Lux Lucet

ISIS fighters

As the war in Syria heats up and greater attention is focused on events there, a disturbing fact has come to light from several credible sources. The terrorist organization known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), rather than being a foe of the United States and the West, is actually their agent, acting to carry out the West’s stated agenda of ousting Syria’s leader, Bashar al-Assad.

Ron Paul talked about the alliance between ISIS and the US in a recent video posted on his YouTube channel titled Does ISIS Exist?. A transcript of this video can be read here. At about the 1:38 mark in the video Paul comments,

But the question is raised, Where did ISIS come from? And there are so many questions: how did it pop up, and gained so much favor and have financing putting out magazines and you know where do they get their weapons and it’s pretty easy to put some of these pieces together and find out that they probably were working to some degrees with some of the people in the West like the United States and maybe some others and got some advantages rather than it being a spontaneous small group of people that all of the sudden took over a large swath of land in Syria and in Iraq. That is probably not true.

As supporting evidence for US involvement with ISIS, Paul’s co-host Daniel McAdams paraphrases a report released by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) which calls for the establishment of a, “Salafist [Sunni extremist] principality…in eastern Syria,” which is exactly what ISIS is. Paul gives the reason why he believes the US has elected this course of action, explaining,

I think their [the US government] goal probably was to use ISIS to do our battles, because we are the ones who declared war against Assad, to go in there and get rid of Assad and then they think this is a cheap way. We don’t have to put boots on the ground, we get them to do the fighting and American people will think they are fighting radical Islam and will win the victory, will have this victory in a short period of time, but that’s where things go wrong, because no victory arrives.

And not only does no victory arrive, but to horror of the US foreign policy establishment, Vladimir Putin has involved Russia in the war in support of Syria’s government, the very government they are attempting to oust.

In his article Turks Throw Gas on Syria’s Fires, columnist Eric Margolis wrote,

Turkey is point-man for the odd coalition of stealthy ISIS backers that includes the US, Saudi Arabia,  the UAE, Egypt,  France and Britain. ISIS is their  weapon of choice against Shia Iran and its Syrian and Lebanese allies and, very soon, Taliban in Afghanistan. Problem is, they  back ISIS but can’t control its youthful members. The rabid dog they helped breed is now running around biting people.

In one way, none of this is surprising. In the 70 years since the end of WWII, the US federal government in general and the CIA in particular have made a habit of interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign nations in the name of US national security. Many times this interference has created deep resentment and ill will toward the US and, with good reason, severely damaged the standing of the US in the eyes of the international community.

Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh.  His ouster in a 1953 CIA engineered coup set the stage for much of the current turmoil in the Middle East.   

On the other hand, given the Global War on Terror (GWOT) hard-sell pushed on the American people since 9/11 by presidents Bush and Obama, the Pentagon and other promoters of national security, most Americans would be profoundly shocked to find out that ISIS, the current poster child of radical Muslim terrorism, is not so much the enemy of the United States as it is its own twisted, Frankenstein-like creation.

Foreign Policy Follies

If the US is involved in the care and maintenance of ISIS, and in the opinion of this writer it almost certainly is, what are Americans to make of this state of affairs? It seems to me there are several implications.

First, GWOT is a hoax and probably was from the beginning. In aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington D.C., Americans by and large bought in to the GWOT rhetoric, with very few questioning the advisability of it. In the 1940s, the US declared war on Japan and Germany, specific national entities. But terrorism is not a nation or even a specific group of people. It is a tactic used by various aggrieved groups for different ends.

But as silly as it is to declare war on a tactic, from the perspective of the federal government, GWOT makes a certain amount of sense. For as with the federal government’s other wars on poverty, drugs, etc., it is delightfully open-ended and constantly shifting in focus. As such, it provides Washington with a convenient excuse to spend more money it doesn’t have creating more agencies it doesn’t need – see my comments on the TSA below – to carry out more activities it shouldn’t undertake.

Second, GWOT may be as bad as the evil it purports to fight. The apostle Paul condemned those who misrepresented the Gospel by accusing him of teaching, “Let us do evil that good may come.” Paul called such an idea blasphemy. But when the US government throws its support behind the medieval minded thugs of ISIS, this is exactly what it claims to be doing, using evil to bring about something good. Such foolishness should be rejected by any Christian.

Third, US support of ISIS implicates Washington as a state sponsor of terrorism. According to the State Department’s own website, state sponsors of terrorism are, “Countries determined by the Secretary of State to have repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism.” All those gruesome videos of ISIS burning and beheading people, those are your tax dollars at work. According to its own guidelines, the State Department should seek to impose sanctions on the US. But I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen. Sanctions, you see, are only for nations that support terrorists of the bad sort. Our boys, on the other hand, are good terrorists.

Jihadi John, notorious ISIS executioner.

Fourth, GWOT supporters involvement with terrorists creates guilt by association. The apostle John warned his readers not to fellowship with false teachers on the grounds that by doing so, they would share in the sins of those who twist the words of Scripture. This is a biblical example of a principle widely known as guilt by association. When the CIA involves the US in support of violent and murderous terrorist groups, they implicate the American people in the crimes committed by those groups.

Fifth, the US has yet to learn the lessons of its own foreign policy failures. John Robbins pointed out that events do not change people’s minds, only ideas do. For example some people who witnessed Jesus’ miracles believed in him, while other who saw the same event sought to have him murdered. The difference was the thoughts they had in their minds. God used the same event to bring some to faith and to harden others.

In like fashion, while you would think that seventy years of foreign policy failure would be enough to make even the most ardent interventionist pause to reconsider his position, such is not the case. In fact, the response of the foreign policy hawks to each new interventionist failure is to call for more of the same. Completely ignoring the concept of blowback, a term coined by the CIA to describe the “unintended results of American actions abroad,” interventionist Republican presidential candidates beat the warfare/security state drum all the louder in response to the terrorist attacks in Paris.

Sixth, GWOT does not eliminate terrorism, but rather encourages it. Building on the concept of blowback, it is widely reported that US antiterrorist activities actually create more terrorists than they kill. Brandon Bryant, a former US Air Force drone operator, put it this way, “We kill four and create 10 [militants].” “If you kill someone’s father, uncle or brother who had nothing to do with anything, their families are going to want revenge.” For everyone but foreign policy hawks, the logic of Bryant’s statement is requires no explanation. Rather than keeping the US safe from terrorism, GWOT likely increases the chance of another 9/11 by fueling hatred of the US among people where it previously did not exist.

Russian SU-24 bomber plummets to the ground after being hit by Turkish F-16s, 11/24/15.

Seventh, GWOT threatens to morph into something much bigger. Flying US built F-16s, this past week NATO ally Turkey shot down a Russian SU-24 bomber. Many observers believe that Turkey would not have taken this action without the permission of the US. With Russian and its allies on one side and the US and its allies on the other, there is no small risk that a wider war could develop if cooler heads do not prevail.

Eighth, GWOT is a destroyer of personal liberty. The Transportation Security Agency (TSA) is a perfect example of this. It is more security theater than actual security. According to one embarrassing story, “Homeland Security agents posing as passengers were able to get weapons past TSA agents in 67 out of 70 tests – a 95 percent failure rate.”

But while the TSA is ineffective at stopping would be terrorists, it does a marvelous job of accustoming Americans to accept as routine gross violations of their personal liberties.

A Better Way

In short, the interventionist foreign policy of the neo-conservatives has been, and continues to be, a disaster. But instead of changing their tune, the only response of American interventionists – and by this is meant mainstream writers, television commentators and politicians, both Democrat and Republican – is to double down on what already is not working. In that way, they remind one of the priests of Baal, who, in response to the failure of their god to light a fire on the altar and consume the sacrifice, danced, shouted and cut themselves all the more in a desperate attempt avoid embarrassing public failure. They just never learn.

The answer to all this neo-conservative cloak and dagger insanity is a Biblical foreign policy that avoids entangling foreign alliances, focuses on minding our own business, and fosters the free movement of people, goods, and ideas. Such was once America’s foreign policy, and it made this county a beacon of hope for millions. It is high time to get back to it.