Hunger for 50 million, no medical care for 40 million and yet a Massive Imperial Army Spread Across the Globe

This is the United States and the ‘Special Relationship’ that Labour Politicians Defend – this is what the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign is about

When the Board of Deputies, which represents at best 20-30% of British Jews presented its 10 Commandments, Labour politicians fell over themselves to signal their acquiescence. Not merely Keir Starmer and Emily Thornberry but the ‘left’ candidate Rebecca Long-Bailey

Of one thing we can be sure. The Board of Deputies is not and never was concerned about anti-Semitism in Britain. Not merely because it is at historically low levels (despite the propaganda that tells you otherwise) but because the Board is a Zionist group.  Zionism from its inception was founded on the belief that anti-Semitism could not be fought. Which is why it never fought it.

Anyone disagreeing with me is invited to read a copy of the founding pamphlet of Political Zionism, Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State or more accurately The State of the Jews. Herzl positively boasted of how useful and helpful anti-Semitism was to his Zionist project:

‘the governments of all countries scourged by Anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want.... Great exertions will hardly be necessary to spur on the movement. Anti-Semites provide the requisite impetus’

In other words anti-Semitism was vital if the Zionist movement was to succeed. Herzl also accepted all the calumnies and stereotypes (or ‘tropes’ to use the current lingo) about Jews.  He wrote:

‘When we sink we become a revolutionary proletariat... when we rise there rises also our terrible power of the purse.’

In his Diaries he wrote (p.9) that

I understand what anti-Semitism is about. We Jews have maintained ourselves, even if through no fault of our own, as a foreign body among’ the various nations. In the ghettos we take on a number of anti-social qualities

The US in Iraq

As Yigal Elam, an Israeli Labour Zionist Historian wrote:

‘Zionism did not consider anti-Semitism an abnormal, absurd, perverse or marginal phenomenon. Zionism considered anti-Semitism a fact of nature, a standard constant, the norm in the relationship of the non-Jews to the presence of Jews in their midst… a normal, almost rational reaction of the gentiles to the abnormal, absurd and perverse situation of the Jewish people in the Diaspora.’ [Zionism and its Scarecrows, Moshe Machover, Maria Offenburg, Khamsin 6]

If the Board of Deputies was concerned about anti-Semitism then it would have taken up the question of the Tory Party’s MEPs sitting in the European parliament with fascists and anti-Semites.  It might even have questioned Boris Johnson over the  many anti-Semitic and racist phrases and parts in his 2004 book 72 Virgins.

But of course the attacks on Corbyn had nothing to do with anti-Semitism but his anti-Americanism. This is well understood by the Labour Right – Keir Starmer, Emily Thornberry, Jess Philips. It is part of our unwritten constitution that both major parties must not question our relationship with the United States.

It is on that basis that I copy two articles.  The first on hunger in the United States. At a time when the US military is literally spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year fighting wars abroad, 50 million Americans go hungry, in particular children and 40 million Americans have no medical insurance cover.

‘The secret of politics under capitalism is to persuade the poor that they should hate other poor people. Their enemy is the 'scrounger', the asylum seeker, the disabled. Anyone but those responsible.’

The secret of politics under capitalism is to persuade the poor that they should hate other poor people. Their enemy is the 'scrounger', the asylum seeker, the disabled. Anyone but the rich. Scapegoatism is built into capitalist politics. What is essential is that people don't blame those who accumulate unprecedented wealth. They are the 'wealth creators' and in this New Labour was as complicit as the Tories.

The article by John Whitehead lifts the lid on American imperialism and its reach across the globe. This is and should be one of the major issues in the Labour Party leadership election. That is why the craven and pathetic acceptance by Rebecca Long-Bailey of the BOD Commands is not a triviality, some kind of irrelevancy. It is crucial to any definition of what it means to be a socialist or left in the 21st century.

That is why the idea that RBL should be supported is not one I support. Anyone who’s socialism rests on the shoulders of US imperialism is not a socialist. 

Tony Greenstein

The Richest Country’s Empty Plates. 50 Million Hungry Americans

By Larry Romanoff

December 19, 2019 "Information Clearing House" –

In July of 2013, Rose Aguilar wrote a wonderful article for al-Jazeera (1), in which she discussed the dire hunger crisis that envelops the US today. In her article, she brought back a memory of something I had long forgotten, an event that so outraged the American public that the government was temporarily forced to respond with more humane policies. That event was a 1968 CBS special hour-long documentary called Hunger in America, in which viewers literally watched a hospitalized child die of starvation. Nixon responded because the public outrage left him no choice, but Reagan quickly dismantled those improvements.

When Reagan came to power in 1980, there were 200 food banks in the US; today there are more than 40,000, all overwhelmed with demand and forced to ration their dispersals. Before 1980, one out of every 50 Americans was dependent on food stamps. Today, it is one out of four. Before Reagan, there were 10 million hungry Americans; today there are more than 50 million and increasing.

A substantial part of the Great Transformation included not only tax cuts and other benefits for the wealthy, but a simultaneous massive reduction in budgets for social programs – in spite of the fact that Reagan and the secret government were creating the conditions that would desperately require those same social programs.

That 50 million hungry Americans today includes the 25% of all children in the US who go to sleep hungry every night. About 25% of the American population today cannot buy sufficient food to remain healthy, with most of these being hungry for at least three months during each year. It is so bad that many college students have resorted to what we call “dumpster-diving” – looking in garbage bins for edible food.

Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Note

(1)        https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/07/201371892231367525.html

The United States Can't Afford Universal Health Care But It Can Afford a Massive Military

Come Home, America: Stop Trying To Dominate The Planet and Put an End to Wars-Without-End

By John W. Whitehead

“Let us resolve that never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad. This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to the rebuilding of our own nation. America must be restored to a proper role in the world. But we can do that only through the recovery of confidence in ourselves…. together we will call America home to the ideals that nourished us from the beginning. From secrecy and deception in high places; come home, America. From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation; come home, America.”—George S. McGovern, former Senator and presidential candidate

January 10, 2020 "Information Clearing House" –

I agree wholeheartedly with George S. McGovern, a former Senator and presidential candidate who opposed the Vietnam War, about one thing: I'm sick of old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

It’s time to bring our troops home.

Bring them home from Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Bring them home from Germany, South Korea and Japan. Bring them home from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. Bring them home from Niger, Chad and Mali. Bring them home from Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

That’s not what’s going to happen, of course.

The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world. Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”

Don’t fall for the propaganda, though: America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.

The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”

US military cadets

This is how a military empire occupies the globe.

Already, American military service people are being deployed to far-flung places in the Middle East and elsewhere in anticipation of the war drums being sounded over Iran.

This Iran crisis, salivated over by the neocons since prior to the Iraq War and manufactured by war hawks who want to jumpstart the next world war, has been a long time coming.

Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton: they all have done their part to ensure that the military industrial complex can continue to get rich at taxpayer expense.

Take President Trump, for instance.

Despite numerous campaign promises to stop America’s “endless wars,” once elected, Trump has done a complete about-face, deploying greater numbers of troops to the Middle East, ramping up the war rhetoric, and padding the pockets of defense contractors. Indeed, Trump is even refusing to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in the face of a request from the Iraqi government for us to leave.

Obama was no different: he also pledged—if elected—to bring the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan and reduce America's oversized, and overly costly, military footprint in the world. Of course, that didn’t happen.

Yet while the rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are policing the globe, these wars abroad (in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen and now Iran) aren’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, are certainly not making America great again, and are undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.

War spending is bankrupting America.

Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world's population, America boasts almost 50% of the world's total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.

In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.

Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging its endless wars.

Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.

In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.

Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.

As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors. Indeed, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”

Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.

A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:

$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.

That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.

Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.

Americans have thus far allowed themselves to be spoon-fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda that keeps them content to wave flags with patriotic fervor and less inclined to look too closely at the mounting body counts, the ruined lives, the ravaged countries, the blowback arising from ill-advised targeted-drone killings and bombing campaigns in foreign lands, or the transformation of our own homeland into a warzone.

That needs to change.

The U.S. government is not making the world any safer. It’s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. Since 9/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 human beings. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.

The U.S. government is not making America any safer. It’s exposing American citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America’s use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback.

The 9/11 attacks were blowback. The Boston Marathon Bombing was blowback. The attempted Times Square bomber was blowback. The Fort Hood shooter, a major in the U.S. Army, was blowback.

The assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani by a U.S. military drone strike will, I fear, spur yet more blowback against the American people.

The war hawks’ militarization of America—bringing home the spoils of war (the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.) and handing them over to local police, thereby turning America into a battlefield—is also blowback.

James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” As Madison explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

We are seeing this play out before our eyes.

The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.

At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

This is the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us more than 50 years ago not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that emerged following the war—one that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.

We failed to heed his warning.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, there’s not much time left before we reach the zero hour.

It’s time to stop policing the globe, end these wars-without-end, and bring the troops home before it’s too late.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

See also No Kid Hungry

The United States Enabled Radical Islam

 How the CIA, George W. Bush and many others helped create ISIS

We have tried to harness the power of radical Islam for our own interests for decades. ISIS is partially on America

By Abdel Bari Atwan

October 18, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - "Salon" -  Since 1980, the United States has intervened in the affairs of fourteen Muslim countries, at worst invading or bombing them. They are (in chronological order) Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosovo, Yemen, Pakistan, and now Syria. Latterly these efforts have been in the name of the War on Terror and the attempt to curb Islamic extremism.

Yet for centuries Western countries have sought to harness the power of radical Islam to serve the interests of their own foreign policy. In the case of Britain, this dates back to the days of the Ottoman Empire; in more recent times, the US/UK alliance first courted, then turned against, Islamists in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. In my view, the policies of the United States and Britain—which see them supporting and arming a variety of groups for short-term military, political, or diplomatic advantage—have directly contributed to the rise of IS.

Supporting the Caliphate

The Turkish Ottoman Empire was, for centuries, the largest Muslim political entity the world has ever known, encompassing much of North Africa, southeastern Europe, and the Middle East. From the sixteenth century onwards, Britain not only championed the Ottoman Empire but also supported and endorsed the institution of the caliphate and the Sultan’s claim to be the caliph and leader of the ummah (the Muslim world).

Britain’s support for the Ottoman Caliph—a policy known as the Eastern Question—was entirely motivated by self-interest. Initially this was so the Ottoman lands would act as a buffer against its regional imperial rivals, France and Russia; subsequently, following the colonization of India, the Ottoman territories acted to protect Britain’s eastward trade routes. This support was not merely diplomatic; it translated into military action. In the Crimean War (1854–56), Britain fought with the Ottoman Empire against Russia and won.

It was only with the onset of the First World War in 1914 that this 400-year-old regional paradigm unraveled. When Mehmed V sided with the Germans, Britain was reluctantly excluded from dealing with the caliphate’s catchment of over 15 million Muslims, reasoning that “whoever controlled the person of the Caliph, controlled Sunni Islam.” London decided that an Arab uprising to unseat Mehmed would enable them to reassign the role of caliph to a trusted and more malleable ally: Hussein bin Ali Hussein, the sherif of Mecca and a direct descendant, it is claimed, of the Prophet Muhammad. The British employed racism to garner support for the uprising, appealing to the Arabs’ sense of ownership over Islam, which had originated in Mecca and Medina, not among the Turks of Constantinople. A 1914 British proclamation declared, “There is no nation among the Muslims which is now capable of upholding the Islamic Caliphate except the Arab nation.” A letter was dispatched to Sherif Hussein, fomenting his ambition and suggesting, “It may be that an Arab of true race will assume the Caliphate at Mecca or Medina” (Medina being the seat of the first caliphate after the death of the Prophet). Again, the British were prepared to defend the caliphate with the sword, promising to “guarantee the Holy Places against all external aggression.” It is a strange thought that, just 100 years ago, the prosecutors of today’s War on Terror were promising to restore the Islamic caliphate to the Arab world and defend it militarily.

The Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, fomented by the British, got underway in 1916, the same year that the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement was made in secret, carving up between the British and French the very lands Sherif Hussein had been promised. Betrayal, manipulation, and self-interest were, and remain, the name of the game when it comes to Western meddling in the Middle East. The revolt would last two years and was a major factor in the fall of the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, the British Army and allied forces, including the Arab Irregulars, were fighting the Ottomans on the battlefields of the First World War. A key figure in these battles was T. E. Lawrence, who became known as Lawrence of Arabia because of the loyalty he engendered in the hearts of Sherif Hussein and his son, Emir Faisal. He was given the status of honorary son by the former, and he fought under the command of the latter in many battles, later becoming Faisal’s advisor. When the Ottomans put a £15,000 reward on Lawrence’s head, no Arab was tempted to betray him.

Sadly this honorable behavior and respect were not reciprocated. In a memo to British intelligence in 1916, Lawrence described the hidden agenda behind the Arab uprising: “The Arabs are even less stable than the Turks. If properly handled they would remain in a state of political mosaic, a tissue of small jealous principalities, incapable of cohesion . . . incapable of co-ordinated action against us.” In a subsequent missive he explained, “When war broke out, an urgent need to divide Islam was added. . . . Hussein was ultimately chosen because of the rift he would create in Islam. In other words, divide and rule.”

Oil Security and Western Foreign Policy

Let us fast-forward to the 1950s and ’60s, by which time oil had become a major factor in the West’s foreign policy agenda. Again, the principle of “divide and rule” was put to work: a 1958 British cabinet memo noted, “Our interest lies . . . in keeping the four principal oil-producing areas [Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, and Iraq] under separate political control.” The results of this policy saw the West arming both sides in the Iran-Iraq war—which brought both powers to the brink of total destruction in the 1980s—and then intervening militarily with a force of almost 700,000 men in the First Gulf War (to prevent Iraq annexing Kuwait) in 1990–91.

The United States, UK, and European powers were also deeply troubled by the cohesive potential of Arab Nationalism, a hugely popular movement led by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and his (at that time) mighty allies in Iraq and Syria. The idea of these three huge, left-leaning regional powers becoming politically and militarily united was unacceptable in the Cold War context and remained so after the fall of the Soviet Empire because of the regional threat to Israel. To counteract the rise of pan-Arabism, the West began to support Islamist tendencies within each country—mostly branches of the Muslim Brotherhood—and also worked hard in the diplomatic field to create strong and binding relationships with Islamic, pro-Western monarchies in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Jordan. These relationships endure to this day.

The most extreme manifestation of radical Sunni Islam was Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism, which it had started to disseminate via a string of international organizations and its self-designated Global Islamic Mission. In 1962, Saudi Arabia oversaw the establishment of The Muslim World League, which was largely staffed by exiled members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood’s relationship with the West (and with the Gulf monarchies) has always been inconsistent and entirely selfish. In the run-up to, during, and after, the 2011 “Arab Spring” revolution against Hosni Mubarak, the United States and UK were actively supporting the Muslim Brotherhood as the most credible (or only) experienced political entity. In 2014, both countries came under pressure from the Saudis to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terror group: though neither has yet gone that far, the UK duly launched an official investigation into the group, headed by UK Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Sir John Jenkins, while in the United States a bill was introduced in Congress, the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act of 2014.

The House of Saud itself feared an “Arab Spring” revolution and encouraged and applauded the June 2013 coup that deposed the Brotherhood’s legitimately elected President Morsi; Saudi King Abdullah phoned coup leader al-Sisi (now the Egyptian president) within hours to congratulate him on his success. Egypt under al-Sisi would prove a better friend to Israel and, like Saudi Arabia, would brutally extinguish any new uprisings, giving the kingdom moral support in its own battle for survival. Saudi political pragmatism (or, as some might frame it, hypocrisy) has been progressively informed by its close relationship with the United States and UK— and is now one of the most significant drivers of the Middle East’s present chaos, including the emergence of ISIS.

Communism: The First Public Enemy Number One

From the 1950s on, the Muslim Brotherhood was supported and funded by the CIA. When Nasser decided to stamp out the movement in Egypt, the CIA helped its leaders migrate to Saudi Arabia, where they were assimilated into the Wahhabi kingdom’s own particular brand of fundamentalism, many rising to positions of great influence. While Saudi Arabia actively prevented the formation of a home-grown branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, it encouraged and financed the movement abroad in other Arab countries. One of the most prominent leaders of the Western-backed Afghan Jihad (1979–89) was a Cairo-educated Muslim Brotherhood member: Burhanuddin Rabbani, head of Jamaat-i-Islami ( JI).

America and, to a lesser extent, Britain fretted about the rise of communism, which was perceived and portrayed as the “enemy of freedom”—a term that would later be applied to the Islamic extremists. In geopolitical terms, by the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union comprised one-sixth of the world’s land mass and was a superpower capable of mounting a devastating challenge to the United States. The White House was also concerned about the future alignment of China, where the Chinese Communist Party had seized power in 1949. Communism was enthusiastically embraced by millions of idealistic post-war Americans and Europeans, posing a perceived domestic political threat. Meanwhile the West observed with horror the increasing popularity of communism and socialism in the Middle East; revolutionary, pro-Soviet, Arab regimes would create an enormous strategic disadvantage and threaten oil security.

For the West, radical Islam represented the best way to counter the encroachment of Arab nationalism communism.

Following the Six-Day War in 1967, US and UK governmental planners noted with satisfaction that Arab unity and sense of a shared cause were finding expression in a revival of Islamic fundamentalism and widespread calls for the implementation of Sharia law. This revival continued through the 1970s and, by the end of the decade, produced the pan-Arab mujahideen that would battle the Soviet armies in Afghanistan for the next ten years.

As in Syria and Iraq, the Sunni jihadists were not alone in the insurgency. There were seven major Sunni groups, armed and funded (to the tune of $6 billion) by the United States and Saudi Arabia, as well as the UK, Pakistan, and China. Abdullah Azzam’s Maktab al-Khidamat (the Services Office), which included bin Laden and from which al Qaeda would emerge, was at this point only a sub-group of one of these, the Gulbuddin faction (founded in 1977 by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar). Often overlooked in retelling the story of this particular Afghan war is the fact that the insurgency was pan-Islamic: there were eight Shi‘i groups, trained and funded by Iran.

Of the Sunni entities it was backing, the CIA preferred the Afghan-Arabs (as the foreign fighters from Arab countries came to be known) because they found them “easier to read” than their indigenous counterparts. In 2003, Australian-British journalist John Pilger conducted research and concluded, “More than 100,000 Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan between 1986 and 1992, in camps overseen by the CIA and MI6, with the SAS training future al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in bomb-making and other black arts. Their leaders were trained at a CIA camp in Virginia.” That Western interference in Afghanistan actually precedes the Soviet invasion by several months is rarely acknowledged. In the context of this book it is worth tracing the motives and methods employed by foreign powers to further their own ends in that territory, as these have been repeated and modified in Iraq and Syria.

Afghanistan’s location and long borders with Iran and Pakistan make it a strategic prize, and rival powers have often fought to control it. A coup in 1978 (the third in five years) brought the pro-Soviet Muhammad Taraki to power, setting off alarm bells in Islamabad, Washington, London, and Riyadh. The Pakistani ISI first tried to foment an Islamist uprising, but this failed owing to lack of popular support. Next, five months before the Soviet invasion, President Jimmy Carter sent covert aid to Islamist opposition groups with the help of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, wrote in a memo to his boss that if the Islamists rose up it would “induce a Soviet military intervention, likely to fail, and give the USSR its own Vietnam.” Another coup in September 1979 brought Deputy Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin to power; Moscow invaded in December, killing Amin and replacing him with its own man, Babrak Karmal. Brzezinski then sent Carter a memo outlining his advised strategy: “We should concert with Islamic countries both a propaganda campaign and a covert action campaign to help the rebels.”

On December 18, 1979, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher enthusiastically endorsed Washington’s approach at a meeting of the Foreign Policy Association in New York, even praising the Iranian Revolution and concluding, “The Middle East is an area where we have much at stake. . . . It is in our own interest that they build on their own deep, religious traditions. We do not wish to see them succumb to the fraudulent appeal of imported Marxism.”

Because IS is a product of Western interference in Iraq and Syria, none of the powers that backed the Afghan mujahideen anticipated the emergence of alQaeda, with its vehemently anti-Western agenda and ambition to re-establish the caliphate. Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf wrote in his autobiography, “Neither Pakistan nor the US realized what Osama bin Laden would do with the organization we had all allowed him to establish.”

Defining Extremism: The Western Dilemma

In the course of the 1990s, radical political Islam became more extremist—a shift that was encouraged and funded by Saudi Arabia. The star of the Muslim Brotherhood began to wane as its leaders were castigated for being too “moderate” and for participating in the democratic process in Egypt; standing as “independents” (since the Muslim Brotherhood was banned), its candidates fared well, becoming the main opposition force to President Hosni Mubarak. There was another reason for the Muslim Brotherhood falling out of favor with Riyadh—it had supported Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The House of Saud now linked its survival with the rise of the Salafi-jihadist tendency, which was consistent with its own custom-fit Wahhabi ideology.

The West viewed this shift into a more radical gear with some alarm as the Salafists’ battle became international: Arab jihadists traveled to Eastern Europe to fight with the Bosnian Muslims from 1992; New York’s World Trade Center was first bombed by radical Islamists in 1993; and in 1995, North African jihadists from the al Qaeda–linked GIA (Armed Islamic Group, Algeria) planted bombs on the Paris Metro, killing 8 and injuring more than 100.

The United States and UK adopted a remarkably laid-back approach to this new wave of radical Islam. The UK government and security services did not consider that the extremists presented a real danger, allowing the establishment of what the media labeled “Londonistan” through the 1990s. It could be argued that this was a successful arrangement in that, in return for being allowed to live in the British capital and go about their business in peace, the jihadists did not commit any act of violence on British streets. The Syrian jihadist Abu Musab al-Suri (aka Setmariam Nasar) was a leading light among the Londonistan jihadist community, which also included Osama bin Laden’s so-called ambassador to London, Khalid al-Fawwaz. Al-Suri confirmed to me that a tacit covenant was in place between M16 and the extremists.

Saudi entities and individuals funded al Qaeda and other violent Salafist groups to the tune of $300 million through the 1990s, and the United States and UK remained stalwartly supportive. A year after Margaret Thatcher left parliament for good, she told a 1993 meeting of the Chatham House international affairs think tank, “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a strong force for moderation and stability on the world stage.” When challenged on Riyadh’s appalling human rights record—which included (and still includes) public executions, floggings, stonings, oppression of women, the incarceration of peaceful dissidents, and violent dispersal of any kind of demonstration—she retorted, “I have no intention of meddling in its internal affairs.” Later, Tony Blair would talk of the Middle East’s Axis of Moderation, meaning Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Turkey, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel.

The First Gulf War brought two changes into play. The first was that Saudi Arabia now became completely dependent, militarily, on the United States for its survival. The second was that, in an attempt to weaken Saddam Hussein, the CIA encouraged Shi‘i groups in southern Iraq to rebel, resulting in thousands of Shi‘a being slaughtered by regime helicopter fire. George H. W. Bush spent $40 million on clandestine operations in Iraq, flying Shi‘i and Kurdish leaders to Saudi Arabia for training, and creating and funding two opposition groups: the Iraqi National Accord, led by Iyad Alawi (who would collaborate in a failed coup plotted by the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group in 1996) and the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi (who was close to Dick Cheney when he was Defense Secretary). And yet, for the next twelve years, Saddam Hussein remained in power despite the punitive sanctions regime.

Washington and London continued to believe that an alliance with “moderate” Islam was key to defeating the extremists. A 2004 Whitehall paper by former UK Ambassador to Damascus Basil Eastwood and Richard Murphy, who had been assistant secretary of state under Reagan, noted: “In the Arab Middle East, the awkward truth is that the most significant movements which enjoy popular support are those associated with political Islam.” For the first time, they identified two distinct groups within the political Islamists: those “who seek change but do not advocate violence to overthrow regimes, and the Jihadists . . . who do.”

This new paradigm gained traction. In 2006, Tony Blair made it clear that the coming fight in the Middle East would be between the moderate Islamists and the extremists. The West, he told an audience in the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles, should seek to “empower” the moderates. “We want moderate, mainstream Islam to triumph over reactionary Islam.” Blair enlarged on the economic benefits this would accrue to the large transnational enterprises and organizations he championed: “A victory for the moderates means an Islam that is open: open to globalization.”

The West continues to behave as if Saudi Arabia can deliver the world from the menace of extremism. Yet the kingdom has spent $50 billion promoting Wahhabism around the world, and most of the funding for al Qaeda—amounting to billions of dollars—still comes from private individuals and organizations in Saudi Arabia. The Sinjar Records (documents captured in Iraq by coalition forces in 2007) provided a clear picture of where foreign jihadists were coming from: Saudi nationals accounted for 45 percent of foreign fighters in Iraq. They swell the ranks of IS today.

The Arab revolutions muddied the waters even more, particularly in Libya and Syria, making it almost impossible to distinguish between moderates and extremists. In Libya the West’s intervention strengthened the radicals and liberated stockpiles of Gaddafi’s sophisticated weapons, which were immediately spirited away by the truckload to jihadist strongholds. In the light of that error, President Obama dithered in Syria, much to the fury of his Saudi allies, allowing the most radical of the extremists to prevail: Islamic State.

Excerpted from “Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate” by Abdel Bari Atwan. Published by the University of California Press. Copyright © 2015 by Abdel Bari Atwan. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.