The Washington Monster

In an interview with the American magazine The Atlantic, Hillary Clinton reproached Barack Obama for having left a “vacuum, which the jihadis have now filled” in Syria, by failing to give military help to the anti-Assad opposition. The interview was done before the United States launched airstrikes against the Islamic State. It’s true that the jihadi group took advantage of the Syrian crisis in order to become the monster it has become. But what Mrs. Clinton neglects to say is that the Islamic State is a consequence of the American invasion of Iraq.

Ten years ago, when the United States attacked the Saddam Hussein regime, the Sunni alliance group then known as al-Qaida in Iraq got into a denominational war, as much with the Shiite resistance movements as with the occupation forces. The same thing happened when the United States and its Western allies attacked Gaddafi’s Libya. There, too, the clashes had the effect of reinforcing the jihadi movement.

Today the Islamic State includes more than 5,000 combatants in Iraq and about 10,000 in Syria. The organization, which has proclaimed itself a caliphate, has only one objective: to spread, starting by establishing a state straddling Syria and Iraq, founded on Sharia law.

The United States refuses to lash out directly at the regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad, who has the support not only of Shiite Iran and Libya, but also of China and Russia (which prevents all intervention by the U.N.). Washington therefore is settling for providing small arms to the moderate rebels of the Free Syrian Army, which is no match for the Assad army or the Islamic State jihadis. And it has for a long time hesitated to do so, aware that these arms run the risk of ending up in the hands of Islamic State extremists. Of the two evils, Assad and the Islamic State, Obama has chosen inaction.

Incidentally, do you know who helped the Islamic State jihadis before they became self-sufficient thanks, notably, to the looting of the banks of Mosul? Yes, that’s right, the countries of the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia, a friend of the United States.

American foreign policy, particularly that which concerns the East, is filled with this kind of paradox. Let’s remember how American President Franklin Roosevelt met with King Ibn Saud on board the USS Quincy in 1945 — the same king who was the founder of the Islamic Saudi monarchy, an absolute monarchy that applies a rigorous version of Islam and is renowned for financing terrorism in the Arab world. The accord between them, which sealed for 60 years the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia, was renewed for the same amount of time in 2005 by George W. Bush, despite his being in the middle of a war against terrorism.

Let’s also remember the Afghanistan of the decade 1979-1989. In its confrontation with the USSR, the United States, through the intermediary of its intelligence services, supported the mujahideen at the root of al-Qaida.

For those who still have doubts, Washington is only intervening in the East to protect its geopolitical and economic interests (and those of its most faithful allies), even if it means making a pact with the devil to get there. The violations of human rights, just like the chemical and nuclear threats, are simply made-up pretexts to justify the unjustifiable.

If the United States has decided to bomb targets in the Islamic State in the north of Iraq, then it’s not to prevent the genocide of Christians and Yazidis, as Obama has maintained, but to protect the multinational companies of the hydrocarbon sector in Kurdistan.

In Syria? There are deaths, more than 200,000 since March 2011 (what is that called, a massacre, a genocide?), but the United States — like its Western allies, by the way — doesn’t see enough interests there to justify a costly and risky military intervention.