According to the Council on Foreign Relation's Foreign Policy the Islamic State will survive the Mosul offensive and live on to wage guerrilla war.
“If the Islamic State has any hope of surviving the loss of Mosul, its leaders will likely shift to a classic guerrilla campaign that includes ambushes, raids, sabotage, targeted assassinations, and suicide attacks,” writes Seth G. Jones for FP.
The fall of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria “may simply be the beginning of a new phase of a generational conflict.”
Conflict Engineered to Last Indefinitely
Generational is the keyword. During a Senate hearing in 2013 Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, said the war on terror will last “at least 10 to 20 years.”
Army Col. Anne Edgecomb “clarified that Sheehan meant the conflict is likely to last 10 to 20 more years from today—atop the 12 years that the conflict has already lasted. Welcome to America’s Thirty Years War,” writes Spencer Ackerman for Wired.
The Obama administration declared the war on terror will continue for at least a decade, possibly two. “Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations [drone attacks, targeted killings] are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaeda continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight,” The Washington Post reported in October 2012.
According to Andrew J. Bacevich the military planned for endless conflict at the end of the Second World War. The establishment created “the sacred trinity,” defined by Bacevich as “U.S. military power, the Pentagon’s global footprint and an American penchant for intervention.” This trinity is used by transnational banks, corporations, defense contractors, think tanks, universities, and the establishment media to gain power and accumulate billions of dollars.
President George H.W. Bush knew the “peace dividend” was a ruse. Bush, Thatcher, and other political class luminaries promised an end to military spending and conflict after the Soviet Union fell.
Meanwhile, the CIA was busy in Afghanistan engineering a new threat to replace the old Soviet threat, which was also a ruse (see Antony Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution: The Remarkable True Story of the American Capitalists Who Financed the Russian Communists). Working closely with Pakistani intelligence, the Saudis, and other partners, the CIA swelled the ranks of the Afghan Mujahideen with thousands of foreign fighters, an influx of cash, and tons of weapons, including sophisticated antiaircraft weapons. Remnants of the Mujahideen became the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Both became officially designated enemies in late 2001.
“I warned them that we were creating a monster,” Selig Harrison of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars said of the CIA’s relationship with the Taliban. “The CIA made a historic mistake in encouraging Islamic groups from all over the world to come to Afghanistan.”
The Islamic State and the Pentagon's Wahhabi Principality
Last December The New York Times published an op-ed by Kyle Orton, a Middle East analyst and Research Fellow with the Henry Jackson Society, a British neocon organization. He writes Saddam Hussein is responsible for the creation of the Islamic State. “The Islamic State was not created by removing Saddam Hussein’s regime; it is the afterlife of that regime,” he writes. Orton theorizes the absurd notion Hussein was an Islamist.
Prior to the US invasion of Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi met with Mullah Krekar, the leader of Ansar al-Islam. They agreed to work together attacking targets in Jordan and the US military in Iraq following the invasion and occupation. In 2003 Krekar told the al-Hayat newspaper he shared a relationship with the CIA (see “Ansar al-Islam leader threatens to document his links to US,” AFP, February 4, 2003).
In 2006 internal military documents and military officers revealed the role allegedly played by “super-terrorist” al-Zarqawi was magnified and exaggerated by a propaganda campaign designed to demonize resistance to the occupation and also propagandize the American people.
“For the past two years US military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi’s role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the ‘US home audience’ as a target of a broader propaganda campaign,” The Sydney Morning Herald reported.
Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. Military’s chief spokesman when the propaganda campaign began in 2004, said the “Zarqawi PSYOP Program is the most successful information campaign to date.”
Al-Zarqawi’s Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn merged with al-Qaeda and became al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Al-Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri outlined a four-stage plan in 2005 calling for the defeat of the US in Iraq and establishing a Sunni Wahhabi Islamic authority or caliphate in the predominately Shia Muslim country. A declassified Pentagon document specifically mentions an Islamic principality in Iraq and Syria.
“Some outlets have reported the US intelligence community’s internal prediction of the rise of ISIS. Yet none have accurately acknowledged the disturbing details exposing how the West knowingly fostered a sectarian, al-Qaeda-driven rebellion in Syria,” writes Nafeez Ahmed.
Brad Hoff, a former US Marine who served during the early years of the Iraq War, writes “US intelligence predicted the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS), but instead of clearly delineating the group as an enemy, the report envisions the terror group as a US strategic asset.”
The 2012 Pentagon document mentions Mosul and Anbar in Iraq and Hasaka and Der Zor in eastern Syria as the areas the Islamic State planned to establish its caliphate.
The establishment media reports the Mosul offensive may spell the end of the Islamic State. The offensive includes the Iraqi army, its special forces and police, and also the Kurdish Peshmerga, Sunni Arab forces trained by Turkey, and Shia Popular Mobilization Forces. A detachment of Turkish forces may also join the conflict.
Foreign Policy sketches out the next phase of the war on terror in the Middle East. Following its defeat in Mosul the Islamic State will melt into the vast countryside of northern Iraq and conduct a classic guerrilla war against the Shia-dominated government and American military targets.
“The most important thing the United States learned -- or relearned -- over the past decade is that counterinsurgency is extraordinarily difficult and expensive, and its outcome is seldom decisive, unambiguous or fully satisfying,” writes Steven Metz for World Politics Review. Reengineering a counterinsurgency structure in response to an Islamic guerrilla war is “something that takes decades of expensive, intensive involvement.”
Decades of expensive and intense involvement will benefit the military-industrial complex. For instance, after Obama said he would send an additional 250 troops to Syria, Lockheed Martin's revenue rose 15.7% and shares rose 1.5%.
“The power and influence of the military-industrial complex in promoting serial wars has resulted in extraordinary rates of profit,” James Petras wrote in 2014. “According to a recent study by Morgan Stanley (cited in Barron’s, 6/9/14, p. 19), shares in the major US arms manufacturers have risen 27,699% over the past fifty years versus 6,777% for the broader market. In the past three years alone, Raytheon has returned 124%, Northrup Grumman 114% and Lockheed Martin 149% to their investors.”
COIN Dollars for War Profiteers
General David Petraeus formulated his counterinsurgency (COIN) plan in 2006. He worked with Rhodes Scholar John Nagl and military historian and former West Point classmate Conrad Crane to revamp the Army's counterinsurgency doctrine and produce the Counterinsurgency Field Manual in December 2006.. The writings of the French soldier-intellectual David Galula figure prominently. Galula fought in Indochina and Algeria in the 1950s as an officer in the French army during its effort to eliminate resistance in French colonial possessions.
“Private military and security contractors appear to be a permanent feature of military architecture,” reports the Danish Institute for International Studies. “The recent engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq have also shown that COIN will in all likelihood also play a prominent role in the future.”
Foreign Policy—a publication produced by a globalist organization influencing the decisions of presidents for nearly a century—provides insight into the next phase of the war on terror.
“The Islamic State has often scoffed at historical tenets of insurgent warfare, killing and intimidating local populations rather than mobilizing them. But if the Islamic State can adapt, the fall of Mosul may simply be the beginning of a new phase of a generational conflict,” writes Jones.
It will also be a new phase in the war in terror. Since the end of the Second World War and the establishment of the national security state the military-industrial complex has reaped huge profit. That obscene profit has cost millions of lives and produced untold misery.
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Kurt Nimmo, Newsbud Producer & Author, is a writer, editor, producer and researcher based in New Mexico. His research centers on international geopolitics and national politics in the United States. He is the former lead editor and writer for Infowars and now edits Another Day in The Empire. His most recent books are Donald Trump and the War on Islam and Another Day in the Empire: The Reign of George W. Bush and the Total War Neocons. Visit Kurt Nimmo’s website here