America’s “Coalition of the Guilty” is the Problem in Iraq and Syria

The US is creating an alliance to supposedly end the pandemonium in Iraq and Syria. What America has assembled is a “coalition of the guilty,” comprised of the very same players that have created the forces menacing Iraq and Syria, hiding America’s own role in creating the disorder.

On September 15, 2014, a conference took place in France about the violence in Iraq. The forthright aim of the Paris conference was to convene a broad coalition to tackle the crisis in Iraq. Just as important, because of the cross-border nature of the crisis, the fighting in Syria was also part of the discussions in Paris.

This whole coalition-building process is a disingenuous deception. Two of the major regional players, which are at the forefront of fighting the cross-border insurgencies in Syria and Iraq, did not even attend the gathering. Syria was not present at the conference, because it was not invited. The Iranians were not present in Paris either.

The best thing that the world can do is to prevent the governments in Washington, Paris, and London from get involved any further in the debacle.

Were the above governments not the very same authorities that helped form, train, arm, and finance the same groups inside Syria that they now say they want to fight there and in Iraq?

Were the head choppers, cannibals, rapists, and criminals that are trying to fragment Iraq and Syria—whatever you want to call them: Al-Qaeda/Al-Nusra/ISIL/ISIS/DAISH/IS/DI—not trained by the US and its allies in places like Jordan and Turkey?

Made by Uncle Sam and Company

For the most part, the whole world knows that the occupiers of Mosul and the ridiculous pseudo-caliphate that they have carved out with blood and bullets in northwestern Iraq and northeastern Syria are the same anti-government forces that are fighting inside both Syria and Iraq. These fighters are the same foreign-supported forces that the US, Britain, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Israel have been propping up against the Syrians since 2011 as part of their bid for regime change in Damascus.

But they say that the US and its cohorts are now at war with these same fighters in Iraq. Yet, they still support them in Syria!

How can you claim to fight them in Iraq, but support them in Syria? Which is it? Do you support them or oppose them?

 

Iraqi President Faud Masum (L) listens while French President Francois Hollande speaks during the International Conference on Peace and Security in Iraq at the Quai d’Orsay on September 15, 2014 in Paris, France. (AFP Photo / Brendan Smialowski) Iraqi President Faud Masum (L) listens while French President Francois Hollande speaks during the International Conference on Peace and Security in Iraq at the Quai d’Orsay on September 15, 2014 in Paris, France. (AFP Photo / Brendan Smialowski)

 

They point out that Washington and a “coalition of the willing” are mobilizing and preparing to bomb these fighters inside Syria. Is that so?

It is odd, but when these ISIL fighters announced the creation of their pseudo-caliphate in Mosul, the US took the opportunity to publicly announce that it was going to deliver half a billion US dollars worth of aid to the insurgency inside Syria. Who do you think the money was for?

The aid was for ISIL! Intended or not, whatever US “aid” is sent to Syria will end up in their hands.

It is no mere coincidence that the ISIL fighters have US and Israeli arms either.

Is the “Coalition of the Guilty” goal regime change?

The US and its “coalition of the willing” is a sick joke. It is comprised of lying and morally bankrupt politicians like French President François Hollande—a socialist who hates the poor in France, according to his former partner Valerie Trierweiler in her 2014 kiss-and-tell book—and the backwards, oppressive Arab petro-dictatorships of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Emirate of Qatar, and the Kingdom of Bahrain.

It is one big sick joke. While they torture, oppress, and kill their own people, the above petro-dictatorships also claim to espouse democratic values for the Syrian people.

Tehran has flatly refused to cooperate with the Pentagon and its anti-ISIL coalition, because the Iranian government knows full well that Washington has orchestrated the rise of the insurgencies inflicting Iraq and Syria.

Walid Al-Muallem, the deputy prime minister and longtime foreign minister of Syria, has even remarked that the US, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and their partners are not fighting terrorism, but using terrorism. According to Foreign Minister Al-Muallem, the countries that are really at the forefront of fighting terrorism are Syria, Iran, Iraq, and the Russian Federation.

Washington knew that Lebanon and Iraq would explode, if a US-led coalition attacked the Syrians. Instead America conducted its own controlled demolition in Iraq by unleashing ISIL across the border, using the crisis to exhaust the local Iraqi forces and to coerce regime change in Baghdad against Nouri Al-Malaki’s government, as an answer to Washington’s clear defeat in Syria after the historic Syrian presidential elections held on June 3, 2014.

What the US has assembled is a “coalition of the guilty” or what we can call the “coalition of guilt.” These are the same governments, tyrants, and countries that authored the fiascos in Iraq and Syria.

Anyway you look at it; it comes down to this key reality: the so-called Islamic State (IS) is the handiwork of Washington; it has been a tool for US interference and intervention in Syria and Iraq.

The “coalition of the guilty” will not be bombing the IS inside Syria, at least exclusively. The Pentagon will be going after the Syrian government and the national military of the Syrian Arab Republic. Make no mistake about it; US-led airstrikes inside Syria will be against international law and an attack on Syria. The US may bomb the IS fighters in Syria too, but the IS will not be the only target. Washington and its “coalition of the guilty” seek regime change in Damascus and will use the opportunity to change the balance of power inside Syria.

In the wings, Israel, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia are all waiting and salivating for the Pentagon to lead an attack.

 

An Islamic gunman walks past a pick up truck belonging to the "Raqa Regional Public Service" headed by the Islamic State (IS) group loaded with the wreckage of a Syrian government forces aircraft which was shot down by IS' militants over the Syrian town of Raqa (AFP Photo / Str) A gunman walks past a pick up truck belonging to the “Raqa Regional Public Service” headed by the Islamic State (IS) group loaded with the wreckage of a Syrian government forces aircraft which was shot down by IS’ militants over the Syrian town of Raqa (AFP Photo / Str)

 

Washington and company are part of the problem, not the solution

The US needs to be called out for fostering the IS or, more appropriately, the “un-Islamic State (uIS).” The vast majority of Muslims view Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the self-declared Caliph “lavish-wristwatch” Ibrahim, and his enterprise as an abomination formed by heretics and mercenaries that many argue cannot possibly be Muslims. Neither is there anything state-like about the “uIS.”

US-led airstrikes—which will absolutely need boots on the ground to select and monitor targets—are not needed. Have not the US and its allies done enough damage in Iraq and its region? Has not enough blood been spilt?

There is a much easier way to stop the “uIS” than what Washington is proposing.

If Washington, London, Paris, and all the usual suspects want to put a stop to the violence, the last thing they need to do is get involved any further in either Iraq or Syria. Their “coalition of the guilty” is a part of the problem and not a part of the solution; they want no actual solutions, aside from establishing a series of vassal states in Syria and Iraq.

Make no mistake about it, the US and this “coalition of the guilty” have blood on their hands and have been participating as belligerents in all the fighting from its inception.

For approximately a decade, Iraqi officials have been blaming the Saudi regime—the sword-wielding, head chopping oil barons of Najd that pretend to be pious Muslims by day and are cocaine snorting, prostitute loving, alcoholics by night—for exporting terrorists into Iraq. In March, just a few months ago, the Iraqi government told the semi-official France 24 network that the Saudi and Qatari regimes were at war with Iraq and using the insurgents in Syria to attack Iraq and using their media networks to support and justify the insurgencies. Nor is it a secret that Turkish security forces openly coordinate with these insurrectionary fighters and their commanders.

It has to be repeated again that there is a much easier way to put an end to this gory farce.

Instead of digging themselves deeper in Iraq and Syria, the US and company literally need to disengage as “belligerents.”

The self-proclaimed IS will fall apart once the US and its allies stop supplying the insurgents with weaponry and end their hostilities towards Damascus.

Moreover, the US and its comical “coalition of the guilty” must end the financing of terrorism by halting their not-so-covert robbery operations, which have involved the theft of oil and other materials by these fighters from Iraq and Syria via Turkey. Despite the claims by the New York Times in a September 13, 2014 article by David E. Sanger and Julie Hirschfeld Davis that Turkey is wheeling and dealing in the black market with the insurgents on its own, and that the US government has desperately tried to get Ankara to stop doing business with the insurgents, it is unlikely that the Turkish government could go on doing business with the insurgents without acquiescence from the US and the EU.

The uIS’s pseudo-caliphate has become a multi-billion dollar business enterprise, because Washington has allowed it to become one and facilitated its business transactions via Turkey. Who can believe that the US government and its EU partners that are so sanctions gung-ho and have exerted themselves in all types of ways to block the trade and financial transactions of their enemies and rivals, cannot do the same thing for the millions and billions of US dollars and euro worth of oil that have been stolen from both Syria and Iraq?

 

Opposition fighters advancing as they capture a Syrian government forces position in the village of Khan Arnabeh, near the eastern border crossing of Quneitra with Israel in the Golan Heights. (AFP Photo / HO / Ahrar Al-Sham)Opposition fighters advancing as they capture a Syrian government forces position in the village of Khan Arnabeh, near the eastern border crossing of Quneitra with Israel in the Golan Heights. (AFP Photo / HO / Ahrar Al-Sham)

 

At the minimum, the US government is looking the other way. It is not too hard to find who is buying such large amounts of oil. Jana Hybaskova, the European Union’s own representative to Iraq, has openly accused EU members of buying oil from the very same killers and rapists that Brussels has declared as perpetrators of crimes against humanity.

Hey, wait a minute the European Union exponents say. Do not blame the European Union for its shady dealings. That self-perceived apex of human civilization, the EU, needs new energy input or supplies—even if stolen and illegal—since it is sanctioning Iran and Russia, the hydrocarbon energy superpower next door, for what the European Commission, US government, and NATO incongruously declare was an invasion of East Ukraine that never even happened!

Arsonists don’t put out their own fires: Thanks, but no thanks!

America and its coalition should halt and desist. The same collective or corrupt governments that have unleashed the horrors in Iraq and Syria are now standing in the limelight and saying that they will come to the rescue. They can only make things worse, and they are in the process of making things worse by planting the seeds that will germinate into future regional crises.

Taking every opportunity to make the violence and crisis worse, the US and its “coalition of the guilty” are arming the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) instead of just sending arms to the Iraqi government in Baghdad for distribution inside Iraq. The motives behind this move are insidious. The US and its “coalition of the guilty” are sending weapons to the KRG with the insight that the same weapons that they are delivering to the Iraqi Kurds will eventually be pointed against the Iraqi federal government in Baghdad when the Kurdistan Regional Government makes its bid for independence, which will effectively partition Iraq.

No wonder Ankara has revived its vision for an Israeli-style security buffer zone inside northern Syria, and even (re)expanded it to include northern Iraq. The talk about Turkey controlling Syrian Kurdistan and Iraqi Kurdistan through a de facto or de jure confederation may not just be President Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman pipedreams.

When it comes down to it, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and his killers are just the foot soldiers. The real pyromaniacs who sit in their offices and palaces in Washington, London, Paris, Doha, Ankara, and Riyadh are the ones that need to be stopped. Arsonists cannot become firefighters sent to put out the fires that they themselves have started, because they usually have an interest in seeing their fires consume the places they have set ablaze. In this case the US and its allies are the arsonists that have an interest in seeing Iraq and Syria fragmented by the fire that the “coalition of the guilty” set alight to create a “New Middle East.”

America and its “coalition of the guilty” are pretending to fight terrorism in an elaborately staged performance for the public. When in reality, all along they have been the forces driving the butchery and terror inside Syria and Iraq. It has been Washington and its “coalition of the guilty” that have been waging a war against the Syrian and Iraqi people through the plethora of insurgent franchises that have carved niches for themselves in Syria and Iraq.

The Iraqi and Syrian militaries and peoples have been making headway against the foreign-backed insurgencies and their reign of terror. They can finish the job themselves without US-led airstrikes. What they really need is for the US and its guilty allies to show some honesty by genuinely ending their support for the insurgencies in Syria and Iraq and to stop fueling sectarian hatred between Arabs and Kurds, Muslims and Christians, and Shiites and Sunnis. Once America’s “coalition of the guilty” ends its own role as the real and main belligerents in the region the cross-border crisis in Iraq and Syria will be locally quarantined and defused with time.

This article was originally published by Russia Today (RT) on September 18, 2014.


About the author:

An award-winning author and geopolitical analyst, Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is the author of The Globalization of NATO (Clarity Press) and a forthcoming book The War on Libya and the Re-Colonization of Africa. He has also contributed to several other books ranging from cultural critique to international relations. He is a Sociologist and Research Associate at the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), a contributor at the Strategic Culture Foundation (SCF), Moscow, and a member of the Scientific Committee of Geopolitica, Italy.

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