{UAH} ISIS ATROCITIES AND US IMPERIALISM

ISIS atrocities and us imperialism

September 8, 2014 Wenceslaus Murape Opinion & Analysis

Patrick Martin
The savage murder of US journalist Steven Sotloff has provoked justifiable anger and revulsion among millions of people around the world. It is necessary, however, not only to sympathise with Sotloff and his family, but to understand the deeper causes of this tragedy.The murder, following that of James Foley last month, is a further demonstration of both the reactionary character of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the terrible consequences of a half-century of intervention in the Middle East by US imperialism.

US Vice President Joseph Biden denounced the beheading of Sotloff in a speech at a naval shipyard in New Hampshire, declaring that US military forces would pursue ISIS to “the gates of hell.” But ISIS is not an incomprehensible emanation of Satanic evil, as portrayed by the Obama administration and the American media. It is a product of the policies of the US government over a protracted period of time.

US administrations have sought to build up the most reactionary and backward Islamic fundamentalist forces in the Middle East for many decades. Throughout the Cold War, Washington mobilised them against secular nationalist leaders viewed either as potential allies of the Soviet Union or as direct threats to the profits and property of American and European corporations.

The US cultivated similar forces in Egypt, including the Muslim Brotherhood, to undermine the regime of Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, who nationalised the Suez Canal and sought military aid from the Soviet Union.

In 1977, the CIA backed the coup in Pakistan carried out by Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who established a martial law regime based on Islamist fundamentalism that lasted until his death in 1988.

The security anchor of American policy in the Persian Gulf region, particularly after the 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah of Iran, was an alliance with the monarchy in Saudi Arabia, which has long promoted the most reactionary forms of Islamic fundamentalism as an ideological bulwark for its parasitic rule.

The state of Israel pursued a similar policy, promoting the Muslim Brotherhood affiliate in the occupied Palestinian territories as a rival to undermine the Palestine Liberation Organization of Yasser Arafat, which it viewed as the main enemy. Out of this effort would emerge Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Islamic fundamentalism became directly linked to terrorist violence through the US campaign of subversion beginning in the late 1970s against the pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan. The CIA, working with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, recruited Islamic fundamentalists from all over the world, trained them in bomb-making and other terror tactics, and funnelled them to the battlefield in Afghanistan.

Prominent among these was the son of a Saudi construction multi-millionaire, Osama bin Laden.

The veterans of Afghanistan returned to their home countries, from Morocco to Indonesia, spreading the influence of Islamic fundamentalism into countries where it had never before existed. A key turning point was the 1990-91 Persian Gulf war, in which half a million US troops were deployed to Saudi Arabia, prompting bin Laden and other Islamists to declare the United States the main enemy.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, carried out by a group of predominantly Saudi terrorists, several of them well known to the US intelligence services, the Bush administration declared its “war on terror” against the former US allies. However, this by no means signified a break with the Islamic fundamentalists, many now operating under the umbrella of Al Qaeda, as later events would show.

There remained a murky connection between US foreign policy and the radical Islamists, most notably in Iraq, Libya and Syria, three countries ruled by secular regimes that had largely suppressed the fundamentalist groups. The US invasion and occupation of Iraq laid waste to the country, killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and destroying the social and physical infrastructure. The US-NATO intervention in Libya in 2011 employed elements linked to Al Qaeda as its ground troops, leading to the current state of political disintegration and civil war in that country.

In Syria, the CIA and US allies such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia directly armed, financed and trained Islamic extremists to fight the government of President Bashar al-Assad, which was allied to Iran and Russia. The recipients of US aid included both the Al-Nusra Front, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, and ISIS, which advocated an even more extreme form of Islamist terrorism than Al Qaeda, including the immediate establishment of a “caliphate” on conquered territory in eastern Syria and western Iraq. — wsws.org.

 

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