And lastly, that the malevolent power to undermine democracies radiates from the "Planet of Arabs" such as Iraq, Iran, and Syria.
As summed up by Edward Herman and Gerry O'Sullivan in their essay Terrorism as Ideology and Cultural Industry: "This is clearly a patriotic model, in which all virtues are ascribed to oneself and one's friends and clients; all villainy is attached to the enemy."[ii]
Excised from the public memory and shoved down the black hole of manufactured amnesia is the role of the U.S. and the NATO axis in creating radicalized Islamic fighters for geopolitical ends.
The US sponsorship of Jihad arises from "protection of strategic geography and defending sea and air access routes linked to defending the vast reservoirs of oil and natural gas in and around the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf, which the industrial world had begun exploiting and depended upon". [iii]
Post Second Word War, the rivalry between U.S. and Russia led to the Cold War. During this phase the policy makers and think tanks associated with the U.S. administration perceived Soviet Russia as a main threat to U.S. geopolitical/ oil interests in the Middle East. The policy makers and political strategists decided that the chief enemy of Communism and Third World Progressive Nationalism (Arab Socialism of Nasser) would be best countered by the Religion of Islam.
As John. K.Cooley, the author of the book Unholy Wars, explains: "The tacit consensus was that the Muslim religion, fundamentally anti-Communist, if translated into politics, could be harnessed as a mighty force to oppose Moscow in the Cold War, in a world growingly polarized by that war." [iv]
What started off as flirtation with Islamic extremism became a marriage of convenience during the Soviet Russian occupation of Afghanistan in 1979. The principal strategy of National Security Advisor Zybygniew Bryzenski was to draw Soviet troops into an Afghanistan trap. As Ahmed Rashid, an expert on Islamic extremism explains: "With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan's ISI [Inter Services Intelligence], who wanted to turn the Afghan jihad into a global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan's fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more came to study in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad. "[v]
During the Presidency of Reagan, as the Washington Post reported in 1992: "The new covert U.S. assistance began with a dramatic increase in arms supplies -- a steady rise to 65,000 tons annually by 1987, ... as well as a "ceaseless stream" of CIA and Pentagon specialists who traveled to the secret headquarters of Pakistan's ISI on the main road near Rawalpindi, Pakistan. There the CIA specialists met with Pakistani intelligence officers to help plan operations for the Afghan rebels."
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