Iraq – Eleven Awkward Questions

How is the Saudi regime, a supposedly key component of the international coalition against Islamic State, complete with its routine beheadings and draconian subjugation of women and gays, qualitatively different from IS? How does the Saudi regime continue to substantially fund Al Qaida, the Taleban and now Islamic State yet still be courted as a key player in the international coalition against Islamic terror? How does Israel, with its relentless occupation of Palestinian land and its regular slaughter of Palestinian civilians differ from the brutality of Islamic State jihadists?

How is the United States of America’s latest military campaign, its third military incursion into Iraq in twenty years, using a deadly array of killer drones, tomahawk missiles and precision bombing, substantially different from the barbarism of the Islamic State fighters?
How is Britain, with its centuries of colonial occupation and imperialist meddling, its concentration camps, its punitive divide-and-rule policies, and its post-colonial cravings for big power status, in any way different to the global ambitions of an Islamic State caliphate?
How is the current government of Iraq, with its murderous Shia dominated sectarianism, substantially different to the old sectarian brutality of Saddam’s Baathist regime, a regime whose overthrow by US and British imperialism created the vacuum in which Islamic State jihadists can operate?

How can the US pretend to have created an international coalition against IS when the UN Security Council has been totally by-passed and three of the world’s big powers; China, Russia and India are not part of that coalition? How can the US claim to have a coherent foreign policy when it was instrumental in arming and financing the largely secular Saddam regime as a bulwark against Iranian Shia regional ambitions, only to end up overthrowing Saddam and installing a pro- Iranian Shia dominated government?

In the One Hundred Year anniversary of the start of WW1 is the unravelling of the Arab dictatorships merely unfinished business from the ruins of global war between rival empires, a war which resulted in the total collapse and dismemberment of the ancient Ottoman Empire?
Can the medieval fascist concept of a world-wide Islamic Caliphate be bombed out of existence by the self-appointed US/UK world policeman?

Has the rise of 21st century Islamism any correlation to the global defeat of 20th century world socialism?

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