What Made ISIS the World’s Most Powerful Terror Group?

How the War on Terror Created the World’s Most Powerful Terror Group by Patrick Cockburn, The Nation, August 21, 2014.

Iraqi officials confirm that they have captured sophisticated arms from ISIS fighters in Iraq that were originally supplied by outside powers to forces considered to be anti–Al Qaeda in Syria.

Oops!

The falsity of the pretense that the anti-Gaddafi jihadis in Libya were less threatening than those in direct contact with Al Qaeda was forcefully, if tragically, exposed when US ambassador Chris Stevens was killed by jihadi fighters in Benghazi in September 2012. These were the same fighters lauded by Western governments and media for their role in the anti-Gaddafi uprising.

ISIS (Al Qaeda on steroids) was jihading like nobody's business in Syria, fighting Assad, but now that the "rebels" are coming to roost in Iraq, committing the exact same atrocities, cannibalizing and cutting people's heads off, it looks like last year's bomb, bomb, bomb Damascus crowd may get their war in Syria after all.  The MIT study scientifically questioning their first casus belli Assad gassed his own people be damned.  The warmongers have found a new pretense: ISIS, a group they cheered on while marauding Syria a year ago.  The new casus belli, the murder video of a kneeling American journalist, James Foley, by an ISIS terrorist with a London accent, whose identity is completely hidden under a black shroud, has also come under scrutiny by forensics experts as having "been staged."

Attempting regime change in Syria fed the ISIS beast, just as regime change in Iraq and Libya did.  Our Republican old guard told us that Saddam was riding shot gun with bin Laden on 9/11 and that Al Qaeda was running rampant in Iraq, but that intel turned out to be nothing but crumby yellow cake with mushroom cloud frosting.  Saddam, as bad as he was, was actually keeping Al Qaeda at bay with his Republican Guard, which was decimated during Iraq War 1, a war based in part on a PR stunt involving babies removed from incubators, which did not happen & Iraq War 2, which was based in part on WMDs that did not exist.

As bad as Assad may be, his army was keeping Al Qaeda/ISIS/ISIL/IS out of Syria, and his country was a secular nation, just as Iraq had been under Saddam.  Fighting Assad, strengthened the Jihadis and gave them the oomph to threaten Iraq.

Saddam, Gaddafi, and Assad did not attack us on 9/11.  The enemy of these 3 were responsible, and they are certainly not our friends!