Years at War, and Now… Russia: How Did We Get Here in the First Place?

by Mike J.

Editor’s Note: supporting links and documentation appear at the end of this article. This first appeared in The Havok Journal on June 23, 2017.

Allow me a not so brief history lesson, if you will.

The earliest communique I can find or read shows Bin Laden and Zarqawi speaking of the coming glory of an Islamic State in 1998. That’s 3 years before 9/11 and 5 years before the invasion of Iraq for those of you not good at math. It was their dream to unite the Middle East under one Islamic Caliphate. I am sure it was spoken about at length before this, but Zarqawi was a frequent visitor to Afghanistan to visit Bin Laden and plan for their future and that’s a known fact at least. So the idea of an Islamic State isn’t a new thing, it’s been around for a hot minute.

Let’s fast forward a bit to 2010-2011 when in all her combined wisdom, America decided to pull out of Iraq to meet an idiotic campaign promise, leaving a majority Shia Government in place. The Sunnis, who make up much of the western half of Iraq, were not given much representation in the new government. They’re opposed to the Shia side of Islam because they disagree on the succession of Mohammed. The Shia believes that only Mohammed’s successors and bloodline should run the show where we get Ayatollahs. The reason this is important is because ISIS blurred that line a bit. ISIS is predominately a Sunni and Sunni-supported organization, at first anyway. They blurred the line because even though they’ve spoken about overthrowing Iran’s leadership, they’ve also spoken very significantly about overthrowing Saudi royalty. They’re very good at playing both sides in order to increase their power and recruitment. The reason we time-traveled forward to 2011, is because, in February of that year, President Obama thought it would somehow be in America and her allies’ best interest to push for regime change in Egypt.

In a very public speech, President Obama called for the resignation of President Mubarak. Behind the scenes, various agencies were doing their best to build up a mostly civilian fighting force that would engage in the same sort of astroturfed protests you see here at home. Of course, unlike America, Egyptians know how to protest what they deem a great injustice, and they did so with guns and bombs. Eventually, they pushed Mubarak out of power, replacing an uneasy peace with Israel with a bunch of wackjobs from the Muslim Brotherhood. Well, Egypt got tired of that quickly and kicked out Mohammed Morsi, the President puppeted into power by the US.  After the people of Egypt got tired of his brief schtick, he was overthrown and imprisoned by Al-Sisi, one of Egypt’s Generals. Morsi remains in prison to this day for conspiring to commit terrorist acts and well…actual terrorism.

Since then hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood supporters throughout Egypt have been caught and put to death and the country is generally happy to keep those nutjobs out of their country. There were a lot of them…where did they go? Oh, that’s an easy one. At the same time, all of this was taking place, there was a concerted effort to do the same sort of thing in Libya. Once again, a country with an uneasy peace at best with Israel and various other nearby allied countries needed regime change. But Gaddafi had to go. So he went, but in this case, there was no real power to replace him with. Once the anti-Gaddafi forces were built up, trained, armed, etc., then they were run by a command and control element in…Benghazi.

Coordination of the transportation of arms and collection of intelligence was run out of a tiny little, sparsely defended compound in Benghazi and while I am not 100% on which agency was running this show, it’s a safe bet to say it was something you could SEE with your EYEs, EH? So while everyone was flipping tout over all the good people we lost due to a purposeful lack of support in Benghazi, did anyone really focus on just what our people were doing there in the first place? No…probably not. The media told us it was an embassy at one point and something else at another point. Let’s put our heads out of our asses for a second, you probably saw the movie after all, why don’t you tell me why there were dozens of CIA staff and other intelligence weirdoes holed up in an unofficial site guarded by contractors and not U.S. Marines? Once Libya was freed from the “tyrannical thumb of Gaddafi,” a guy who I might add, instituted a few pretty amazing programs in his day.

But whatever, he was a crazy person who ranted at the UN and threw support at Hamas when he could. So he had to go. Benghazi was the Tactical Operations Center (TOC) for that operation. I imagine it was allowed to be trashed and overthrown to tie off a loose end and spin another narrative we’re all so familiar with. Or is it more likely that a big chunk of the Libyan population, who were happy under Gaddafi’s rule, was tired of America’s never-ending attempts to keep the non-Saudi Arabian part of the Middle East destabilized to protect a bottom line somewhere? Or you know, it could have just been angrier Muslim Brotherhood/AQ guys who decided, much like Bin Laden in the late 80s and early 90s, that they had enough help from America and they could do this shit on their own.  Now Libya is a failed state and a complete nightmare.

So now we turn our eyes to Syria. This is another country, with Russia as an ally I might add, that decided, “No, eat shit Qatar, America, we don’t want your pipeline or your bullshit, piss off.” Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton didn’t like that so much as Qatar was nice enough to throw literally millions of dollars at her Foundation for things like speeches and Bill Clinton’s birthday. So Syria’s President, Bashir Assad, had to go. Forces from both the Egypt and Libyan regime change efforts were pushed into Syria very quickly. They were given metric tons of weapons and equipment and probably on the ground advisors as well. Syria quickly devolved into the same sort of mess we saw in Egypt but didn’t get as bad as Libya just yet, because Assad also allowed Russia to have a nice port on its coast. So Assad would request assistance from Russia at a later time, but before that, he would use his own forces to attempt to prevent his removal from power. Meanwhile, a number of people including, but not limited to, John McCain and John Kerry, were parading around doing photo-ops with members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) while trying to politically embroil us in yet another Middle Eastern conflict.

The reason I refer to these two specifically, is because they had a very public face throughout this whole thing pushing support for the FSA which was, in Kerry’s own words, being spearhead by Al-Nusra, an offshoot of Al-Qaeda, yes those guys, to push money and guns their way. Hold on a second, I hear the phone…oh, ha! It was Charlie Wilson and the 1980s, they want their proxy war with Russia back. So the US, with the help of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, two of US politicians’ favorite campaign financiers, built an army out of disaffected, illiterate, quasi-religious wackjobs as well as a few really smart disaffected, quasi-religious wackjobs and began really throwing money and arms at them. At one point, Syria looked like it was about to go the route of Libya, and for sure, parts of it have. Something like a quarter of a million civilians, probably even more now, died within the first few years of this nightmare. But Syrian forces and Russia fought back and handed the FSA/AQ/Al-Nusra co-op their ass a bit. So where did they retreat to?

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