view
of the huge funding and other backing ISIS has been receiving from
countries that joined the same Saudi meeting.
Yet
only a few months back one had a hard time tracing reliable data in
Western media or at internet on the history of ISIS’ funding. Some
researchers of US think tanks such as the Brookings Institution were
quoted as stating that ISIS has been mobilizing support from Gulf states
for years. Only recently has the world’s mainstream press woken up to
the fact that Wahhabi clerics and other backers have been voicing
pro-ISIS propaganda on t.v. channels in Qatar, and that the Saudi and
Kuwaiti government have not hindered, but allowed ISIS-sympathizers to
publicly canvass for donors. Worse Turkey, Syria’s neighbor, has been
facilitating oil exports from areas ISIS controls. Indeed, one wonders
for how long Western intelligence agents active in the Middle East have
been asleep.
US officials,
pressed by these media reports, now argue that Gulf state governments
should curb any funding of ISIS from their territories. But is the
matter merely one of a lax attitude by Gulf states towards Sunni
extremism? How come this issue is being addressed only now, whereas the
rise of ISIS and other new ‘al-Qaida’-type forces started way back in
the middle of the previous decade, when US forces were battling against
Sunni extremist groups in the context of their Iraq occupation? The
point is of course that cooperation with Wahhabism, Sunni
fundamentalism´s leading current, has been built into the very strategy
which the hegemonic Western powers -, first Great Britain, then the US –
have been pursuing for long.
The
UK did so from well before the founding of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi
kingdom (1932). Further, Western allies such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and
other Gulf states may finally been seen to distance themselves from
ISIS, – but the reality is that the ideology and practices of these
countries’ rulers and their Wahhabi clergy closely resemble those of
ISIS’s top leadership! Just as in ISIS’ ‘Caliphate’, people who don’t
conform to the country’s strict laws are regularly beheaded in Saudi
Arabia. Just as in areas ‘liberated’ by ISIS in Iraq, numerous Sufi
shrines have been demolished here in the past. Saudi rulers have pledged
to the US that they will help train fighters against ISIS, and have
proposed that Saudi clerics inculcate these combatants with proper
Islamic views. Yet is there any sharp line of demarcation between Saudi
Wahhabism and ISIS’s extremism?
Clearly,
after over a decade of unsuccessful efforts to combat international
‘terrorism’, US foreign policy is enmeshed in a web of self-inflicted
internal contradictions. But then there may be other, hard reasons
explaining the US decision to forge an alliance with cousins of ISIS’s
Sunni extremism. Here Qatar is probably the most telling example right
now. Though Qatar’s rulers profess their own variety of Wahhabism and
have been enthusiastic supporters of Sunni fundamentalist forces
operating throughout the Middle East for years, – the tiny Gulf state’s
air base Al Udeid hosts the regional headquarters of CENTCOM, the
command centre of US military personnel and hardware in the Middle East.
Given the controversy over Qatar’s role in helping ISIS get funding
from people who have amassed oil wealth, – its rulers have now been told
to keep a low profile and tone down their international role. Yet no
incriminating revelations by US think tanks or press reports prevent the
US from maintaining the closest possible arms’ trade-ties with the
government of Qatar. In the middle of July last, US officials announced
that negotiations had been concluded towards the sale of Patriot
missiles, Apache helicopters, and other weapons, valued at 11 Billion US
Dollars! And this deal was stated to be the ‘very biggest’ arms’
trade-deal of the US in 2014.
Some
six years back, Obama was elected the US’s President by the American
people on an anti-war ticket. Yet being put under huge pressure from the
side of the US’s transatlanticized Military Industrial Complex, he has
launched air strikes that are causing massive devastations and further
disruption of life in both Syria and Iraq. Just a year ago, in September
of 2013, Obama felt compelled to call off air strikes planned against
Syria’s government of Assad. The evidence over the use of chemical
weapons was shaky, and Russia mediated a sensible compromise.
This
time round, the relentless, nightly aerial bombardments are ostensible
directed against Assad’s jihadi opponents, meaning the barrel of Obama’s
gun is now pointing in reverse direction. Surely, the current air
strikes were preceded by a publicity offensive that was well
orchestrated, and a significant part of the public in the West believes
the strikes are justified. Yet as the above story on the new war
alliance the US has crafted with Arab states indicates, – by no stretch
of imagination can it be argued that the current war systematically aims
at weakening the international influence of intolerant forms of Islam.
Already, critics argue that the air war only threatens to prolong, nay
vastly increase the suffering of people all over the Middle East. As did
the wars initiated in 2001 and 2003, respectively against the Taliban
in Afghanistan and against Saddam’s Iraq. The UN should immediately take
the US to task, demand it halt its unjust war waged with intolerant
Wahhabi regimes, and take its own responsibility.
Dr. Peter Custers
is internationally reknowned as Bangladesh and South Asia specialist.
He is a theoretician on the production/exports of arms and the world
economy, and the author of ’Questioning Globalized Militarism’ (Merlin
Press/Tulika, 2007)
No comments:
Post a Comment