21st Century Wire says…
The continuing support of this failed strategy spells disaster for American foreign policy.
Watch a video of this report here:
In the latest request from Obama for $582.7 billion in funding for the Pentagon, $7.5 billion is due to be set aside specifically to ‘fight ISIS’.
Secretary of Defence Ash Carter said “we need to keep ISIL down.”
Carter fails to mention that the US intervention in Iraq, which obliterated the country, created the vacuum that allowed a force like ISIS to gain power.
He also says nothing of the US program to train ‘moderate rebels’ to attack the Syrian government, destabilising the country, and again allowing ISIS to flourish unabated.
Those ‘moderates’ very likely never existed, and many of these Western trained fighters are known to have switched sides multiple times often aligning themselves with purely terror groups.
Shockingly, Carter says the US needs to continue to support for such forces:
“Our strategic approach is to keep motivated local forces which are hard to find. We have to take Mosul and we have to take Raqqa in order to make sure that there is no Islamic State,”
The fact that Carter wants to keep these terrorists ‘motivated’ with American tax payer dollars is highly concerning, most of these local groups are more concerned with fighting Assad’s internationally recognised and sovereign government than ISIS. So, does that mean Carter is advocating for the material support of terrorism?
$1.8 billion of the ‘fighting ISIS’ budget will go towards buying more than 45,000 GPS-guided smart bombs and laser-guided rockets. Meaning that the military industrial complex is sure to see a nice rise in their stock prices.
For how much longer will the US pursue this failing strategy? The only real winners are the ones lining their pockets.
READ MORE ON THE ISIS CRISIS: 21st Century Wire Syria Files