The Big Blowback: How US Foreign Policy Erodes Democracy Everywhere

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/34401-the-big-blowback-how-us-foreign-policy-erodes-democracy-everywhere

How U.S. policy created ISIS or ISIL, fear of which now drives U.S. domestic and foreign policy, is relatively well documented. The U.S. invasion of Iraq threw the lid off Iraqi society, which had been a pressure cooker of sectarian rivalries contained by the regime of Saddam Hussein. As a Shia-dominated regime took over in Baghdad, an extremist Sunni movement, al-Qaida in Iraq, headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, rose to fight the government and its American sponsors. Zarqawi found many receptive recruits among the hundreds of thousands of Sunni soldiers in Saddam’s army, which had been disbanded by the Americans shortly after their takeover. Adherents were also nurtured in U.S. prison camps, among them Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. After the death in battle of Zarqawi, Al Baghdadi emerged as the leader of the group, which now assumed the name Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

At first, ISIS was seen by western intelligence as focused mainly on establishing a Caliphate in the Middle East, for which it undertook a sophisticated international recruitment campaign via the internet. Then concern developed that ISIS was not simply recruiting young people from Europe and the U.S. to fight in Iraq or Syria but training them to be sent back to perform terrorist acts in their home countries. The Paris massacre in mid-November hat saw a handful of shooters kill some 130 people in a sophisticated coordinated operation hitting seven targets was seen as the “ultimate blowback.” That is, until the San Bernardino shooting two weeks later, which U.S. authorities saw as the most scary blowback of all: shooters carrying out uncoordinated individual actions inspired by Isis propaganda disseminated on the net.

[underthematrix]

1. Yes foreign policy is complex and this is why unless you're

part of national security briefings, it's difficult to understand how the details affect the broader picture. one way to understand currenyt foreign policy is to read books about US presidents. It's such an eye opener and can us understand the real landscape on which US foreign policy is formulated.

[leveymg]

2. Not a word about the authors of regime change or those who finance it,

or their secular alliance that has an effective political headlock on both political parties in the United States. Get rid of that and you might start to think about defeating or deflating ISIS.

[pampango]

3. "Study after study has refuted claims that migrants take jobs away from the non-migrant workers or

that they don’t pay their taxes. Yet, Mexican migrants are continually blamed by opportunistic politicians on the make, like Trump and his Republican colleagues. It is unfortunate that this opportunistic, demagogic game of playing on physical fear (“Muslim terrorists out to take your life”) and economic fear (“Mexican workers out to steal your jobs”), has resonated among many of the country’s white population. Trump, whose anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican rhetoric is most brazen, leads his opponents in the Republican presidential race by a wide margin in the surveys."