Saturday 21 October 2017

Sunday Morning Sermon



Life has never been a place of continuous happiness or continuous joy. Anybody who expects that is a fool. But we cannot ask our babies before they are conceived if they wish to live or not. Therefore any decision made can only be the decision of the parents, or made without choice if there is no access to contraception. 

To force children to live in a world of starvation and misery, war, and horror is not the choice of most parents, rather political decisions made by evil leaders of theirs or another country, or by the evil, unequal, capitalist based distribution systems in place globally. Even if your country is as socialist as is possible, it will still be affected by the global greeds and corruptions of the rest of the world. 

So parents bring, or not bring their children into the world due to their own desires. I desired children, and in the end I gave birth to five. Each one of them brought me so much joy, and I tried to give them the happiest lives within my power. I did not always succeed, things went wrong , like the breakup of my relationship, him using my children as pawns against me, never quite having enough money, stuff like that. But I always felt responsible, that having chosen to have these children, that I must give them the best start I could and teach them well. I believe I have succeeded in that to the best of my ability.

But I do have regrets. It first hit me, at the time of the Twin Towers, that I had brought my children into a human world that is inherently violent, against each other, against the planet, against the very earth that sustains us. For some years I struggled with the deepest depression, I still do. And my only way out from that, to find any hope at all, turned out to be joining the Green Party of Aotearoa, a political party which abhors war, embraces pacifism, cares for the earth and the people on it. Environment and social care are entertwined, a system that exploits one has the same attitude to the other. I and each of us, must bear responsiblity for the world we bring our children into. 

I also deeply believe that each one of us, now that we are here, are entitled to make our own decision about whether we wish to continue with our life. If our life is too much to bear, for whatever reason, we should be entitled to leave it. But only I can make that decision for me, only you can make that decision for you. Just because a person has disabilities does not mean their lives are too much to bear; a perfectly physically able person may have no joy in their life. It is arrogance that decides for another that their life is a nothing, Malthusianism at its most dangerous, it is this perspective that is morally wrong. 

I insist on everyone's right to live. I insist on everyone's right to choose the time of their death for whatever reason. And their right to bear or not bear children. But with every right comes responsibility. We are all responsible for the world we live in, and the children that live within it.

Wednesday 4 October 2017

Speaking ill of Hugh Hefner.



You call us shallow. But I and so many other women lived through your so-called sexual revolution.

We are the women who were girls in the seventies.

We are the girls who were told that if we didn't "put out" this bloke we thought was so cool would move on to the next girls.

We are the girls who were told we were sluts after we put out and that bloke had moved onto the next girl anyway.

And he told all his slaggy mates we weren't that great at sex.

More of a wash-out.



Or, he said, she will put out for anyone and they all came calling, all singing the same tune.

And you were still a slut, eh.

Or, after the first two or three your stomach churned and you said no,

And then they said, but you put out for him and then him, so now do it for me.

Entitlement.

That is what was gifted to the boys by Hugh Hefner.



Or what if that first time you said no, and you stuck to your guns,

Then you weren't a slut after all, you were a frigid bitch instead.

Don't go out with her because she won't put out and so you were left lonely and confused.



Or maybe when you said no that first time.
No, you said, no, no, no.

And he said, I know you really want it, and he got on top of you

Ramming himself against you, bang bang bang,

Under the pine trees.

In the dark.



Under those pine trees, stinking of pine and afterwards, when you pull your pants up,
you get scratched by the pine needles in your pants.

I knew you had done it before, he says, you are no virgin.

I knew you had put out before.

Under the pine trees.

And you had only met him that afternoon. He was in the back seat of a Vauxhall where
Playboy magazines were scattered about. On the floor.



You were Thirteen. When you finally got home there was blood in your pants.
And pine needles.

And you know he told all his mates you were a slut and no virgin and you put out,
They should have a turn with you.

Under the pine trees.

When you were Thirteen.






Tuesday 26 September 2017

Dirty Filthy Politics and Dead Cats on the Table.

Once again all the National voters, and all those swinging voters who voted for the National Party, know that you have all been totally manipulated by The National Party political advisory consultants, Crosby Textor, that Australian political advisory firm who manipulated the first National/Key election, possibly the second, don't know about the third but by golly they are alive and kicking in this campaign.
The antics of Crosby Textor were first let out of the bag in Aotearoa/New Zealand, in Nicky Hagar's "Hollow Men" and  "Dirty Politics" books. It is the 'dead cat on the table' ploy, in this case the lie about the so-called billion dollar hole that Steven Joyce (National Party campaign chairman) and Bill English (National Party leader and current Prime Minister) knew was a lie the whole way through because it was a lie thought up by Crosby Textor.
Crosby Textor were also campaign managers for the Tories in the UK, Theresa May used them, David Cameron and Boris Johnson to become Mayor of London. Tony Abbbot and Malcolm Turnbull have also employed them. Clearly the right wing parties just love them. No worries about deceit and lies are troubling any of these people, and their parties.
So, did you think Bill English was a decent bloke? Honest? Straight forward? Well think again because he and Joyce have lied, and lied, and lied, to everyone in this country all the way to the box office. Read the article linked at the end of this blog and realise that the Nats are laughing at you all every one of you, all the way to the bank. Again. Michael Wright on the Stuff article (25th September, 2017) explains in the first paragraph, 
"It worked so well it looked like it didn't work. It looked like National copped a hiding in the media and from the experts over its claim that Labours fiscal plan had an $11.7b hole in it but somehow managed to escape with 46% of the vote on Election Night. In fact, it was perhaps the single biggest factor in why National did as well as it did."
I read the article first of all on a newspaper copy of The Christchurch Press. It was on the bottom half of the front page, continued on page two wrapped around articles about Jacinda Ardern (leader of the Labour Party where she is described as being naive. "Substance trumped style, wrote Mike Yardley. "Play nice idealism is all very well, but you also need mongrel and a killer instinct in your arsenal ..." Translate this into, you need to be a liar and deceitful, you need to be corrupt. You need to stare into a camera with bland face and lie like the devil. Like the National Party.

Apart from the National Party getting the highest percentage in our election this weekend entirely through their lies, which in another country with a First Past the Post (FFP) voting system, would have won them the election; the saddest thing about all this, is the people who might read this post and/or the Michael Wright article and blithely say, 'oh well all politicians are corrupt', but actually they are not. And the people who believe these things about corruption and politicians are most often the people who do not turn out to vote because they say, what's the point they are all the same.

But I will argue that they are not all corrupt. Not in Aotearoa. The politicians who have not used the lies (advice) of Crosby Textor. The NZ Labour Party. The Green Party of Aotearoa. New Zealand First even. But what do we all do against this evil. How do we fight this? Do these other parties find their own Cosby Textor Political Advisory firms? Are the biggest liars with the biggest budgets always going to win now just like in the USA? Is this the Aotearoa/New Zealand that we want?

I have even more questions. Were Cosby Textor behind the vitriol aimed at Metiria Turei by John Armstrong, David Seymour of Act Party, Mike Hosking over and over on TV Ones Seven Sharp, Patrick Gower on Three. et al? I would not be surprised. When Metiria Turei first announced the Green Policy of Ending Poverty the Green Party went up to 15% on the polls. It was following that that all hell broke loose, as those privileged white men in suits unleashed the viciousness onto Metiria Turei and her "benefit fraud" after which the Green Party plummeted in the polls, even going under the 5% threshold. Did that all happen because of a nod from Cosby Textor?

Another question still. Was the leak about Winston Peters (Leader NZ First) superannuation overpayment also a Cosby Textor ploy, this time to undermine Winston Peters as National was fighting to win back the Northland Electorate from him? If the leak did not come from the Inland Revenue (IRD) or the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) then the only other place was the National Party itself, perhaps Steven Joyce in his capacity as National's campaign Manager? Perhaps we will never know.

So, at this time of writing, the negotiations start between National and New Zealand First, between Labour, Greens, and New Zealand First. Will Winston Peters swallow the overpayment leak and the losing of Northland? Watch the space,

The 'Dead Cat' Masterstroke that just may win National the Election (the article)

Wednesday 13 September 2017

Honesty in Politics



(This post has started life as a comment on Doug Noakes post on Facebook, in answer to Benni Jones, in the US.)

As a financial member of The Green Party Of Āotearoa, I am privileged to have met several honest MPs, all people who are honest, intelligent, and who all have integrity. I am proud to know them. Honesty and Integrity can get in the way sometimes as we are finding out especially, in this Election Campaign 2017. I wish it were over. I am scared of the result when it is over. Apologies up front, this "comment" may turn into a bit of a dissertation.

The Green Party in New Zealand started life as the Values Party on the seventies. It became the Green Party Of Āotearoa in the nineteen nineties. This last Election Cycle we have had fourteen MPs in Parliament. It is a part of our kaupapa that we always have two co-leaders, this last cycle they have been Metiria Turei and James Shaw. James became a co-leader during the cycle when Russell Norman stood down to become CEO of Greenpeace NZ.

In August Metiria Turei and James Shaw, (during the Greens AGM) launched two major policy platforms for the Greens Campaign. James launched policy over the environment, Metiria's policy platform was on Ending Poverty in New Zealand, a policy from her heart, because unlike many other people, she understands what it is to be a single mother on a benefit in New Zealand, especially during the nineteen-nineties after the then National Party government had cut benefits to 20% below what was needed to live on. I was on the same journey back then, so you get that I have strong empathy with this story. Since then poverty has become more and more obvious in New Zealand, we now have families living in cars, people living under bridges or sleeping under shop verandahs, children lacking shoes, coats, or school lunches, people in despair. This was not part of the Āotearoa/NZ that I grew up in, where we believed in community or equality of opportunity. Today's New Zealand is driven by classism, racism, and money, and sheer nastiness, it seems to me, and Metiria's story has become the graphic example of that nastiness, that wilful ignorance aimed at keeping the status quo.

Because, as a part of that Ending Poverty launch, Metiria revealed how she had 'lied' to Work and Income (WINZ) about flatmates in her home which would have effected her accommodation supplement on her single parent benefit. Filling out her annual forms to WINZ, she had neglected to mention that she had two flatmates in her home at he time; this because she didn't want to lose money, back then this was about survival, this was about putting food in her baby's mouth, and keeping a roof over her and the baby's heads. Remember, the benefits had had that major cut. In fact, pedantically, I would say she withheld information rather than outright lying, and further, had her flatmates been framed as boarders, people on the Domestic Purpose Benefit were allowed two boarders in their home. Boarders were not seen as income in the same way. Metiria told this story in an effort to get people to understand how bad poverty is in New Zealand, to get them to understand how difficult poverty is, that people are forced to scrimp and to lie in order to survive. which is true. I know this also. Incidentally the amount of money would be miniscule, but every little bit counts when you simply do not have enough money.

Anyhow, when I saw that launch on the TV, that Sunday night my heart dropped into my stomach. I was terrified. I was so afraid at what might happen, in fact what did happen.

Because all the nasties came out. Those well-off, sleek, white men, in designer suits with designer shirts and designer ties, the Mike Hoskings, the Patrick Gowers, the David Seymours, et al., the men (and some women) who are milking it from today's classism and racism, today's inequalities, today's housing market, where investors make millions, and low-waged people struggle to put food on the table or pay rents, even if they are working 2 or 3 jobs. Those media men led by ACT Party's David Seymour, they came out guns blazing, screeching about Benefit Fraud, the word fraud probably never having crossed their lips, nor their pens, nor their keyboards a few months earlier when the now Prime Minister, Bill English, ex-farmer, had been found out to have lied (oops, sorry dear, just made a wee mistake even) when he had claimed for accommodation supplements he was not entitled too, as part of his being an MP, to the tune of some $33,000! And I see little of that nasty, scathing rhetoric from those white men in suits over Winston Peter's (NZ First party leader) little mistake in claiming for more superannuation than he was entitled to, to the tune of some $18,000. Neither of those men had owned up as Metiria had done, both had been found out. But oddly, these little, maybe even deliberate mistakes are considered not fraud, rather they are technically legal? Really?

See, I think, that when Metiria told her story, the whole juggernaut of class, of gender, of racism, of the hatred that rich and well-off Pākēhā have for the unemployed, and the poor, and single mothers not kowtowing to some man somewhere, all that hatred and viciousness was brought out, and we in New Zealand got to see the true ugliness that surges underneath. The Green Party and Metiria lost control of the message which was, of course, to highlight poverty and the shifts that people have to go to in order to survive, and to launch this grand and wonderful policy to END POVERTY and Mending The Safety Net in New Zealand.

For the record, the policy was and still is :The Green Party will repair the holes in the social safety net by Increasing all benefits by 20%. They will increase the amount people can earn before their benefit is cut. Increase the value of Working for Families for All Families. Create a Working for Families Children's Credit of $72 per week. Introduce a new Top Tax Rate of 40% on income over $150,000 per annum, and Raise the Minimum Wage to $17.75 per hour in the first year and keep raising it until it reaches 66% of the average wage. These changes are to bring people out of poverty and provide independence, dignity and real choices.

Now, as we still carry on through the Election campaigning (till 23rd September), I wish that Metiria had not told that story. I understand why she did. She explained that she had been trying for 15 years in politics to get the message about poverty across, to get the message across about how it stunts growth, how it traumatises people, and how it turns good people into liars despite their normal inclinations. Because nobody can sit and look at an empty table at dinner time and their hungry kids if there is something they can do about it, especially when it is, to all intent and purpose, a victimless crime. Nobody is saying its ok to hold up the nearest dairy or bank here, ok. But in all these years nobody had listened, media had not given a jot, and Paula Bennett, Anne Tolley, and the National Party government have continued to reduce beneficiaries into frightened, ground-down people. At least that is the intent. So she used her own story in order to explain. While she knew that some would villify, I believe she thought that most of us would get it, that people would get on board and vote for this policy. We see stories about the homeless so frequently on TV now, that we would respond to this new Green Policy with open arms. It is what you would think if you still believe that most people care.

Even two of our own MPs did not understand, Kennedy Graham and David Clendon; they were so focused on the Fraud, that they wound up resigning from the party.

The trouble is, that in telling the story, Metiria Turei, instead of the Mana of being an MP and leading the Green Party, was put down and villified as a single Māori mother, a beneficiary like myself and many others, seen as a drag on the economy, shiftless, scum, all those things that are said to reflect the so-called underclass who live precarious lives, hoping like hell that the washing machine won't break down, that the school won't decide to take the kids on an unaffordable field trip that your kids can't go to. I remember one of my sons wouldn't even tell me about field trips, you know, because he knew I couldn't afford it, or would do without myself in order for him to go. And If I did find our, he would just insist that he really didn't want to go anyway. Anyway that nasty upperclass set went on and on about Benefit Fraud, night after night on the TV news, in all the papers, in articles online, on The Project and Seven Sharp, night after night and day after day of relentless shitraising about Benefit Fraud, and they sent out teams of people to Investigate Metiria Turei and her life in the nineteen-nineties to see if they could find more evidence of Bad Things she might have done back then when she was a Solo Mother on The Benefit. And any little scrap they found they published with glee. What do you think, New Zealand, do you think this woman ought to be an MP, they would sneer and they dragged in whanau (family) so that in the end Metiria had enough and resigned from being our Leader, and being on our party list.

And now the Green Party who were polling at 15% at the outset of the campaign are now polling at 5,2%, 5%, 4.9%. If we don't win an electorate or cross that 5% threshold, The Green Party will not be in Parliament at all.

Note: Metiria Stanton Turei is still standing as an Electorate Candidate in the Te Tai Tonga Electorate. Voters can get her back into Parliament by electorate voting in Te Tai Tonga.



Wednesday 9 August 2017

Losing Metiria Turei



I am devastated over the loss of Metiria from the co-leadership of our Green Party and from Parliament. I had such hopes that there was finally someone in Parliament that understood the plight of people in poverty and what's more, had a vision for what needed to be done. In all the years since the eighties when Rogernomics /neo liberalism took control, there has been absolutely nobody who cared enough to stand up like Metiria had. Nobody. Nobody gave a damn. 

I brought up my children n on a benefit and it has marked them. Not always for bad, there are skills they have learnt because of poverty. But that is because, I as their mother, also had good skills. One skill that is incredibly important while in poverty is the ability to get hold of any money you can from wherever. As Metiria has been telling the country in her own example. We lie, if you like, or stretch the truth, or withhold information. We now people's lawns under the table, babysit other people's kids, clean other people's houses, the list goes on. These are things we can do while our kids are at kindy or school. I think that over the years I have done all of those things, probably every other beneficiary as well. I did not write #IamMetiria lightly. So if Metiria has committed fraud, so have I, and so have thousands of others. We do this to feed our kids, to put food on the table, to buy them shoes and coats. We do it because, as Metiria has been telling the country, the benefits were set at 20% below the breadline in the early nineties and never altered since. 

So with my teenage twins still at home around 2009, I received $340pw approx. From that $210 was rent. Old cold uninsulated house was $60pw at least to heat. Leaving $70 to live on, food, clothing, transport, school fee, school trips, etc for 3 people.

For all those people who say those of us struggling are immoral, let me ask you about the immorality of allowing people to live like this, of turning your backs on us. The immorality of expecting people to live on such low amounts of money. And then hitting them while they are down.

I am alright now, I only have to look after me. My children are grown and they all have good jobs. But so many other people are still struggling and it is even worse for them than it was for me and mine and it breaks my heart. And I am heartbroken now that Metiria has gone. And I see Kennedy as one contributory factor to Metiria giving up finally, and therefore, I for one, do not welcome him back.

Monday 7 August 2017

Let He Who Is Without Sin ...

Cartoon by Toby Morris

"We do not believe that lying to a public agency ... can ever be condoned." K Graham & D Clendon

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. I am extremely disappointed in the attitudes and actions of Kennedy Graham and David Clendon. For years I and many others like me have wished that someone in Parliament would actually get it - would actually stand up and say that all mothers matter, that all children matter, that families matter, that decent homes for all matter. That some kind of equality matters even.
And finally, after around thirty years of beneficiary bashing, ever-widening income gaps, house prices and rents rising out of control while benefits are cut and unions are smashed, etc., finally Metiria Turei stands up and says, enough! And as part of a rollout of social justice policy, she tells everyone how it was/is to be on the bottom of the ladder and why change needs to happen. She tells the truth.
And oh man, what vitriol has come out, much of it expected of course, from the right wing assholes like Hosking and Gower and co. But omg, I did not expect two of our own to turn their noses up, as well.
Many years ago when I was in labour with my first daughter, I turned my back for an instant, and the father of that child walked out on me, and left me to cope on my own. And ever after I have always had it in my mind, that men will never be around when you need them. Right now Metiria Turei needs all of us to have her back, but David Clendon MP and Kennedy Graham MP have shown themselves, like that man who shafted me, to have feet of clay.
When the chips are down, people show their true character.


Saturday 15 July 2017

I Got Plenty Of Nothing



If we are lucky when we are at school, we get to have at least one stand-out teacher who inspires imagination, who teaches us to think, who adds to our cultural experience, the teacher we remember most of our lives.

I was in Standard Four at Picton Primary School, aged ten, and my teacher was Mr Curtis. He seemed an innocuous man, not very tall, wearing a suit, white shirt and tie. He set our desks in straight lines facing the the blackboard. He thought our drawing was terrible so he taught us how to draw in 3D, a suitcase, then a train curving towards us straight off the blackboard. Once he had us drawing Māori people. Coming from mostly Pākēhā Blackball, no telly back then, my knowledge of traditional Māori culture and dress was negligible, but I drew a brown lady in flax skirt, but then what did she wear on top? My mind was a blank so I left her topless, drew her breasts in. The other kids were like, haha, that's rude, but Mr Curtis put my drawing up on his display board just outside the classroom with all the best drawings, not because mine was especially good (it wasn't) but because it was outside the norm. Honest. Brave even.

Mr Curtis was an artist, into music, and a storyteller. He would set us a task, maths problems generally, and while we were working away, he would rub everything of the blackboard, and start to draw. We'd be peeping, what's the story going to be about? We would finish our work, he would finish his drawing, and then he would sit on his desk and just start the story telling. Sometimes it was a story from Greek Mythology, sometimes it was an old classic, Charles Dickens, maybe. Today it was the musical, Porgy and Bess.

I remember very imperfectly, as the story of a lovely man, a cripple who wheeled himself around on a wooden cart and lived in a shack.  He meets Bess, she moves in with him, but then, from her past comes the bad man, the criminal, who takes her away with him. I didn't understand back then why she had to choose to leave Porgy (not sure I do even now, I might need to try and track down the book or something). Porgy is heartbroken and leaves his home to find her. As I said, that's how I remember it. I doubt Mr Curtis played us the whole record; it would have taken far too long but the song he definitely did play was "I got plenty of nothing", which I have remembered all these years, a refrain in my head even though I don't recall hearing the song since. However, I have always held this idea that material goods were less important than other things, that it is "he tangata, he tangata, he tangata, he aha te mea nui o te ao", it is people who are the most important in the world. It's all only stuff, eh.

So many influences in our lives inform the person we become, the beliefs our parents role model to us, the culture of our country, the stories and music in our lives, our teachers. Porgy and Bess looms large in my life thanks to Mr Curtis, even though I never heard the whole thing then nor since. My ideas about how we should be living in this world, ideas about social justice and fairness in this world.

Because of Mr Curtis, I first heard the music of Gershwin, soul and jazz styles at age 10, after a childhood of pop music, Shirley Temple and Julie Andrews musicals.

Today, fifty years later, I find Porgy and Bess on Spotify, sung by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald and it is as fresh as it was, all those years ago. Loving it.

A Bit of Extra Info

DuBose Heyward wrote his novel, Porgy, in 1925. In 1927 he and his wife, playwright Dorothy Heyward, adapted the novel as a play. Composer George Gerswhin made the play into a musical which was produced as Porgy and Bess in 1935. Porgy and Bess was first performed on the 30th of September, 1935 featuring a cast of classically-trained, African American singers. No Blackface.
Following the performance in Boston, then from the 10th October in Broadway for 124 performances, then on tour in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago and Washington DC. In Washington the cast successfully protested segregation in the National Theatre, eventually resulting in the first integrated performance in that theatre.

In 1942 the show was revived for Broadway. On the 23rd of March 1943, the show was premiered in Copenhagen, this time with white actors/singers in Blackface, presumably so as not to offend the sensibilities of Hitler and his gang as the Nazis were occupying the country at this time. However after 22 performances the Nazis closed down the production anyway. The show was also performed in Gothenburg and Zurich, Sweden, and Zurich, Switzerland. still with white actors in Blackface in 1948.

Over the years the show has been successfully revived.

Saturday 15 April 2017

Another Pipeline War


Note: this post is clearly not my own work, however I add it for my own education and for anyone else who is interested, apologies to R.F. Kennedy Jr. I hope he does not mind.

Syria: Another Pipeline War
by Robert F. Kennedy Jr (25th February, 2016) uplifted from EcoWatch
The fossil fuel industry's business model is to externalize its costs by clawing in obscene subsidies and tax deductions—causing grave environmental costs, including toxic pollution and global warming. Among the other unassessed prices of the world's addiction to oil are social chaos, war, terror, the refugee crisis overseas, and the loss of democracy and civil rights abroad and at home.
As we focus on the rise of ISIS and search for the source of the savagery that took so many innocent lives in Paris and San Bernardino, we might want to look beyond the convenient explanations of religion and ideology and focus on the more complex rationales of history and oil, which mostly point the finger of blame for terrorism back at the champions of militarism, imperialism and petroleum here on our own shores.
America's unsavory record of violent interventions in Syria—obscure to the American people yet well known to Syrians—sowed fertile ground for the violent Islamic Jihadism that now complicates any effective response by our government to address the challenge of ISIS. So long as the American public and policymakers are unaware of this past, further interventions are likely to only compound the crisis. Moreover, our enemies delight in our ignorance.
As the New York Times reported in a Dec. 8, 2015 front page story, ISIS political leaders and strategic planners are working to provoke an American military intervention which, they know from experience, will flood their ranks with volunteer fighters, drown the voices of moderation and unify the Islamic world against America.
To understand this dynamic, we need to look at history from the Syrians' perspective and particularly the seeds of the current conflict. Long before our 2003 occupation of Iraq triggered the Sunni uprising that has now morphed into the Islamic State, the CIA had nurtured violent Jihadism as a Cold War weapon and freighted U.S./Syrian relationships with toxic baggage.
During the 1950's, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers rebuffed Soviet treaty proposals to leave the Middle East a cold war neutral zone and let Arabs rule Arabia. Instead, they mounted a clandestine war against Arab Nationalism—which CIA Director Allan Dulles equated with communism—particularly when Arab self-rule threatened oil concessions. They pumped secret American military aid to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon favoring puppets with conservative Jihadist ideologies which they regarded as a reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism. At a White House meeting between the CIA's Director of Plans, Frank Wisner, and Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, in September of 1957, Eisenhower advised the agency, “We should do everything possible to stress the 'holy war' aspect."
The CIA began its active meddling in Syria in 1949—barely a year after the agency's creation. Syrian patriots had declared war on the Nazis, expelled their Vichy French colonial rulers and crafted a fragile secularist democracy based on the American model. But in March of 1949, Syria's democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Kuwaiti, hesitated to approve the Trans Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria. In his book, Legacy of Ashes, CIA historian Tim Weiner recounts that in retaliation, the CIA engineered a coup, replacing al-Kuwaiti with the CIA's handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named Husni al-Za'im. Al-Za'im barely had time to dissolve parliament and approve the American pipeline before his countrymen deposed him, 14 weeks into his regime.
Following several counter coups in the newly destabilized country, the Syrian people again tried democracy in 1955, re-electing al-Kuwaiti and his Ba'ath Party. Al-Kuwaiti was still a Cold War neutralist but, stung by American involvement in his ouster, he now leaned toward the Soviet camp. That posture caused Dulles to declare that “Syria is ripe for a coup" and send his two coup wizards, Kim Roosevelt and Rocky Stone to Damascus.
Two years earlier, Roosevelt and Stone had orchestrated a coup in Iran against the democratically elected President Mohammed Mosaddegh after Mosaddegh tried to renegotiate the terms of Iran's lopsided contracts with the oil giant, BP. Mosaddegh was the first elected leader in Iran's 4,000 year history, and a popular champion for democracy across the developing world. Mosaddegh expelled all British diplomats after uncovering a coup attempt by UK intelligence officers working in cahoots with BP.
Mosaddegh, however, made the fatal mistake of resisting his advisors' pleas to also expel the CIA, which they correctly suspected, and was complicit in the British plot. Mosaddegh idealized the U.S. as a role model for Iran's new democracy and incapable of such perfidies. Despite Dulles' needling, President Truman had forbidden the CIA from actively joining the British caper to topple Mosaddegh.
When Eisenhower took office in January 1953, he immediately unleashed Dulles. After ousting Mosaddegh in “Operation Ajax," Stone and Roosevelt installed Shah Reza Pahlavi, who favored U.S. oil companies, but whose two decades of CIA sponsored savagery toward his own people from the Peacock throne would finally ignite the 1979 Islamic revolution that has bedeviled our foreign policy for 35 years.
Flush from his Operation Ajax “success" in Iran, Stone arrived in Damascus in April 1956 with $3 million in Syrian pounds to arm and incite Islamic militants and to bribe Syrian military officers and politicians to overthrow al-Kuwaiti's democratically elected secularist regime. Working with the Muslim Brotherhood, Stone schemed to assassinate Syria's Chief of Intelligence, its Chief of the General Staff and the Chief of the Communist Party and to engineer “national conspiracies and various strong arm" provocations in Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan that could be blamed on the Syrian Ba'athists.
The CIA's plan was to destabilize the Syrian government, and create a pretext for an invasion by Iraq and Jordan, whose governments were already under CIA control. Roosevelt forecasted that the CIA's newly installed puppet government would “rely first upon repressive measures and arbitrary exercise of power."
But all that CIA money failed to corrupt the Syrian military officers. The soldiers reported the CIA's bribery attempts to the Ba'athist regime. In response, the Syrian army invaded the American Embassy taking Stone prisoner. Following harsh interrogation, Stone made a televised confession to his roles in the Iranian coup and the CIA's aborted attempt to overthrow Syria's legitimate government.
The Syrian's ejected Stone and two U.S. Embassy staffers—the first time any American State Department diplomat was barred from an Arab country. The Eisenhower White House hollowly dismissed Stone's confession as “fabrications and slanders," a denial swallowed whole by the American press, led by the New York Times and believed by the American people, who shared Mosaddegh's idealistic view of their government.
Syria purged all politicians sympathetic to the U.S. and executed them for treason. In retaliation, the U.S. moved the Sixth Fleet to the Mediterranean, threatened war and goaded Turkey to invade Syria. The Turks assembled 50,000 troops on Syria's borders and only backed down in the face of unified opposition from the Arab League whose leaders were furious at the U.S. intervention.
Even after its expulsion, the CIA continued its secret efforts to topple Syria's democratically elected Ba'athist government. The CIA plotted with Britain's MI6 to form a “Free Syria Committee" and armed the Muslim Brotherhood to assassinate three Syrian government officials, who had helped expose “the American plot." (Matthew Jones in The 'Preferred Plan': The Anglo-American Working Group Report on Covert Action in Syria, 1957). The CIA's mischief pushed Syria even further away from the U.S. and into prolonged alliances with Russia and Egypt.
Following the second Syrian coup attempt, anti-American riots rocked the Mid-East from Lebanon to Algeria. Among the reverberations was the July 14, 1958 coup, led by the new wave of anti-American Army officers who overthrew Iraq's pro-American monarch, Nuri al-Said. The coup leaders published secret government documents, exposing Nuri al-Said as a highly paid CIA puppet. In response to American treachery, the new Iraqi government invited Soviet diplomats and economic advisers to Iraq and turned its back on the West.
Having alienated Iraq and Syria, Kim Roosevelt fled the Mid-East to work as an executive for the oil industry that he had served so well during his public service career. Roosevelt's replacement, as CIA Station Chief, James Critchfield attempted a failed assassination plot against the new Iraqi president using a toxic handkerchief. Five years later the CIA finally succeeded in deposing the Iraqi president and installing the Ba'ath Party to power in Iraq.
A charismatic young murderer named Saddam Hussein was one of the distinguished leaders of the CIA's Ba'athists team. The Ba'ath Party's Interior Minister, Said Aburish, who took office alongside Saddam Hussein, would later say, “We came to power on a CIA train." Aburish recounted that the CIA supplied Saddam and his cronies a “murder list" of people who “had to be eliminated immediately in order to ensure success."
Critchfield later acknowledged that the CIA had, in essence, “created Saddam Hussein." During the Reagan years, the CIA supplied Hussein with billions of dollars in training, Special Forces support, and weapons and battlefield intelligence knowing that he was using poisonous mustard and nerve gas and biological weapons—including anthrax obtained from the U.S. government—in his war against Iran.
Reagan and his CIA Director, Bill Casey, regarded Saddam as a potential friend to the U.S. oil industry and a sturdy barrier against the spread of Iran's Islamic Revolution. Their emissary, Donald Rumsfeld, presented Saddam with a pair of pearl-handled revolvers and a menu of chemical/biological and conventional weapons on a 1983 trip to Bagdad. At the same time, the CIA was illegally supplying Saddam's enemy—Iran—with thousands of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to fight Iraq, a crime made famous during the Iran Contra scandal. Jihadists from both sides later turned many of those CIA supplied weapons against the American people.
Even as America contemplates yet another violent Mid-East intervention, most Americans are unaware of the many ways that “blowback" from previous CIA blunders has helped craft the current crisis. The reverberations from decades of CIA shenanigans continue to echo across the Mid-East today in national capitals and from mosques to madras schools over the wrecked landscape of democracy and moderate Islam that the CIA helped obliterate.
In July 1956, less than two months after the CIA's failed Syrian Coup, my uncle, Senator John F. Kennedy, infuriated the Eisenhower White House, the leaders of both political parties and our European allies with a milestone speech endorsing the right of self-governance in the Arab world and an end to America's imperialist meddling in Arab countries. Throughout my lifetime, and particularly during my frequent travels to the Mid-East, countless Arabs have fondly recalled that speech to me as the clearest statement of the idealism they expected from the U.S.
In July 1956, less than two months after the CIA's failed Syrian Coup, my uncle, Senator John F. Kennedy, infuriated the Eisenhower White House, the leaders of both political parties and our European allies with a milestone speech endorsing the right of self-governance in the Arab world and an end to America's imperialist meddling in Arab countries. Throughout my lifetime, and particularly during my frequent travels to the Mid-East, countless Arabs have fondly recalled that speech to me as the clearest statement of the idealism they expected from the U.S.
Kennedy's speech was a call for recommitting America to the high values our country had championed in the Atlantic Charter, the formal pledge that all the former European colonies would have the right to self-determination following World War II. FDR had strong-armed Churchill and the other allied leaders to sign the Atlantic Charter in 1941 as a precondition for U.S. support in the European war against fascism.
Thanks in large part to Allan Dulles and the CIA, whose foreign policy intrigues were often directly at odds with the stated policies of our nation, the idealistic path outlined in the Atlantic Charter was the road not taken. In 1957, my grandfather, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, sat on a secret committee charged with investigating CIA's clandestine mischief in the Mid-East. The so called “Bruce Lovett Report," to which he was a signatory, described CIA coup plots in Jordan, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Egypt, all common knowledge on the Arab street, but virtually unknown to the American people who believed, at face value, their government's denials.
The report blamed the CIA for the rampant anti-Americanism that was then mysteriously taking root “in the many countries in the world today." The Bruce Lovett Report pointed out that such interventions were antithetical to American values and had compromised America's international leadership and moral authority without the knowledge of the American people. The report points out that the CIA never considered how we would treat such interventions if some foreign government engineered them in our country. This is the bloody history that modern interventionists like George W. Bush, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio miss when they recite their narcissistic trope that Mid-East nationalists “hate us for our freedoms."
The Syrian and Iranian coups soiled America's reputation across the Mid-East and ploughed the fields of Islamic Jihadism which we have, ironically, purposefully nurtured. A parade of Iranian and Syrian dictators, including Bashar al-Assad and his father, have invoked the history of the CIA's bloody coups as a pretext for their authoritarian rule, repressive tactics and their need for a strong Russian alliance. These stories are therefore well known to the people of Syria and Iran who naturally interpret talk of U.S. intervention in the context of that history.
While the compliant American press parrots the narrative that our military support for the Syrian insurgency is purely humanitarian, many Syrians see the present crisis as just another proxy war over pipelines and geopolitics. Before rushing deeper into the conflagration, it would be wise for us to consider the abundant facts supporting that perspective.
In their view, our war against Bashar Assad did not begin with the peaceful civil protests of the Arab Spring in 2011. Instead it began in 2000 when Qatar proposed to construct a $10 billion, 1,500km pipeline through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey.
Note the purple line which traces the proposed Qatar-Turkey natural gas pipeline and note that all of the countries highlighted in red are part of a new coalition hastily put together after Turkey finally (in exchange for NATO's acquiescence on Erdogan's politically-motivated war with the PKK) agreed to allow the US to fly combat missions against ISIS targets from Incirlik. Now note which country along the purple line is not highlighted in red. That's because Bashar al-Assad didn't support the pipeline and now we're seeing what happens when you're a Mid-East strongman and you decide not to support something the US and Saudi Arabia want to get done. (Map: ZeroHedge.com via MintPress News)
Qatar shares with Iran, the South Pars/North Dome gas field, the world's richest natural gas repository. The international trade embargo, until recently, prohibited Iran from selling gas abroad and ensured that Qatar's gas could only reach European markets if it is liquefied and shipped by sea, a route that restricts volume and dramatically raises costs.
The proposed pipeline would have linked Qatar directly to European energy markets via distribution terminals in Turkey which would pocket rich transit fees. The Qatar/Turkey pipeline would have given the Sunni Kingdoms of the Persian Gulf decisive domination of world natural gas markets and strengthen Qatar, America's closest ally in the Arab world. Qatar hosts two massive American military bases and the U.S. Central Command's Mid-East headquarters.
The EU, which gets 30 percent of its gas from Russia, was equally hungry for the pipeline which would have given its members cheap energy and relief from Vladimir Putin's stifling economic and political leverage. Turkey, Russia's second largest gas customer, was particularly anxious to end its reliance on its ancient rival and to position itself as the lucrative transect hub for Asian fuels to EU markets. The Qatari pipeline would have benefited Saudi Arabia's conservative Sunni Monarchy by giving them a foothold in Shia dominated Syria.
The Saudi's geopolitical goal is to contain the economic and political power of the Kingdom's principal rival, Iran, a Shiite state, and close ally of Bashar Assad. The Saudi monarchy viewed the U.S. sponsored Shia takeover in Iraq as a demotion to its regional power and was already engaged in a proxy war against Tehran in Yemen, highlighted by the Saudi genocide against the Iranian backed Houthi tribe.
Of course, the Russians, who sell 70 percent of their gas exports to Europe, viewed the Qatar/Turkey pipeline as an existential threat. In Putin's view, the Qatar pipeline is a NATO plot to change the status quo, deprive Russia of its only foothold in the Middle East, strangle the Russian economy and end Russian leverage in the European energy market. In 2009, Assad announced that he would refuse to sign the agreement to allow the pipeline to run through Syria “to protect the interests of our Russian ally."
Assad further enraged the Gulf's Sunni monarchs by endorsing a Russian approved “Islamic pipeline" running from Iran's side of the gas field through Syria and to the ports of Lebanon. The Islamic pipeline would make Shia Iran instead of Sunni Qatar, the principal supplier to the European energy market and dramatically increase Tehran's influence in the Mid-East and the world. Israel also was understandably determined to derail the Islamic pipeline which would enrich Iran and Syria and presumably strengthen their proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas.
Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link. In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria.
Bashar Assad's family is Alawite, a Muslim sect widely perceived as aligned with the Shia camp. “Bashar Assad was never supposed to be president," says journalist Sy Hersh. “His father brought him back from medical school in London when his elder brother, the heir apparent, was killed in a car crash."
Before the war started, according to Hersh, Assad was moving to liberalize the country—“They had internet and newspapers and ATM machines and Assad wanted to move toward the west. After 9/11, he gave thousands of invaluable files to the CIA on Jihadist radicals, who he considered a mutual enemy."
Assad's regime was deliberately secular and Syria was impressively diverse. The Syrian government and military, for example, were 80 percent Sunni. Assad maintained peace among his diverse peoples by a strong disciplined army loyal to the Assad family, an allegiance secured by a nationally esteemed and highly paid officer corps, a coldly efficient intelligence apparatus and a penchant for brutality which, prior to the war, was rather moderate compared to other Mideast leaders, including our current allies.
According to Hersh, “He certainly wasn't beheading people every Wednesday like the Saudis do in Mecca." Another veteran journalist, Bob Parry, echoes that assessment. “No one in the region has clean hands but in the realms of torture, mass killings, civil liberties and supporting terrorism, Assad is much better than the Saudis."
No one believed that the regime was vulnerable to the anarchy that had riven Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Tunisia. By the spring of 2011, there were small, peaceful demonstrations in Damascus against repression by Assad's regime. These were mainly the effluvia of the Arab Spring which spread virally across the Arab League states the previous summer. However, Huffington Post UK reported that in Syria the protests were, at least in part, orchestrated by the CIA. WikiLeaks cables indicate that the CIA was already on the ground in Syria.
But the Sunni Kingdoms wanted a much deeper involvement from America. On Sept. 4, 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry told a congressional hearing that the Sunni kingdoms had offered to foot the bill for a US. invasion of Syria to oust Bashar al-Assad. “In fact, some of them have said that if the United States is prepared to go do the whole thing, the way we've done it previously in other places [Iraq], they'll carry the cost," he stated. Kerry reiterated the offer to Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL27): “With respect to Arab countries offering to bear the costs of [an American invasion] to topple Assad, the answer is profoundly Yes, they have. The offer is on the table."
Despite pressure from Republicans, Barrack Obama balked at hiring out young Americans to die as mercenaries for a pipeline conglomerate. Obama wisely ignored Republican clamoring to put ground troops in Syria or to funnel more funding to “moderate insurgents." But by late 2011, Republican pressure and our Sunni allies had pushed the American government into the fray.
In 2011, the U.S. joined France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and England to form the “Friends of Syria Coalition," which formally demanded the removal of Assad. The CIA provided $6 million to Barada, a British T.V. channel, to produce pieces entreating Assad's ouster. Saudi intelligence documents, published by WikiLeaks, show that by 2012, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia were arming, training and funding radical Jihadist Sunni fighters from Syria, Iraq and elsewhere to overthrow the Assad's Shia allied regime. Qatar, which had the most to gain, invested $3 billion in building the insurgency and invited the Pentagon to train insurgents at U.S. bases in Qatar. U.S. personnel also provided logistical support and intelligence to the rebels on the ground. The Times of London reported on Sept. 14, 2012, that the CIA also armed Jihadists with anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles and other weapons from Libyan armories that the agency smuggled by ratlines to Syria via Turkey. According to an April 2014 article by Seymour Hersh, the CIA weapons ratlines were financed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
The idea of fomenting a Sunni-Shia civil war to weaken the Syrian and Iranian regimes so as to maintain control of the region's petro-chemical supplies was not a novel notion in the Pentagon's lexicon. A damning 2008 Pentagon funded Rand report proposed a precise blueprint for what was about to happen. That report observes that control of the Persian Gulf oil and gas deposits will remain, for the U.S., “a strategic priority" that “will interact strongly with that of prosecuting the long war."
Rand recommends using “covert action, information operations, unconventional warfare" to enforce a “divide and rule" strategy. “The United States and its local allies could use the nationalist jihadists to launch a proxy campaign" and “U.S. leaders could also choose to capitalize on the sustained Shia-Sunni conflict trajectory by taking the side of the conservative Sunni regimes against Shiite empowerment movements in the Muslim world ... possibly supporting authoritative Sunni governments against a continuingly hostile Iran."
WikiLeaks cables from as early as 2006 show the U.S. State Department, at the urging of the Israeli government, proposing to partner with Turkey, Qatar and Egypt to foment Sunni civil war in Syria to weaken Iran. The stated purpose, according to the secret cable, was to incite Assad into a brutal crackdown of Syria's Sunni population.
As predicted, Assad's overreaction to the foreign made crisis—dropping barrel bombs onto Sunni strongholds and killing civilians—polarized Syria's Shia/Sunni divide and allowed U.S. policymakers to sell Americans the idea that the pipeline struggle was a humanitarian war. When Sunni soldiers of the Syrian Army began defecting in 2013, the Western Coalition armed the “Free Syrian Army" to further destabilize Syria. The press portrait of the Free Syria Army as cohesive battalions of Syrian moderates was delusional. The dissolved units regrouped in hundreds of independent militias most of whom were commanded by or allied with Jihadi militants who were the most committed and effective fighters. By then, the Sunni armies of Al Qaeda Iraq (AQI) were crossing the border from Iraq into Syria and joining forces with the battalions of deserters from the Free Syria Army, many of them trained and armed by the U.S.
Despite the prevailing media portrait of a moderate Arab uprising against the tyrant Assad, U.S. Intelligence planners knew from the outset that their pipeline proxies were radical jihadists who would probably carve themselves a brand new Islamic caliphate from the Sunni regions of Syria and Iraq. Two years before ISIS throat cutters stepped on the world stage, a seven-page Aug. 12, 2012 study by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), obtained by the right wing group Judicial Watch, warned that thanks to the ongoing support by U.S./Sunni Coalition for radical Sunni Jihadists, “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI (now ISIS), are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria."
Using U.S. and Gulf State funding, these groups had turned the peaceful protests against Bashar Assad toward “a clear sectarian (Shiite vs Sunni) direction." The paper notes that the conflict had become a sectarian civil war supported by Sunni “religious and political powers." The report paints the Syrian conflict as a global war for control of the region's resources with “the west, Gulf countries and Turkey supporting [Assad's] opposition, while Russia, China and Iran support the regime."
The Pentagon authors of the seven-page report appear to endorse the predicted advent of the ISIS caliphate:
“If the situation continues unravelling, there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasakah and Deir ez-Zor) and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want in order to isolate the Syrian regime." The Pentagon report warns that this new principality could move across the Iraqi border to Mosul and Ramadi and “declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria."
Of course, this is precisely what has happened. Not coincidentally, the regions of Syria occupied by ISIS exactly encompass the proposed route of the Qatari pipeline.
But then in 2014, our Sunni proxies horrified the American people by severing heads and driving a million refugees toward Europe. “Strategies based upon the idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend can be kind of blinding," says Tim Clemente, who chaired the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force between 2004 and 2008 and served as liaison in Iraq between the FBI, the Iraqi National Police and the U.S. Military. “We made the same mistake when we trained the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan. The moment the Russians left, our supposed friends started smashing antiquities, enslaving women, severing body parts and shooting at us."
When ISIS' “Jihadi John" began murdering prisoners on TV, the White House pivoted, talking less about deposing Assad and more about regional stability. The Obama Administration began putting daylight between itself and the insurgency we had funded. The White House pointed accusing fingers at our allies. On Oct. 3, 2014, Vice President Joe Biden told students at the John F. Kennedy, Jr. forum at the Institute of Politics at Harvard that “Our allies in the region are our biggest problem in Syria." He explained that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were “so determined to take down Assad" that they had launched a “proxy Sunni-Shia war" funneling “hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons to Jihadists of the al-Nusra front and al-Qaeda"—the two groups that merged in 2014 to form ISIS.
Biden seemed angered that our trusted “friends" could not be trusted to follow the American agenda. “ISI[S] is a direct outgrowth of al-Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion," declared Obama, disassociating himself from the Sunni rebellion, “which is an example of unintended consequences which is why we should generally aim before we shoot." As if to demonstrate their contempt for America's new found restraint, our putative allies, the Turks responded to the U.S. rebukes by shooting down a plane belonging to our other putative ally, the Russians—probably to spoil a potential deal between Russia and the U.S. that would leave Assad in power.
Across the Mid-East, Arab leaders routinely accuse the U.S. of having created ISIS. To most Americans immersed in U.S. media perspective, such accusations seem insane. However, to many Arabs, the evidence of U.S. involvement is so abundant that they conclude that our role in fostering ISIS must have been deliberate. On Sept. 22, 2014, according to the New York Times, Iraqi leader, Shiite Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, told Baghdad demonstrators that “the CIA created ISIS." Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister, Bahaa Al-Araji, echoed al-Sadr's accusation. “We know who made Daesh," Iraq's Treasury Secretary, Haidar al-Assadi, told the Digital News Aggregate, “The Islamic State is a clear creation of the United States, and the United States is trying to intervene again using the excuse of the Islamic State."
In fact, many of the ISIS fighters and their commanders are ideological and organizational successors to the Jihadists that the CIA has been nurturing for 30 years. The CIA began arming and training the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan in 1979 to fight the Soviets. Following the Soviet withdrawal, the CIA's Afghan Mujahedeen became the Taliban while its foreign fighters, including Osama bin Laden, formed Al-Qaeda. In 2004, then British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that Al-Qaeda took its name—meaning “database" in Arabic—from the voluminous CIA database of Jihadists—Mujahedeen foreign fighters and arms smugglers trained and equipped by the CIA during the Afghan conflict.
Prior to the American invasion, there was no Al-Qaeda in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Bush destroyed Saddam's secularist government and his viceroy, Paul Bremer, in a monumental act of mismanagement, effectively created the Sunni Army, now named ISIS. Bremer elevated the Shiites to power and banned Saddam's ruling Ba'ath Party laying off some 700,000, mostly Sunni, government and party officials from ministers to school teachers. He then disbanded the 380,000 man army, which was 80 percent Sunni.
Bremer's actions stripped a million of Iraq's Sunnis of rank, property, wealth and power; leaving a desperate underclass of angry, educated, capable, trained and heavily armed Sunnis with little left to lose. General Petraeus' decision to import dirty war tactics, including torture and death squads, from the CIA's El Salvador conflict in order to shock and awe the Sunni resistance, instead ignited a shockingly bloody spiral of sectarian violence that devolved quickly into escalating atrocities topped finally by the Sunni Army signature head cutting. The Sunni insurgency named itself Al-Qaeda Iraq (AQI).
Beginning in 2011, our allies funded the invasion by AQI fighters into Syria. In June 2014 having entered Syria, AQI changed its name to ISIS. According to the New Yorker, “ISIS is run by a council of former Iraqi Generals ... many are members of Saddam Hussein's secular Ba'ath Party, who converted to radical Islam in American prisons." The $500 million in U.S. military aid that Obama did send to Syria almost certainly ended up benefiting these militant Jihadists. On Sept. 16, 2015, incredulous senators from the Armed Services Committee listened to U.S. General Lloyd Austin, Commander of the U.S. Central Command, explain that the Pentagon had spent $500 million to train and arm “moderate" insurgents in Syria and had only “four or five reliable moderate fighters" to show instead of the promised 5,000. The remainder apparently deserted or defected to ISIS.
Tim Clemente told me that the incomprehensible difference between the Iraq and Syria conflicts are the millions of military aged men who are fleeing the battlefield for Europe rather than staying to fight for their communities. “You have this formidable fighting force and they are all running away. I don't understand how you can have millions of military aged men running away from the battlefield. In Iraq, the bravery was heartbreaking—I had friends who refused to leave the country even though they knew they would die. They'd just tell you it's my country, I need to stay and fight," Clemente said.
The obvious explanation is that the nation's moderates are fleeing a war that is not their war. They simply want to escape being crushed between the anvil of Assad's Russian backed tyranny and the vicious Jihadi Sunni hammer that we had a hand in wielding in a global battle over competing pipelines. You can't blame the Syrian people for not widely embracing a blueprint for their nation minted in either Washington or Moscow. The super powers have left no options for an idealistic future that moderate Syrians might consider fighting for. And no one wants to die for a pipeline.
What is the answer? If our objective is long-term peace in the Mid-East, self-government by the Arab nations and national security at home, we must undertake any new intervention in the region with an eye on history and an intense desire to learn its lessons. Only when we Americans understand the historical and political context of this conflict will we apply appropriate scrutiny to the decisions of our leaders.
Using the same imagery and language that supported our 2003 war against Saddam Hussein, our political leaders led Americans to believe that our Syrian intervention is an idealistic war against tyranny, terrorism and religious fanaticism. We tend to dismiss, as mere cynicism, the views of those Arabs who see the current crisis as a rerun of the same old plots about pipelines and geopolitics. But, if we are to have an effective foreign policy, we must recognize the Syrian conflict is a war over control of resources indistinguishable from the myriad clandestine and undeclared oil wars we have been fighting in the Mid-East for 65 years. And only when we see this conflict as a proxy war over a pipeline do events become comprehensible.
It's the only paradigm that explains why the GOP on Capitol Hill and the Obama administration are still fixated on regime change rather than regional stability, why the Obama administration can find no Syrian moderates to fight the war, why ISIS blew up a Russian passenger plane, why the Saudi's just executed a powerful Shia cleric only to have their embassy burned in Tehran, why Russia is bombing non-ISIS fighters and why Turkey went out of its way to down a Russian jet. The million refugees now flooding into Europe are refugees of a pipeline war and CIA blundering.
Clemente compares ISIS to Colombia's FARC—a drug cartel with a revolutionary ideology to inspire its foot soldiers. “You have to think of ISIS as an oil cartel," Clemente said. “In the end, money is the governing rationale. The religious ideology is a tool that inspires its soldiers to give their lives for an oil cartel."
Once we strip this conflict of its humanitarian patina and recognize the Syrian conflict as an oil war, our foreign policy strategy becomes clear. Instead, our first priority should be the one no one ever mentions—we need to kick our Mid-East oil jones, an increasingly feasible objective, as the U.S. becomes more energy independent. Next, we need to dramatically reduce our military profile in the Middle East and let the Arabs run Arabia. Other than humanitarian assistance and guaranteeing the security of Israel's borders, the U.S. has no legitimate role in this conflict. While the facts prove that we played a role in creating the crisis, history shows that we have little power to resolve it.
As we contemplate history, it's breathtaking to consider the astonishing consistency with which virtually every violent intervention in the Middle East since World War II by our country has resulted in miserable failure. The long list of CIA and military adventures has each cost us dearly in national treasure, in liberty at home, in our moral authority abroad and in our national security. Without any memorable exception, every violent intervention has resulted in a catastrophic blowback far more costly to our country than any problems the authors meddling intended to solve. Our mischief has neither improved life in the Middle East nor has it made America safer.
A 1997 U.S. Department of Defense report found that “the data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement abroad and an increase in terrorist attacks against the U.S." Let's face it, what we call the “war on terror" is really just another oil war. We've squandered $6 trillion on three wars abroad and on constructing a national security warfare state at home since oilman Cheney declared the “Long War" in 2001. The only winners have been the military contractors and oil companies who have pocketed historic profits. We have compromised our values, butchered our own youth, killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, subverted our idealism and squandered our national treasures in fruitless and costly adventures abroad. In the process, we have turned America, once the world's beacon of freedom, into a national security surveillance state and an international moral pariah.
America's founding fathers warned Americans against standing armies, foreign entanglements and, in John Adams' words, “going abroad in search of monsters to destroy." Those wise men understood that imperialism abroad is incompatible with democracy and civil rights at home. They wanted America to be a “city on a hill"—a model of democracy for the rest of the world.
The Atlantic Charter echoed their seminal American ideal that each nation should have the right to self-determination. Over the past seven decades, the Dulles brothers, the Cheney Gang, the neocons and their ilk have hijacked that fundamental principle of American idealism and deployed our military and intelligence apparatus to serve the mercantile interests of large corporations and particularly, the petroleum companies and military contractors who have literally made a killing from these conflicts. It's time for Americans to turn America away from this new imperialism and back to the path of idealism and democracy. We should let the Arabs govern Arabia and turn our energies to the great endeavor of nation building at home. We need to begin this process, not by invading Syria, but by ending our ruinous addiction to oil.