Violent Islamic extremism and Middle East Terrorism have been added to the list of fundamental concerns that lie behind current US policy and its interventions.
The fight against terrorism, which began in North Africa with the bloody war between the Algerian government and the Islamist opposition in the nineties, has spread throughout the Middle East in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001 attacks on U.S.
Terrorism will remain for a long time one of the main determinants of US interventions in the region understood in a broad sense, from Mali to Iraq and beyond, through Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The effort to curb Islamic extremism and Middle East Terrorism, has led the United States to focus its attention on areas previously considered marginal to its interests.
Historically, the Gulf region has been important for the US for it’s oil, Egypt and the Levant, pushed by Israel and various strategic considerations.
Things are not like that anymore in regards to Middle East Terrorism
However, since the interest of the United States in these areas is focused on curbing terrorism, political action is governed by military principles.
In 2002, the United States launched for the first time a Pan Sahel Initiative that brought together several countries in the region under the control of the Central Command of the US Army.
In 2005, the initiative was expanded to include more countries and was renamed the Trans-Saharan Anti-terrorist Association.
It remained under military control, although back in 2007 it was transferred from CENTCOM to the newly created African Command, or AFRICOM.
The need to combat violent extremism and the threat it poses to the US was also the argument for intervening in Iraq in Syria since the summer of 2014.
In June, an organization called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, or ISIS, since in Arabic Levante is Al Shams, which gave rise to the two acronyms) it left its bastion in eastern Syria and captured the city of Mosul in northern Iraq.
They then proclaimed an Islamic caliphate whose territory, as he explicitly stated, “would continue to expand.”
The takeover of Mosul ended the reluctance of the Obama administration, which launched a new military offensive in the Middle East and still continues under the Trump Administration today.
But the arguments in favor of the intervention were extraordinarily limited and defensive: the United States had to protect its interests and, above all, its personnel in Iraq.
For example, Washington justified its decision to bomb ISIL positions close to a major dam by claiming that if the IS destroyed it, the flood would threaten the staff of the US embassy in Baghdad, an absurd argument, given the devastation the country might have suffered, in case of breakage of the dam.
The baseness of the argument contrasts sharply with the grandiloquence with which the Bush administration justified the invasion of Iraq back in 2003, when it argued that the overthrow of the authoritarian regime of Saddam Hussein would set in motion the democratic transformation not only of Iraq, but of the entire Middle East.
Is anyone actually buying this crap?
Now we have Trump, yet another corporate stooge elected by the top corporations to do their bidding.
They keep saying that it about Democracy?
lets call a spade a spade, Its ALL about the OIL , Natural Gas and Opium.
Leave a comment below, tell us what you think? and don’t for get to share this post!
