A few days ago President Trump met with the former “terrorist” in Saudi Arabia and announced moves to reduce sanctions.
Is the new US policy to “make Al Qaeda great again”?
Or is the change simply moving toward greater transparency for the close relationship that the US and its allies have had with Al Qaeda and other Sunni jihadists dating back to the 1970s?
All these groups are cut from the same jihadist cloth. Even if they end up fighting against each other. Maybe it’s a genetic thing, predicted way back in Exodus.
Maybe in global geopolitics one or the other can be usefully directed against one’s enemy. It’s all fun when the entity they choose to attack is not you:
Shifting priorities by the US makes such evolution and changes inevitable. Every country is the same.
Plus Its difficult to keep the Islamic extremist bogeyman threat going when 9-11 was nearly 25 years ago and there is an entire generation of adults that have zero recollection of the event.
Its similar to the attack on Pearl Harbour for me and pretty much everyone else its an even from history, we have no emotional attachment to it. No one today carries any animosity to the Japanese for the attack and deaths.
My grandad was in a Japanese POW camp and hated them till the day he died. While I can understand why and empathize, it was impossible for me to feel the same way about the Japanese.
“Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?” makes more sense than attacking Iraq after 9-11. At least the Germans were actually allies with the Japanese. Sadaam Hussein and Al Qaeda were enemies.
Osama Bin Laden and most of the 9-11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. It would have made a lot more sense to bomb Riyadh instead of Baghdad.
Of course, attacking Iraq makes perfect sense if 9-11 was just pretext for wars elements in the US government were itching to fight any way.
ISIS-K is made up of Sunnis from Tajikistan who also speak a dialect of Persian.
Are they the modern replacement for the Afghan freedom fighters? Anyone who kills large numbers of Iranian and Russian civilians can’t be all bad . . .
About the same time that Trump was shaking hands with the Syrian Al Qaeda leader, the US Navy was bombing an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Somalia. International politics makes strange bedfellows.
I believe that Bush went to bomb Iraq because he felt he needed that geographical are in his control for some reason.
I also agree that we’re friends with Japan and that’s a good thing.
Now Siria…
I can only speculate that, since there is potential conflict with Iran in the near future, that Trump is trying to make as many friends in the ME as he can.
So that’s what makes sense to me.
Americans have been fed one lie after another as a pretext for war. Sunni jihadists, such as ISIS and Al Qaeda, have long been funded by US allies such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. At the same time, the US has used fear of Al Qaeda and ISIS to justify wars against secular leaders in the Arab world as well as Iran.
Western support for the installation of Al Qaeda as the government of Syria is just a public confirmation for what has been going on for decades.
The president is just following orders; that is reportedly what Bush himself said in private:
“George Bush said to me — he was standing in the Oval Office and he pointed to the Resolute desk — ‘Any man who sits behind that desk, anybody, doesn’t matter who it is, Hillary Clinton or anybody, when they sit behind that desk, they’ll realize they have very few options. Their hands are tied. Don’t worry. Whoever sits in that chair will execute things pretty much the same way I have.’ And he smiled like, see? We’re all good. And I thought to myself, no, that’s not good. That’s really not good,” Glenn recalled. https://www.glennbeck.com/2013/06/07/glennâs-chilling-white-house-conversation/
