Curtis reveals how in the 1950s, Britain flirted with Islamist militants in Iran to facilitate the overthrow of democratically elected Mossadeq, when he challenged Anglo-American corporate hegemony over the country's oil resources, and covertly financed the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood from the 40s through to the 70s to roll-back Egyptian President Nasser's dangerous brand of pan-Arab nationalism. He also points out more recent episodes the covert British financing in 1999 of the al-Qaeda-affiliated KLA, complete with one elite KLA unit being commandeered by the brother of bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri; tacit approval of Shi'ite death squads in Iraq; the continuing contradictory alliance with Pakistan despite its being the primary state-sponsor of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. He adds a highly revealing tidbit:
"Militants may be serving other useful functions. The then Foreign Office minister Kim Howells told a parliamentary inquiry in March 2007: "At dinners at embassies around the world I have suddenly discovered that somebody happens to be sitting next to me who is from the respectable end of a death squad from somewhere. The ambassador has, with the best will in the world, invited that person along because he thinks that, under the new democracy, they will become the new government.'"
The attitude is, in other words, commonplace and standard diplomatic practice. Identify potential useful idiots, whether they be militants or terrorists is of no consequence, as long as they might play a role in facilitating British social engineering projects to enforce "democracies' in regions that just happen to be of key strategic significance in terms of geopolitics, resources, and so on.
What we're seeing today is not the emergence of accountability, as the coalition government had promised, but a return to the age-old imperatives of damage-control, secrecy and the protection of the capacity of the deep state to continue to operate outside the rule of law, in the name of national security.
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