INDISPENSABLE BOOKS: F.W. Engdahl’s The Lost Hegemon

As I sit down to write these words, Western Europe is being overwhelmed with a cultural and social challenge unprecedented in her history. A brutal four-year long war in Syria has spread around the world. An organization calling itself ISIS or the Islamic State erupted violently onto the world stage in 2014 to claim the right to create what they termed The Global Caliphate. The conditions of war and terror in Syria had created more than two million refugees on the move for safety, more than one million of them coming to Europe seeking asylum during the final months of 2015 alone.
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On September 30, 2015 the Russian Federation accepted a call from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to help defeat ISIS in Syria. That call came despite bombing from the United States, allegedly against ISIS strongholds, for more than one year, a bombing that appeared only to have expanded the control of ISIS.
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The direct Russian involvement in military action far from her shores signaled a new era in global politics following the collapse of the Soviet Union a quarter century before. The world seemed to be ineluctably moving towards a new world war, this one with religion at its core. Ultimately, Islamic terror was being instrumentalized as a weapon of war, one being aimed to defeat Russia, China and pre-empt emergence of a rival to the sole hegemony of the United States.
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On November 13, 2015 grotesque suicide bomber attacks across Paris signaled a new phase in the attack on civilization. Yet few asked who or what was actually behind the IS and its reign of terror. To answer that it would be necessary to go back to the early post-World War II period and the birth of a new American intelligence agency.
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For more than six decades, a faction in the US intelligence community used, and even trained, various Islamic political groups for their goal to extend an American hegemony in the world. The relationship between the CIA and certain specific groups of political Islamists began in the 1950s in postwar Munich and reached a new dimension  in the 1980s, when the CIA, together with Saudi Arabian intelligence, brought a wealthy Saudi Islamist named Osama bin Laden to Pakistan to recruit Islamic Jihadists for a terrorist war against the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan.
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The success of the CIA’s Operation Cyclone, to arm and train Afghani and other Mujahideen Islamic combatants, led Washington to deploy the same tactic after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Veterans of the Afghan Mujahideen war, many of them Saudi and other Arab nationals recruited by bin Laden’s organization, Al Qaeda, were brought on CIA private air transports into Azerbaijan, where British and US oil companies had their eye on the petroleum riches of the Caspian Sea. The CIA brought them into Yugoslavia to fan the flames of war there, from Bosnia-Herzegovina to Kosovo. They smuggled them into Chechnya and Dagestan to sabotage Russian oil pipeline routes.
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As evident success grew with each attempt, some in Washington became heady with their strategy. They were convinced they had discovered the ideal instrument for making terror anywhere in the world to advance their agenda of global hegemony now that the Soviet Union had collapsed, while blaming it on crazed “stirred up Muslims,” as Zbigniew Brzezinski once termed them.
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The CIA and Pentagon finally had their new “enemy image” to replace the old Soviet communism when they blamed the events of September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington on Osama in Laden and his Al Qaeda network, whether true or not. Washington promptly declared a War on Terror and, under that banner, spread US military bases and its hegemony across the globe to places inconceivable just a decade before. Fear gripped an uncertain American population. They joined in the new war.
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US military forces had their excuse to invade oil-rich Iraq in 2003. There they proceeded to unleash an unholy military terror that pitted Sunni Muslim Iraqis against Shi’ite Muslim Iraqis. Out of the bloody US occupation new recruits for Al Qaeda in Iraq grew dramatically. At the same time, the CIA worked across the Turkic world, from Uzbekistan to Xinjiang in western China, the site of China’s major oil and gas activities. They trained new recruits to a Turkish Jihad, using the illusion of restoring an Ottoman empire to unleash terror and chaos across mineral-rich Central Asia to ultimately open it for penetration by Western multinationals in the power vacuum left with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
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By December 2010 Washington was ready to unleash their most ambitious form of spreading radical political Islam. In Tunisia, using the event of the self-immolation of the young Tunisian, Mohamed Bouazizi, the CIA, US State Department, George Soros’ Open Society foundation, Freedom House, NED, and other CIA-linked NGOs unleashed a wave of Arab world Color Revolutions. It was CIA- and US State Department-backed regime change using Twitter, Facebook, and deploying youthful activists Washington had trained months before.^[1]

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Once millions of naïve, hopeful students and workers had poured into Tahrir Square in Cairo, in Tunis, and across the Islamic North Africa and Middle East, Washington and the CIA backed their “asset,” the Muslim Brotherhood, to establish new regimes they believed that they could control.
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The oil-rich Islamic world was becoming too independent of British and American banks and oil companies. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Tunisia’s Ben Ali, and Libya’s Ghaddafi were combining to create an interest-free union of Islamic banks that potentially threatened the domination of Wall Street and the City of London. Moreover, China was moving in to the region for the first time, investing billions in Sudan, Iraq, Libya and beyond, in order to secure its oil supplies.
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However with the launch of their so-called Arab Spring, a nightmare began to unfold for Washington and her allies in NATO and Tel Aviv. Tectonic fault lines surfaced which were not anticipated. The Muslim Brotherhood dictatorship that the CIA backed under Mohammed Morsi in Egypt was toppled by a military coup backed by the Egyptian people and financed by a nervous the Saudi monarchy. Libya descended into tribal warfare and its oil flows dwindled to near extinction as civil war raged.
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However, the planners in Washington—the Pentagon, Langley CIA headquarters, the State Department and the Obama White House—had no Plan B. Unleashing CIA-financed and CIA-trained Jihadists and their terror in the name of Allah was Plan A. It was their only plan.

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[dropcap]W[/dropcap]ith a wave of shocking successes, an Islamic terror organization with the imposing name of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)—otherwise known variously as Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL), al-Qaeda in Iraq, Islamic State (IS), or, in Arabic, Da’ash—scored shocking military victories in the summer of 2014. Well-armed with the most modern weapons and vehicles, they overtook the strategic city of Mosul and key oil centers in Iraq, including Kirkuk, then swept over the border into Syria as far as the border to Turkey.
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The organization ISIS became a household word when YouTube videos—later forensically proven to have been faked using professional actors—of the alleged beheading of an American journalist, James Foley, created a groundswell for a US-led NATO military action in Iraq and Syria.^[2]
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ISIS, later calling itself IS, had been created as a joint project by the CIA and Israeli Mossad to combine psychotic mercenaries posing as Islamic Jihadists, gathered from around the world—Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, even China’s Turkic Xinjiang Province—in what the CIA called Operation Hornet’s Nest. When some Israeli journalist experts pointed out that the letters “I-S-I-S” stood for the English name of Mossad—Israeli Secret Intelligence Service—the Jihadis quickly proclaimed over YouTube a new name: Islamic State, or IS in what appeared to be a clumsy coverup attempt.^[3]

ISIS’ self-appointed head, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, self-proclaimed “direct descendant” of the Prophet Mohammed, announced he was the (again, self-proclaimed) Caliph of all Muslims worldwide. It was a claim disputed by Islamic scholars and religious leaders worldwide.
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Al Baghdadi, whose name meant simply, “the one from Baghdad,” and who declared he had directly descended from Mohammed, and his Caliphate were pure CIA and Mossad fabrication, with money from Qatar and other Sunni states including Erdogan’s Turkey, designed to terrify a gullible American public into going to war again in the Middle East.

A “trusted source” close to the Saudi multi-billionaire and former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri said, on condition of anonymity, that the final green light for the war on Iraq and Syria with ISIS was given behind closed doors at the Atlantic Council’s Energy Summit in Istanbul, Turkey, November 22–23, 2013. The Atlantic Council was one of the most influential US think tanks with regard to US and NATO foreign policy and geopolitics.

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The same source stated that the key coordinator of ISIS, or Da’ash, military actions was US Ambassador to Turkey Francis Riccardione. “As far as I know, nothing moves without Ambassador Riccardione,” the Hariri intimate declared.^[4]

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After 1989, al-Zarqawi moved into Iraq, where he was commissioned by his CIA handlers to found Al-Qaeda in Iraq—the direct predecessor of ISIS—first against Saddam Hussein’s secular Baath Party rule, then, after 2003, as a Sunni terror force waging attacks on US occupation troops, as well as against Shi’ites, to justify a permanent US military occupation of Iraq. In that, they failed, when the Shi’ite government of Nouri al-Maliki ordered Washington to remove US troops from Iraq.

As a consequence, out of the Al Qaeda in Iraq, the Pentagon and CIA created a new, far larger Jihadist killing machine. Its purpose was  to create the preconditions needed to bring US military troops back into Iraq, into Syria, Lebanon and beyond, and to remove Russia’s ally Assad in Damascus.

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The key fighters of ISIS were trained by CIA and US Special Forces Command at a secret camp in Jordan in 2012, according to informed Jordanian and other sources. US, Turkish, and Jordanian intelligence were running a training base for the Syrian rebels in the Jordanian town of Safawi in the country’s northern desert region, conveniently near the borders to both Syria and Iraq. Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the two Gulf monarchies most involved in funding the war against Syria’s Assad, financed the Jordan ISIS training.^[5] Other reports claimed that a part of ISIS was also trained in secret camps in Libya as well as in NATO bases in Turkey near to the Syrian border.

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A geopolitical contest between the US against Russia and increasingly against China was the ultimate objective of leading neoconservatives in the CIA, Pentagon, and State Department. On November 7, 2015 US Defense Secretary Ash Carter delivered a major speech in which he singled out China and Russia. He stated, “Moscow’s nuclear saber-rattling raises questions about Russia’s leaders’ commitment to strategic stability…We do not seek to make Russia an enemy. But make no mistake; the United States will defend our interests, and our allies, the principled international order…” He added, “In the face of Russia’s provocations and China’s rise, we must embrace innovative approaches to protect the United States and strengthen that international order.” ^[6] Clearly radical Islamic terrorism was one such “innovative approach.”

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In the early 1990s, during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the CIA transported hundreds of Mujahideen who were Saudi and other veterans of the 1980’s Afghanistan secret war against the Soviet Red Army. They were smuggled into Chechnya to disrupt the struggling new Russian Federation. They aimed particularly to sabotage the Russian oil pipeline running directly from Baku on the Caspian Sea into Russia. James Baker III and his friends in Anglo-American Big Oil had other plans. It was called the BTC pipeline, owned by a British-US oil consortium, running through Tbilisi into NATO-member Turkey, free of Russian territory.

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In 2014 after a bloody, failed attempt over three years to unseat Bashar al-Assad, the ISIS terrorist assaults in Syria and Iraq conveniently gave the US neoconservative war hawks the pretext for their proxy war against Russia, Iran, and China’s strategic Middle East ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The paranoid and obscenely rich Sunni rulers of Saudi Arabia and Qatar—aided by deluded Turkish President Erdogan with his delusions of restoring Turkey to its lost Ottoman glory—did the dirty work for Washington and Tel Aviv in Syria.

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On one level, the IS war was about oil, gas, and pipelines to control the vast oil riches of the region, as well as to deny Russia the South Stream gas route to a Europe independent of Ukraine. On a deeper level, the IS war was part of a larger global strategy to defeat the only effective resistance to the creation of a new 21^st century universal fascism, a return to the dark times of the Middle Ages but on a world scale, “one world” that would be controlled by very rich Western families whose agenda was total control over the world and reduction of global population through eugenics, wars and terrorism.

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The Washington war against Syria and the US-created war in Ukraine were two fronts in what, in reality, was one war. It was a war against Russia and, at the same time, a war against China. Those two Eurasian powers, the key nations of the BRICS and of the Eurasian Shanghai Cooperation Organization, represented the center of gravity for the only effective counterweight to a new global fascist barbarism, a barbarism the Pentagon called Full Spectrum Dominance and the American oligarch David Rockefeller called his New World Order.

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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]o comprehend the psychopathic, murderous rage of the Jihadists and mercenaries of IS, it was necessary to search into their historical roots. The search led back to the First World War, to Sykes-Picot, and to the historical roots of Arab rage. It led back to Egypt in the 1920s and the creation of a Sunni-based Islamic death cult known as the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood under Hasan al-Banna. It led to the evolution of that Muslim Brotherhood and their profane alliances to various non-Muslim intelligence services, from the British MI6 to Heinrich Himmler and the Nazi SS to, finally, the CIA beginning in the 1950s.

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By the early days of 2015, it was becoming more and more clear that as a Washington war in Ukraine faltered, as a Washington war in Syria became an unspeakable debacle, and as their creation of a new Islamic Ottoman Empire in Turkey around Fethullah Gülen’s Cemaat organization faced existential threat in a confrontation with former ally, Turkish President Erdogan, the Washington tactic of using political fundamentalist Islam to secure a revitalized American global hegemony was failing everywhere.

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The American oligarchs who controlled Washington through their influential think tanks and ownership of mainstream media—names like Gates, Rockefeller, Soros, and Bush, the families who owned the American military–industrial complex—were becoming desperate. In their growing desperation, they threatened a new world war, using their old nemesis Russia as pretext. Literally, as the words of the ancient proverb attributed to Euripides expressed it, “Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.”  By the early weeks of 2015 the Sole Superpower, the global Hegemon, the American Oligarchs were not only lost, but also going mad. The world was slipping from their grasp.

—F. William Engdahl, Frankfurt am Main, January 2016

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