Another dubious Islamic State video, more foreign policy folly
By Brandon Martinez
So ‘Islamic State’ just released another terrible video, have they?
This latest one allegedly shows a captured Jordanian pilot, Moaz al-Kasasbeh, being
burned alive in a cage.
The slickly made video begs a few questions. Who produces IS’s videos for them? Rag‐tag militants simply don’t have the technical prowess required for IS’s latest execution flick. Where do they get the money to finance these projects? How do they have time to make such videos amidst an insurgency against the Syrian regime? And how do they shoot these highly choreographed videos while they allegedly dodge Western coalition airstrikes?
The execution videos appear to be part of a coordinated public relations effort on
the part of the Western ‘coalition’ to ratchet up support for their superficial campaign against the militant group. With the release of every new video, Western governments affirm the ‘necessity’ of their counterfeit crusade to ‘end the barbarity.’ Execution videos of this nature are calculated to create maximum emotional impact and stoke the rage of the Western public who then inevitably demand that their governments “put an end” to such cruelty.
What folly. What manipulation.
We know that the CIA is fond of manufacturing fake videos depicting their perceived enemies in a bad light. In a 2010 Washington Post report, journalist Jeff Stein revealed that in 2003 the Agency sought to produce a slew of fake videos featuring Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. A CIA psychological warfare team planned to portray the al-Qaeda leader and the Iraqi strongman as gay pedophiles in order to discredit them among their support bases.
Many people forget that four years ago when the Syrian conflict first erupted, Washington and its allies were firmly on the side of the ‘rebels’ against the ‘dictator’ Bashar al-Assad who, we were told, was “killing his own people.” Obama, Cameron, Hollande and company openly poured hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and armaments to the ‘freedom fighters’ in Syria – the same ‘freedom fighters’ they now call ‘terrorists.’ In 2012 Obama drew an imaginary ‘red line,’ saying that if Assad used chemical weapons, Washington would invade. That ‘chemical attack’ conveniently came months after Obama’s ‘red line’ proclamation, but independent investigations conducted by the United Nations and Russia determined that US-backed ‘rebels’ were likely responsible for the attack, not Assad. That didn’t stop Washington from categorically fingering Assad’s forces as the guilty party without any evidence.
This was the exact same storyline foisted upon us during the run-up to the Libya invasion. Gaddafi was on the brink of committing ‘genocide’ against his own citizenry, we were told. “He has to be stopped,” said the interventionists in Washington, London, and Paris, “before he slaughters his own people en masse.” This squalid propaganda turned out to be completely false. There was no impending ‘genocide.’ There was no government-sponsored ‘bloodbath’ in Tripoli, Benghazi or anywhere else. Like in Syria, most of the worst atrocities in that conflict were perpetrated by Washington’s ‘freedom fighters.’ The Libyan ‘rebels’ were cut from the same cloth as Islamic State and al-Nusra in Syria, subsidized by the West and its puppet monarchies in the Gulf, but that fact has been quietly swept under the rug.
We have seen this scenario unfold time and again. Washington’s duplicitous double game of building up mercenary forces to cause problems for ‘unfriendly regimes’ and then attacking their own Frankenstein monster later is standard fare for imperial geopolitics. They pulled the same stunt in 1979 by sponsoring Islamic Wahhabi guerrillas who later formed the base of ‘al-Qaeda’ against the Soviets in Afghanistan. During their proxy war against the Soviet Union, the CIA even created and channeled radical Wahhabi textbooks that glorified militancy and violence into Afghan schools, hoping to spur Afghan youths into embracing the Mujahideen’s jihad against the ‘godless communists.’
If the West really wanted to, they could shut down IS in a week by freezing all of their bank accounts. How is it that the West can apply tough economic sanctions on Russia, the second most powerful country on the planet, yet has been unable to seriously hamper IS’s activities? Many suspect the West does not genuinely want to undermine IS’s onslaught in Syria, as the group is essentially acting in lock step with the West’s ‘regime change’ schemes for the region. The group also functions as a scarecrow for our power-grabbing politicians at home who have been happily pulling our freedoms out from under our feet in the name of ‘keeping us safe.’ When it comes down to it, the West’s ‘war against IS’ is a devious volte-face maneuver designed to wash away their own bloody fingerprints behind the rise of that group.
The world has been sleepwalked into a handful of senseless wars in the Middle East that have served no other purpose than to fatten the pockets of Western war profiteers and strengthen the Israeli regime’s position in the region.
And we can’t seem to find a way off this deadly trajectory towards doom.
Copyright 2015 Brandon Martinez
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