How the US Creates Terrorism
The US brags about its commitment to democracy. But its interventions have yielded death and despotism for the Middle East.
In February, writing in the pages of the Nation, the Middle East historian Juan Cole ruminated on how the US could defeat ISIS. The answer, he argued, is to forge an alliance with Iran and its network of militias.
Cole has a short historical memory.
The genealogy of ISIS can, no doubt, be traced a good way back in Islamic history. But it includes a very prominent and recent pedigree: the Sunni jihadists that the US sponsored and armed to fight its then-ideological enemy, the USSR, in the 1980s and 1990s. Cole would have the US attack ISIS at all costs, even if his preferred strategy plunged the Muslim world into a state of deeper violence and chaos, and birthed a fiercer enemy in the future.
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