Legacy, Bushie Style, ISIS Dept. 0
In a long and tightly-reasoned article at Asia Times, Ramzy Baroud explores how the propaganda machine for the Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq prepared the ground for ISIS. A snippet:
That “design” was not put in place arbitrarily. The conventional wisdom was that the US army is better seen as a “liberator” than an invader, where the Shiites community was supposedly being liberated from an oppressive Sunni minority. By doing so, those in their name Iraq was “liberated” were armed and empowered to fight the “Sunni insurgency” throughout the country. The “Sunni” discourse, laden with such terminology as the “Sunni Triangle” and “Sunni insurgents” and such, was a defining component of the American media and government perception of the war. In fact, there was no insurgency per se, but an organic Iraqi resistance to the US-led invasion.
The design had in fact served its purposes, but not for long. Iraqis turned against one another, as US troops mostly watched the chaotic scene from behind the well-fortified Green Zone. When it turned out that the US public still found the price of occupation too costly to bear, the US redeployed out of Iraq, leaving behind a broken society.
Do read the rest.
