The war on terrorism, which the United States has been waging since 2001, is a failure for a myriad of reasons, but chiefly because it is a farce. Set aside the idiocy of waging war on a tactic; the war on terrorism creates terrorism by arming, training, and funding militant Islamists.
A case in point is the revolving-door policy of the United States regarding who is a terrorist and who is an ally.
In Syria the narrative has shifted so dramatically that it resembles the “double-think” of Big Brother’s state in Geoge Orwell’s novel 1984. The United States declared al-Qaeda a terrorist organization in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — ostensibly to defeat al-Qaeda — before switching gears in 2012 and declaring them to be allies in the fight against terrorism in Syria. The purpose: to bring down Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
Of course, that was before the militants formerly known as al-Qaeda became famous (or rather infamous) under the banner of ISIS. As acts of indiscriminate torture and terror — including videotaped beheadings — became everyday news, ISIS was suddenly not an ally, but a terrorist organization again. The New American’s Alex Newman has reported on U.S. involvement in the transition from al-Qaeda to ISIS as well as U.S. support of ISIS.
Assad is still considered an enemy (at least as of this writing), but the newest narrative of his evildoing is that he now supposedly supports ISIS — the very terrorist organization the United States helped create to bring him down. In this case it appears that the enemy of our enemy is still our enemy, but we accuse them of befriending each other in order to justify our heavy-handed involvement.
According to a New York Times article last week, “Islamic State militants are marching across northern Syria toward Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, helped along, their opponents say, by the forces of President Bashar al-Assad.” And Slate reported that the United States is accusing Assad of “not just allowing but helping ISIS’s spread throughout Syria” by bombing positions held by anti-Assad forces as they were being attacked by ISIS, “helping ISIS’s advance.”
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