Israel/Palestinian casualties—The big lie through lopsided coverage

SOME DEATHS REALLY MATTER – THE DISPROPORTIONATE COVERAGE OF ISRAELI AND PALESTINIAN KILLINGS
By Medialens Editors

[I]sraeli deaths matter much more than Palestinian deaths. This has long been a distinguishing feature of Western news media reporting on the Middle East. The recent blanket coverage afforded to the brutal killing of three Israeli teenagers highlights this immutable fact.

Channel 4’s Alex Thomson offered a rare glimmer of dissent:

‘Curious to watch UK media living down to the Palestinian claim that 1 Israeli life is worth 1000 Palestinian lives.’

Major broadcasters, such as BBC News, devoted headlines and extended reports to the deaths, and included heart-rending interviews with grieving relatives in Israel. The Guardian ran live coverage of the funerals for more than nine hours. But when has this ever happened for Palestinian victims of Israeli terror?

A reader challenged the Guardian journalist leading the live coverage:

‘@Haroon_Siddique Did I somehow miss @guardian’s live-tweeting of Palestinian victims’ funerals & eulogies?’

Several nudges elicited the standard display of hand-washing:

‘I’m not an editor so don’t take decisions on future coverage.’

An extensive list of news stories and video reports appeared on the BBC website describing how Israel is ‘united in grief’, alongside stories titled, ‘Netanyahu: “Wide and deep chasm” between Israel and enemies’, ‘Thousands gather for Israeli teenagers’ funerals’, ‘Grief and anger after Israel teenager deaths’, and ‘On road where teens vanished’.

These all strongly, and rightly, expressed the broadcaster’s empathy with the fact that something terrible had happened. But when has the BBC ever expressed this level of concern for the deaths of Palestinian teenagers? The question matters because consistent empathic bias has the effect of humanising Israelis for the public and dehumanising Palestinians. This is an extremely lethal form of media propaganda with real consequences for human suffering.

A Guardian editorial noted that the killings ‘had shocked [Israel] to the core’. Western leaders had also expressed solidarity – an outpouring of concern that contrasted with the reaction to Palestinian deaths, which ‘so often pass with barely a murmur’. But that was all the Guardian editors had to say.

The missing, ugly reality is that over the last 13 years, on average, one Palestinian child has been killed by Israel every 3 days. Since the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000, 1,523 Palestinian children have been killed by Israel’s occupation forces. Over the same time period, 129 Israeli children have been killed. Thus, the ratio of Palestinian children to Israeli children killed is more than ten to one. You would be forgiven for not having the slightest inkling of this from Western media coverage. Even in the past few days, in reporting the massive Israeli operation to find the teenagers, only the briefest of nods has been given to the ‘five Palestinians, including a number of minors, [who were] killed’ in the process.

Following the tragic discovery of the bodies of the three Israeli teenagers, corporate journalism gave headline attention to President Obama’s condemnation of ‘this senseless act of terror against innocent youth’. Significant coverage was given to the shocked reaction of prime minister David Cameron who said:

‘This was an appalling and inexcusable act of terror perpetrated against young teenagers. Britain will stand with Israel as it seeks to bring to justice those responsible.’

But when have Obama or Cameron ever condemned the killing of Palestinian youths or children by Israelis in this vehement way?

We can easily see the contrast in media treatment of Israeli and Palestinian deaths by observing the lack of coverage, and the silence of Western leaders, about two young Palestinians, Nadim Nuwara, 17, and Muhammad Abu al-Thahir, 16, who were shot dead by Israeli security forces in May. The BBC did not entirely ignore the killings. But the deaths werepresented as a murky event in which the truth was strongly disputed:

‘A human rights group has released a video it says shows two teenage Palestinians being shot dead by Israeli security forces at a protest last week.’ (Our emphasis.)

The BBC report was quick to present the Israeli viewpoint upfront:

‘But the Israeli military said the video had been edited and did not document the “violent nature” of the incident.

‘It also questioned a claim that live ammunition had been fired at the boys.’

A few days later, the Israeli military ordered the removal of the CCTV cameras that had captured the killings. The security cameras belonged to Fakher Sayed who ran a nearby carpentry shop. And the interest in this from BBC News and the rest of the corporate media? Zero, as far as we can tell.

Every violent death is a tragedy. But the disproportionate coverage given to Israeli and Palestinian deaths is symptomatic of a deep-rooted, pro-Israel bias. Why is it so extreme? Because of the intense pressure brought to bear on the media by the powerful Israeli lobby, and by allied US-UK interests strongly favouring Israel. As one senior anonymous BBC editor once put it:

‘We wait in fear for the phone call from the Israelis.’

The Superpower and the Caliphate

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by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

[D]on’t believe the hype that the CIA is behind ISIS’s declaration of an Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. “The Caliphate threatens, not only its immediate adversaries, but the potentates of the Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and the Mother of All Monarchist Corruption in the Arab Sunni heartland, the Saudi royal family.” It also signals the collapse of U.S. strategy in the region.

“The game plan that was hatched in 2011 for Libya, Syria, Iraq – for the whole region – is kaput.”

ISIS has proclaimed its caliphate, and the world will never be the same again. Although the territorial scope of the jihadist political entity will shift with the fortunes of battle, or maybe even vanish, the emergence of the “Islamic State” signals the final collapse of U.S. imperial strategy in the Muslim world – certainly, in the Arab regions of Islam.

“The legality of all emirates, groups, states and organizations becomes null by the expansion of the caliph’s authority and the arrival of its troops to their areas,” said Abu Mohamed al-Adnani, spokesman [5] for the fighters formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. “Listen to your caliph and obey him. Support your state, which grows every day.”

Think of it as a Salafist declaration of independence – not just from al Qaida, whose marginality in the region was confirmed when its designated affiliate in Syria, Al-Nusra, swore allegiance [6] to ISIS – but from the Arab monarchies and western intelligence agencies that have nurtured the international jihadist network for almost two generations. The Caliphate threatens, not only its immediate adversaries in the Shiite-dominated governments of Syria and Iraq, but the potentates of the Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and the Mother of All Monarchist Corruption in the Arab Sunni heartland, the Saudi royal family. The threat is not inferential, but literal, against “all emirates, groups, states and organizations” that do not recognize that ISIS in its new incarnation is the embodiment of Islam at war.

The jihadist die is cast, a point of no return for the U.S. strategy of projecting imperial power in the region through armed Islamic fundamentalist surrogates. The international jihadist network, which did not exist before the CIA, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan created it to undermine the leftist secular government of Afghanistan in mid-1979 [7], has become a movement that can no longer be controlled. The physical contours of the ISIS caliphate, the movement’s dynamic new focal point, may prove indefensible, especially if the Americans decide they cannot avoid an all-out assault on their former asset. But, whatever the U.S. military response, the game plan that was hatched in 2011 for Libya, Syria, Iraq – for the whole region – is kaput, based as it is on the reliable deployment of jihadists as surrogates for NATO and Arab royals. Worse, the Arab oil potentates understand full well that their own regimes are now in grave danger from the indigenous monstrosity they have created. The Saudis, in particular, justify their family’s monopolizing of the Arabian peninsula’s great wealth as reward for safeguarding the holy sites of Islam. No doubt the “Islamic State,” with its movable borders and swiftly expanding pan-Arab and even pan-Muslim constituency, would be glad to assume these responsibilities – over the dead bodies of those Saudi princes who did not escape to London, Paris and New York. The same goes for all the royal lineages aligned with the West and, de facto, Israel.

“U.S. policymakers have no idea how to reposition themselves in the region.”

It is true that the United States retains nearly limitless power to create chaos in the region. Chaos is useful in preventing conventional governments and civil societies from achieving national goals that are inimical to imperialism. But chaos is not empty; it is a cauldron in which contradictions can become explosively acute. The jihadists are, at root, anti-imperialists – inalterably opposed to domination by the “Crusaders” of the West and Zionists. As we have previously asserted, the fundamentalist jihad, although profoundly reactionary, inevitably behaves much like a kind of nationalism – for some, it fills a political void left by the demise of yesteryear’s secular pan-Arab nationalism. ISIS now claims to be the expression of that nationalist-like yearning, as the “Islamic State.”

If you think all this is the work of the CIA, then thank them profusely for accelerating the epic unraveling of U.S. imperial strategy in the Muslim world. As during the days when America’s Egyptian stooge Mubarak was pushed from power, threatening an “Arab Spring” that might depose the oil monarchies, U.S. policymakers have no idea how to reposition themselves in the region. The Americans cannot replace the jihadists as foot soldiers of imperialism. Thus, a period of ad-libbing begins, which will surely involve ostentatious displays of U.S. military prowess, as the Americans remind themselves and everyone else that a superpower outranks a caliphate.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com [8].

Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/superpower-and-caliphate

The Rise of ISIS

The West, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are Responsible for Talibanization of Iraq

By Gilbert Mercier, NEWS JUNKIE POST

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Geopolitics of chaos backfire

[S]ome call it ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), other call it ISIL (Islamic State In Iraq and the Levant), but whatever it is, this Jihadist army with territorial ambition has taken a new dimension. Jihadist fighters are nothing new. They’ve been around under other names like Mujahideen or “freedom fighters,” in Afghanistan, for more than 30 years. Just like al-Qaeda, ISIS is the secret love child of United States imperialism and the kings and sheiks of the Gulf states. In other words, in the Middle East, engineering of failed states has been on the US foreign policy agenda for decades. This was already at play in the early 1980s, when the Reagan administration — effectively run by Vice President George Bush Sr — backed Saddam Hussein in Iraq’s war against Iran.

An all-out regional sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites might not have been the goal, but it is certainly the result. Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of the region should have known that Iraq, Libya and Syria, without strongmen like Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and Bashar al-Assad at their helm, were likely to implode into chaos. Who might ultimately profit from fueling a fratricidal war within Islam? Could this be a strategy of ash and ruins, preliminary to the expansion of the Jewish state into the so-called Greater Israel?

In 2003, under the pretext of a war on terror, the US invaded Iraq. Eleven years later, it is the Jihadists of ISIS who can say “mission accomplished.” Iraq and Syria are in ruins, soaked with the blood of several hundred thousand people, and millions of their nationals are scattered to the wind as refugees. As this tragedy continues for Iraqis and Syrians, their former government officials are enjoying their retirements with hobbies such as painting, without facing international tribunals for war crimes, such as using depleted uranium weapons in civilian areas. They are more eager than ever to rewrite history and pass the blame to someone else. What could have gone so wrong?

Policymakers in the US and European Union, as well as their mainstream media echo chambers, act as if they have been caught off guard by the rise of ISIS. Were they sleeping at the wheel when their Machiavellian policy of playing Sunnis against Shiites, using Islamist fundamentalists soldiers of fortune, blew up into their faces. Large swaths of Iraq and Syria have been taken by a 60,000-strong Jihadist army. They are on the move, are combat hardened and now have their own funds. ISIS is estimated to possess more than $2.3 billion in assets.

When ISIS took Mosul in its three-day offensive, which also gave it control of Tikrit, it robbed all the assets of Mosul Central Bank: around $500 million plus a large amount of gold. Consequently, the Jihadists of ISIS do not have to rely on the deep pockets of Qatar and Saudi Arabia anymore and are no longer the tools of Saudis or Qataris. They have the numbers, plenty of money to make new recruits and buy weapons, and their own agenda. ISIS is stronger and more ambitious than al-Qaeda ever was. ISIS wants to redraw the map of the Middle East.

ISIS: Out of imperialism’s pandora’s box

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has rightly accused Saudi Arabia and Qatar of having sponsored the Jihadists of ISIS for about three years, ever since the start of the Syrian civil war. Al-Maliki should also blame the US and its European allies. By invading Iraq in 2003, toppling Saddam Hussein, and then fostering and sponsoring of the Jihadists in Syria since 2011, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the US have opened a geopolitical pandora’s box. Out of it came ISIS. United States foreign policy has been schizophrenic for decades, but it recently reached the apex of contradiction: to please Saudis and Qataris, Washington has supported the Jihadist fighters against Assad in Syria, and simultaneously in Iraq, Washington has supported (sort of) al-Maliki’s government against those same Jihadists.

The outcome was predictable, and one could wish that top policymakers would be held accountable for this crime of astonishing stupidity. As early as February 2012, we were raising concerns that Syria’s civil/proxy war could easily become a full-blown regional sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites. Again, on June 26, 2012, I commented in a Russia Today (RT) interview that the US was backing up a de facto Talibanization of the Middle East, just like the Reagan administration did in Afghanistan during the 1980s.

Welcome to Jihadistan!

The Islamist fighters thrived first in Iraq, where they seized on the opportunities presented by the toppling of Saddam Hussein, the US withdrawal, and a Shiite-dominated Iraqi government that largely failed to be inclusive of Sunnis. Then in 2011, ISIS and its many affiliates took advantage of a weakened Assad government in Syria. Flush with petro-dollars from Qatar and Saudi Arabia, they quickly became Assad’s leading military opposition. The Jihadists of ISIS are an Islamist foreign legion. They come from, not only the entire Islamic world, but also Europe. Thousands joined their ranks in Syria. The leader of ISIS is an Iraqi called al-Baghdadi. ISIS controls Syria’s southeast and all Iraq’s Sunni-majority area. The goal of ISIS is to impose a Caliphate, i.e. an Islamist state under strict sharia law to encompass much of the Arab world.

Who is afraid of ISIS?

The rise of ISIS is so concerning that it has motivated some abrupt reversal of alliances and made some strange bedfellows. On June 18, 2014, the Obama administration announced that 300 so-called military advisers would be sent to Iraq. Reading between the lines, this means that thousands of US special forces will be sent to secure the Iraqi oil fields and the Green Zone in Baghdad. The crisis has provoked a rapprochement between Washington and Teheran. Iran has sent at least 2,000 of its revolutionary guards to protect Baghdad. At least for the time being, American and Iranian special forces will be allied against ISIS.

Down the line, Iran’s military involvement could grow. The ISIS crisis will also be an opportunity for Assad’s troops, with the help of Hezbollah, to maintain their momentum. Those who should be most concerned about the Jihadists’ blitzkrieg in Iraq might be ISIS’ own biological fathers: the kings and sheiks of the Gulf States. If ISIS takes Baghdad, who can stop the Jihadist march on Doha (Qatar), Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), or even Amman (Jordan), in a most unwelcome return of the prodigal son.

Editor’s Notes: Photographs one, four, and six by James Gordon. Photographs two, seven and eleven from Freedom House. Photographs eight, nine and ten by Ahmad Mousa.

About the author
Gilbert Mercier is the Editor in Chief of News Junkie Post, where this essay originally appeared.

– See more at: http://newsjunkiepost.com/2014/06/20/rise-of-isis-west-saudi-arabia-and-qatar-are-responsible-for-talibanization-of-iraq/#sthash.mE0mxPOC.dpuf

The Ghoulish Face of Empire

By Chris Hedges

[W]e are not, as we thought when we entered Iraq, the omnipotent superpower able in a swift and brutal stroke to bend a people to our will. We are something else. Fools and murderers. Blinded by hubris. Faded relics of the Cold War. And now, in the final act of the play, we are crawling away. Our empire is dying.

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The black-clad fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, sweeping a collapsing army and terrified Iraqis before them as theyadvance toward Baghdad, reflect back to us the ghoulish face of American empire. They are the specters of the hundreds of thousands of people we murdered in our deluded quest to remake the Middle East. They are ghosts from the innumerable roadsides and villages where U.S. soldiers and Marines, jolted by explosions of improvised explosive devices, responded with indiscriminate fire. They are the risen remains of the dismembered Iraqis left behind by blasts of Hellfire and cruise missiles, howitzers, grenade launchers and drone strikes. They are the avengers of the gruesome torture and the sexual debasement that often came with being detained by American troops. They are the final answer to the collective humiliation of an occupied country, the logical outcome of Shock and Awe, the Frankenstein monster stitched together from the body parts we left scattered on the ground. They are what we get for the $4 trillion we wasted on the Iraq War.

The language of violence engenders violence. The language of hate engenders hate. “I and the public know what all schoolchildren learn,”W.H. Auden wrote. “Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.” It is as old as the Bible.

There is no fight left in us. The war is over. We destroyed Iraq as a unified country. It will never be put back together. We are reduced — in what must be an act of divine justice decreed by the gods, whom we have discovered to our dismay are Islamic — to pleading with Iran for military assistance to shield the corrupt and despised U.S. protectorate led by Nouri al-Maliki.

We are not, as we thought when we entered Iraq, the omnipotent superpower able in a swift and brutal stroke to bend a people to our will. We are something else. Fools and murderers. Blinded by hubris. Faded relics of the Cold War. And now, in the final act of the play, we are crawling away. Our empire is dying.

We should have heeded, while we had a chance, the wails of mothers and fathers. We should have listened to the cries of the wounded. We should have wept over the bodies of Iraqi children lined up in neat rows in the morgues. We should have honored grief so we could honor life. But the dance of death is intoxicating. Once it begins you whirl in an ecstatic frenzy. Death’s embrace, which feels at first like sexual lust, tightens and tightens until you suffocate. Now the music has stopped. All we have left are loss and pain.

And where are the voices of sanity? Why are the cheerleaders of slaughter, who have been wrong about Iraq since before the invasion, still urging us toward ruin? Why are those who destabilized Iraq and the region in the worst strategic blunder in American history still given a hearing? Why do we listen to simpletons and morons?

They bang their fists. They yell. They throw tantrums. They demand that the world conform to their childish vision. It is as if they have learned nothing from the 11 years of useless slaughter. As if they can dominate that which they never had the power to dominate.

I sat in a restaurant Thursday in Boston’s Kenmore Square with military historian Andrew Bacevich. You won’t hear his voice much on the airwaves. He is an apostate. He speaks of the world as it is, not the self-delusional world our empire builders expect it to be. He knows war with a painful intimacy, not only as a Vietnam combat veteran and a retired Army colonel but also as the father of a U.S. Army officer killed in a 2007 suicide bombing in Iraq.

“In the 1990s there was a considerable effort made in the military, but also in the larger community of national security experts scratching their heads and [asking] what are the implications of all this technology,” he said…

“They conceived of something called the Revolution in Military Affairs — RMA. If you believed in the Revolution of Military Affairs you knew that nothing could stop the United States military when it engaged in a conflict. Victory was, for all practical purposes, a certainty. People like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, and I expect Dick Cheney also, bought this hook, line and sinker. You put yourself in their shoes in the wake of 9/11. An attack comes out of Afghanistan, a country frankly nobody cares about, and you conceive of this grand strategy of trying to transform the Islamic world. Where are we going to start? We are going to start by attacking a country [Iraq] — we had it under surveillance and sanctions for the past decade — where there is a bona fide bad guy to make a moral case and where we are confident we can make short work of this adversary, a further demonstration that the American military cannot be stopped.”They utterly and totally miscalculated. Iraq is falling apart. And many of these people, either in government or outside of government, who were proponents of the war are now advocating for a resumption of the American war. Not one of them is willing to acknowledge the extent of that military miscalculation. Once you acknowledge it, then the whole project of militarizing U.S. policy towards the Greater Middle East collapses.”Bacevich blames the concentration of power into the hands of the executive branch for the debacle. He said that since the Kennedy administration…

“the incoming president and his team, it does not matter which party, see the permanent government as a problem. If we [the new officials] are going to get done what we want to get done we have to find ways to marginalize the permanent government. This has led to the centralization of authority in the White House and means decisions are made by a very small number of people. The consultation becomes increasingly informal, to the point it is not even documented.”“I do not think we even know when the decision to go to war with Iraq was actually made,” Bacevich said…

“It was supposed to be the catalyst that would enable us … to change the region. It turned out to be the catalyst that resulted in destabilization. The big question of the moment is not what can we do or is there anything we can do to salvage Iraq. The question is to what degree have our actions resulted in this larger regional mayhem. And to the extent they have, isn’t it time to rethink fundamentally our expectations of what American power, and particularly American military power, can achieve?”“We need to take a radically different course,” Bacevich said…

“There is an analogy to be made with Great Britain in the wake of World War I. It was in World War I that Britain and France collaborated to dismantle the Ottoman Empire to create the new Middle East. While on the one hand there was an awareness that Britain was in decline, at the level where policy was made there was not a willingness to consider the implications of that fact. It took World War II to drive it home–that the [British] empire was doomed. I think that is where we are.”Out of this decline, Bacevich said, is emerging a multipolar order. The United States will no longer be able to operate as an unchallenged superpower. But, he said, similar to what happened as the British Empire took its last gasps, “there is very little willingness in Washington or in policy circles to take on board the implications multipolarity would call for in terms of adjusting our policy.”

The inability to adjust to our declining power means that the United States will continue to squander its resources, its money and its military.

“By squandering power we forfeit our influence because we look stupid and we bankrupt ourselves,” Bacevich said…

“We will spend $4 trillion, not dollars spent in the moment but dollars we will have spent the last time the last Afghanistan veteran gets his last VA check. That money is gone forever. It is concealed because in the Bush administration’s confidence that victory would be easily won the government did not bother to mobilize the country or increase our taxes. We weaken ourselves economically. People complain about our crappy infrastructure. Give me $4 trillion and I probably could have fixed a couple of bridges. And we must never forget the human cost. Lives lost, lives damaged. And in these two wars [Afghanistan and Iraq] there does seem to be this increase in PTSD that we don’t know what to do about. It is a squandering of human capital.”

Bacevich said the “military mind-set” has so infected the discourse of the power elite that when there is a foreign policy problem the usual response is to discuss “three different courses of military action. … Should it be airstrikes with drones? Should it be airstrikes with manned aircraft? Special operations forces? Or some combination of all three? And that’s what you get.” The press, he said, is an “echo chamber and reinforces the notion that those are the [only] options.”

The disintegration of Iraq is irreversible. At best, the Kurds, the Shiites and the Sunnis will carve out antagonistic enclaves. At worst, there will be a protracted civil war. This is what we have bequeathed to Iraq. The spread of our military through the region has inflamed jihadists across the Arab world. The resulting conflicts will continue until we end our occupation of the Middle East. The callous slaughter we deliver is no different from the callous slaughter we receive.

Our jihadists — George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Thomas Friedman and Tommy Franks — who assured us that swift and overwhelming force in Iraq would transform the Middle East into an American outpost of progress, are no less demented than the jihadists approaching Baghdad. These two groups of killers mirror each other. This is what we have spawned. And this is what we deserve.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

BLOWBACK IN IRAQ: The Rise of ISIS

By Michael Faulkner
LETTER FROM LONDON

The term “war criminal” is bandied about often but in few cases it fits the bill as well as in this instance. These two men belong in a dungeon, for high crimes against peace and the death of at least one million people.

[I]t is now more than eleven years since the unprovoked invasion of Iraq by the USA and Britain. Because those who planned and prosecuted that invasion, and those who supported them, continue to defend what they did with contorted and specious arguments, it is worth recalling the attempted justifications for it that were made at the time.

Former prime minister Tony Blair who has escaped prosecution as a war criminal, astonishingly still emerges from time to time, apparently oblivious to the widespread contempt in which he is held, to argue that he did the right thing and that Iraq and the wider world are far better for being rid of Saddam Hussein. Although he and those who supported the war, including most of the British media at the time, now conveniently avoid mentioning it, the invasion of Iraq was supposedly to rid the country of weapons of mass destruction. It was not to effect regime change. Shortly before the invasion Blair himself pointedly stated that the planned invasion would be called off and Saddam could remain in power if he agreed to destroy his stockpile of WMD. The public was assured that he possessed such weapons despite the absence of any credible evidence that he did and despite convincing testimony from very reliable sources that they had all been destroyed shortly after the first Gulf war. In spite of all this and against mass popular opposition to the war manifested in the largest demonstrations in British history, the U.K. parliament, including crucially the majority of Labour MPs and almost all the Tories, voted in favour of the invasion. Had the majority of Labour MPs voted with the Liberal Democrats and the minority of Tory opponents, Britain could not have joined Bush in the invasion and Blair would have had to resign. It is to their everlasting shame that instead they voted for a war which, at the time and since, the great majority of international lawyers regarded as illegal. The events of the past week or so in Iraq are the entirely foreseeable consequence of that disastrous, criminal invasion in 2003.

At the time of writing (20.June) the situation in Iraq is almost as bad as it can get. Almost, because it can – and by the time this is published – probably will become even worse. At the moment Isis (the Islamic state of Iraq and al-Sham) has control of Iraq’s third largest city, Mosul, and Tal Afar in the north. It has taken Tikrit (Saddam Hussein’s birthplace) and also controls a string of smaller towns on or close to the oil pipelines from Basra to Haditha and Tal Afar to Baghdad. This includes the refinery at Baiji. Another refinery at Samarra is also under threat. In the Kurdish north-west the refinery at Irbil is now effectively in the hands of the large and well-trained Kurdish military force, the peshmerga. The venal Iraqi army, trained and armed by the U.S., and hyped as the best military force in the Arab world, melted away in the north as Isis forces advanced. The corrupt, sectarian, Shia-dominated government of Nouri al-Maliki, backed until now by the U.S., stands impotently transfixed by the crisis. Maliki can do nothing but beg his paymasters and mentors in Washington and London for air-cover and drones as the jihadists draw ever closer to Baghdad. He has been upstaged by the Shia cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistrani, who, with considerable success, has called upon his followers to take up arms against the Sunni jihadists.

The country faces almost certain collapse in one way or another. Either Isis takes Baghdad and proclaims the first stage of a new-born trans-national Caliphate stretching from the Mediterranean to the Gulf, or Iraq disintegrates into three warring regions – a Sunni-Jihadist north-west dominated by Isis; a north-eastern Kurdistan and a Shia dominated south. Whatever may happen, the whole country is likely to undergo a further and more intense period of sectarian-religious conflict. This will occur whether or not Britain and the U.S. intervene. U.S. drone strikes and/or aerial bombardment, should they be attempted, are likely to inflame sectarian passions even more. Such intervention will certainly not bring an end to the crisis provoked by the invasion of 2003. It will simply prolong and intensify the crisis. A mark of British/U.S. desperation may be seen in the overtures at present being made to Iran, only yesterday the dominant actor in G.W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil”. Where do things go from here? Can we look forward to the rehabilitation of Assad or a working alliance with Hezbollah? Where does it leave the close relationship with Saudi-Arabia, sworn enemy of Iran and armourer of the Sunni jihadists? And all this hardly begins to address the crucial question of Iraq’s oil reserves and the western stake in the industry. Who will control oil production and export in the tumultuous times ahead? Apparently Opec was predicting earlier this year that 60% of its future production would come from Iraq.

It is a sad reflection on the fate of the “Arab Spring” about which there were such high hopes after the toppling of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt in 2011, that in almost every case the outcome has been, not the democratic transformation expected by the revolutionaries, but the ascendancy of reactionary Islamism and, in Egypt, as a counter-blast against it, the restoration of a military regime hardly better than Mubarak’s dictatorship. It is depressing to admit that in Syria after the agonies of the last three years, the choice has turned out to be between a brutish secular dictatorship and an Islamist barbarism redolent of the dark ages. The enlightened forces of the Arab revolution have turned out to be feeble or chimerical. Though true, it doesn’t help much to point out that the emergence and growth of fanatical Islamism in its “modern” manifestation can be traced at least to the arming and funding of the Afghan Mujahedeen by the U.S. against the Soviets in the 1980s, culminating in the collapse of the Soviet-backed regime and ultimately in the castration, butchery and dismemberment of its leader, Mohammad Najibullah, by the victorious western-backed jihadists in Kabul in1996: a foretaste of things to come.

It is inconvenient for the dwindling band of apologists for the 2003 invasion and supporters of the “War on Terror” to be reminded that before the war to “liberate” the country from Saddam’s tyranny there was no al Qaeda in Iraq. They do not want to be told that the frenzied sectarian bloodletting which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives since 2003 was a direct consequence of that illegal invasion and the murderous occupation that succeeded it. Tony Blair continues to deny that there is any causal connection between the war he launched and the catastrophe that is now engulfing Iraq. It beggars belief that the British news media still defer to this man and, as has been remarked recently, it is beyond parody that he is still in post as peace envoy for the Middle East.

But what might one expect a left wing assessment of the present situation to be? Here it is more important than ever to distinguish between wishfulness and reality. In the early years after the Bolshevik revolution when the first revolutionary phase had passed elsewhere, Lenin criticised those who refused to recognize this for believing in fairy tales. In light of the rise to prominence and dominance throughout much of the Arab and wider Muslim world of particularly violent and reactionary brands of Islamism, it makes little sense to continue talking about the Arab revolution as though it was a living reality in any progressive sense.. In 1979 the “Islamic revolution” in Iran marked the beginning of a relatively new phenomenon – the fusion of a mass social revolutionary movement and a predominantly reactionary theocratic ideology (Shia Islamism) containing elements of populist anti-imperialism. Nowhere in the (Sunni) Arab world and the wider Sunni world have secular revolutionary forces been able to withstand the rise of militant Islamism. The U.S. and its allies must bear a large part of the responsibility for this. During the cold war their opposition to more progressive secular Arab nationalist movements such as Nasserism and the Algerian FLN which leant towards the Soviet Union, helped bring about the decline of progressive nationalism and paved the way for more pliant reactionary secular regimes, and ultimately for the rise of Islamist jihadists. The most extreme of these are now running rampant in Iraq and Syria.

It is a sad reflection on the present state of affairs that a significant minority of young Muslim men in Britain and elsewhere in Europe have in recent years reacted to western invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and to their own often marginalised and economically precarious status in society, by identifying with these jihadist movements. Several thousands from European countries have enlisted to fight in Syria and Iraq. Some commentators have suggested that these jihadists can be compared to the anti-fascists of the 1930s who joined the international brigades to fight for the Spanish republic. Nothing could be further from the truth. Those who volunteered to fight fascism in Spain were clear-sighted socialists, motivated by the highest humanist principles, prepared to fight and die for a noble cause – the struggle to defend democracy from the onslaught of a barbaric militarist rebellion. Those who enlist in the ranks of Isis are surrendering themselves to a benighted, intolerant, misogynistic movement that aims to drag the societies it conquers back into the dark ages.

Further western intervention in Iraq and Syria needs to be vigorously opposed. It is by no means certain that the Isis territorial gains in Iraq can be held. It is likely that the internal forces in Iraq will force Nouri al-Maliki to resign and his passing will be most welcome. But it seems highly unlikely that Iraq will escape an intensified Shia-Sunni-Kurdish conflict. It is likely that the Shia forces will be actively supported by Iran and their proxies, Hezbollah. The outcome, at least in the short-run, could be the break-up of Iraq into three regions. Facing hard and unpalatable reality it is clear that any idea of a progressive secular revolution succeeding in the foreseeable future is to believe in a fairy story. The best that can be realistically hoped for at the moment is that western intervention is blocked and that the advance of Isis is halted and reversed. If that is to be accomplished in Iraq it is likely to be done by predominantly Shia forces, hopefully supported by anti-Isis Sunnis and the Kurdish peshmerga. It is also to be hoped that the back of Isis and similar jihadists in Syria is broken too. If this can only be achieved by the armed forces of the Assad regime backed by Hezbollah, so be it. Not a particularly encouraging outcome. However, the choice is not between differing favourable solutions but between the lesser of evils.

Senior Contributing Editor Mike Faulkner is a British citizen. He lives in London where for many years he taught history and political science at Barnet College, until his retirement in 2002. He has written a two-weekly column, Letter from the UK, for TPJ Magazine since 2008, and Letter from London for TGP since 2014. Over the years his articles have appeared in such publications as Marxism Today, Monthly Review and China Now. He is a regular visitor to the United Sates where he has friends and family in New York City.