The UK and al-Qaeda agree on perpetual war

British jets began bombing Iraq yet again last week. Another war against this beleaguered country, an Arab country that has been decimated and torn apart by decades of Western-imposed war. These wars have included a vicious and protracted civil war, one that seems to perpetually bubble under the surface, re-erupting periodically.

But the civil war between religious factions in Iraq is a historically new phenomenon, one introduced to the country by the 2003 US-UK invasion of Iraq. In fact, American policy governing Iraq during the years of direct occupation very consciously sought to stoke religious sectarianism and deliberately perpetuate civil war — the classic colonial divide-and-rule tactic.

The Americans established sectarian death squads not long after they took over in Baghdad. This bore resemblance to US policy in Latin America in the 1980s, when the spectre of “Communism” was used as a bogey to put the people of the region back under the American boot. Many of the US-backed dictatorships there were death-squad, torture regimes.

But in Iraq, this policy had a religious dimension. So-called “special police commando” units set up under the lead of retired US colonel James Steele (a veteran of US dirty wars in Central America) were in fact mostly composed of the vicious Badr organisation, a sectarian Shia militia. Their Sunni victims were systematically tortured, sometimes within earshot of their US handlers.

A joint investigation by BBC Arabic and The Guardian broke open that story last year – yet this inconvenient little fact of history has been totally ignored in the pathetic media debate over how “we must help” in Iraq.

This US policy helped rise of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the group which ultimately today is known variously as the “Islamic State,” ISIS or ISIL. al-Qaeda’s main targets were Shia pilgrims and other non-Sunni civilians. The protracted civil war, which peaked in 2006, at its height saw headless bodies turning up in ditches or at roadsides every single day.

So the civil war introduced to the country by the Americans and the British was no accident. It was deliberately instigated and perpetuated. A divided Arab world is good for US hegemony, and gives Israel more breathing space in which to continue its various crimes and conspiracies against the people of the region.

As the bombs dropped on Iraq this week, David Cameron warned it would go on for years: “This mission will take not just months, but years, and I believe we have to be prepared for that commitment.”

While Cameron has also been agitating for the British bombing campaign to be extended to “Islamic State” positions in Syria, the vote passed in the Commons explicitly ruled that out without a further debate and vote (mainly because opposition leader Ed Milliband did not agree to it). But US warplanes have been hitting Syria, along with some token forces from the reactionary Arab monarchies. The attacks on ISIS in Syria also targeted al-Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda.

In one respect, a Nusra Front spokesperson sounded very similar to Cameron: “We are in a long war,” Abu Firas al-Suri wrote online, according to The Guardian. “This war will not end in months nor years, this war could last for decades,” he said.

Both al-Qaeda and its Western opponents appear to agree on the prospect of perpetual war in the Arab world.

This is a holdover from the “War on Terror” that began in 2001, when, in the immediate aftermath of the 11 September attacks, some American and British leaders would talk about a 50-years war against “the threat of radical Islam”.

But the whole “War on Terror” propaganda line got somewhat stale, with the public at large in Britain becoming more and more cynical, especially after the deeply unpopular war against Iraq (which was a disaster for Iraqi civilians, killing as it did over a million people).

In this respect ISIS has been a boon for US and Israeli control of the region. As long as those sides are fighting each other, they pose no threat to us, so the thinking goes.

Quite a common theory amongst many Arabs is that the US and Israel actually created ISIS as a way to cause chaos in the region, and allowing the Americans to step back into Iraq. While there is no real evidence to back up that theory, with the amount of very real conspiracies targeting the region it is no wonder people suspect it. What is for sure is that the Americans created ISIS in the sense that they established the conditions in which ISIS arose – in both Iraq and Syria (with US military aid going to “rebel” groups that was mostly fanatical fundamentalists).

Henry Kissinger reputedly once said of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s that he wished both sides could lose. Neither government was friendly to American interests. Today, such thinking still represents Israeli and American policy in the region.

Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York, summed it up last year: “Let them both [sides] bleed, haemorrhage to death: that’s the strategic thinking here. As long as this [civil war] lingers, there’s no real threat from Syria.”

Never-ending war for the region is good for powerful interests. It keeps arms manufacturers in business; it keeps western intelligence services operating; it keeps the heat off Israel, since Arabs are busy fighting each other; and it also helps fanatics like al-Qaeda and “Islamic State” to perpetuate their twisted vision, since both thrive in conditions of war against the west.

In this way, fanatics on all sides agree. The victims are the ordinary people of the region.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.