President Bashar al-Assad

The president in Damascus, January 2015. (Media and Communications Office, Presidency of Syria)
Jan 26, 2015, Foreign Affairs

Israel is also capitalising on the war on the IS to misleadingly portray it as identical with the Palestinian “Islamic” resistance movements because of their Islamic credentials. “When it comes to their ultimate goals, Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas,” Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly on September 29.

The third century Christian theologian Tertullian is famously credited with defending his faith with the outrageous claim, “Credo quia absurdum” (I believe, because it is absurd). That is a paraphrase of Tertullian’s actual statements from De Carne Christi, notably “certum est, quia impossibile” (It’s certain because impossible). Some have claimed that Tertullian was appealing to an Aristolean notion that it is possible to deduce an argument of probability from the astonishing improbability of an event.

Another Summer has come and gone – it’s time for the annual Fall festival of fantasy, when Americans gear up for another season of national chest-beating.  The more innocuous among us will satisfy the primal urge with football, perhaps binge viewing of a favorite television series, and/or the usual back to school clacque-tivities into which their spawn are channeled.

The covert war on Syria has now finally exploded into the open, with US warplanes launching a blitzkrieg on the Arab country over night.
Washington and its allies have now crossed a dangerous Rubicon, setting the stage for an all-out war on Syria under the guise of “defeating extremism.”

President Obama has announced that he is seeking a coalition to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS in Iraq, Syria and wherever else it may be. That coalition, however, will apparently be neither a NATO coalition nor a United Nations coalition. Why not?

Listening to President Obama describe his intention to “degrade and destroy” ISIS, he named a number of reasons for launching yet another war in Iraq. Gazing out at the nation through the eye of a camera lens, he intoned, “In a region that has known so much bloodshed, these terrorists are unique in their brutality. They execute captured prisoners. They kill children. They enslave, rape, and force women into marriage. They threatened a religious minority with genocide.

The media is selling fear of beheadings to the public. Syria is destroyed and so is Iraq, principally at the hands of the U.S. military machine and western partners. Oil pipelines and weapons deals are the reasons for this monstrosity that knows no end in its brutal occupation. The U.S. sold arms to Nouri al-Maliki to back his corrupt regime and backed his forces with drone strikes against ISIS, even though the American CIA also previously supported jihadist Sunni rebels, including the ISIS—procuring weapons for these groups, to attack the government of Bashar al-Assad.

The maintenance of superpower prestige above all obligates the Obama Administration to launch a full scale air war against the against the well organized, well supplied and so far victorious barbaric Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria (formerly ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria).

 The capture of Mosul by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) means a radical change in the political geography of Iraq and Syria. It is not just in Iraq that the balance of power is changing. The Iraq-Syrian border no longer exists for most practical purposes. In Syria Isis forces will become vastly more powerful because the movement can draw on fighters, weapons and money from its newly conquered territories in Iraq.