Cockburn writes: "It is fortunate for Saudi Arabia and Qatar that the furor
over the sexual antics of Donald Trump is preventing much attention being
given to the latest batch of leaked emails to and from Hillary Clinton. Most
fascinating of these is what reads like a US State Department memo."
Leaked memos which appeared on the WikiLeaks site demonstrate that the US
knew its own allies were funding the Islamist terror group ISIS. (photo:
Getty Images)
New Evidence That US Allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar Are Funding ISIS
By Patrick Cockburn, Independent
16 October 16
There is a bizarre discontinuity between what the Obama administration knew
about the jihadis and what they would say in public
It is fortunate for Saudi Arabia and Qatar that the furore over the sexual
antics of Donald Trump is preventing much attention being given to the
latest batch of leaked emails to and from Hillary Clinton. Most fascinating
of these is what reads like a US State Department memo, dated 17 August
2014, on the appropriate US response to the rapid advance of Isis forces,
which were then sweeping through northern Iraq and eastern Syria.
At the time, the US government was not admitting that Saudi Arabia and its
Sunni allies were supporting Isis and al-Qaeda-type movements. But in the
leaked memo, which says that it draws on "western intelligence, US
intelligence and sources in the region" there is no ambivalence about who is
backing Isis, which at the time of writing was butchering and raping Yazidi
villagers and slaughtering captured Iraqi and Syrian soldiers.
The memo says: "We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional
intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi
Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to
Isis and other radical groups in the region." This was evidently received
wisdom in the upper ranks of the US government, but never openly admitted
because to it was held that to antagonise Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies,
Turkey and Pakistan would fatally undermine US power in the Middle East and
South Asia.
For an extraordinarily long period after 9/11, the US refused to confront
these traditional Sunni allies and thereby ensured that the "War on Terror"
would fail decisively; 15 years later, al-Qaeda in its different guises is
much stronger than it used to be because shadowy state sponsors, without
whom it could not have survived, were given a free pass.
It is not as if Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and the US foreign
policy establishment in general did not know what was happening. An earlier
WikiLeaks release of a State Department cable sent under her name in
December 2009 states that "Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support
base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan]." But
Saudi complicity with these movements never became a central political issue
in the US. Why not?
The answer is that the US did not think it was in its interests to cut its
traditional Sunni allies loose and put a great deal of resources into making
sure that this did not happen. They brought on side compliant journalists,
academics and politicians willing to give overt or covert support to Saudi
positions.
The real views of senior officials in the White House and the State
Department were only periodically visible and, even when their frankness
made news, what they said was swiftly forgotten. Earlier this year, for
instance, Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic wrote a piece based on numerous
interviews with Barack Obama in which Obama "questioned, often harshly, the
role that America's Sunni Arab allies play in fomenting anti-American
terrorism. He is clearly irritated that foreign policy orthodoxy compels him
to treat Saudi Arabia as an ally".
It is worth recalling White House cynicism about how that foreign policy
orthodoxy in Washington was produced and how easily its influence could be
bought. Goldberg reported that "a widely held sentiment inside the White
House is that many of the most prominent foreign-policy think tanks in
Washington are doing the bidding of their Arab and pro-Israel funders. I've
heard one administration official refer to Massachusetts Avenue, the home of
many of these think tanks, as 'Arab-occupied territory'."
Despite this, television and newspaper interview self-declared academic
experts from these same think tanks on Isis, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and
the Gulf are wilfully ignoring or happily disregarding their partisan
sympathies.
The Hillary Clinton email of August 2014 takes for granted that Saudi Arabia
and Qatar are funding Isis - but this was not the journalistic or academic
conventional wisdom of the day. Instead, there was much assertion that the
newly declared caliphate was self-supporting through the sale of oil, taxes
and antiquities; it therefore followed that Isis did not need money from
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. The same argument could not be made to explain
the funding of Jabhat al-Nusra, which controlled no oilfields, but even in
the case of Isis the belief in its self-sufficiency was always shaky.
Iraqi and Kurdish leaders said that they did not believe a word of it,
claiming privately that Isis was blackmailing the Gulf states by threatening
violence on their territory unless they paid up. The Iraqi and Kurdish
officials never produced proof of this, but it seemed unlikely that men as
tough and ruthless as the Isis leaders would have satisfied themselves with
taxing truck traffic and shopkeepers in the extensive but poor lands they
ruled and not extracted far larger sums from fabulously wealthy private and
state donors in the oil producers of the Gulf.
Going by the latest leaked email, the State Department and US intelligence
clearly had no doubt that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were funding Isis. But
there has always been bizarre discontinuity between what the Obama
administration knew about Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states and what they
would say in public. Occasionally the truth would spill out, as when
Vice-President Joe Biden told students at Harvard in October 2014 that Saudi
Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates "were so determined to take down
Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war. What did they do? They
poured hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into
anyone who would fight against Assad. Except that the people who were being
supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis
coming from other parts of the world". Biden poured scorn on the idea that
there were Syrian "moderates" capable of fighting Isis and Assad at the same
time.
Hillary Clinton should be very vulnerable over the failings of US foreign
policy during the years she was Secretary of State. But, such is the crudity
of Trump's demagoguery, she has never had to answer for it. Republican
challenges have focussed on issues - the death of the US ambassador in
Benghazi in 2012 and the final US military withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 -
for which she was not responsible.
A Hillary Clinton presidency might mean closer amity with Saudi Arabia, but
American attitudes towards the Saudi regime are becoming soured, as was
shown recently when Congress overwhelmingly overturned a presidential veto
of a bill allowing the relatives of 9/11 victims to sue the Saudi
government.
Another development is weakening Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies. The
leaked memo speaks of the rival ambitions of Saudi Arabia and Qatar "to
dominate the Sunni world". But this has not turned out well, with east
Aleppo and Mosul, two great Sunni cities, coming under attack and likely to
fall. Whatever Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and the others thought they were
doing it has not happened and the Sunni of Syria and Iraq are paying a heavy
price. It is this failure which will shape the future relations of the Sunni
states with the new US administration.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Leaked memos which appeared on the WikiLeaks site demonstrate that the US
knew its own allies were funding the Islamist terror group ISIS. (photo:
Getty Images)
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/hillary-clinton-wikileaks-email-isis-sau
di-arabia-qatar-us-allies-funding-barack-obama-knew-all-a7362071.htmlhttp://
www.independent.co.uk/voices/hillary-clinton-wikileaks-email-isis-saudi-arab
ia-qatar-us-allies-funding-barack-obama-knew-all-a7362071.html
New Evidence That US Allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar Are Funding ISIS
By Patrick Cockburn, Independent
16 October 16
There is a bizarre discontinuity between what the Obama administration knew
about the jihadis and what they would say in public
t is fortunate for Saudi Arabia and Qatar that the furore over the sexual
antics of Donald Trump is preventing much attention being given to the
latest batch of leaked emails to and from Hillary Clinton. Most fascinating
of these is what reads like a US State Department memo, dated 17 August
2014, on the appropriate US response to the rapid advance of Isis forces,
which were then sweeping through northern Iraq and eastern Syria.
At the time, the US government was not admitting that Saudi Arabia and its
Sunni allies were supporting Isis and al-Qaeda-type movements. But in the
leaked memo, which says that it draws on "western intelligence, US
intelligence and sources in the region" there is no ambivalence about who is
backing Isis, which at the time of writing was butchering and raping Yazidi
villagers and slaughtering captured Iraqi and Syrian soldiers.
The memo says: "We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional
intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi
Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to
Isis and other radical groups in the region." This was evidently received
wisdom in the upper ranks of the US government, but never openly admitted
because to it was held that to antagonise Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies,
Turkey and Pakistan would fatally undermine US power in the Middle East and
South Asia.
For an extraordinarily long period after 9/11, the US refused to confront
these traditional Sunni allies and thereby ensured that the "War on Terror"
would fail decisively; 15 years later, al-Qaeda in its different guises is
much stronger than it used to be because shadowy state sponsors, without
whom it could not have survived, were given a free pass.
It is not as if Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and the US foreign
policy establishment in general did not know what was happening. An earlier
WikiLeaks release of a State Department cable sent under her name in
December 2009 states that "Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support
base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan]." But
Saudi complicity with these movements never became a central political issue
in the US. Why not?
The answer is that the US did not think it was in its interests to cut its
traditional Sunni allies loose and put a great deal of resources into making
sure that this did not happen. They brought on side compliant journalists,
academics and politicians willing to give overt or covert support to Saudi
positions.
The real views of senior officials in the White House and the State
Department were only periodically visible and, even when their frankness
made news, what they said was swiftly forgotten. Earlier this year, for
instance, Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic wrote a piece based on numerous
interviews with Barack Obama in which Obama "questioned, often harshly, the
role that America's Sunni Arab allies play in fomenting anti-American
terrorism. He is clearly irritated that foreign policy orthodoxy compels him
to treat Saudi Arabia as an ally".
It is worth recalling White House cynicism about how that foreign policy
orthodoxy in Washington was produced and how easily its influence could be
bought. Goldberg reported that "a widely held sentiment inside the White
House is that many of the most prominent foreign-policy think tanks in
Washington are doing the bidding of their Arab and pro-Israel funders. I've
heard one administration official refer to Massachusetts Avenue, the home of
many of these think tanks, as 'Arab-occupied territory'."
Despite this, television and newspaper interview self-declared academic
experts from these same think tanks on Isis, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and
the Gulf are wilfully ignoring or happily disregarding their partisan
sympathies.
The Hillary Clinton email of August 2014 takes for granted that Saudi Arabia
and Qatar are funding Isis - but this was not the journalistic or academic
conventional wisdom of the day. Instead, there was much assertion that the
newly declared caliphate was self-supporting through the sale of oil, taxes
and antiquities; it therefore followed that Isis did not need money from
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. The same argument could not be made to explain
the funding of Jabhat al-Nusra, which controlled no oilfields, but even in
the case of Isis the belief in its self-sufficiency was always shaky.
Iraqi and Kurdish leaders said that they did not believe a word of it,
claiming privately that Isis was blackmailing the Gulf states by threatening
violence on their territory unless they paid up. The Iraqi and Kurdish
officials never produced proof of this, but it seemed unlikely that men as
tough and ruthless as the Isis leaders would have satisfied themselves with
taxing truck traffic and shopkeepers in the extensive but poor lands they
ruled and not extracted far larger sums from fabulously wealthy private and
state donors in the oil producers of the Gulf.
Going by the latest leaked email, the State Department and US intelligence
clearly had no doubt that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were funding Isis. But
there has always been bizarre discontinuity between what the Obama
administration knew about Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states and what they
would say in public. Occasionally the truth would spill out, as when
Vice-President Joe Biden told students at Harvard in October 2014 that Saudi
Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates "were so determined to take down
Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war. What did they do? They
poured hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into
anyone who would fight against Assad. Except that the people who were being
supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis
coming from other parts of the world". Biden poured scorn on the idea that
there were Syrian "moderates" capable of fighting Isis and Assad at the same
time.
Hillary Clinton should be very vulnerable over the failings of US foreign
policy during the years she was Secretary of State. But, such is the crudity
of Trump's demagoguery, she has never had to answer for it. Republican
challenges have focussed on issues - the death of the US ambassador in
Benghazi in 2012 and the final US military withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 -
for which she was not responsible.
A Hillary Clinton presidency might mean closer amity with Saudi Arabia, but
American attitudes towards the Saudi regime are becoming soured, as was
shown recently when Congress overwhelmingly overturned a presidential veto
of a bill allowing the relatives of 9/11 victims to sue the Saudi
government.
Another development is weakening Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies. The
leaked memo speaks of the rival ambitions of Saudi Arabia and Qatar "to
dominate the Sunni world". But this has not turned out well, with east
Aleppo and Mosul, two great Sunni cities, coming under attack and likely to
fall. Whatever Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and the others thought they were
doing it has not happened and the Sunni of Syria and Iraq are paying a heavy
price. It is this failure which will shape the future relations of the Sunni
states with the new US administration.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
