The 'War on Terror' … or Whatever It Is

“Pity the poor American who wants to be a good citizen, wants to understand the world and his country’s role in it, wants to believe in the War on Terrorism, wants to believe that his government seeks to do good … What is he to make of all this?”

The foregoing is asked by the noted American columnist William Blum in a work published Oct. 7, 2013 in Issue 121 of his website, The Anti-Empire Report.

“For about two years, his dear American government has been supporting the same anti-government side as the jihadists in the Syrian civil war; not total, all-out support, but enough military hardware, logistics support, intelligence information, international political, diplomatic and propaganda assistance (including the crucial alleged-chemical-weapons story), to keep the jihadists in the ball game.”

Blum appreciates that such wide support has been maintained despite the many atrocities attributed to them, “truck and car suicide bombings (with numerous civilian casualties), planting roadside bombs à la Iraq, gruesome massacres of Christians and Kurds, grotesque beheadings and other dissections of victims’ bodies.”

All of this barbarism has made it increasingly difficult to sell this war to the American public, accustomed to stories of good guys versus bad guys, always with an evil dictator who must be eliminated.

Blum clarifies, however, that this would not be the first time that the United States has found itself trapped in a contradiction of this type and recalls that Washington has fought on the same side as al-Qaida on repeated occasions before doing it now in Syria.

In Afghanistan, during the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, they did it in support of the mujahedeen — Islamic “holy warriors.” The CIA orchestrated a war there against the Afghan government and its Soviet allies, in which it invested several billions of dollars in weapons and military training.

In 2001, The Wall Street Journal wrote that al-Qaida arose as a major force on the world stage in 1992, when the Vienna embassy of the Bosnian Muslim government of Alija Izetbegovic issued a passport in the name of Osama bin Laden.

During the last 10 years, “the most senior leaders of al-Qaida have visited the Balkans, including bin Laden himself on three occasions between 1994 and 1996. The Egyptian surgeon turned terrorist leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri has operated terrorist training camps, weapons of mass destruction factories and money-laundering and drug-trading networks” in Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Turkey.

British newspaper The Guardian offered “the full story of the secret alliance between the Pentagon and radical Islamist groups from the Middle East designed to assist the Bosnian Muslims.” Some of these groups are the very same which the Pentagon is now supporting in its “war on terror.”

In the last decade of the Balkan civil wars, Serbia, then considered by Washington as “the last communist government in Europe,” was always looked upon as the main enemy.

“Kosovo, overwhelmingly Muslim, was a province of Serbia, the main republic of the former Yugoslavia. In 1998, Kosovo separatists — the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) — began an armed conflict with Belgrade to split Kosovo from Serbia. The KLA was considered a terrorist organization by the U.S., the U.K. and France for years, with numerous reports of the KLA having contact with al-Qaida, getting arms from them, having its militants trained in al-Qaida camps in Pakistan, and even having members of al-Qaida in KLA ranks fighting against the Serbs.”

However, when U.S. and NATO forces initiated military action against the Serbs in Kosovo, the KLA was taken off of the United States’ terrorist list and officially began to receive weapons from the United States and NATO, which supported its fight against Serbia.

“In 2008 Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia, an independence so illegitimate and artificial that the majority of the world’s nations still have not recognized it.” Notwithstanding, the United States was the first country to recognize it.

The United States has insistently pressured for Kosovo’s membership in NATO and the European Union but has found problems due to the amount of evidence of its leaders’ participation in trafficking of women, heroin and human body parts.

In short, these are the elements of George W. Bush’s war on terror, which Obama is continuing.