ISIS: Made in Washington?

Matt Carr

As a result of its continuing offensives in Iraq, the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant (ISIS) has become the latest Islamist threat to civilisation. If the rightwing Internet website World Net Daily is to be believed however, the US government may have inadvertently played a direct role in ISIS’s creation, through a military training program which began in the spring of 2012.

According to WND, ‘dozens of ISIS members were trained at the time as part of covert aid to the insurgents targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The officials said the training was not meant to be used for any future campaign in Iraq.‘

Evidence to support this thesis comes from ‘ informed Jordanian officials’ and is rather thin on the details. WND does not say, for example, how US military trainers knew that they were training ISIS, given that the group has only emerged as a military force in Syria in the last 12 months. Its reporters also quote ‘a high official in the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’ who says that the US was aware of more recent training and support provided to ISIS by Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

These are hardly reliable or conclusive sources, especially coming from a conservative website which undoubtedly has more interest in advancing conspiracy theories involving the Obama administration than it might have done say, if George Bush had still been in power. Nevertheless, it is not outlandish to suggest that Isis may be – in part – yet another of the unexpected consequences or ‘blowback’ of the clandestine backchannels through which US/ Western strategic interests are pursued. From the earliest period of the rebellion against Assad, the Syrian opposition was receiving money, weapons and training from Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Gulf States.


The Former Friends of Tony Blair

Matt Carr

Tony Blair’s latest self-aggrandizing and bloodthirsty pronouncements on Iraq have not surprisingly been greeted with a storm of ridicule, contempt, and disgust across a wide spectrum of political opinion. Boris Johnson, Clare Short, Malcolm Rifkind, Christopher Meyer and even John Prescott have all joined in the chorus of condemnation. Johnson says that Blair has ‘gone mad.’ Short says that he is ‘wrong, wrong. wrong.’ Former Deputy Prime Minister Prescott, who once voted for the Iraq war, now says that he once told Blair that he risked restarting the crusades by going to war.

Beyond the mainstream the condemnation has been even more severe and unrelenting, as is only to be expected. Blair himself is clearly aware of this, and can’t understand why the world doesn’t admire him as much as he admires himself. In his public appearances he increasingly looks like a haunted and hunted man, a disturbing mixture of arrogance, fanaticism and narcissistic self-belief that is entirely disconnected from any awareness of the consequences of his actions.

Blair may have become rich, but outside the elite circles that he serves, his reputation is in tatters and it is difficult to imagine how it can ever be restored. Instead he is likely to spend the rest of his life as a faintly pathetic and dishonourable figure, hollowed out by his own lies and pursued by the horrific trail of blood, folly, madness and destruction that his dim-witted actions have helped unleash, and which he has never accepted responsibility for.


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