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How The War Party Betrayed America’s Non-Interventionist Foreign Policy Tradition
How The War Party Betrayed America’s Non-Interventionist Foreign Policy Tradition
So Vladimir Putin in his U.N. address summarized his indictment of a U.S. foreign policy that has produced a series of disasters in the Middle East that we did not need the Russian leader to describe for us.
Fourteen years after we invaded Afghanistan, Afghan troops are once again fighting Taliban forces for control of Kunduz. Only 10,000 U.S. troops still in that ravaged country prevent the Taliban’s triumphal return to power.
A dozen years after George W. Bush invaded Iraq, ISIS occupies its second city, Mosul, controls its largest province, Anbar, and holds Anbar’s capital, Ramadi, as Baghdad turns away from us — to Tehran.
The cost to Iraqis of their “liberation”? A hundred thousand dead, half a million widows and fatherless children, millions gone from the country and, still, unending war.
How has Libya fared since we “liberated” that land? A failed state, it is torn apart by a civil war between an Islamist “Libya Dawn” in Tripoli and a Tobruk regime backed by Egypt’s dictator.
Then there is Yemen. Since March, when Houthi rebels chased a Saudi sock puppet from power, Riyadh, backed by U.S. ordinance and intel, has been bombing that poorest of nations in the Arab world.
Five thousand are dead and 25,000 wounded since March. And as the 25 million Yemeni depend on imports for food, which have been largely cut off, what is happening is described by one U.N. official as a “humanitarian catastrophe.”
“Yemen after five months looks like Syria after five years,” said the international head of the Red Cross on his return.
On Monday, the wedding party of a Houthi fighter was struck by air-launched missiles with 130 guests dead. Did we help to produce that?
What does Putin see as the ideological root of these disasters?
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The Paris Jihad, Ready or Not, Has Begun, and Will Widen
The Paris Jihad, Ready or Not, Has Begun, and Will Widen
“The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.”
— Barack Hussein Obama (address to the United Nations General Assembly, September 2012)
The jihadist murders at the French satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo, on January 7, 2015, was inevitable and long anticipated.
So was the concurrent detonation of a car-bomb in front of a Paris synagogue, and so were the lethal clashes with Paris police on January 8, the hostage taking in a kosher market in Paris (where the hostage takers threatened to execute six hostages if the Charlie Hebdo attackers were harmed by police), and the random shooting near the Eiffel Tower on January 9. The attack on the Charlie Hebdo is a spark and a catalyst for a still-unfolding eruption of rage of the jihadist youth of France and Western Europe.
By late afternoon on January 9, 2015, both hostage situations had been resolved, with the jihadist hostage-takers killed by police.
A witness at the scene of the shooting told police that one of the shooters told the bystanders: “You can tell the media that it’s al-Qaida in Yemen.” Indeed, Charlie Hebdo and the key editors, writers, and cartoonists were for a long time on the “most wanted” list of the Yemen-based Al-Qaida of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). They featured on the list of the most hated Westerners in the March 2013 issue of AQAP’s Inspire Magazine.
On January 9, 2015, Caliphate senior official Abu Saad al-Ansari claimed responsibility in a sermon deliv-ered during the Friday prayers in Mosul. He explained that the attacks in Paris were the first salvo in a major offensive against the West avenging the US-led “transgression” — air strikes — against the Cali-phate’s forces. “We started with the France operation for which we take responsibility. Tomorrow will be in Britain, America and others,” Abu Saad al-Ansari stated. “This is a message to all countries participating in the [US-led] coalition that has killed Islamic State members.”
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Weaponized Ebola? ISIS Militants Said To Contract Deadly Virus | Zero Hedge
Weaponized Ebola? ISIS Militants Said To Contract Deadly Virus | Zero Hedge.
Forget targeted US airstrikes, ISIS faces a new existential threat. Citing an unnamed source in a Mosul hospital, Iraq’s official pro-government newspaper, al Sabaah, said Ebola arrived in Mosul from “terrorists” who came “from several countries” and Africa. Mashable further confirms, three outlets reported that Ebola showed up at a hospital in Mosul. For now, it’s unclear if any disease experts or doctors in Mosul are even able to test for the Ebola virus; but it would mark the first time the virus had been detected in an area controlled by ISIS, a group that doesn’t embrace science and modern medicine.
Reports that Islamic State militants in Mosul have contracted Ebola swirled though Iraqi media sources on Wednesday. World Health Organization officials said they haven’t confirmed the cases, but the organization has reached out to offer assistance.
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“We have no official notification from [the Iraqi government] that it is Ebola,” Christy Feig, WHO’s director of communications told Mashable.
Feig added that WHO is in the process of reaching out to government officials in Iraq to see if they need help investigating the cases, a task that could be a challenge, given the restrictions that would come with operating in ISIS-controlled territory.
