by\u00a0Tom Engelhardt<\/a>, The Nation Whatever your politics, you\u2019re not likely to feel great about America right now.\u00a0 After all, there\u2019s Ferguson (the\u00a0whole world<\/a>\u00a0was watching!), an\u00a0increasingly unpopular<\/a>\u00a0president, a Congress whose\u00a0approval ratings<\/a>\u00a0make the president look like a rock star, rising poverty, weakening wages, and a growing inequality gap just to start what could be a long list.\u00a0 Abroad, from\u00a0Libya<\/a>\u00a0and Ukraine to Iraq and the\u00a0South China Sea<\/a>, nothing has been coming up roses for the US\u00a0 Polls reflect a general American\u00a0gloom<\/a>, with\u00a071 percent<\/a>\u00a0of the public claiming the country is \u201con the wrong track.\u201d\u00a0 We have the look of a superpower down on our luck.<\/p>\n What Americans have needed is a little pick-me-up to make us feel better, to make us, in fact, feel distinctly\u00a0good<\/a>.\u00a0 Certainly, what official Washington has needed in tough times is a bona fide enemy so darn evil, so brutal, so barbaric, so inhuman that, by contrast, we might know just how exceptional, how truly necessary to this planet we really are.<\/p>\n In the nick of time, riding to the rescue comes something new under the sun: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), recently renamed Islamic State (IS).\u00a0 It\u2019s a group so extreme that even al-Qaeda\u00a0rejected<\/a>\u00a0it, so brutal that it\u2019s brought back\u00a0crucifixion<\/a>,\u00a0beheading<\/a>,\u00a0waterboarding<\/a>, and amputation, so fanatical that it\u2019s ready to\u00a0persecute<\/a>\u00a0any religious group within range of its weapons, so grimly beyond morality that it\u2019s made the beheading of an innocent American a global propaganda phenomenon.\u00a0 If you\u2019ve got a label that\u2019s really, really bad like\u00a0genocide<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0ethnic cleansing<\/a>, you can probably apply it to ISIS’s actions.<\/p>\n It has also proven so effective that its relatively modest band of warrior jihadis has routed the Syrian and Iraqi armies, as well as the Kurdish pesh merga militia, taking control of a territory larger than Great Britain in the heart of the Middle East.\u00a0 Today, it rules over at least\u00a0four million people<\/a>, controls its own functioning oil fields and refineries (and so their\u00a0revenues<\/a>\u00a0as well as infusions of money from looted banks, kidnapping ransoms, and Gulf state patrons).\u00a0 Despite opposition, it still seems to be\u00a0expanding<\/a>\u00a0and claims it has established a caliphate.<\/p>\n A Force So Evil You\u2019ve Got to Do Something<\/strong><\/p>\n Facing such pure evil, you may feel a chill of fear, even if you\u2019re a top military or national security official, but in a way you\u2019ve gotta feel good, too.\u00a0 It\u2019s not everyday that you have an enemy your president can\u00a0term<\/a>\u00a0a \u201ccancer\u201d; that your secretary of state can\u00a0call<\/a>\u00a0the \u201cface\u201d of \u201cugly, savage, inexplicable, nihilistic, and valueless evil\u201d which \u201cmust be destroyed\u201d;\u00a0that your secretary of defense can\u00a0denounce<\/a>\u00a0as \u201cbarbaric\u201d and lacking a \u201cstandard of decency, of responsible human behavior… an imminent threat to every interest we have, whether it’s in Iraq or anywhere else\u201d; that your chairman of the joint chiefs of staff can describe as \u201can organization that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision and which will eventually have to be defeated\u201d; and that a retired general and former commander of US forces in Afghanistan can brand a \u201cscourge<\/a>… beyond the pale of humanity [that]… must be eradicated.\u201d<\/p>\n Talk about a feel-good feel-bad situation for the leadership of a superpower that\u2019s seen better days!\u00a0 Such threatening evil calls for only one thing, of course: for the United States to step in.\u00a0 It calls for the Obama administration to dispatch the\u00a0bombers and drones<\/a>\u00a0in a slowly expanding air war in Iraq and, sooner or later, possibly Syria.\u00a0 It falls on Washington\u2019s shoulders to\u00a0organize<\/a>\u00a0a new \u201ccoalition of the willing\u201d from among various backers and opponents of the Assad regime in Syria, from among those who have\u00a0armed and funded<\/a>\u00a0the extremist rebels in that country, from the ethnic\/religious factions in the former Iraq, and from various NATO countries.\u00a0 It calls for Washington to transform Iraq\u2019s leadership (a process no longer termed \u201cregime change\u201d) and elevate a\u00a0new man<\/a>\u00a0capable of reuniting the Shiites, the Sunnis, and the Kurds, now at each other\u2019s throats, into one nation capable of turning back the extremist tide.\u00a0 If not American \u201cboots on the ground,\u201d it calls for proxy ones of various sorts that the US military will naturally have a hand in training, arming, funding, and advising.\u00a0 Facing such evil, what other options could there be?<\/p>\n If all of this sounds strangely familiar, it should.\u00a0 Minus a couple of invasions, the steps being considered or already in effect to deal with \u201cthe threat of ISIS\u201d are a reasonable summary of the last 13 years of what was once called the Global War on Terror and now has no name at all.\u00a0 New as ISIS may be, a little history is in order, since that group is, at least in part, America\u2019s legacy in the Middle East.<\/p>\n Give Osama bin Laden some credit.\u00a0 After all, he helped set us on the path to ISIS.\u00a0 He and his ragged band had no way of creating the caliphate they dreamed of or much of anything else.\u00a0 But he did\u00a0grasp<\/a>\u00a0that goading Washington into something that looked like a crusader\u2019s war with the Muslim world might be an effective way of heading in that direction.<\/p>\n In other words, before Washington brings its military power fully to bear on the new “caliphate,” a modest review of the post-9\/11 years might be appropriate.\u00a0 Let\u2019s start at the moment when those towers in New York had just come down, thanks to a small group of mostly Saudi hijackers, and almost 3,000 people were dead in the rubble.\u00a0 At that time, it wasn\u2019t hard to convince Americans that there could be nothing worse, in terms of pure evil, than Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.<\/p>\n Establishing an American Caliphate<\/strong><\/p>\n Facing such unmatchable evil, the United States officially went to war as it might have against an enemy military power.\u00a0 Under the rubric of the Global War on Terror, the Bush administration launched the unmatchable power of the US military and its paramilitarized intelligence agencies against… well, what?\u00a0 Despite those dramatic videos of al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, that organization had no military force worth the name, and despite what you\u2019ve seen on \u201cHomeland,\u201d no sleeper cells in the US either; nor did it have the ability to mount follow-up operations any time soon.<\/p>\n In other words, while the Bush administration talked about \u201cdraining the swamp<\/a>\u201d of terror groups in up to\u00a060 countries<\/a>, the US military was dispatched against what were essentially will-o\u2019-the-wisps, largely representing Washington\u2019s own conjured fears and fantasies.\u00a0 It was, that is, initially sent against bands of largely inconsequential Islamic extremists, scattered in tiny numbers in the tribal backlands of Afghanistan or Pakistan and, of course, the rudimentary armies of the Taliban.<\/p>\n It was, to use a word that George W. Bush let slip\u00a0only once<\/a>, something like a “crusade,” something close to a religious war, if not against Islam itself\u2014American officials piously and repeatedly made that clear\u2014then against the idea of a Muslim enemy, as well as against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and later Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.\u00a0 In each case, Washington mustered a coalition of the willing, ranging from Arab and South or Central Asian states to European ones, sent in air power followed twice by full-scale invasions and occupations, mustered local politicians of our choice in major \u201cnation-building\u201d operations amid much self-promotional talk about democracy, and built up vast new military and security apparatuses, supplying them with\u00a0billions of dollars<\/a>\u00a0in training and arms.<\/p>\n Looking back, it\u2019s hard not to think of all of this as a kind of American jihadism, as well as an attempt to establish what might have been considered an American caliphate in the region (though Washington had far kinder descriptive terms for it).\u00a0 In the process, the US effectively dismantled and destroyed state power in each of the three main countries in which it intervened, while ensuring the destabilization of neighboring countries and finally the region itself.<\/p>\n In that largely Muslim part of the world, the US left a grim record that we in this country generally tend to discount or forget when we decry the barbarism of others.\u00a0 We are now focused in horror on ISIS\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n We, however, ignore the virtual library of videos and other imagery the US generated, images widely viewed (or heard about and discussed) with no less horror in the Muslim world than ISIS\u2019s imagery is in ours.\u00a0 As a start, there were the infamous \u201cscreen saver<\/a>\u201d images straight out of the Marquis de Sade from\u00a0Abu Ghraib prison<\/a>. \u00a0There, Americans tortured and abused Iraqi prisoners, while creating their own\u00a0iconic version<\/a>\u00a0of crucifixion imagery.\u00a0 Then there were the videos that no one (other than insiders) saw, but that everyone heard about.\u00a0 These, the CIA took of the repeated torture and abuse of al-Qaeda suspects in its \u201cblack sites.\u201d \u00a0In 2005, they were\u00a0destroyed<\/a>\u00a0by an official of that agency, lest they be screened in an American court someday.\u00a0 There was also the Apache helicopter\u00a0video<\/a>\u00a0released 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.\u00a0 There was the\u00a0video<\/a>\u00a0of US troops urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.\u00a0 There were the\u00a0trophy photos<\/a>\u00a0of body parts\u00a0brought home<\/a>\u00a0by US soldiers.\u00a0 There were the\u00a0snuff films<\/a>\u00a0of the victims of Washington\u2019s drone assassination campaigns in the tribal backlands of the planet (or \u201cbug splat<\/a>,\u201d as the drone pilots came to call the dead from those attacks) and\u00a0similar footage<\/a>\u00a0from helicopter gunships.\u00a0 There was the bin Laden snuff film video from the raid on Abbottabad, Pakistan, of which President Obama\u00a0reportedly watched<\/a>\u00a0a live feed. \u00a0And that\u2019s\u00a0only to begin<\/a>\u00a0to account for some of the imagery produced by the US since September 2001 from its various adventures in the Greater Middle East.<\/p>\n All in all, the invasions, the occupations, the drone campaigns in several lands, the deaths that ran into the hundreds of thousands, the\u00a0uprooting<\/a>\u00a0of millions of people sent into external or internal exile, the expending of\u00a0trillions<\/a>\u00a0of dollars added up to a bin Laden dreamscape.\u00a0 They would prove jihadist recruitment tools par excellence.<\/p>\n When the US 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\u2014as 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.<\/p>\n Though the militants of ISIS would undoubtedly be horrified to think so, they are the spawn of Washington.\u00a0 Thirteen years of regional war, occupation, and intervention played a major role in clearing the ground for them.\u00a0 They may be our worst nightmare (thus far), but they are also our legacy\u2014and not just because so many of their leaders\u00a0came from<\/a>\u00a0the Iraqi army we disbanded, had their beliefs and skills honed in the prisons we set up (Camp Bucca<\/a>\u00a0seems to have been the West Point of Iraqi extremism), and gained experience facing US counter-terror operations in the \u201csurge\u201d years of the occupation.\u00a0 In fact, just about everything done in the war on terror has facilitated their rise.\u00a0 After all, we dismantled the Iraqi army and rebuilt one that would flee at the first signs of ISIS\u2019s fighters,\u00a0abandoning<\/a>\u00a0vast stores of Washington’s weaponry to them. We essentially destroyed the Iraqi state, while fostering a Shia leader who would\u00a0oppress enough Sunnis<\/a>\u00a0in enough ways to create a situation in which ISIS would be welcomed or tolerated throughout significant areas of the country.<\/p>\n The Escalation Follies<\/strong><\/p>\n When you think about it, from the moment the first bombs began falling on Afghanistan in October 2001 to the present, not a single US military intervention has had anything like its intended effect.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Looked at in a clear-eyed way, this is what any American military intervention seems to offer such extremist outfits\u2014and ISIS knows it.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t consider its\u00a0taunting video<\/a>\u00a0of James Foley’s execution the irrational act of madmen blindly calling down the destructive force of the planet\u2019s last superpower on themselves.\u00a0 Quite the opposite.\u00a0 Behind it lay rational calculation.\u00a0 ISIS\u2019s leaders surely understood that American air power would hurt them, but they knew as well that, as in an\u00a0Asian martial art<\/a>\u00a0in which the force of an assailant is used against him, Washington\u2019s full-scale involvement would also infuse their movement\u00a0with greater power<\/a>.\u00a0 (This was Osama bin Laden\u2019s most original insight.)<\/p>\n It would give ISIS the ultimate enemy, which means the ultimate street cred in its world.\u00a0 It would bring with it the memories of all those past interventions, all those snuff videos and horrifying images.\u00a0 It would help inflame and so attract more members and fighters.\u00a0 It would give the ultimate\u00a0raison d’\u00eatre<\/em>\u00a0to a minority religious movement that might otherwise prove less than cohesive and, in the long run, quite vulnerable.<\/em>\u00a0 It would give that movement global bragging rights into the distant future.<\/p>\n ISIS\u2019s urge was undoubtedly to bait the Obama administration into a significant intervention.\u00a0 And in that, it may prove successful.\u00a0 We are now, after all, watching a familiar version of the escalation follies at work in Washington.\u00a0 Obama and his top officials are clearly on the up escalator.\u00a0 In the Oval Office is a visibly reluctant president, who undoubtedly desires neither to intervene in a major way in Iraq (from which he proudly withdrew American troops in 2011 with their \u201cheads held high<\/a>\u201d), nor in Syria (a place where he avoided sending in the bombers and missiles back in 2013).<\/p>\n Unlike the previous president and his top officials, who were all confidence and overarching plans for creating a\u00a0Pax Americana<\/em>\u00a0across the Greater Middle East, this one and his foreign policy team came into office intent on managing an inherited global situation.\u00a0 President Obama\u2019s only plan, such as it was, was to get out of the Iraq War (along lines already established by the Bush administration).\u00a0 It was perhaps a telltale sign then that, in order to do so, he felt he had to \u201csurge<\/a>\u201d American troops into Afghanistan.\u00a0 Five and a half years later, he and his key officials still seem\u00a0essentially plan-less<\/a>, a set of now-desperate managers engaged in a seat-of-the-pants struggle over a destabilizing Greater Middle East (and increasingly Africa and the borderlands of Europe as well).<\/p>\n Five and a half years later, the president is once again\u00a0under pressure<\/a>\u00a0and being\u00a0criticized<\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0assorted neocons<\/a>,\u00a0McCainites<\/a>, and this time, it seems, the\u00a0military high command<\/a>\u00a0evidently eager to be set loose yet one more time to take out barbarism globally\u2014that is, to up the ante on a losing hand.\u00a0 As in 2009, so today, he\u2019s slowly but surely giving ground.\u00a0 By now, the process of \u201cmission creep\u201d\u2014a term strongly rejected by the Obama administration\u2014is well underway.<\/p>\n It started slowly with the collapse of the US-trained and US-supplied Iraqi army in Mosul and other northern Iraqi cities in the face of attacks by ISIS.\u00a0 In mid-June, the aircraft carrier USS\u00a0H.W. Bush<\/em>\u00a0with more than 100 planes was\u00a0dispatched<\/a>\u00a0to the Persian Gulf and the president\u00a0sent in<\/a>\u00a0hundreds of troops, including Special Forces advisers (though officially no \u201cboots” were to be “on the ground\u201d).\u00a0 He also\u00a0agreed to<\/a>\u00a0drone and other air surveillance of the regions ISIS had taken, clearly preparation for future bombing campaigns.\u00a0 All of this was happening before the fate of the Yazidis\u2014a small religious sect whose communities in northern Iraq were brutally destroyed by ISIS fighters\u2014officially triggered the commencement of a limited bombing campaign suitable to a \u201chumanitarian crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n When ISIS, bolstered by US heavy weaponry captured from the Iraqi military, began to crush the Kurdish pesh merga militia, threatening the capital of the Kurdish region of Iraq and taking the enormous Mosul Dam, the bombing\u00a0widened<\/a>. More troops and advisers were\u00a0sent in<\/a>, and weaponry\u00a0began to flow<\/a>\u00a0to the Kurds, with promises of all of the above further south once a new unity government was formed in Baghdad.\u00a0 The president explained this bombing expansion by citing the threat of ISIS blowing up the Mosul Dam and flooding downriver communities, thus supposedly\u00a0endangering<\/a>\u00a0the US Embassy in distant Baghdad.\u00a0 (This was a lame cover story because ISIS would have had to flood parts of its own \u201ccaliphate\u201d in the process.)<\/p>\n The beheading video then provided the pretext for the possible bombing of Syria to be put on the agenda.\u00a0 And once again a reluctant president, slowly giving way, has\u00a0authorized<\/a>\u00a0drone surveillance flights over parts of Syria in preparation for possible bombing strikes that may\u00a0not be long<\/a>\u00a0in coming.<\/p>\n The Incrementalism of the Reluctant<\/strong><\/p>\n Consider this the incrementalism of the reluctant under the usual pressures of a militarized Washington eager to let loose the dogs of war.\u00a0 One place all of this is heading is into a morass of bizarre contradictions involving Syrian politics.\u00a0 Any bombing of that country will necessarily involve implicit, if not explicit, support for the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad, as well as for the barely existing \u201cmoderate\u201d rebels who oppose his regime and to whom Washington may now ship more arms.\u00a0 This, in turn, could mean indirectly delivering yet more weaponry to ISIS.\u00a0 Add everything up and at the moment Washington seems to be on the path that ISIS has laid out for it.<\/p>\n Americans prefer to believe that all problems have solutions.\u00a0 There may, however, be no obvious or at least immediate solution when it comes to ISIS, an organization based on exclusivity and divisiveness in a region that couldn\u2019t be more divided.\u00a0 On the other hand, as a minority movement that has already alienated so many in the region, left to itself it might with time simply burn out or implode.\u00a0 We don\u2019t know.\u00a0 We can\u2019t know.\u00a0 But we do have reasonable evidence from the past 13 years of what an escalating American military intervention is likely to do: not whatever it is that Washington wants it to do.<\/p>\n And keep one thing in mind: if the US 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Osama bin Laden’s killing was presented to us as an ultimate triumph over Islamic terror.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The fact that we can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n The American record in these last 13 years is a shameful one.\u00a0\u00a0Do it again<\/em>\u00a0should not be an option.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The calls for escalating military action against Islamic State (IS) ignore 13 years of evidence that US intervention usually accomplishes the opposite of what Washington intends. by\u00a0Tom Engelhardt, The Nation click here for original article Whatever your politics, you\u2019re not likely to feel great about America right now.\u00a0 After all, there\u2019s Ferguson (the\u00a0whole world\u00a0was watching!), 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\nclick here for original article<\/a><\/p>\n