F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL

*

THIS AUDIO RANT IS FROM F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL'S BOOK ENTITLED The-Lost-Hegemon-Whom-the-gods-would-destroy PAGES 208 TO 210. THE TEXT TO THIS RANT CAN BE READ AT AUDIO MP3 BOOKS DOT COM. THE  AUTHORS WEBSITE IS WILLIAM ENGDAHL DOT COM.

The Lost Hegemon Whom the gods Would destroy PGS-208-210 10MIN MP3.mp3

In every case, to disguise the key role of the United States government in a region where it was distrusted and even despised following the disastrous Iraq and Afghan wars, US-financed NonGovernment Organizations— such as the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, or the neoconservative Committee on the Present Danger— were used to identify opposing groups and factions, especially religious, and exacerbate tensions in the target country.13

The self-proclaimed leader of IS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, claimed to have traced his own lineage back to Prophet Muhammad. In June 2014 the group proclaimed a new Caliphate with al-Baghdadi as its Caliph. According to strict Saudi Wahhabite tradition the legitimate Caliph can demand allegiance of all Muslims worldwide. It mattered little that IS could produce no proof of al-Baghdadi’s claim to be Caliph. IS soon issued a proclamation that stated: “The legality of all emirates, groups, states and organisations becomes null by the expansion of the Caliphate’s authority and arrival of its troops to their areas.”

This was a rejection of the political divisions in the Middle East established by the Western powers during World War I in the Sykes–Picot Agreement. 15 Middle East sources reported that IS had been trained in the months before their dramatic emergence in Iraq and Syria at secret military bases in Turkey, Jordan and Libya, by US intelligence special forces, CIA and by Israeli Mossad. A “trusted source” close to Saudi multi-billionaire and former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri said, on condition of anonymity, that the final green light for the war on Iraq and Syria with ISIS was given behind closed doors at the Atlantic Council’s Energy Summit in Istanbul, Turkey, November 22–23, 2013.

The Atlantic Council was one of the most influential US think tanks with regard to US and NATO foreign policy and geopolitics. 16 The same source stated that the key coordinator of ISIS, or Da’ash, military actions was US Ambassador to Turkey Francis Riccardione. “As far as I know, nothing moves without Ambassador Riccardione,” the Hariri intimate declared.17 In May, 2015 Judicial Watch, a US legal watchdog group, obtained classified Pentagon documents in a court case that revealed that the US and other select Western governments deliberately allied with al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria, in their effort to topple Syria’s Bashir al-Assad.

In late 2013 al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria made a formal split with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, head of the Osama bin Laden affiliated al Qaeda in Iraq since 2004 after the US invasion. The new organization under al-Baghdadi was called ISIS or Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. 18 The formerly classified Pentagon document further revealed that in coordination with the Gulf states and Turkey, the West intentionally sponsored violent Islamist groups to destabilize Assad, despite anticipating that doing so could lead to the emergence of an ‘Islamic State’ in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

According to the US document, the Pentagon foresaw the rise of the ‘Islamic State’ as a direct consequence of the strategy, describing that outcome as a strategic opportunity to “isolate the Syrian regime.” 20 The USA trained and armed IS terrorists who then advanced the Washington agenda of deliberate chaos by carrying out ethnic cleansing on a mass scale, gang rapes of captured non-Sunni girls and women, beheadings of soldiers, civilians, journalists and aid workers, and the deliberate destruction of cultural heritage sites.

Excuse for US to bomb Iraq, Syria Conveniently for Pentagon war planners, on August 3, 2014, IS captured the cities of Zumar, Sinjar, and Wana in northern Iraq. The IS proceeded to cut off food and water for thousands of Kurdish Yazidis, members of an ancient monotheistic religion linked to Persian Zoroastrianism. The Yazidis fled up a mountain out of fear of approaching hostile IS militants. Threat of genocide to Yazidis as proclaimed by IS, in addition to protecting Americans in Iraq and supporting Iraq in its fight against IS, gave the Obama Administration the pretext for the US to launch a “humanitarian” mission on 7 August 2014, to aid the Yazidis stranded on Mount Sinjar. Washington used that to start an aerial bombing campaign in Iraq on 8 August and later Syria.

By May 2015 little military success against IS was evident amid reports that instead of hitting IS terrorists, US planes were dropping military supplies and food to the IS zones to reinforce their efforts to topple Assad.21 By 2015 IS was claiming allied organizations or terrorist “Jihad” groups in Egypt, Afghanistan, Libya, Boko Harem in Nigeria, rebels in Yemen and even in the European Union, where they disguised themselves as innocent war refugees seeking humanitarian asylum. Virtually all the assorted CIA terror groups masquerading as Islamic Jihadists were being put under the one IS umbrella. It was simply a crass attempt to reincarnate the CIA’s Al Qaeda.

The Lost Hegemon

By 2014, the only thing that was clear from the US effort to weaponize Islam through the Arab Spring and their later creation of the IS was the unintended consequences of that effort. The US-backed regime of Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi in Egypt was ousted in a military coup backed and financed by Saudi Arabia and other conservative Gulf monarchies. Egypt, a traditional military partner of Washington, turned to Russia’s Putin instead—with Saudi mediation—to purchase needed arms.

Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates united to blacklist neighboring Qatar for the latter’s continuing support of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and elsewhere. Saudi Arabia itself was undergoing a royal succession as King Abdullah died and the new King apparently felt he needed to prove himself by bombing Yemen. Washington was becoming a laughing stock across the Islamic world—a symbol of imperial decline—as President Obama’s policies swerved from one hapless option to another with no clear direction. Obama himself had to be saved from a war he did not want over Syria in 2013 by Vladimir Putin.

In terms of its security, Israel found itself surrounded by unstable regimes and hostile Jihadists on every side. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formed an unlikely and unholy alliance with Saudi Arabia against Syria, Iran, and, most remarkably, against her traditional ally, the United States.

The neo-conservative war faction in the Washington government, think tanks, and the CIA—the architects of weaponizing Islam in new Holy Wars—then created a violent coup d’état in Ukraine beginning with yet another Color Revolution protest in Kiev’s Maidan Square in November, 2013. This time Muslims played no role. Ukraine was a part of the American Oligarchs’ larger war against any possible challenge to US sole hegemony.

China, Russia, Iran and other Eurasian states, along with Brazil in the BRICS group and other states in South America were moving clearly away from the destructive effects of the dollar and from US dictates. The American Century proclaimed by Henry Luce so grandiosely in 1941 was rotting at its very foundations, a mere 73 years into that century. The Washington coup in Ukraine threatened to restart a new Cold War and possibly a hot war as Russia acted to defend its strategic survival.

The foreign policy of the sole Superpower, the United States, was a disastrous shambles in the early months of 2014. European powers struggling with their own financial and economic crisis were unable to implement constructive, peaceful alternatives. The deadly, unintended consequences of not very intelligent people—in Washington, Tel Aviv, Riyadh, Damascus, Ankara, Brussels, and beyond— had brought the world to the brink of a global conflagration by the spring of 2015.

It was because of their inability to see the deeper significance of relationships that they had destroyed and the consequences of that destruction, by their schemes to use political Islam as a weapon. The West, especially the CIA and those in the USA military industrial and political complex believed they could weaponize currents within Islam as their killing machine without any unintended consequences. For their part, Jihadists of all currents believed that in the name of Allah their hate and killings of any and all “infidels” would give them innocence in an afterlife.

Truly, whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. Sane voices around the world were beginning to ask whether there was another better way of creating true democracy—constructive diplomacy, development of common and beneficial economic initiatives to lift mankind out of poverty and hunger, respecting national borders, peacefully negotiating changes when necessary, respecting fellow human beings regardless their faith, building bridges of cooperation between nations and between peoples. They began to grasp that there might possibly be a more intelligent and a more human alternative to the current agenda of those oligarchs, one where people could feel again, “I’m good and I want to be good to me, to my family and friends, to others, to my country. After all, in the end, we are, every one, human beings.”