4&20 blackbirds

by William Skink

Lee Newspapers’ further degradation of the media landscape with wikipedia rip-offs (Pogreba says plagiarism because Walsh’s take down still stings) is sad, but small potatoes compared to what the New York Times can pull off with it’s reporting on foreign affairs. The most recent example, ferreted out at Moon of Alabama, involves a smokescreen excuse of a sandstorm for why US air strikes weren’t more vigorously pursued against ISIS as they took Ramadi.

Most Americans probably think it’s preposterous that the psychos running US foreign policy would want ISIS to take Ramadi, but as far back as 2007, politicians like Joe Biden were advocating for breaking Iraq into three pieces:

At least Caesar was just commenting on reality when he wrote that “all Gaul is divided into three parts.” Last week, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Joe Biden attempted to create reality when an overwhelming majority of the U.S. Senate voted for his non-binding resolution to divide Iraq into three parts — Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish autonomous zones. Shailagh Murray of the Washington Post reported that the 75-23 Senate vote was “a significant milestone …, carving out common ground in a debate that has grown increasingly polarized and focused on military strategy.” Murray added, “The [tripartite] structure is spelled out in Iraq’s constitution, but Biden would initiate local and regional diplomatic efforts to hasten its evolution.”

In Iraq, the plan was termed a “disaster” by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki; a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called the Senate resolution “a step toward the breakup of Iraq.” He added, according to Juan Cole’s Informed Comment website, “It is a mistake to imagine that such a plan will lead to a reduction in chaos in Iraq; rather, on the contrary, it will lead to an increase in the butchery and a deepening of the crisis of this country, and the spreading of increased chaos, even to neighboring states.” In the meantime, Sunni clerics and various political parties joined in the denunciations. Only the Kurds, eager for an independent state, evidently welcomed the plan.

Seymour Hersch also wrote about this plan 8 years ago for The New Yorker, in a piece titled The Redirection.

So why would this be a US objective? Because destroying Iraq and creating a power vacuum has significantly increased Iran’s influence in the region. The US reaction has been to assist our lovely allies in the region, like Saudi Arabia, in the creation of a jihadist counter-weight to this influence.

This isn’t some whacked out conspiracy theory. Former ambassador to the UN, Joe Bolton, recently stated the goal explicitly on Fox News:

I think our objective should be a new Sunni state out of the western part of Iraq, the eastern part of Syria run by moderates or at least authoritarians who are not radical Islamists. What’s left of the state of Iraq, as of right now, is simply a satellite of the Ayatollahs in Tehran. It’s not anything we should try to aid.

This puts the deceit regarding the taking of Ramadi into sharper focus. ISIS isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.