F. William Engdahl - The Lost Hegemon: Whom the Gods would destroy

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I dedicate this work to Antje, whose extraordinary and loving insightsinto the deeper themes of human abuse in the name of religion defined this work; to Sibel and Buket, who guided me so skillfully through the complexities of Hizmet; and to all children raped in the name of wars ofreligion everywhere, that they may use their experience of murder of thesoul to help break the generations-long cycle of hate and killing.

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As I sit down to write these words, Western Europe is being overwhelmed with a cultural and social challenge unprecedented in her history. A brutalfour-year long war in Syria has spread around the world. An organizationcalling itself ISIS or the Islamic State erupted violently onto the world stagein 2014 to claim the right to create what they termed The Global Caliphate.The conditions of war and terror in Syria had created more than two millionrefugees on the move for safety, more than one million of them coming toEurope seeking asylum during the final months of 2015 alone.

On September 30, 2015 the Russian Federation accepted a call fromSyrian President Bashar al-Assad to help defeat ISIS in Syria. That call camedespite bombing from the United States, allegedly against ISIS strongholds,for more than one year, a bombing that appeared only to have expanded the control of ISIS.

The direct Russian involvement in military action far from her shoressignaled a new era in global politics following the collapse of the Soviet Union a quarter century before. The world seemed to be ineluctably moving towards a new world war, this one with religion at its core. Ultimately, Islamic terror was being instrumentalized as a weapon of war, one being aimed to defeat Russia, China and pre-empt emergence of a rival to the sole hegemony of the United States.

On November 13, 2015 grotesque suicide bomber attacks across Paris signaled a new phase in the attack on civilization. Yet few asked who orwhat was actually behind the IS and its reign of terror. To answer that itwould be necessary to go back to the early post-World War II period and the birth of a new American intelligence agency.

For more than six decades, a faction in the US intelligence community used, and even trained, various Islamic political groups for their goal toextend an American hegemony in the world. The relationship between theCIA and certain specific groups of political Islamists began in the 1950s in postwar Munich and reached a new dimension in the 1980s, when the CIA, together with Saudi Arabian intelligence, brought a wealthy Saudi Islamist named Osama bin Laden to Pakistan to recruit Islamic Jihadists for a terrorist war against the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan.

The success of the CIAs Operation Cyclone, to arm and train Afghani and other Mujahideen Islamic combatants, led Washington to deploy the same tactic after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Veterans of the Afghan Mujahideen war, many of them Saudi and other Arab nationals recruited by bin Ladens organization, AlQaeda, were brought on CIA private air transports into Azerbaijan, where British and US oil companies had their eye on the petroleum riches of the Caspian Sea. The CIA brought them into Yugoslavia to fan the flames ofwar there, from Bosnia-Herzegovina to Kosovo. They smuggled them intoChechnya and Dagestan to sabotage Russian oil pipeline routes.

As evident success grew with each attempt, some in Washington becameheady with their strategy. They were convinced they had discovered the idealinstrument for making terror anywhere in the world to advance their agendaof global hegemony now that the Soviet Union had collapsed, while blamingit on crazed stirred up Muslims, as Zbigniew Brzezinski once termed them.

The CIA and Pentagon finally had their new enemy image to replace the old Soviet communism when they blamed the events of September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington on Osama in Laden and his Al Qaedanetwork, whether true or not. Washington promptly declared a War onTerror and, under that banner, spread US military bases and its hegemonyacross the globe to places inconceivable just a decade before. Fear gripped an uncertain American population. They joined in the new war.

US military forces had their excuse to invade oil-rich Iraq in 2003.There they proceeded to unleash an unholy military terror that pittedSunni Muslim Iraqis against Shiite Muslim Iraqis. Out of the bloody USoccupation new recruits for Al Qaeda in Iraq grew dramatically. At the same time, the CIA worked across the Turkic world, from Uzbekistan toXinjiang in western China, the site of Chinas major oil and gas activities. They trained new recruits to a Turkish Jihad, using the illusion of restoring an Ottoman empire to unleash terror and chaos across mineral-rich Central Asia to ultimately open it for penetration by Western multinationals in the power vacuum left with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

By December 2010 Washington was ready to unleash their most ambitious form of spreading radical political Islam. In Tunisia, using the event ofthe self-immolation of the young Tunisian, Mohamed Bouazizi, the CIA,US State Department, George Soros Open Society foundation, Freedom House, NED, and other CIA-linked NGOs unleashed a wave of Arabworld Color Revolutions. It was CIA- and US State Department-backed regime change using Twitter, Facebook, and deploying youthful activists Washington had trained months before.1

Once millions of nave, hopeful students and workers had poured into Tahrir Square in Cairo, in Tunis, and across the Islamic North Africa and Middle East, Washington and the CIA backed their asset, the MuslimBrotherhood, to establish new regimes they believed that they could control.