[sparkscoffee] Re: Butchers Of The Islamic State
- From: "schalestock@xxxxxxxx" <schalestock@xxxxxxxx>
- To: sparkscoffee@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2014 17:20:53 GMT
RR I'm sure you will agree that war and conflict has been with man since the
beginning. The horror of killing and watching friends being killed strikes a
cord in the human psyche that scars and alters a man irrevocably. It is
antithical to the human spirit which, in need of self preservation, allows
itself to become deadened to the pain. The result expresses itself in
brutality. Which is just another face of evil. As with any conflict, you can
argue cause and effect, aggression and revenge. But I think what we have in the
current situation goes deeper. It is a clash of cultures that are fundamentally
and diametrically opposed to each other - the ethics of the 7th century versus
the morality of the 21st. The Geneva Convention didn't come about because the
war mongers developed a conscience. What they did realize is that without some
semblance of rules, participants and societies would become insane and self
destructive - mutually assured destruction of the temporal world we live in.
It was grudgingly accepted that there would always be winners sand losers.
Enter the current Sharia based bestiality of Islam, a true culture of death,
and all bets are off. Dealing with a rabid animal is a fair analogy. It is
either you or it and the only mode of communication is violence. This is a
long way from Clausewitz's dictum that war is simply a continuation of politics
by other means. What we are dealing with in ISIS is evil, pure and simple.
Explanations and analysis of it's motives is futile redundancy. Or as my old
Gunny Sargent was fond of saying, "Kill em all and let God sort them out." JS
---------- Original Message ----------
From: Ron Ristad <ristad@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: sparkscoffee@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [sparkscoffee] Re: Butchers Of The Islamic State
Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2014 10:20:47 -0600 (GMT-06:00)
JS,
What the article is saying is that the U.S. is responsible for creating Islamic
extremism in the first place, starting all the way back with Osama Bin Laden.
Al Queda was created by the CIA in order to fight Russia in Afghanistan. The
"war on terror" will never be won by invading other countries and killing the
local citizens. What has the war on terror accomplished? Nothing. It has been
the cause of hundred's of thousands of deaths, mostly of innocent civilians,
and has created more and more radical Muslims. All the killing and torture and
deaths of American soldiers did not bring back any of the people who died on
9/11. Two wrongs never make a right.
-RR
-----Original Message-----
From: "schalestock@xxxxxxxx" <schalestock@xxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sep 4, 2014 9:57 AM
To: sparkscoffee@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [sparkscoffee] Re: Butchers Of The Islamic State
RR Just wondering...is this supposed to represent some kind of moral
equivalency? I notice he didn't mention any details about why the Marine recon
team urinated on that dead Taliban. Here's some genuine moral equivalency. One
of their team members had been captured, tortured then mutilated. Penis cut off
and stuffed in his mouth. (didn't see any mention of that in the article.)
When the team wiped them out in a firefight, pissing on the corpse of one of
these animals was pretty light payback in my opinion. I would have joined in.
At any rate, this kind of "journalism" which is transparently predicated on
some kind of supposed "moral equivalency" is pathetic. No one said war was a
soccer game. Nor that atrocities are not committed. But presenting this
article as some kind of "proof" that we are the cause of all the trouble over
there is less than convincing to say the least. JS
---------- Original Message ----------
From: Ron Ristad <ristad@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: [sparkscoffee] Butchers Of The Islamic State
Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2014 08:35:12 -0600 (GMT-06:00)
by Tom Engelhardt • September 3, 2014In that largely Muslim part of the
world, the U.S. left a grim record that we in this country generally tend to
discount or forget when we decry the barbarism of others. We are now focused in
horror on ISIS’s video of the murder of journalist James Foley, a
propaganda document clearly designed to drive Washington over the edge and into
more active opposition to that group.
We, however, ignore the virtual library of videos and other imagery the U.S.
generated, images widely viewed (or heard about and discussed) with no less
horror in the Muslim world than ISIS’s imagery is in ours. As a start,
there were the infamous “screen saver” images straight out of the
Marquis de Sade from Abu Ghraib prison. There, Americans tortured and abused
Iraqi prisoners, while creating their own iconic version of crucifixion
imagery. Then there were the videos that no one (other than insiders) saw, but
that everyone heard about. These, the CIA took of the repeated torture and
abuse of al-Qaeda suspects in its “black sites.” In 2005, they were
destroyed by an official of that agency, lest they be screened in an American
court someday. There was also the Apache helicopter video released by WikiLeaks
in which American pilots gunned down Iraqi civilians on the streets of Baghdad
(including two Reuters correspondents), while on the sound track the crew are
heard wisecracking. There was the video of U.S. troops urinating on the bodies
of dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. There were the trophy photos of body
parts brought home by U.S. soldiers. There were the snuff filmsof the victims
of Washington’s drone assassination campaigns in the tribal backlands of
the planet (or “bug splat,” as the drone pilots came to call the
dead from those attacks) and similar footage from helicopter gunships. There
was the bin Laden snuff film video from the raid on Abbottabad, Pakistan, of
which President Obama reportedly watched a live feed. And that’s only to
begin to account for some of the imagery produced by the U.S. since September
2001 from its various adventures in the Greater Middle East.
All in all, the invasions, the occupations, the drone campaigns in several
lands, the deaths that ran into the hundreds of thousands, the uprooting of
millions of people sent into external or internal exile, the expending of
trillions of dollars added up to a bin Laden dreamscape. They would prove
jihadist recruitment tools par excellence.
When the U.S. was done, when it had set off the process that led to
insurgencies, civil wars, the growth of extremist militias, and the collapse of
state structures, it had also guaranteed the rise of something new on Planet
Earth: ISIS – as well as of other extremist outfits ranging from the
Pakistani Taliban, now challenging the state in certain areas of that country,
to Ansar al-Sharia in Libya and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen.
Though the militants of ISIS would undoubtedly be horrified to think so, they
are the spawn of Washington. Thirteen years of regional war, occupation, and
intervention played a major role in clearing the ground for them. They may be
our worst nightmare (thus far), but they are also our legacy – and not
just because so many of their leaders came from the Iraqi army we disbanded,
had their beliefs and skills honed in the prisons we set up (Camp Bucca seems
to have been the West Point of Iraqi extremism), and gained experience facing
U.S. counterterror operations in the “surge” years of the
occupation. In fact, just about everything done in the war on terror has
facilitated their rise. After all, we dismantled the Iraqi army and rebuilt one
that would flee at the first signs of ISIS’s fighters, abandoning vast
stores of Washington’s weaponry to them. We essentially destroyed the
Iraqi state, while fostering a Shia leader who would oppress enough Sunnis in
enough ways to create a situation in which ISIS would be welcomed or tolerated
throughout significant areas of the country.
The Escalation Follies
When you think about it, from the moment the first bombs began falling on
Afghanistan in October 2001 to the present, not a single U.S. military
intervention has had anything like its intended effect. Each one has, in time,
proven a disaster in its own special way, providing breeding grounds for
extremism and producing yet another set of recruitment posters for yet another
set of jihadist movements. Looked at in a clear-eyed way, this is what any
American military intervention seems to offer such extremist outfits –
and ISIS knows it.
And keep one thing in mind: if the U.S. were truly capable of destroying or
crushing ISIS, as our secretary of state and others are urging, that might
prove to be anything but a boon. After all, it was easy enough to think, as
Americans did after 9/11, that al-Qaeda was the worst the world of Islamic
extremism had to offer. Osama bin Laden’s killing was presented to us as
an ultimate triumph over Islamic terror. But ISIS lives and breathes and grows,
and across the Greater Middle East Islamic extremist organizations are gaining
membership and traction in ways that should illuminate just what the war on
terror has really delivered. The fact that we can’t now imagine what
might be worse than ISIS means nothing, given that no one in our world could
imagine ISIS before it sprang into being.
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/the-islamic-state-spawn-of-washingtons-wars-of-terrror/
-RR
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