Could ISIS in Iraq Be a Hoax?

I have to admit that as the week has gone on, with the increasingly breathless media blather over the baddest bogeymen of all - ISIS - that I have been struck with the idea that this just doesn't smell right. The emergence of a jihadist force, so nasty that even al Qaeda doesn't want them seems to be a wet dream to a war machine that has spent the past year just itching for another military intervention. That the uprising occurred shortly after the recent electoral triumphs of both Iraq's Nouri al-Maliki and Syria's Bashar al-Assad makes it suspect of being a creation of the "regime changers" who can claim plausible deniability that it ISIS arose out of festering regional fanaticism hellbent at the establishment of that new caliphate long preached about by the neocon warmongers.

The unstoppable force of ISIS has provided the worst culprits of the Bush-Cheney regime, including the dark master himself with a new opportunity to revise history in favor of their ideology of global and regional conquest as put forth by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and they have been hitting the media circuit with a vigor. The emergence of ISIS has also allowed President Barack Obama to begin to reinsert the US military back into Iraq after the lying bastard had vowed not to do so. Thursday's announcement that 300 military "advisers" were headed to Iraq is the beginning of an escalation that will further deplete American resources and squander the lives of more US troops in an ultimately doomed crusade that in effect never really ended.

Writer Mike Whitney just put out an interesting piece that I strongly recommend that questions the frenzy, especially in the corrupt state-corporate media to sell the ISIS menace - a task that shouldn't be too difficult considering that most Americans live in a constant state of fear of their own shadows let alone head-chopping jihadists hellbent on imposing Sharia law upon besieged Christians. The Whitney piece is published at Counterpunch and is entitled "The ISIS Fiasco: It’s Really an Attack on Iran" from which I excerpt:

There’s something that doesn’t ring-true about the coverage of crisis in Iraq. Maybe it’s the way the media reiterates the same, tedious storyline over and over again with only the slightest changes in the narrative. For example, I was reading an article in the Financial Times by Council on Foreign Relations president, Richard Haass, where he says that Maliki’s military forces in Mosul “melted away”. Interestingly, the Haass op-ed was followed by a piece by David Gardener who used almost the very same language. He said the “army melts away.” So, I decided to thumb through the news a bit and see how many other journalists were stung by the “melted away” bug. And, as it happens, there were quite a few, including Politico, NBC News, News Sentinel, Global Post, the National Interest, ABC News etc. Now, the only way an unusual expression like that would pop up with such frequency would be if the authors were getting their talking points from a central authority. (which they probably do.) But the effect, of course, is the exact opposite than what the authors intend, that is, these cookie cutter stories leave readers scratching their heads and feeling like something fishy is going on.

And something fishy IS going on. The whole fable about 1,500 jihadis scaring the pants off 30,000 Iraqi security guards to the point where they threw away their rifles, changed their clothes and headed for the hills, is just not believable. I don’t know what happened in Mosul, but, I’ll tell you one thing, it wasn’t that. That story just doesn’t pass the smell test.

Whitney goes on to question the official media narrative - I went out and did a quick search and the term "melted away" in describing the Iraqi army indeed pops up in a number of different variations which is a giveaway what the story is centrally created. If any thinking American still has any faith whatsoever in the credibility of our corrupt and contemptible media then they are a sucker. After being lied to over the Bush regime's original hogwash fairy tales to attack and invade Iraq in the first place, the pack of whoppers and propaganda that inflated a massive stock market bubble to the benefit of a small amount of crony capitalists at the expense of millions after the 2008 economic collapse (remember Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's "Green Shoots"?), the attempts to use a bogus Sarin gas attack to justify the bombing of Syria and most recently the vilification of Vladimir Putin and coverup of a US backed coup in Ukraine that installed neo-Nazi backed fascists who can anyone believe anything that comes out of the media?

While Whitney makes a compelling case there is one just unveiled masterpiece of bullshit and spin that sealed the deal for me that the entire ISIS narrative is a serious and intricate psyops hoax and that was yesterday's amazing discovery of Saddam's missing weapons of mass destruction by the miraculous ISIS. The tale followed the usual echo chamber routine, first appearing in The Telegraph and then being amplified by a network of right-wing neocon blogs and websites as well as operatives who appeared in chat rooms and message boards and ended up in the central neocon propaganda beacon The Washington Post this morning "Islamist militants bear down on Iraqi forces; seize former chemical weapons facility". Just wait until the Sunday morning "news" shows, if Senator Lindsey Graham was already shrieking about ISIS plotting another 9/11 from Iraq and Syria last week the man will need to be restrained or seriously medicated about 48 hours from now as I publish this on Friday morning. 

Whitney nailed it that the ISIS tale "doesn't pass the smell test" but I would disagree in that it smells like bullshit.

Neocons Dragging US Back to Iraq

Now that the region is erupting anew with the storming of Iraq by radical jihadist elements such as ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) and the franchise that is al Qaeda the warmongers and neocons in The Homeland are shrieking like banshees over Obama's "loss" of Iraq. The current chaos though would not be possible were it not for the original sin of attacking Iraq in 2003, toppling Saddam Hussein who was subsequently lynched and showing that America was no better than it's former puppet in continuing the torture at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison. The country was also plunged into sectarian violence, bombed to smithereens - the civilian death toll is staggering - and had the indignity of having to see one US puppet replaced with another with no real benefit to the country nor the people. Now it is all going up like a flaming bag of dogshit in Uncle Scam's hand.

To be fair on this one the disaster in Iraq is not Obama's fault, were the Bushreich not to have lied the American public into an illegal and unnecessary war based on a pack of lies about Saddam's phantom weapons of mass destruction there would still be stable country, granted that Saddam was a bastard but he was our bastard. Obama has been far too busy avenging his offense at being humiliated by Russian leader Vladimir Putin over his giving asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and later intervening to stop what would have been a catastrophic war in Syria. Obama has more important things to do than dick around with Iraq with pushing to start a new Cold War and perhaps stumble into World War III. Robert Parry at Consortium News puts it best in his latest piece over at Consortium News entitled "Blaming Obama for Iraq's Chaos" from which I excerpt:

After Islamic militants captured the major Iraqi city of Mosul on Tuesday, the danger of Official Washington’s false narratives again asserted itself, a direct consequence of the failure to enforce any meaningful accountability on the neocons and others who pushed the Iraq War.

The emerging neocon-preferred narrative is that the jihadist victory in the northern city of Mosul and the related mess in neighboring Syria are the fault of President Barack Obama for not continuing the U.S. military occupation of Iraq indefinitely and for not intervening more aggressively in Syria’s civil war.

For instance, the New York Times on Wednesday wrote that “the swift capture of large areas of [Mosul] by militants aligned with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria represented a climactic moment on a long trajectory of Iraq’s unraveling since the withdrawal of American forces at the end of 2011.”

What is perhaps most striking about such accounts, which are appearing across the major U.S. media, is that the narrative doesn’t go back to the most obvious starting point: President George W. Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was that invasion and the ensuing occupation that hurtled Iraq and – to an extent – Syria into their current chaos.

Bush’s invasion, which was justified by bogus claims about Iraq hiding weapons of mass destruction, was in clear violation of international law, lacking the explicit approval of the United Nations Security Council. Yet, even after the WMD falsehoods were exposed and the body counts soared, there was almost no accountability enforced either on the public officials who carried out the aggressive war or on the opinion leaders who rationalized it.

In many cases, the same pundits and pols continue to shape U.S. public opinion today and are dominating the narratives on Iraq and Syria. Thus, there is almost no attention to the fact that before the U.S. overthrow (and subsequent hanging) of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, there was no al-Qaeda threat in Iraq or Syria.

Mr. Parry goes on to debunk the myth of "The Surge" which was nothing more than a propaganda term for a brief escalation of violence led by the hallowed General David Petraeus and his rat pack of media whore supporters as well as the always bloodthirsty Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. The "Surge" was of course bullshit and primarily targeted at putting a sunny side up spin on what was in essence a humiliating defeat for the US and the neocons of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) whose lunacy had contributed to the disaster in the first place. Now in 2014 many of the same culprits for the Iraq debacle are being afforded legitimacy that then don't deserve by a corrupt media whose only purpose it to shill for wars and protect the interests of the oligarchy and the political elite who serve them. Case in point - the New York Times has once again featured a story by the dutiful neocon lackey Michael Gordon "Iraq Said to Seek U.S. Strikes on Militants" which will be what the war party will push along with their standard "stabbed in the back" whining as they agitate for a re-engagement of US forces in Iraq to "finish the job" this time.

The neocon propaganda beacon over at the Washington Post has a real knee-slapper today, a column by an Iraq war veteran decrying the overrunning of Iraq entitled  "Iraq veteran: This is not what my friends fought and died for" rehashing the old Vietnam canard of "they didn't let us win".  The writer is described in the sub-header as:  John Nagl, a veteran of both Iraq wars, is the headmaster of The Haverford School and author of the forthcoming "Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War." - just another death pimp hustling a book and playing on the gullibility of Americans whose bogus concern for veterans only surfaces when political fodder is needed. So the neocons will be doing what they always do in caterwauling about the global Islamic takeover and calling for the government to send more US servicemen and women to die for their vainglorious stupidity and failed ideology.  This should do wonders for the collapsing house of cards economy that has already been gutted by wars of choice as well as the entire Veterans Administration healthcare system that is understaffed, underfunded and can't book appointments fast enough for the victims and buddies of guys like Nagl let alone a new wave of permanently damaged victims who will be sacrificed upon the neocon altar of lies.