The Washington Monster

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http://watchingamerica.com/News/244402/the-washington-monster/



The Islamic State is a consequence of the American invasion of Iraq.

The Washington Monster
Le Soleil, Canada
By Élisabeth Fleury
Translated By Kathryn Manz
13 August 2014
Edited by Gillian Palmer

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.