Secular Nationalism makes ISIS Tick, Whitehorse Star Oped Dec. 2 2015

Secular Nationalism makes ISIS Tick Whitehorse Star Oped Dec. 2 2015

Glimpses into conventional Arab nationalism, non-religious military command as well as secular administrative leadership under the Islamic State recruiter veneer are not new, but a trove of documents acquired by Der Spiegel consolidates a transformative understanding (http://goo.gl/mtjcG4 ).

All the while, the mistakes of 9-11 are repeated, skipping grief and pain of what must be immeasurable loss and jumping into unwise action. Solidarity with the French people means to get especially the French government out of Syria. Here is why.

To get a grip on where the now fast-expanding situation is headed, we need to backtrack and employ the most human of qualities: think a little.

Syria is where the French army was defeated after 14 murderous years of anti-colonial fighting from 1920 to 1934, foreshadowing France’s downfall in the Land of a Million Martyrs, Algeria 1962 after eight years of an imperial bloodbath.

Britain was thrown out of Iraq in 1932 after 12 years of killing and maiming from 1920 to 1932. It still echoed when ex-U.S. president George W. Bush’s and former British prime minister Tony Blair’s coalition of the willing went into Bagdad and stayed 12 years ago.

Of course, France got started in Syria, signing the secret Sykes-Picot agreement with Britain in 1916 that carved out a colonial post First World War Arabia ruled by them.

Particularly French governments have a history of fanatical colonial aspirations in the Middle East and North Africa.

At the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919, to satisfy those ambitions, French prime minister Georges Clemenceau asked David Lloyd George in earnest out for a duel with a choice of pistols or swords, which Lloyd George declined. It wasn’t 1914, which saved his honour and perhaps his life too.

What Arabs typically remember better than the Brits and French is that their promised freedom was stabbed in the back, while as brothers in arms of the allied powers, they were dying in battles against the Ottomans.

History may not condemn a serious rescue mission or military expedition authorized by the UN in response to unspeakable or genocidal ISIS massacres on Muslim communities, Parisians, Kurds and Yazidis.

But a UN Charter, Chapter 7 intervention cannot carry at the same time a second badge of neo-colonial domination and gunboat diplomacy.

More than fear of casualties, this is the real reason of the air war obsession. In the air, one would not have to account for illegal acts of war.

The Arabs are not buying the distinction; neither does international law.

It may sound a bit like a contradiction on terms because without continued Western colonialism, there would be no ISIS political fascism, as they couldn’t care less about distant Western liberties one way or the other.

But going forward on practical terms, there are a few items that would remove the colonizer badge.

However incomplete, a good effort may set a different tone and perhaps open surprising and useful future options by addressing:

Drone warfare-terrorized Muslim populations from Nigeria to the Philippines experience a very common but strange notion. They name a feeling of being dehumanized to the level of bugs that are attacked by crop dusters, particularly by this technology.

The Trudeau government plans to up the military trainer scheme. It is a famously stupid exercise of expediency to sneak neo-colonial occupational forces into countries that don’t want them. The method escalated the Vietnam war, but the Vietnamese caught on pretty quickly. So do the Afghans in a war, with body counts still climbing.

Our women and men in uniform are prepared to die for us, but the very real possibility of once again being murdered execution-style on the military training ground by extremists posing as recruits is a different matter. It is just not right to put Canadian soldiers into this type of hopeless position.

Kurdish, Shia as well as Sunni militias are famous for their cunning and toughness and for their sophisticated artillery and battle-hardened infantry skills – if, and this is a big if, they fight for their own national causes and not a foreign-dictated one.

General Izzat Ibrahim al-Douiri and his assortment of all secular veterans, from the Iraqi officer corps, are doing a phenomenal job training and guiding the ISIS battle units.

Ibrahim had been the one that got away in the U.S. command’s famous deck of cards of Saddam’s Ba’athist villains following the illegal 2003 invasion.

Not since the Russian Red Army defeated the German Wehrmacht, or 90 per cent of it, have conventional ground forces been as successful in set piece battles against superior airpower.

All of these are well-recognized indicators by independent observers that Iraqis and Syrians don’t need foreign military instructors.

U.S. President Barack Obama never made good on the Bush promise and his own promise to withdraw all occupation forces from Iraq by 2011. Thousands of military contractor troops and the U.S. military never left Bagdad’s Green Zone and other strongholds.

Obama could stop his efforts toward implementing the original Bush/Cheney plan of attacking a dozen or so Muslim countries beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa and the Horn of Africa.

Obama could stop his efforts to steal Iraqi oil by not any longer pushing the Iraq oil law, which even the most corrupt puppet governments in Bagdad, after years of being pressured, won’t sign.

Obama and the U.S. Congress could initiate serious reparations starting in stable corners of destroyed Iraq.

It also requires moral and legal reparations by prosecuting war criminals of the Bush presidency but also from within his own administration.

Efforts are slowly underway in Great Britain to prosecute Blair for war crimes, but justice delayed is justice denied.

Unfortunately, there is no indication yet from the Trudeau government that Canada will return to the world community of nations that follows the UN Child Soldier Conventions signed by Canada in 1949, 1977 and 2000.

Under the law, prosecution and punishment of child soldiers or combatants under 18, including the cover-up, facilitation or aiding thereof, is a war crime (no ifs and buts).

Justice and compensation for Omar Khadr, who was also psychologically tortured with attention to sadistic detail by Canada’s CSIS in Guantanamo (CBC video: https://goo.gl/8cTgn4 ), is overdue, and has to be the measure of that.

Aggravating injustice occurred on Feb. 4, 2008, when the U.S. military commissions, in Guantanamo, accidentally released and later suppressed an eyewitness report OC-1 CITF of March 17, 2004.

It contains sworn, legal testimony by the U.S. army personnel who captured Khadr in Afghanistan on July 27, 2002, that Khadr, then 15, did not kill U.S. army medic Christopher Speer.

Some decent women and men stood up for the law and Khadr’s rights.

Among them were UN officials, RCMP Chief Supt. Mike Cabana, who resigned in protest from the RCMP anti-terrorism unit Project O Canada, the former senator and general Romeo Dallaire, Michelle Shepard from the Toronto Star, American military lawyer Bill C. Kuebler and Dennis Edney from Edmonton.

It is widely agreed that the Guantanamo concentration camp continues to be a first-rate recruiting tool transforming young Muslim women and men toward the extreme.

One way to put a little more distance between Canada and Guantanamo would be to avoid the usual decades-long foot-dragging for victim rehabilitation in the justice system and clear the air quickly for all Canadians and now upstanding, loyal citizen Khadr.

Obama could prove that his interest in Syria is about more than increasing arms industry revenue. Maher Arar is a dual Canadian/Syrian citizen who also has family ties to Syria. For a start, he and his family need to be removed from the U.S. no-fly list.

In September of 2002, he was wrongfully framed and smeared by the RCMP as Muslim terrorist. As a result, under the illegal U.S. Extraordinary Rendition program, Arar was kidnapped at JFK International Airport and deported to Syria for contract torture by the Assad regime. Canada made amends exonerating and compensating the innocent Arar, but not the U.S.

Fact is, a lot of difficult processing we do by language, which can be a good and creative force or a bad and obediently dull tool, and some amends are in order.

Toning down terrorism and radicalization of Muslims rhetoric and re-introducing intellectual and mental hygiene to the conversation would help a lot.

To qualify as a terrorist, it seems, one has to be a Muslim first. How often do we hear about Christian terrorists?

When last were Genocidaires with a Christian background, and there are a few of those around from Germany, Rwanda and Serbia, referred to in the context of radicalized Christianity?

When were Christian community groups and churches asked to denounce crimes they have nothing to do with by forcing such demagogic obligations on them?

Perhaps Hannah Arend, the late philosopher and educator remembered for coining some hard-won, transformative truths of our time, can help to break destructive stereotypes?

As a foreign Jew in 1940, she was interned in Camp Gurs in southwest France and narrowly escaped deportation by the French Vichy Regime to a Nazi death camp in Poland.

In 1961, she went on to report for the New Yorker on the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, receiving serious flak for it, at the time.

One reason was that in Eichmann, quasi the transportation agent of the Shoa, she observed mainly an unremarkable bureaucrat who was obediently following orders, not personal hate, even after questions had crossed his mind.

The second reason that got Arendt into equally hot water was that she reported what had come up in the survivor statements of the trial.

Perhaps some of the Jewish community leaders could have risked a little wiggle room and daring towards underhanded resistance rather than submit?

This work later evolved into the household words “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.”

“And I hope that thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down.” (Quote from the 2012 movie Hannah Arendt.) Presence of mind and guts sound useful to me.

Justin Trudeau, Obama, French President Francois Hollande, Russian President Vladimir Putin, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and company: bury your inner Cheney and remember Lester Pearson, who de-escalated the extremely dangerous Suez crisis after Britain, France and Israel had attacked Arab Egypt!

In 1956, the so-called Tripartite Aggression aimed at stealing the Suez Canal from the Egyptian people and at regime change against president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had exercised the radical impertinence of nationalizing the canal.

In popular radio and television interviews, Hannah Arendt had learned and taught to carefully and succinctly distinguish “Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme.”

Peter Becker is a Whitehorse energy consultant.

By Peter Becker