The 'War On Terror' Was A Scam.
The Trump Administration Wants To Remove The Al Qaeda Led Government In Syria Off The State Sponsor Of Terrorism List.
Written By: Justin K.P.
The War on Terror was a scam; it was never about fighting Al Qaeda or ISIS, but was about destabilizing countries that got in the way of Israel-American dominance of the Middle East.
The Trump administration is currently moving to take Syria off the state sponsor of terrorism list, despite the fact that the country’s leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, was a former Al Qaeda leader who the U.S. state department previously called “the senior leader of the terrorist organization, the al-Nusrah Front (ANF), al-Qa’ida’s affiliate in Syria” and despite the fact that the current Syrian military, has foreign Al Qaeda affiliated groups , such as Turkistan Islamic Party, from Xinjiang, China, integrated into the Syrian military.
Not long ago, the official justification for endless American wars in the Middle East was a “war on terror” against Al Qaeda, so why is Trump now removing a government from the state sponsor of terrorism list that is led by a man who not long ago was considered one of the main Al Qaeda leaders?
The answer is that the “war on terror” was always a scam, and Al Qaeda was always a Western asset.
The Afghan Trap.
Years before the 9/11 attacks, Al Qaeda was an asset of the CIA in its proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
U.S. official Zbigniew Brzezinski boasted that in 1979, the U.S. armed the mujahideen in Afghanistan, in an attempt to draw a Soviet invasion in support of the Soviet backed government, in hopes it would lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Brzezinski boasted:
According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, in substance: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
After the Soviets fell into America’s “Afghan trap”, the U.S. continued supporting the mujahideen until 1989, through the CIA’s “Operation Cyclone”, listed in the Guinness book of World Records as “the most expensive covert action” of all time.
This operation is what created Al Qaeda.
Robin Cook, the former UK Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs noted :
Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally ‘the database’, was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians. Inexplicably, and with disastrous consequences, it never appears to have occurred to Washington that once Russia was out of the way, Bin Laden’s organisation would turn its attention to the west.
The PNAC-Clean Break Alliance
Prior to 9/11, American zionists advising Benjamin Netanyahu were clamouring for an invasion of Iraq as part of a broader strategy to create an Israeli-dominated Middle East.
These advisors wrote a letter to Benjamin Netanyahu when he first came to power titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” which advocated for Israel to abandon the two state solution and instead overthrow governments seen as too sympathetic to the Palestinians, first and foremost starting with “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right”.
One year later in 1997, the Neo-Conservatives Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan founded the Project for A New American Century (PNAC), a think tank dedicated to rebuilding the American empire after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Laying out this vision, PNAC published the paper “Rebuilding America’s Defences: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century”
The paper states that “America should seek to preserve and extend its position of global leadership by maintaining the preeminence of U.S. military forces.”
It added that “unless the United States maintains sufficient military strength, this opportunity will be lost. And in fact, over the past decade, the failure to establish a security strategy responsive to new realities and to provide adequate resources for the full range of missions needed to exercise U.S. global leadership has placed the American peace at growing risk.”
The paper complained that “years of cuts in defense spending have eroded the American military’s combat readiness, and put in jeopardy the Pentagon’s plans for maintaining military superiority in the years ahead. Increasingly, the U.S. military has found itself undermanned, inadequately equipped and trained, straining to handle contingency operations, and ill-prepared to adapt itself to the revolution in military affairs. Without a well-conceived defense policy and an appropriate increase in defense spending, the United States has been letting its ability to take full advantage of the remarkable strategic opportunity at hand slip away.”
“The Cold War world was a bipolar world; the 21st-century world is – for the moment, at least – decidedly unipolar, with America as the world’s ‘sole superpower.’ America’s strategic goal used to be containment of the Soviet Union; today the task is to preserve an international security environment conducive to American interests and ideals. The military’s job during the Cold War was to deter Soviet expansionism. Today its task is to secure and expand the ‘zones of democratic peace;’ to deter the rise of a new great-power competitor; defend key regions of Europe, East Asia and the Middle East; and to preserve American preeminence through the coming transformation of war made possible by new technologies” the paper wrote.
As part of this broader plan, the paper wrote that American wars with Iraq and Iran would help ensure permanent U.S. military bases in the Middle East.
“After eight years of no-fly-zone operations, there is little reason to anticipate that the U.S. air presence in the region should diminish significantly as long as Saddam Hussein remains in power. Although Saudi domestic sensibilities demand that the forces based in the Kingdom nominally remain rotational forces, it has become apparent that this is now a semi-permanent mission. From an American perspective, the value of such bases would endure even should Saddam pass from the scene. Over the long term, Iran may well prove as large a threat to U.S. interests in the Gulf as Iraq has. And even should U.S.-Iranian relations improve, retaining forward-based forces in the region would still be an essential element in U.S. security strategy given the longstanding American interests in the region” the paper wrote.
The paper wrote that in order to achieve this plan for American dominance “the United States must retain sufficient forces able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars” with the goal of regime change, writing, “American military preeminence will continue to rest in significant part on the ability to maintain sufficient land forces to achieve political goals such as removing a dangerous and hostile regime when necessary”.
Most disturbingly, the paper wrote, one year before the 9/11 attacks , that “the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”
In 2000, when George W. Bush was elected president, all power players in his administration were either from PNAC or were authors on the clear break memo.
As journalist Bette Stockbauer noted , “Many PNAC members now hold key positions in the White House, Defense and State Departments, among them Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams, Lewis Libby, and John Bolton, along with others in lesser positions.”
Meanwhile, David Wurmser, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, were all authors of the clean break document.
9/11: A Gift To The PNAC and Israel First.
When 9/11 happened, PNAC and the Israel firsters in the Bush administration could not have been happier.
PNAC got its “catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor” it needed to achieve the goal of a unipolar American empire through “simultaneous large-scale” regime change wars.
Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu’s reaction to 9/11 was to say it was “very good” for Israel because “it will generate immediate sympathy” and “strengthen the bond between our two peoples”.
This, in effect, was the birth of the “war on terror,” a series of regime-change wars in the Middle East that targeted enemies of U.S./Israeli dominance.
This plan both fulfilled imperialist ambitions of the Neo-cons from PNAC and Israel’s U.S. based plants who wrote the clean break memo.
Through intelligence deceptions created by the U.S., Israel and the UK, the U.S. made the 2003 war with Iraq part of its war on terror, falsely claiming that the secular Iraqi government had Weapons of Mass Destruction and was connected to Al Qaeda.
Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or 9/11, and the power vacuum from his removal ended up creating ISIS, but his removal was an “important Israeli strategic objective” and aided the PNAC goal of a never-ending U.S. troop presence in the Middle East.
The Clean Break Expands.
For the planners of the “war on terror,” Iraq was just the beginning.
As professor Jeffery Sachs documented, “The Clean Break strategy was effectively carried out by the US and Israel after 9/11. As NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark revealed, soon after 9/11, the US planned to ‘attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years—starting with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.’”
Years later, Clark revealed that this list came from a study which was “paid for by the Israelis” and said, “if you want to protect Israel, and you want Israel to succeed… you’ve got to get rid of the states that are surrounding”.
These wars were all carried out by neoconservatives in consecutive administrations.
Sachs documented:
The first of the wars, in early 2003, was to topple the Iraqi government. Plans for further wars were delayed as the US became mired in Iraq. Still, the US supported Sudan’s split in 2005, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006, and Ethiopia’s incursion into Somalia that same year. In 2011, the Obama administration launched CIA operation Timber Sycamore against Syria and, with the UK and France, overthrew Libya’s government through a 2011 bombing campaign. Today, these countries lie in ruins, and many are now embroiled in civil wars.
Netanyahu was a cheerleader of these wars of choice–either in public or behind the scenes–together with his neocon allies in the U.S. Government including Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Victoria Nuland, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, and others.
These wars had nothing to do with fighting Al Qaeda or ISIS, and actually strengthened the groups but were actually about destroying nationalist resistance groups opposed to Israeli dominance, and paving the way for American Neo-con world dominance.
Following the U.S. led NATO removal of Gaddafi in Libya, a UK parliament report acknowledged that “It is now clear that militant Islamist militias played a critical role in the rebellion from February 2011 onwards. They separated themselves from the rebel army, refused to take orders from non-Islamist commanders, and assassinated the then-leader of the rebel army, Abdel Fattah Younes”.
The Canadian newspaper National Post reported that:
Some officers in the Canadian Forces tried to raise concerns early on in the war that removing Gaddafi would play into the hands of Islamic extremists, but military sources say those warnings went unheeded. Later, military members would privately joke about Canada’s CF-18s being part of ‘Al-Qaeda’s air force,’ since their bombing runs helped to pave the way for rebel groups aligned with the terrorist group.
The regime change campaign also gave way to the rise of ISIS in Libya. The UK parliament report acknowledged “various tribes, independent militias and ISIL took advantage of the absence of a central government to seize control of portions of Libyan territory”.
In Syria, the U.S. deep state even sent the depleted arms of Gaddafi to Al Qaeda affiliates for the next regime change war.
Journalist Seymour Hersh in 2012 reported that the CIA authorized a “rat line” used “to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition. Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida.”
In 2012, then-Hillary Clinton advisor Jake Sullivan wrote “AQ [Al Qaeda] is on our side in Syria” in an email.
Following this in 2013, the CIA launched Timber Sycamore, described by the New York Times as “one of the most expensive efforts to arm and train rebels since the agency’s program arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 1980s” to arm and train Al Qaeda-linked rebels in Syria.
The Think Tank Century Foundation wrote that Timber Sycamore “have functioned as a battlefield auxiliaries and weapons farms for larger Islamist and jihadist factions, including Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate.”
Meanwhile, in 2015, the United States backed Saudi Arabia’s war on Ansar Allah in Yemen, which again strengthened Al Qaeda.
Reuters reported in 2016 that “The campaign, backed by the United States, has helped Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) to become stronger than at any time since it first emerged almost 20 years ago.”
Michael Horton, an analyst with the Jamestown Foundation told the AP in 2018, “Elements of the U.S. military are clearly aware that much of what the U.S. is doing in Yemen is aiding AQAP (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula), and there is much angst about that, However, supporting the UAE and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia against what the U.S. views as Iranian expansionism takes priority over battling AQAP and even stabilizing Yemen”.
U.S. arms even ended up in the hands of AQAP in Yemen.
In all of these wars, a pattern emerges. The real U.S. goal in the “war on terror” was to destroy resistance groups opposed to Israeli expansion, and that get in the way of neoconservative world domination plans, and Al Qaeda and ISIS have actually often been allies of the U.S. and Israel in that.
As journalist Aaron Mate reported in 2003, the State Department acknowledged that the former Syrian government was an ally in fighting against Al Qaeda, but refused to consider resistance to Israeli occupation in Lebanon and Syria terrorism.
The report wrote, “The Syrian government, the report acknowledged, has ‘provided tangible and beneficial CT [counter-terrorism] cooperation, in particular with respect to information-sharing’” but added that, “Syrian officials continue to distinguish between terrorism and what it considers to be ‘legitimate’ armed resistance undertaken by people living in occupied territories for the sake of national liberation. For this reason, Syria does not recognize Hizballah or the Palestinian rejectionist groups as terrorist organizations, and thus refuses to take actions against them consonant with the actions it has taken against other terrorist organizations/individuals.”
“Even though the US acknowledged that Syria provided ‘tangible and beneficial cooperation’ against Al Qaeda, its support for Hezbollah and Palestinian groups who seek ‘national liberation’ was enough to mark it for regime change”, Mate noted.
Iran, similarly, is listed by the U.S. as a state sponsor of terrorism, despite the fact that the country led the fight against ISIS, because it supports resistance against Israel in Palestine and Lebanon.
The reality is that the “war on terror” was always a scam, designed to advance the Greater Israel project and the Project for a New American Century’s imperial vision.
The fact that a former Al Qaeda leader is no longer on the state sponsor of terrorism is perhaps the best piece of evidence to back this up.
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It strongly supports MLK's observation back in the 60s that the US Government is the greatest purveyor of violence on the planet.
Excellent analysis, Justin K.P.!!!
That is why I have long called it The Global War OF Terror. We must be accurate in our terminology. ;-)