MOSCOW, September 6 (RIA Novosti), Ekaterina Blinova - ISIS has emerged due to the irresponsible foreign policy conducted by the US in the Middle East, which created a "power vacuum" that was then filled by Islamist fanatics, according to several American politicians and foreign policy experts.
"George W. Bush held out the promise of a peaceful Mesopotamian democracy as a magnet for all Arab nations. What we produced is a broken land awash in blood, a country severed by tribe and faith: a Kurdish north, Shia south and a Sunni west controlled by the savages of an ‘Islamic State’ even al-Qaeda hates and fears… We are the enablers of the Islamic State," writes Patrick Buchanan, a prominent American political commentator and politician, in his article "How to Defeat the Islamic State," published by the American Conservative.
According to the political analyst, radical Islamists "have gained the upper hand" in Libya, Iraq and in northern and eastern Syria due to the irresponsible foreign policy conducted by Washington in the Middle East.
"In all three countries, the United States, which claimed to be battling dictatorship to bring democracy, helped to create the power vacuum these Islamists have moved in to fill," Mr. Buchanan emphasizes.
Since the very beginning of the standoff in Syria, Washington has been supporting the so-called Syrian opposition fighting President Bashar al-Assad, which included not only Arab and Western militants, but also radical jihadi groups.
The White House was turning a blind eye to the Sunni extremists’ private sponsors from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar, who have been providing them with military and financial aid.
The Brookings Institution, an American think tank, has questioned how the US responded to the funding of radical insurgents. "The US Treasury is aware of this activity and has expressed concern about this flow of private financing. But Western diplomats' and officials' general response has been a collective shrug," it stated in a report entitled "Playing with Fire: Why Private Gulf Financing for Syria's Extremist Rebels Risks Igniting SectarianConflict at Home" in December, 2013.
Political analysts highlighted the atrocities US soldiers and military contractors committed in Iraq, stressing that these events had evidently undermined the faith of the Arab people in Western democratic values and were used as rallying cries for radical Islamist recruiters.
In 2004 it was revealed that US soldiers from the 372nd Military Police Company and American intelligence personnel had brutally tortured Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib, an Iraqi prison. The American military police guards were using such torture practices as "breaking chemical lights and pouring phosphoric liquid on detainees; [stitching] the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with chemical light," etc., the New Yorker reported in an article, "Torture at Abu Ghraib," that was published on May 10, 2004.
Although those who were responsible for the Abu Ghraib atrocities were punished, there were other cases of torture and mistreatment in Iraq, experts say. The American military and its private contractors are accused of having intimidated, injured and murdered Arabs. According to the Wikileaks' disclosure of the "The Iraq War Logs" in 2010, covering the time period from 2004 to 2009, over 60 percent of deaths caused by war and US occupation of Iraq were peaceful civilians.
In June 2014, Time reported on the abandoned investigation of Blackwater's mission in Iraq in an article, "Alarms Were Sounded on Blackwater Well Before the 2007 Iraq Shooting." The media source emphasized that the military contractors lacked oversight and enjoyed impunity, citing government investigator Jean C. Richter, as saying: "The management structures in place to manage and monitor our contracts in Iraq have become subservient to the contractors themselves."
Efforts to conduct a thorough investigation into Blackwater’s activities repeatedly faced opposition from US Embassy officials in Iraq, who sided with Blackwater’s top management. Eventually, the tragic events in Baghdad in September 2007, when the contractors killed 17 civilians and injured 20 others in Nisour Square, led to termination of Blackwater's mission in Iraq. Time noted that the Nisour Square shooting had allegedly influenced the decision of PM Nouri al-Maliki to reject the US-Iraqi treaty, "that would have allowed American troops to remain in the country after 2011."
"Since the end of the Second World War, American political leaders and opinion-makers have led the public to believe that the aggressive use of overt and covert military force are essential tools of US foreign policy," wrote Nicolas J. S. Davies, an American author, in his article "10 Years After the Invasion: America Destroyed Iraq But Our War Crimes Remain Unacknowledged and Unpunished," published in 2013.
Referring to the mistakes of the past, experts are warning Washington to avoid another large-scale military operation, claiming that such an approach will ultimately plunge the region into chaos.
