Newsletter:
Vol. 14, Iss. 2
October 2015
America Paved the Way for ISIS
Professor Noam Chomsky
An interesting interview with Graham
Fuller appeared a couple of days ago. Fuller is a former CIA officer, one
of the leading intelligence and mainstream analysts of the Middle East. The
title of the interview is The United States Created ISIS. This is a source
at the heart of the US establishment. Fuller hastens to point out that he
doesn’t mean the US decided to put ISIS into existence and then funded it.
His point is that the US created the background out of which ISIS grew and
developed. In 2003, the US and Britain invaded Iraq. Just this afternoon the
British parliament granted the government the authority to bomb Iraq again.
The invasion was devastating to Iraq. Iraq had already been virtually destroyed,
first of all by the decade-long war with Iran in which Iraq was backed by
the US, and then the decade of sanctions. The sanctions were described as
“genocidal” by the respected international diplomats who administered them
and both resigned in protest for that reason. They devastated the civilian
society, they strengthened the dictator, compelled the population to rely
on him for survival. That’s probably the reason he wasn’t overthrown. Finally,
the U.S. decided to attack Iraq in 2003. The attack is compared by many Iraqis
to the Mongol invasion of a thousand years earlier. Very destructive. Hundreds
of thousands of people killed, millions of refugees, millions of other displaced
persons, destruction of the archeological richness and wealth of the country
back to Sumeria.
One of the effects of the invasion was immediately to institute sectarian
divisions. Within a couple of years, there was a major, brutal sectarian conflict
incited by the invasion. If you take a map of Baghdad in 2002, it’s a mixed
city: Sunni and Shi’a are living in the same neighborhoods, they’re intermarried.
In fact, sometimes they didn’t even know who was Sunni and who was Shi’a.
It’s like knowing whether your friends are in one Protestant group or another
Protestant group. There were differences but it was not hostile. In fact,
for a couple of years both sides were saying: there will never be Sunni-Shi’a
conflicts. We’re too intermingled in the nature of our lives. By 2006 there
was a raging war. That conflict spread to the whole region. By now, the whole
region is being torn apart by Sunni-Shi’a conflicts.
The natural dynamics of a conflict like that is that the most extreme elements
begin to take over. Their roots are in the major US ally, Saudi Arabia. Saudi
Arabia has been the major US ally in the region as long as the US has been
seriously involved there, in fact, since the foundation of the Saudi state.
Saudi Arabia is a kind of a family dictatorship. The reason is it has a huge
amount oil.
Britain, before the US, had typically preferred radical Islamism to secular
nationalism. When the US took over, it essentially took the same stand. Radical
Islam is centered in Saudi Arabia, which is the most extremist, radical Islamic
state in the world. By comparison, it makes Iran look like a tolerant, modern
country. It’s not only directed by an extremist version of Islam, the Wahhabi
Salafi version, but it’s also a missionary state. So it uses its huge oil
resources to promulgate these doctrines throughout the region. It establishes
schools, mosques, clerics from Pakistan to North Africa.
An extremist version of Saudi extremism is the doctrine that was picked up
by ISIS. So it grew ideologically out of the most extremist form of Islam—the
Saudi version. Saudi Arabia not only provides the ideological core that led
to the ISIS radical extremism, but it also funds them. Not the Saudi government,
but wealthy Saudis, wealthy Kuwaitis, and others provide the funding and the
ideological support for these jihadi groups that are springing up. This attack
on the region by the US and Britain is the source, where this thing originates.
You can be pretty confident that as conflicts develop, they will become more
extremist. The most brutal, harshest groups will take over. That’s what happens
when violence becomes the means of interaction. It’s almost automatic. It’s
true in neighborhoods. It’s true in international affairs. If they manage
to destroy ISIS, they will have something more extreme on their hands.
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