Sept. 11, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
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| Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| So this is ISIS beheadings, or 9-11 continued. | |
| Thirteen years ago today, Osama Bin Laden, the head of Al-Qaeda, attacked the World Trade Center in New York, causing the deaths of almost 3,000 people. | |
| Yesterday, Barack Obama announced a new plan to wage war against yet another terrorist organization from the Middle East, ISIS. ISIS was originally the branch of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, but in February of this year, 2014, there was a split or a rift between the two organizations, but it grew out of the same root and branch of Al-Qaeda. | |
| Now, for those of you who don't know, Al-Qaeda was originally not a terrorist organization. | |
| It was a database. | |
| Al-Qaeda actually means the data. | |
| It was a database compiled by American foreign operatives such as the CIA. To allow for the Mujahideen, which the American government hoped to use against Soviet incursions and imperialism, particularly in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Al-Qaeda was a database which allowed people to organize that the US felt they had common interests with in fighting the Soviets. | |
| It was the members, the mujahideen were originally of course founded, funded, armed and trained by the CIA, including Osama bin Laden. | |
| They were proxy warriors designed to oppose Soviet imperialism. | |
| So one thing to understand about modern warfare is that since the end of the Second World War, it's been pretty patently revealed that empires are a net loss to the occupier. | |
| So, the Second World War destroyed Britain's finances almost completely, and as a result, the British Empire unraveled, unwound. | |
| England at one point ruled a third of the world. | |
| The saying was, Queen Victoria said, the sun never sets on the British Empire. | |
| And so, if empires were so profitable, then when England was broke, it should have used the resources of the empire to rebuild its economy. | |
| But this, of course, is not what happened. | |
| Empires are profitable. | |
| To specific mercantile or crony capitalism groups within a society, they are a net loss to the society as a whole. | |
| So the lesson of the Second World War was that if you can destroy the economy of the occupying power, then that occupying power will withdraw. | |
| Now, as weapons technology has become increasingly sophisticated, empires have become Equally expensive to maintain. | |
| Now, one of the reasons for this is that the occupying powers, particularly the Western powers, do not want to specifically target Civilian populations. | |
| Not only has it become a war crime, but it also invites retaliation in terms of dirty bombs, radioactive bombs, chemical bombs, or other forms of WMDs against the occupying population such as the Americans. | |
| So, what's happened as a result of a refusal to target civilian populations is that civilian populations have become camouflage for the local fighters. | |
| They abandon their uniforms or never put them on and they blend into the local populations. | |
| And that requires boots on the ground infiltration and all of the associated vulnerabilities to improvised explosive devices and sniper attacks and so on. | |
| And this has made occupation ferociously expensive. | |
| And it has made defending against occupation increasingly cheap. | |
| One of the things that the Mujahideen learned in Afghanistan, although they were taught by the CIA, is that a $15,000 Stinger missile, surface-to-air missile, can take down a $20 million And this imbalance of resources that it's much more expensive to attack than it is to defend has been the path towards local autonomy and the overthrow of foreign occupations. | |
| So basically, to expel foreign occupation now, modern defensive fighters wage wars of expensive attrition that is designed to target the occupier's economy, the domestic economy as a home. | |
| This was known to French resistance fighters in Vichy France in the 1940s under the Nazi occupation. | |
| So they would target German soldiers but they would actually aim not to kill the German soldiers but to wound them because that was much more expensive to treat and maintain and of course this is happening with the American fighters as well. | |
| So, this mismatch between the cost of attack and the cost of defense is the new reality of war. | |
| The occupier who stays dies. | |
| So, if you look at the costs of occupation, or in the case of the U.S. war on terror, five trillion dollars, most conservatively, it's probably many times that when you count opportunity costs, five trillion dollars have been spent on the war on terror. | |
| This vastly outstrips the costs of starting the war on terror. | |
| Al-Qaeda is estimated to have spent just a few hundred thousand dollars on the 9-11 attacks, but their attacks destroyed the equivalent of between a third and a half Of America's annual GDP. In other words, the cost of attacking America was 10 million times less than the cost of America's response. | |
| And of course this was their stated goal and this is what they had been taught when fighting the Russians by the Americans. | |
| So Bin Laden broadcasted by Al Jazeera to Muslims throughout the world and he said, All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration, i.e. | |
| Bush. | |
| All that we have to do is send two mujahideen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written Al-Qaeda in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefit for their private companies, such as Halliburton. | |
| So this is the stated goal of the fighters in the Muslim world and in the occupied countries to provoke Americans into a disproportionately expensive response designed to wreck the American economy and thus cause the withdrawal of American troops from around the world. | |
| Now, the US economy, of course, it did take a massive war-related blow in 2007 to 2008, and over the next few years, approximately 40% of American household wealth vaporized, vanished, was wiped out. | |
| But this has not been enough to end US occupations or to close the 700-plus US military bases scattered throughout the world. | |
| And so now, in order to provoke further response and further wreck the US economy, we have these videos of beheadings. | |
| This is designed to provoke the US government and the US people into destroying what is left of the American economy and the fruitless pursuit of reactionary vengeance. | |
| So this growing crisis in Iraq is something that Western leaders are being pinned. | |
| It's being pinned on Western leaders. | |
| Professor George Jaffe, one of the three experts who briefed Blair has addressed these accusations in an essay where he says... | |
| The reality is that the whole of the Middle East and beyond is going through a huge agonizing and protracted transition. | |
| We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that we have caused this. | |
| We haven't. | |
| We can argue as to whether our policies at points have helped or not, and whether action or inaction is the best policy. | |
| And there's a lot to be said on both sides. | |
| But the fundamental cause of the crisis lies within the region, not outside it. | |
| This is a staggering statement. | |
| A staggering statement. | |
| Iraq has a population of approximately 30 million people. | |
| Of those 30 million, 1 million people have been killed as a result of the US-led invasion from 2003 to the present. | |
| Over a million people. | |
| This would be the equivalent of 30 million Americans dying. | |
| 30 million Americans dying as the result of an invasion. | |
| Over 2 million, in fact the estimates go as high as 2.7 million, Iraqis are refugees. | |
| From the invasion. | |
| That is a staggering, staggering sum. | |
| And the amazing thing about it is we're talking 60, 70 to 80 million Americans on top of the 30 million Americans who were killed. | |
| 60, 70, 80 million Americans have had to flee America as the result of an invasion. | |
| Do you not think there would be some blowback, some backlash? | |
| From that, of course there would be. | |
| Media outlets are often blaming the Iraqi crisis on the divide between the Sunni and Shia Muslim sects, as well as the failed policies of the country's US-backed Prime Minister. | |
| So, are Western governments mere enablers, or did they like the match that exploded the Middle Eastern powder keg? | |
| Well, let's take a look at the facts. | |
| So the first thing, of course, is that Iraq was ruled by outsiders for most of the 20th century, certainly for all of the 20th century. | |
| There was originally the Ottoman Empire and then at the end of the Second World War it transitioned to British and then the British installed the government in 1932 and so the region has not developed along cultural and religious lines. | |
| It has been basically jammed together by foreign occupiers and the sects within the Iraqi borders are constantly at war with each other. | |
| When you introduce democracy to fundamental and fanatical groups that it becomes a religious war. | |
| This is what always happens when you have democracy because each group attempts to gain the power of the state in order to impose its caliphate or its version of religious perfectionism on everyone else. | |
| And so, democracy becomes like a gun thrown into a room full of hoodlums. | |
| Everyone tries to grab it to get his or her way. | |
| And this is one of the reasons why when you have a real mongrel of a country, you usually end up with a dictator, a brutal dictator such as Saddam Hussein and all of Milosevic, of course, in the Baltics. | |
| But this is what happens when you have oppositional mismatched and incompatible belief systems within a particular geographical area. | |
| Yay, diversity! | |
| The US stoked the Sunni Muslim resentment by establishing relationships with Shiite tribes in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. | |
| And they propped up a Shiite government after toppling Saddam Hussein's pro-Sunni state. | |
| So ultimately ISIS has been exploiting the growing tension between the Shia and Sunni Iraqis to fill up their ranks. | |
| Now another aspect of this that is essential to understand is that one of the most criticized actions of the US after the invasion of Iraq was to disband The Iraqi military was considered to be an absolutely catastrophic decision. | |
| It's one thing to disband an army when you have a free market. | |
| So when American troops came home from the Second World War, they filled up the free market fairly easily. | |
| There was a lot of flexibility and growth. | |
| Plus, of course, they're not a completely destroyed infrastructure and largely corrupted and destroyed infrastructure. | |
| Domestic population. | |
| But when you don't have a free market, i.e. | |
| right after an invasion, when you disband the military, you have a lot of people who are trained to kill who suddenly have no source of income. | |
| And there are no jobs being created that they can transition into, therefore they will often join resistance forces. | |
| At least two of ISIS's top leaders are former generals from Saddam Hussein's army. | |
| Many of the soldiers joined what are called terrorist organizations. | |
| So, according to an Iraqi scholar, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the current leader of ISIS, spent five years in an American, I guess we could say, detention center or prison, where he became more radicalized. | |
| Baghdadi's path to terrorism is not unique. | |
| Many ISIS members, both foot soldiers and leaders, have spent time in US prisons in Iraq where they may have been tortured. | |
| Now, it's hard to understand what's going on in Iraq without also looking to Libya and to some degree Syria. | |
| So, in 2011, amidst claims of an impending massacre in Benghazi, not the embassy one, but a much more significant one numerically, US and its allies launched an attack on Libya again in 2011. | |
| The goal was to topple Muammar Gaddafi's government. | |
| Now, in April 2014, the Citizens Commission on Benghazi, an organization comprised of former top military officers, revealed that the US allowed, are you ready? | |
| Are you ready? | |
| Half a billion dollars worth of weapons to get into the hands of anti-Gaddafi terrorist organizations. | |
| ISIS being one of them. | |
| Do you see a pattern here, my friends? | |
| Do you see that the US arms radical groups to fight its supposed enemies and then those radical groups end up fighting the United States? | |
| Half a billion dollars worth of weapons, your tax dollars, your children's national debt at work. | |
| Not only did the US help arm the jihadists, but after Gaddafi was killed, terrorists tapped into Gaddafi's massive weapons arsenal and started distributing them throughout the Middle East. | |
| Significant portions of Gaddafi's weapons arsenal was supplied to Gaddafi by the United States. | |
| According to Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney, he says, we helped build ISIS, and he's referring to the Libyan weapons ending up in the hands of jihadists. | |
| Syria, you don't hear much of these days, but the reality is that Syria is a country that's been virtually destroyed. | |
| I mean, there are always going to be lunatics lurking in the crevices of Middle Eastern politics prepared to launch some new caliphate, but they have a giant, massive, discontented, enraged recruiting pool of nearly 14 million displaced peoples. | |
| So 11 million Syrians, or almost half the country's population, and 2.8 million Iraqis, or a tenth of the country's population, have been displaced. | |
| Half of Syrians have had to flee their homes. | |
| Many of them have nothing to go back to, no job opportunities, no savings, and when people have nothing to lose and they need to eat, they will join radical organizations, they will fight to the death, and they will take out their rage on others. | |
| The Wall Street Journal reported in June 2012, quote, U.S. intelligence operatives and diplomats have stepped up their contacts with Syrian rebels in part to help organize their burgeoning military operations against President Bashar al-Assad's forces, according to senior U.S. officials. | |
| The U.S. in many ways is acting in Syria through proxies, particularly Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, say U.S. and Arab officials. | |
| Syrian rebels were being armed by the United States through various proxy governments. | |
| Relying on surrogates, says the New York Times later that year, relying on surrogates allows the US to keep its fingerprints off operations but also means they may play out in ways that conflict with American interests. | |
| In 2012, the US trained Syrian rebels in Jordan to help them overthrow President Assad in Syria. | |
| Those same rebels later joined ISIS. It's a revolving door of hellish proportions. | |
| In June 2014, the Obama administration requested $500 million to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels. | |
| Factions of the moderate US-backed Free Syrian Army were reported to have pledged allegiance to ISIS only 11 days later. | |
| Now, the billions of dollars that is being sent through Saudi Arabia and Qatar have helped make ISIS the richest terrorist organization in history. | |
| So did the US help ISIS rise to power? | |
| Well, since at least early 2012, despite growing concerns that anti-Assad insurgents are involved with terrorist organizations, the CIA has continuously provided training, weapons and finances to Syrian rebels. | |
| As veteran Middle East correspondent Patrick Coburn points out, quote, US government as a whole and foreign powers steer away from one very crucial aspect of the rise of ISIS, which is that in Syria, the West backed the uprising against President Assad and still does, and this enabled ISIS to develop and gain military experience and then use it back in Iraq. | |
| As mentioned, of course, destabilization in the region has given Muslim radicals a new voice. | |
| The civil war in Syria has claimed the lives of over 170,000 people, and it's a conflict that's largely sustained through Western involvement. | |
| The ruins of Syria have become a breeding ground for ISIS terrorists. | |
| So, ISIS initially avoided provoking the U.S., but its approach changed over the last few months. | |
| Of course, beheading two U.S. journalists on video and taunting Barack Obama, the president, has not remained silent. | |
| He opened his speech last night with the following sentence. | |
| My fellow Americans, tonight I want to speak to you about what the United States will do with our friends and allies to degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIS or ISIL. He didn't really get round to mentioning that ISIS was one of America's former friends and allies. | |
| He stated later in his speech, still we continue to face a terrorist threat. | |
| We cannot erase every trace of evil from the world, and small groups of killers have the capacity to do great harm. | |
| That was the case before 9-11, and that remains true today. | |
| He proceeded to outline a plan involving Systematic airstrikes, sending more troops to the region, and providing support to anti-ISIS Syrian forces. | |
| Because that wasn't a problem before, how could it be a problem again? | |
| Much like Blair, Obama ignored experts warning him that every US bomb is an advertisement and recruiting campaign for ISIS. So you're beginning to see the parallels between ISIS and Al-Qaeda. | |
| Remember, ISIS grew out of an Al-Qaeda branch in Iraq. | |
| Al-Qaeda, or the database, was the original aggregation of contacts developed by the CIA to fight a hostile occupying superpower, thus destroying its economy and doing something to liberate its citizens from the tyranny of a late-stage corporate capitalism, growingly fascistic state. | |
| Will ISIS finish off what its root branch or predecessor Al-Qaeda started, which is the destruction of the capacity of the United States to wage overt and covert wars throughout the world? | |
| There is a great statement from Shakespeare. | |
| Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. | |
| Havoc is chaos and confusion and the fog of war. | |
| Let slip the dogs of war means that you take rabid animals off their leash. | |
| You cannot control them after that. | |
| The world is not a chess set. | |
| The world is not full of pawns you can move around at will. | |
| Every action you take, every bomb you drop, every gun you sell, every group of fanatics you think you can bind to you, With the imaginary hoops of loyalty, have their own minds, their own passions, their own preferences, their own agendas. | |
| They may use you just as you are using them, but the alliance is only temporary. | |
| And today's friend can just as easily become tomorrow's murderous enemy. | |
| We cannot continue to wade into foreign countries, foreign cultures, foreign systems of belief, foreign religions. | |
| And think that we can arm people and bribe people and train people in the mechanisms of death and think that there will never be blowback. | |
| Once we learn this lesson, then the United States can finally have the Department of Defense live up to its name. |
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