by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | July 04, 2017

F. William Engdahl

Over the years, I have marveled at F. William Engdahl’s brilliant writings and interviews, so it is with great pleasure I present a snippet from the latest book I purchased.

“As I sit down to write these words, Western Europe is being overwhelmed with a cultural and social challenge unprecedented in her history. A brutal four-year long war in Syria has spread around the world. An organization calling itself ISIS or the Islamic State erupted violently onto the world stage in 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 million refugees on the move for safety, more than one million of them coming to Europe seeking asylum during the final months of 2015 alone.

On September 30, 2015 the Russian Federation accepted a call from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to help defeat ISIS in Syria. That call came despite 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 shores signaled 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 or what was actually behind the IS and its reign of terror. To answer that it would 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 to extend an American hegemony in the world. The relationship between the CIA 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 CIA’s 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 Laden’s organization, Al Qaeda, 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 of war there, from Bosnia-Herzegovina to Kosovo. They smuggled them into Chechnya and Dagestan to sabotage Russian oil pipeline routes.

As evident success grew with each attempt, some in Washington became heady with their strategy. They were convinced they had discovered the ideal instrument for making terror anywhere in the world to advance their agenda of global hegemony now that the Soviet Union had collapsed, while blaming it 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 bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network, whether true or not. Washington promptly declared a War on Terror and, under that banner, spread US military bases and its hegemony across the globe to places inconceivable just a decade before. Fear gripped an uncertain American population. They joined in the new war.”

–F. William Engdahl, The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy

Another great book from F. William Engdahl:  Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order

From ClearNFO:

Russia’s Remarkable Renaissance (Engdahl)