Egyptian Students Protesting the Decision to Exonerate Mubarak of Murder

b. traven and W.J. Astore

It’s time to eliminate U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies. It is they who are most responsible for setting up the extremist and jihadist organizations that are creating havoc throughout the world community.

Amazingly, the CIA and the Mossad have started and funded entities like the Shah of Iran, the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, Hezbollah in Lebanon, an autocratic military caste in Egypt, that are undemocratic and violent as well as disruptive in that they create blowback that gives the U.S. and Israeli agencies and militaries further excuses to intervene. It’s a recipe for forever war, which is exactly what the U.S. is reaping, for you reap what you sow.

The first cause is easy to state: oil.  Why else is the U.S. bending over backwards to preserve Saudi Arabia, the country from which hailed fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers?  Oil, energy, and profits drive U.S. policy, together with the goal of preventing any powerful rival to Israel emerging in the Middle East, while suppressing “radical” Shia Islam.  But in the cause of dominating oil, protecting Israel, and suppressing Islam, the U.S. and its Israeli “friends” have created or incited radical jihadists throughout the world.

A little history is in order.  In 1953, the CIA overthrew the democratically-elected Iranian President because he sought to nationalize Iranian oil assets.  The CIA installed a dictator (the Shah) who was so oppressive that he generated a conservative Islamic revolution against him in the late 1970s.  U.S. relations with Iran have been troubled ever since.  Meanwhile, the Saudis don’t like Iran now because it is a well-functioning Shia state and they are Sunnis.  They prefer their own medieval Sunni kingdom that beheads people rather than the fairly modern Iranian Shia state that merely tortures. The Saudis, joined by Israel for its own reasons, continue to manipulate and provoke the U.S. into going to war against Iran for “regime change.”

It was our CIA that orchestrated “regime change” in Iran sixty years ago, a change that led to the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis that bedeviled the Carter Administration.  Anyone care to repeat that disaster?

Having not learned from this blowback our current CIA and Obama’s Secretary of State, John Kerry, tried the same trick in Egypt after young people rose up during the Arab Spring against a forty-year-long dictatorship under Hosni Mubarak. After the Egyptian military overthrew the democratically-elected Morsi government in 2013, Kerry refused to name it a “coup,” thus legitimizing it while restoring U.S. funding to Egypt’s military. This again made both Israel and the Saudis happy because Morsi was associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. So now we have a new dictator of Egypt, Sisi, a former military general and graduate of the U.S. Army War College who oversaw the coup and has seen to it that the imprisoned Mubarak is exonerated of murder.  The youth of Egypt had best forget about democracy for another forty years.

Now here’s the real shocker! Richard Silverstein at his Internet site tells us how ISIS, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, and similar terrorist nightmares were originally funded and set up by those imaginative guys and gals in our intelligence agencies. In the 1960s, Rafi Eitan was the master Israeli Mossad agent who arranged the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann to stand trial in Israel for crimes against humanity during the Holocaust. He played a key role in the Israeli air attack in 1981 on the Iraqi Osirak nuclear facility and managed the American Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard (which incidentally ended Eitan’s career in Mossad).

From richardsilverstein.com 

One notorious and hitherto secret operation for which Eitan deserves far more ‘credit’ is the key role he played in the formation of Hezbollah.  Eitan’s wife, Miriam, who for decades played the traditional Israeli role of dutiful wife and silent witness, reveals via her personal diary, Eitan’s efforts in founding the Islamist group:

She remained quiet when he disappeared for days on end in Lebanon and founded there a militant Shiite organization which, in future days would come to be Hezbollah.

He initially conceived Hezbollah as a counter to the power of Arafat’s PLO within Lebanon.  It’s virtually the same strategy Israel used in founding Hamas, also a little known chapter in Israeli intelligence history told in the Wall Street Journal (of all places!).  In this circumstance too, after trying and failing numerous times to create quisling Palestinian entities to combat the supremacy of the PLO, it determined to found an Islamist organization to counter-balance the secular Fatah.

In both cases, Israel’s strategy succeeded beyond its wildest dreams.  In fact, both Islamist groups, like the legendary Golem from the medieval Jewish folktale, took on a life of their own and escaped the clutches of their creators.  Once they became independent, they turned into Israel’s worst nightmare.  Anyone who’s seen the film, Charley Wilson’s War, will understand that the CIA determined to do the same with the Afghan mujahadeen, in fighting the Russians.  Instead, they eventually spawned Osama bin Laden.  Similarly, in trying to bring the downfall of Bashar al-Assad the U.S. and Gulf States built up the radical Islamist Sunni groups that became Al Nusra and ISIS.  This sort of strategy almost always leads to unforeseen fatal consequences.  These are tragedies borne by future generations.  The geniuses who conceive these ideas rarely have to live with, or take responsibility for what they’ve done.

So folks, don’t you think it’s time to question the value of our “intelligence” agencies?  What they are truly best at is creating terror, not preventing it.

It’s high time we defund our “intelligence” agencies and put the roughly $100 billion we’d save into a cabinet position for a Department of Peace, as former Congressman Dennis Kucinich once proposed.