Al-Qaeda extremism is resurgent - the neocons are whitewashing their role in spreading it.

[DonViejo]

Forgetting Why Al-Qaeda Spread
January 5, 2014

Exclusive: Al-Qaeda extremism is resurgent across the Middle East with its affiliates seizing territory in western Iraq and in neighboring Syria. But the neocons are whitewashing their role in spreading this extremism via George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

President George W. Bush and Official Washington’s neocons are gifts that keep on giving, at least to America’s terrorist enemies. The Shiite-Sunni sectarian conflict that Bush and his neocon advisers stirred up by invading Iraq in 2003 has now engulfed the entire region and has given al-Qaeda and its affiliates footholds in countries where they hadn’t existed before the Iraq War.

But the Washington Post’s neocon editorial page, which served as the bullhorn for the Iraq War’s advocates, has figured out who’s to blame for the deepening mess in the Middle East: President Barack Obama – for not continuing the U.S. military occupation of Iraq and not intervening more aggressively in Syria to help overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.

The Post’s version of history – as expressed in a lead editorial on Sunday – follows the neocon narrative that begins in 2007 with President Bush’s supposed “victory” in Iraq, which President Obama then allegedly squandered by completing the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2011. According to this neocon narrative, Bush’s “surge” had defeated al-Qaeda forces in Iraq before the feckless Obama threw all that hard-won success away.

Left out of the Post’s narrative is the fact that al-Qaeda didn’t exist in Iraq (or in many other places outside of a few remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan) until Bush – with the enthusiastic support of the Post’s editorial page – invaded Iraq in 2003 and destroyed the delicate balance between Sunni and Shiite sectarian interests across the Middle East. Before and during the war, the Post also helped spread a lot of lies to the American people.

more
http://consortiumnews.com/2014/01/05/forgetting-why-al-qaeda-spread/

[TwilightGardener]

1. Obama is on the right track, finally. He needs to continue to resist the

loud voices from the usual suspects, always screaming for American intervention. I wish he had listened more to his own instincts in his first term.