Third Iraq War : Framing the Case for Global Wars on "Extremism"

'...the third Iraq war, endorsed by parliament on the eve of the Tory conference (the deficit again no object) is itself a lurch backwards into the failures and disasters of the war on terror launched by Bush and Blair 13 years ago'.-Seumas Milne, The Guardian October 2, 2014

The obsessive drive to intervene militarily against ISIS by the Cameron government in Britain is justified not by a 'reactionary' agenda: on the contrary, the 'war on terror' is a militant progressive cause which pits 'liberal democracy' against 'Islamist extremism', a force on the 'wrong side of history.

Cameron is cloning the Blair's government's rhetoric about ISIS being a 'global threat' and potentially having weapons of mass destruction “within a few hours’ flying time of our country” ( May ) because it is useful in framing all regional violent jihadi-Islamist groups as part of one single threat to the west.

While a minority of Islamists within Britain, and those who clearly sympathise with them because they have an insecure adolescent hatred for 'the west' ,would like to believe they are part of a global movement for revolutionary change, the reality is quite different.

The use of the myth of the single global threat of ISIS works for both western governments and the jihadists alike. Jihadi-Islamists need to seek confrontation with first the Hypocrites in the region and then the Infidel who is portrayed as the root cause of all the problems everywhere in 'the Muslim World'.

For Blair and Cameron the myth acts to simplify complicated regional conflicts into one 'threat against us' and so legitimises any military intervention designed to secure supplies of oil and gas upon which a high octane consumer economy such as Britain's increasingly needs from far off lands.

When Cameron copies Blair in his insistence these threats 'directly affect us' the subtext is that they do because of the threat to oil and gas. Indeed, disparate jihadi groups from the Maghreb to Central Africa and the Middle East aim at sabotaging the pipelines and oil infrastructure or to capture it.

In a democracy dominated by media image and spin, the need is for a simplistic mock heroic narrative in which the jihadists are simply one cosmic force of evil transcending national boundaries and so in need of being combated at home as much as it must be abroad.

The reason is the voters cannot be told the military interventions are about geopolitical strategies they would not understand, as in Afghanistan, or , as in Iraq, about securing the present and future oil supplies needed to maintain stable or falling oil prices and so the lifestyle consumers feel entitled to expect as a right.

The Third Iraq war is clearly dominated by concerns over the threat that ISIS poses to the region and oil supplies. However, the call of the Caliphate applies across to lands elsewhere such as Nigeria where corrupt regimes are battling legions of impoverished fanatics uprooted by the impact of global warming.

Milne is no different from the political establishment he belongs to in portraying the military interventions since 9/11 according to a simplistic propaganda template: he merely inverts the humanitarian narrative and claims the real motive is 'imperial domination' of Muslims which is bound to be 'resisted'.

The reality is that military intervention is supposedly justified ( when it is not based on the global terror threat) in accordance with 'Democratic Geopolitics' in which the aim is to spread liberal democracy and help 'moderate rebels' overthrow dictators and protect their lands from 'extremists'.

The problem with this idea, as was clear in both Libya and Syria, is that the alternative to the dictator is often, in the context of war and the breakdown of government, civil war and violent Islamist jihadism with 'moderate' democratic Islamists not counting for much on the ground.

The flexible cant words 'extremist' and 'moderate' are Orwellian euphemisms for 'bad and not useful' and 'good and useful' in what is really a power struggle over resources. The insistence that Sunni jihadists in the FSA were 'moderates' in 2013 was because they were useful in removing Assad.

The fact is that Qatar was an ally pumping billions into Britain's ailing debt ridden rentier and consumer economy but backing jihadi fanatics. So the fiction of the 'moderate rebels' had to be maintained. Now that strategy has led to jihadists joining ISIS and turning against Qatar and the west, they are now 'extremists'.

So there is, as a consequence, an absurd power game in within Britain in which Islamist groups are classified as 'extremist' according to the shoddy criteria of political expediency as much as their perceived threat. The only way out of this repetitive idiocy is to search for alternatives to oil and gas dependency.

The Causes of Third Iraq War and the Global Struggle Against IS

War against ISIS is becoming more imminent eaders and diplomats from more than 30 countries pledged to use "whatever means necessary" to defeat the 'global threat' of Islamic State ( ISIS ) with France set to join Americal air strikes and Britain, no doubt, waiting til after the Scottish referendum on September 18.

The Paris talks are mostly concerned about containing ISIS and protecting the oil producing zones of Kurdistan and those towards the south of Iraq around Basra and near the borders of Kuwait and towards Saudi Arabia. The terror threat to the West is useful mostly as 'public diplomacy' in democracies.

ISIS does pose a potential threat to the region and across its so-called caliphate because most of the lands it stakes a claim to are in regions with copious supplies of rare earth and minerals as well as oil that the world economy requires. So in that real sense it is a 'global threat'.

Public diplomacy requires that the population is given an simplistic narrative in which there are evil terrorist ready to attack Britain or France because a war to secure resources is seen as lacking the necessary heroic uplift that a cosmic battle between good and evil has.

In the US, statesmen and advocates of geopolitical strategies are usually more refreshingly more candid about the importance of strategic control over resources than in Britain where politicians think it's rather bad form to mention the grubby reality of oil needs in front on the electorate, that is, the children.

A surge in oil prices could damage the economies of the west such Britain's with its fragile and ailing rentier economy easily affected by the higher cost of oil, not least as it is dependent upon East Asian manufactured goods being produced cheaply to keep up consumer led recovery through shopping.

The threat to Qatar in particular is a threat to Britain's supply of liquified natural gas upon which it depends for 12-15% of its gas imports with the decline of North Sea gas reserves. Qatar is a vital market for French and British weapons system and billions of dollars of investment to prop up their ailing rentier economies.

Britain is one of many global powers with a developed economy that has an interest in that along with OPEC nations and East Asian countries such as Japan and China, even though the 'international core coalition' to defeat ISIS is primarily a US western led alliance.

Maintaining western influence by making its military capacity useful to Saudi Arabia and the GCC states is considered vital to fend off the prospect of China making inroads and muscling in to the lucrative arms market dominated by US, French and British companies.

The other aim is to try to bring together the Gulf states again over differences as regards Libya where Qatar is backing militant Islamists and the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt which are backing ex-Gaddafi militias. The need to freeze Iran out of diplomacy is also thought necessary.

One reason is because the 'Friends of Syria' Group ( i.e the west and its allies ) want unity between Qatar and Saudi Arabia so as to be able to overthrow Assad and secure the Turkey-Qatar pipeline. That would thwart Iran's alternative plan for a Shi'ite pipeline through Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean.

Resource wars and struggles for access to far flung supplies of oil and gas are set to be a recurrent feature of the 21st century. Jihadists, as in Syria, were used as part of a risky strategy to try to get rid of Assad just as they were in Libya, the better to try to gain control over oil.

The consequence was blowback. Wherever the US, France and Britain have considered military intervention the stakes have been fighting a 'global terror threat' which is portrayed as such because there is a need to justify intervening to secure oil supplies whether Boko Haram in Nigeria or jihadists in Yemen or Egypt.

ISIS has a base in Syria and Iraq but it is, like Al Qaida, becoming a franchise operation that is set to spread across the lands claimed as part of the caliphate because in such regions jihadi-Islamists are leading the disenfranchised poor in a war to seize oil or menace oil transit zones or vital pipeline routes.

Throughout all these lands climate change, drought, crop failure , overpopulation, the strain on water supplies and resource struggles are combining now in a lethal brew to spawn pyschopathological jihadi-movements that have nothing to lose in trying to deal crippling blows to the world economy.

Propaganda of the Name: The Meaning of 'Islamic State'.

'we believe the media, civic society and governments should refuse to legitimise these ludicrous caliphate fantasies by accepting or propagating this name. We propose that 'UnIslamic State' (UIS) could be an accurate and fair alternative name'-'Islamic State' is a slur on our faith, say leading Muslims. Observer, Saturday 13 September 2014

The complaint by British Muslim organisations and imams that the Prime Minister should stop using the words 'Islamic state' to describe the self-proclaimed Islamic State takes the absurd to new levels. For a start, Obama and Cameron have been at pains not to call it IS or ISIS or regard it as truly Islamic.

In countering the threat which is a threat to the US and Britain but not yet, it seems the threat does not even have the name is has as 'Islamic State' because President Obama, and so David Cameron, call it 'ISIL'. Cameron referred to a 'so-called Caliphate' and 'nihilists'.

It is understandable why British Muslims would not want to be associated with what they call the 'Unislamic State'. But by denying the neo-caliphate could be 'islamic' and demanding it is called the opposite of what it calls itself they run the risk of being ridiculed and giving more publicity to the idea of its being Islamic or not.

More than that, by acting childishly and petulantly by demanding the media calls Islamic State the 'Unislamic State', the Muslim organisations invite the sort of response which would delight in countering, with malicious glee, that Islamic State really is the 'real face' of Islam going back to its authentic and true 'medieval' origins.

The grotesque irony of all this is that IS would get exactly what they want in the aftermath of the first online public beheading of of a British hostage, captured aid worker David Haines, by reinforcing the attitudes of those who see that act at the hands of a British jihadist either as 'real' Islam' or as 'nothing to do with it'.

There are those who see the beheading as a warning that this is the sort of act that 'you have coming' from a British jihadist 'near you'. Then there are those denying that such an action could ever be committed by anyone professing to be Islamic, to which the answer is going to be like the panto refrain 'oh, yes it is !'.

IS knows that the beheadings are so gory and vile that the western media would whip up outrage of the sort media obsessed politicians such as Cameron thrive on when bigging up the terror threat, the better to increase their self important need to 'do' something as well as playing for votes and 'looking tough on terror'.

By talking up the 'global terror threat', IS gets precisely the necessary response. They are intelligent enough to know how useful their threat is in forcing politicians in media dominated democracies to make out the threat to be a unified one so as to better justify any military interventions they would need to take.

The reasons for that are that IS realises the western nations in Britain are bound to need to intervene militarily to protect oil and gas supplies from control or else sabotage by jihadists across the regions which is claimed as part of a new revived caliphate stretching from sub-Saharan Africa through to the Greater Middle East.

By portraying disparate jihadi-Islamist threats across these different nations as one seamless 'global threat', and using that to intervene militarily, with drones, air strikes or 'boots on the ground' IS would be able to spread its franchise operation out of its core base in Syria and into Iraq into Egypt, Libya, Yemen or Nigeria.

The ultimate ambition, of course, is to be the threat that Cameron is portraying IS as being, that is, one that reaches its sinister tentacles into the heartlands of Britain, something already played on by celebrity jihadists Anjem Choudary who are as media savvy as establishment politicians playing on fear. 

Though appearing a buffoon, Choudury is already knows how to play up to his useful media role in linking the outrage over the execution of hostages to the fact there is less outrage over the way western foreign policy means "hundreds of thousands of people have been beheaded by drones and daisy cutters".

IS online beheadings are meant to stir things up in Britain by opening up a discussion on British foreign policy why Britain is uncritically following the US as 'lapdog' and why it is condemning the execution of one British hostage claimed by ISIS to have been in the British army rather than the foreign policy for 'causing' it.

This gloating and gory propaganda of the deed which is intended by IS to be what Cameron calls 'pure evil' compared to the 'greater evil' against which ISIS is ranged: the Hypocrite Sunni Muslim regimes that made their state possible by bankrolling jihadi efforts against Assad's regime and their Infidel allies.

Islamic State is, in reality, the Islamist State of Syria and Iraq. This would be a far better designation which distinguishes between Islam and the ideologisation of Islam into a set of political tactics and doctrines adapted to the modern world which owes much in its ideas to thinkers such as Maududi and Nabhani.

Maududi used the word 'Islamic State' to mean one in which all aspects of public and private life in a perfect society would be determined by a select Godly elite who would slowly infiltrate their way into institutions and take them over from within and purge kuffars from positions of power.

Maududi put forward a non-violent path to create an utopia. Other thinkers such as Qutb, an influence on Al Qaida, stressed modernistic ideas such as a vanguard elite bent on destroying a decadent world and creating a new world through acts of apocalyptic violence and terrorism.

None of those ideas exist in the Qu'ran. Islamist ideas such as Al Qaida's at one extreme. Those groups such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir which have an ambiguous attitude towards violence demand a Caliphate as an Islamified version of the sort of utopia longed for by, for example, the Bolsheviks in Tsarist Russia.

Islamic State is no more necessarily Islamic than the the Soviet Union was a true union of republics based on the control of worker's councils or even truly socialist. However, few socialists in the west, even those who rejected the Soviet Union would have called it the 'fake union of unsocialist unfree pseudo-republics'.

Malise Ruthven puts it well when he refers to Islamism as,

'the ideologization of Islam at the political level, the construction of a political ideology using some symbols culled from the historical reperiore of Islam, to the exclusion of others. This ideology, sometimes refered to as 'Islamic fundamentalism', is better described as Islamism: the Latin suffix attached to the Arabic original more accurately expresses the relationship between the pre-existing reality ( in this case a religion ) and its translation into a political ideology, just as communism ideologizes the reality of the commune, socialism the social, and fascism the ancient symbol of Roman consular authority'.

The difference is that socialism or communism were not words with a necessary cultural resonance for those identifying with a religion and civilisation such as Islam does imply. This is why not colluding in the portrayal of Islamic State at face value is vital and why 'Islamist State' would be the right name.

One advantage, is that those following or tempted to identify with Islamist groups in Britain would see that the necessary outcome of trying to create a caliphate based on an enforced and extreme version of sharia law ends up creating a hell on earth for other Muslims first and foremost in the lands under its control.

On message politicians in Britain, however, insist on 'ISIL' for reasons of 'public diplomacy'. One reason is 'ISIL' sounds more pointedly sharp and sinister, far more deadly and dangerous than ISIS which is also the name of an Egyptian Goddess. It sounds more evil and vile like SPECTRE in James Bond.

Another handy use of ISIL, is it avoids serving to remind those who opposed air strikes against Syria in 2013 that the last 'S' in ISIS means 'Syria' which could be entered targets there bombed. ISIL sounds more like a bacteria or lethal virus, a truly 'poisonous ideology' that can seep unguarded into any 'community'.

ISIL could be borne back to 'the homeland'. Having said that, some criticised the use of ISIL because the 'L' means Levant, that is the power claim made over Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Iraq , Southern Turkey, or even Israel. Yet that would serve to create a greater sense threat in the region too as well as the US.

The calculation could be that nobody actually knows that 'L' means Levant or what Levant means apart from sounding a bit fragrant. Of course, ISIL and ISIS are both better than IS which means 'Islamic State' and it could not be admitted that Islamic State is either a real state or that its really Islamic which is what IS wants.

How to Prevent Islamist Terrorism in Britain.

With Islamic State now posing the new improved version of the previous terror threat offered by Al Qaida in the mass marketplace for insane terror brands to self-identify with, Harun Khan, deputy secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, says the threat could only grow if they are not involved in countering it,

"They need to be talking to us and others to understand what it is that's leading these boys down this route..Part of the problem is the constant talk of legislation, harassment and monitoring, stripping people of their passports. This is what's leading young people towards radicalism."

Well, given that the threat of violent jihadi-Islamist terrorism in Britain predates the creation of IS and the Syrian Conflict, which started in 2011, by at least ten years, this statement is mendacious spin and a cretinous "explanation" of how young British Muslims could be drawn into terrorist activity.

The most likely aim of Khan is to uphold the MCB as a group that acts as the 'representative' of the 'community', given that there is no such corporate institution in Islam equivalent to 'the Church', whether the Church Of England or the Roman Catholic Church.

The reason a small number of young British Muslims are drawn towards terrorist activity is due both to identification with the aims of certain violent Islamist ideologies as well as to the fact that they could actually get to Syria in the first place because the government did nothing to prevent them.

The British government have only started ramping up the rhetoric now because Sunni militants dominant in Syria are no longer useful 'assets' in trying to overthrow Assad ; the Islamic State ( IS ) in control in northern Syria is targeting not only the Kurds in Iraq but also the Free Syria Army Britain backs in Syria.

The argument that the terror threat is only consequence of a "poisonous ideology", the explanation put forth by Cameron or else the case that 'its a response to Western foreign policy', spouted by Islamist ideologues, are both equally wrong and intentionally based on a power game.

The Islamic State is said to have had around 500 British born insurgents fighting for it and they went because they could. The question is why nothing was done previously in conjunction with Turkey to try to halt the flow of fighters who wanted to go there in the first place.

The answer is that the British born jihadists were fighting against Assad, the chances would be that they would either be killed or could be used to gain information and that the British security state prioritises risky geopolitical strategies concerned with energy security over terrorism.

The reason why British-born Muslims would want to go and fight their jihad and to import the terror back home, once IS turned against the FSA and was bombed by the US, is due to the fact their ideology teaches them see Western foreign policy as the sole reason for the chaos in the Middle East.

Britain's security from terrorism depends upon developing a new foreign policy away from cooperating too closely with powers such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar which promote fanatical jihadist groups and developing energy alternatives to fuels such as imported gas which Qatar supplies.

At a domestic level, preventing terrorism means focusing on the goal of integration, curtailing population numbers created by mass migration the better to integrate those already living in Britain and closing off the funding for militant organisations that promote Saudi-exported Islamist doctrines and practices.

"A Greater and Deeper Threat to our Security than we have Known Before".

"It was clear evidence, not that any more was needed, that this is not some foreign conflict thousands of miles from home that we can hope to ignore. The ambition to create an extremist caliphate in the heart of Iraq and Syria is a threat to our own security here in the UK.

In Afghanistan the Taliban were prepared to play host to al Qaida, the terrorist organisation. With IS we are facing a terrorist organisation not being hosted in a country but seeking to establish and then violently expand its own terrorist state.

"With designs on expanding to Jordan, Lebanon, right up to the Turkish border, we could be facing a terrorist state on the shores of the Mediterranean and bordering a Nato member.

The ambition to create an extremist caliphate in the heart of Iraq and Syria is a threat to our own security here in the UK.

The terrorist threat was not created by the Iraq war 10 years ago. it existed even before the horrific attacks on 9/11, themselves some time before the war.

This threat cannot be solved simply by dealing with perceived grievances over Western foreign policy. Nor can it be dealt with by addressing poverty, dictatorship or instability in the region - as important as these things are.

The root cause of this threat to our security is quite clear. It is a poisonous ideology of Islamist extremism that is condemned by all faiths and faith leaders."-Prime Minister David Cameron.

The threat that Islamic State poses would most likely not have existed had it not been for Western foreign policy as it could not have exploited the chaos in northern Syria to gain power and declare the coming of the Caliphate both there and in Sunni parts of Iraq, a land destabilised by the 2003 US-UK invasion.

The tissue of untruths spun by Prime Minister Cameron, in reaction to the barbaric beheading of US journalist James Foley, shows how leading politicians are prepared to use the power of media images to put the case for unending and permanent intervention, even of a military kind, in the Middle East.

MI6 is there to advance geostrategies and manage the attendent risks. As Patrick Cockurn made plain, MI6 was involved, alongside the CIA, in channelling weapons to Sunni jihadists such as Jabhat al-Nusra from Libya and setting up a 'supply chain' of weapons provision across the Turkish borders into Syria.

Britain should never have backed the strategic policy of Qatar and Turkey in backing Sunni militants against Assad through groups such as 'Friends of Syria'. The reason why Britain's security has been comprimised is because this policy of backing regional powers in the Middle East who were prepared to back jihadists.

Britain should have been putting far more pressure on Turkey to tighten up the borders to prevent Western jihadists entering. Certainly, Turkey would need have to prevent IS militants crossing back into its territory so if it could acheive that, as Turkey is an IS target too, they could be detained there.

Ramping up the terror threat level to "highly likely", of course, is a way of preparing Britain for an attack if it happened. It also serves to deflect attention away from the fact that Britain's foreign policy helped empower IS by supposing that 'moderate' Sunni forces could be backed to oust Assad.

It was clear that both Qatar and Saudi Arabia were locked into a competition throughout 2012-2013 to back the most effective ( i.e ruthless ) jihadi groups so that they would be able to determine a post-Assad Syria. That and the chaos of the war created space for IS to gain ground and flourish.

In 2013 ISIS was fighting with the Free Syria Army against the Kurds which are now being supported by the US and Britain. Until late 2013 and 2014 little was done by London or Washington to put greater pressure on Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to stop the transfer of funds from private donors to Sunni militants.

All these prevention of terrorism policies are reflexes to to the consequence of a failed foreign policy strategy that was even more fundamentally foolish that the one in which the US and Britain backed the mujahadeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s, splinter factions of which went on to become Al Qaida.

Syria has become a failed state in the north as a consequence of the policy that 'Assad must go', a demand pushed for by Qatar and Turkey to check Iran and to expedite the possible construction of a gas pipeline from the South Pars gas field to Turkey and an energy hungry EU.

At the core of the West's problems and the terror threat is its energy dependency upon gas from unstable lands which makes it bound to look for energy diversification no matter what the consequences and risks could be. Qatar is a major supplier of LNG to Britain and France.

The foreign policy agenda was clearly set out by Philip Hammond in April 2014, when mulling the possibility of a British base being constructed in Qatar

“The West is crucially dependent on a stable energy market above all else, Our economic recovery is fragile. Anything that calls for a spike in the oil price would derail it. The mostly likely scenario to cause that up spike is a surge in tension in this region, particularly in the Strait of Hormuz. It is very much in our interest to have a stable situation in the Gulf. That is why Western countries are prepared to invest so much in this region and supporting the Gulf states to maintain that stability.”

With Russia and Ukraine almost in a state of war and Libya haven fallen to Islamist jihadists, Britain and Europe's energy security looks more fragile than ever before and this has been factored in to the need to take risky foreign policy decisions such as continuing to back Sunni militants in Syria.

Until Britain, and other European powers, find energy alternatives to oil and gas, the dependency dillemma is always going to drag Western powers into meddling in the Middle East and causing the sort of potentially very dangerous problem of terrorist 'blowback' on a permanent basis.

Postscript: A Note on Britain's Gas Imports.

It uses an increasing amount of LNG from Qatar which prevents it making up for declining North Sea gas reserves by having to purchase more gas directly from Russia, as was confirmed in a Reuters report in March 2014,  in accordance with an agreement dating back to 2012.

'Britain will begin this year to import gas from Russia under a formal contract for the first time, just as European calls to loosen Moscow's grip on energy supply mount because of the crisis over Ukraine.
The country's biggest utility Centrica signed a deal in 2012 with Russian state-controlled Gazprom to import 2.4 billion cubic metres of gas over a period of three years, and the supplies will begin flowing in October.

The next fact is that Britain and the EU's energy network is interconnected and, of course, a surge in oil or gas prices would affect the British economy if it were to have an impact upon the economies of its European partners. A report from the New Scientist made the energy dilemma clear,

The situation in the UK is less clear. Gas imports account for around 70 per cent of supply, but because of the complex European network of pipelines and interconnectors that we rely on, it's difficult to say exactly how much of that imported gas is Russian. Some reports claim that Russia supplies around 15 per cent of that total and others put this figure much lower. Russian energy giant Gazprom estimates that it sends 11 to 12 billion cubic metres to the UK each year, out of an overall UK consumption of around 84 billion cubic metres.

Whatever the figure, if Russia cuts gas supply to Europe, the knock-on effect would be felt as keenly in the UK as in many other parts of Europe. The crisis may also affect a deal made between Centrica (which owns British Gas) and Gazprom to begin importing 2.4 bn cubic metres of Russian gas via a pipeline from Holland in a couple of months' time.

Energy security is national security for high octane consumer societies which need dependable supplies of oil and gas to uphold the energy intensive lifestyles the great majority of citizens in Western nations have come to take for granted. The search for alternatives ought to be a matter of urgency.

Gaza, Israel and the Uses of Terror.

'Israel is being projected on the world’s TV screens and front pages as a callous, brutal monster, pounding the Gaza strip with artillery fire that hits schools, hospitals and civilian homes...They know what it looks like – but they desperately want the world to see what they see.'-Jonathan Freedland, Israel’s fears are real, but this Gaza war is utterly self-defeating, The Guardian July 25 2014

There is no reason why Israelis need to identify with the military position being taken on Gaza or to accept the routine propaganda line that the 'ground incursion' and air and naval strikes are primarily or only about protecting them from Hamas terror. Hamas rocket attacks are mostly ineffective.

The Iron Dome defence system that was constructed in 2011-12 has been seen , to use that currently popular media word, a 'game changer' in that Israel is largely safe from attacks. The determination to go for outright victory and what Netanyahu terms the 'demilitarisation of the Gaza Strip' is the policy.

The Hamas tunnels and the possibility of abductions caused real fears but they are hardly on such a scale that would justify the the degree to which the IDF has pounded Gaza. The abduction of the three Israeli teenagers was seized on as the pretext for the Netanyahu to pursue his military strategy.

As Zbigniew Brzezinski pointed out,

'When Hamas in effect accepted the notion of participation in the Palestinian leadership, it in effect acknowledged the determination of that leadership to seek a peaceful solution with Israel. That was a real option. They should have persisted in that.

Instead Netanyahu launched the campaign of defamation against Hamas, seized on the killing of three innocent Israeli kids to immediately charge Hamas with having done it without any evidence, and has used that to stir up public opinion in Israel in order to justify this attack on Gaza, which is so lethal'

The question is why. The purpose of the campaign is quite clear: the readiness to eliminate Hamas or destroy its military capacity regardless of civilian casualties is part of a strategy that aims at destroying its bargaining position following the unity agreement between Hamas and Fatah in the West Bank.

One means to effect that is to firmly secure control over the Gaza Marine gas reserves which lie 20km off the Gazan coastline and so clearly in range of potential Hamas rocket attacks .To tap these reserves is considered a vital interest in the eyes of the Israeli government and its accepted by its allies.

Many conflicts across the globe after the end of the Cold War have been about access to strategically important resources such as oil and gas ( as well, in fact, even water). The Iraq War was justified on a 'war on terror' narrative but was about geopolitics and oil. The Gaza conflict is no exception.

So the problem is that the conflict in Gaza is portrayed as one concerned on the Israeli side only with fears for its security and the mutual fear, distrust and antagonism that goes all the way back to the way Israel emerged as a nation state in 1948. That is important to understand but it is not the entire picture.

Clearly, there is a fear that if Hamas were to be aligned with the Palestinian Authority then it would stand to benefit from the gas wealth, 10% of which is earmarked for the Palestinians as part of the policy of developing the West Bank economically.

The sticking point has been that Israel has wanted first to break Hamas, then pursue a separate peace with the Palestinian Authority whereby the gas revenues would flow into their 'special funds' on condition that violence against Israel is renounced in the West Bank.

The thinking behind such a strategy, supported by Special Envoy Tony Blair, is that a developing West Bank would act as a model for Gaza and encourage Gazans and Hamas to realise that armed resistance ( i.e terrorism ) and jihadism could only see them isolated further from the region.

Evidently, the longer the 2014 conflict drags on, the more anger and bitterness amongst Palestinians is set to increase. But the fact remains that in power political terms it is irrelevant because Israel would be able to develop economically and militarily with or without the Palestinians. 

For the first time in history, Gaza and Hamas are totally isolated. Iran is advancing its regional strategy via the backing Shia governments and forces such as Hizbollah. Egypt is intent on deepening and strenthening energy and security ties with Israel no matter the domestic reaction.

The Israeli government has seen a historic window of opportunity to compel a peace deal on Hamas on their terms by using effective military force to finish it off as an effective force with bargaining power. This is the reality of the conflict of 2014 and why it could be the bloodiest yet as the stakes are so high.

Hamas has its back against the wall. The blockade, the sealing of the border with Egypt following the Sisi coup against the Muslim Brotherhood government, the increased poverty and immiseration, the lack of regional support means armed struggle is seen as vital but their capacity for it is being eroded.

Israel has nothing to lose by crushing Hamas. It's security is not going to be made worse by the ground incursion into Gaza. The EU is interested in cooperating with it in the exploitation of its gas reserves. The US is bound to back it as part of the policy of securing the Saudi-Egypt-Israel alliance.

As for Israeli citizens, most of them would be able to get on with their ordinary daily lives in a largely successful advanced consumer-capitalist land without much that thought for Gazan casualties who inhabit a very different world from them and could be considered as dying because of the stupdity of their leaders.

Certainly, that the thrust of Israeli 'public diplomacy' from Netanyahu and slightly sinister spin doctors such as Mark Regev who claim that the victims of the IDF's 'ground incursion' are not really being killed by Israel but by the Hamas policy of hiding rocket stores in civilian areas.

Israeli government claims need only have a certain degree of plausibility for them to be accepted by both the Israeli public which wants security and finds the Palestinian issue a tiresome and tedious legacy of the past, and Western leaders who are also willing to identity with Israeli war aims the better to serve their interests.

ISIS: Britain's Lethal Embrace of Qatar and the Threat of Blowback

'Why Cameron should want to elevate, indeed almost romanticise, that menace is a mystery. The only security against this violence is from policing and from targeted intelligence. The only security against this violence is from policing and from targeted intelligence'-Simon Jenkins, Isis is no Threat to Britain, The Guardian, 22nd June 2014.

The reason both Cameron and Fox want to ramp up the threat of ISIS as one that could be directed against Britain is that the British government has backed Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar in their geopolitical struggle and use of Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq against Iran and its allies in Syria and Iraq.

There is a need, therefore, to pretend that ISIS is simply another 'more extreme' version of Al Qaida, another evil which has arisen as though out of the void caused by the collapse of authority in Iraq which is blamed almost wholly on Maliki in Baghdad ruling in a sectarian way.

Yet the fear is one of 'blowback' from Syria and the possibility both northern Syria and Iraq could become similar to Afghanistan, another land where Sunni jihadists backed primarily by Britain and America's Gulf allies gained a foothold and that ended up creating Al Qaida.

While Saudi Arabia has backed off from supporting Sunni jihadists such as Al Nusra, because of a certain amount of pressure from Washington, Kuwait has continued as a source of funding and Qatar made in plain in March 2014 that it would continue to back the toughest Sunni jihadists in Syria.

Foreign Minister Khaled al-Attiyah said in a speech in Paris "The independence of Qatar's foreign policy is simply non-negotiable...Qatar is to take decisions, and follow a path, of its own." Backing Sunni jihadists is considered essential to advancing its regional interests.

Removing Assad is considered crucial in order to advance the prospect of building a Qatar-Turkey pipeline that would pump Qatari gas towards lucrative EU markets and enable it to avoid having to depend on exporting LNG via the Iranian controlled Straits of Harmuz in the Persian Gulf.

Britain is a key backer of Qatar and unwilling to criticise Qatar's regional ambitions because as North Sea gas has depleted, the importance of imported Qatari LNG has become vital. In 2011 it was reported that it provided all but two cargoes of the product shipped to the UK.

Hague's obsession that 'Assad must go' is connected to energy security and backing Qatar no matter the potential threat of jihadist blowback. Britain is overdependent upon gas from Qatar but Russia, the only power that has more of the globe's gas than Qatar, is regarded as as a threat to its interests.

Russia, of course, has backed Assad and gained a foothold in exploiting the Levant Basin, a field of offshore oil and gas in the Eastern Mediterranean. Yet Russia also, through the annexation of Crimea and the advance of pro-Russia separatists in Eastern Ukraine, could control energy flows in the Black sea region.

As Russia exerts greater influence over regions considered strategically vital for the flow of oil and gas into the EU, Britain has shown readiness to court favour in Doha. Qatar owns 20% of the London Stock Exchange, invests 10bn pounds annually in the UK and has helped shore up London's property boom.

Britain is increasingly overdependent upon Qatar to prop up its ailing rentier economy and provide it with up to 90% of its LNG which, in turn, provides around a quarter of the UK's gas supply and 59.3 % of the total gas supplied to British homes. Britain's economic recovery after the financial crash of 2008 depends heavily on Qatar.

Britain, therefore, backed Qatar in its proxy war against Iran in Syria after 2011 so as to forestall the possibility of the Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline that would transport gas from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea in order to supply Europe and that could bypass Turkey and sink Qatar's proposed alternative.

The consequence of this brutal geopolitical proxy conflict is that is has opened up space for ISIS to operate no matter that Britain and the US is trying to use its intelligence services to redirect assistance to Sunni jihadists it can control in order to contain those that could pose the threat of blowback.

This 21st century will see greater conflicts over access to oil and gas in a world of increased demand and competition caused by global industrialisation and high octane consumerism, one described by the American academic and writer Michael Klare in his aptly titled Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy. 

It is in preparation for those resource conflicts and the threat of terrorist blowback that politicians such as Liam Fox argue for increased levels of state surveillance over 'extremists' in our midst and, by implication, over the entire populace in Britain as part of a messianic 'ideological battle' that is set to 'go on for a long time'

Postscript.

How Dependent is Britain upon Qatar ? 

It is possible to argue that  LNG is not a particulary predominant section of Britain's energy portfolio and that is is not 'dependent' upon Qatar. While it's true that domestic production of gas and Norwegian supplies made up the bulk of it in 2013, this is not the entire story.

Britain's North Sea gas is rapidly depleting and Russia is held to pose a threat to the energy interests of other EU nations and the expansion of NATO power, something evident in Rasmussen's attempt to claim that anti-fracking activists were being funded by Moscow.

The only reason why demand for more LNG declined in 2013 was the mild winter which allowed stocks not to be used up, which is fortunate as LNG is becoming more expensive due to high Asian demand, especially from Japan in the wake of the Fukashima nuclear power plant disaster.

LNG is a crucial component of Britain's domestic gas market and the need for politicians to keep prices lower rather than higher accounts for the interest in a Qatar-Turkey pipeline which would run via Syria and prevent gas having to get to Europe via tanker on the Straits of Hormuz.

Support for Qatar and opening London to its lucrative investments is one reason why Qatar is prepared to divert LNG supplies west even when the price does not fall so much in Asia as as would justify that on the profits it could have otherwise made from its sale in the east.

The boost to Britain's economy provided by Qatari capital from gas exports should not be underestimated. In February 2014 it was reported that Qatar was going to boost investment in Barclays Plc
(BARC) and J Sainsbury Plc after aquiring stakes in both.

Ahmad Al-Sayed, chief executive officer of the sovereign wealth fund,claimed, on visiting London, "Britain is one of the main destinations for investment...You’ve great systems, great regulations. We’re happy to invest more when the opportunity is coming.”

The UK is the main destination in Europe for Qatari investments, amounting to $33.8 billion. By any standards, that's a huge amount and its a prime driver of London's property market boom which is blamed for creating the 'wrong kind of growth' and a bubble economy.

Britain has depended upon Qatar to assist in getting it out of the economic recession caused by the finacial crash of 2008 and out of austerity in readiness for the 2015 elections. It is prepared to invest in infrastructure projects from nuclear reactors to London's sewers.

The cost of that dependence is that Britain, led as a 'Global Player' by Cameron and Hague, is support for its foreign policy in Syria no matter the potential consequences of terrorist blowback, as part of the 'warm bilateral relationship' both countrties

LNG is not the only reason why Britain is so beholden to Qatar but is important along with its huge investments and large market for British weapons and military assistance which even led in April 2014 to plans for the UK to have a military base in the region.

As Defence Minister Phillip Hammond put it,

"The UK and Qatar enjoy a very strong and multi-faceted bilateral relationship, which embraces defence and security issues, trade and investments, and is getting stronger all the time. We are building the momentum to strengthen the relationship and we are conscious of the need to sustain that momentum,"

Blair, Islamism and Planetary Plots

Seumas Milne is right that there is a lot of mendacious propaganda flying about in an age when 'public diplomacy' consists of 'framing devices' put forth by the political class. The aim of Blair's speech was to shape perceptions about both his policy towards the Middle East and the course of foreign policy.

It could not have gone amiss that Blair gave the speech at Bloomberg's London HQ. For those fearful that the future could involve Britain being involved in endless conflicts and interventions, with the looming threat of terror hanging over its cities and town, this speech was a propaganda template for that.

So Blair's speech is important because a significant part of the political and media class In London value Blair's ability to stake out a position that can be used by politicians in need of an alarmist way in which to connect Britain's foreign policy with the need for domestic protection.

So it is odd that Milne opines that the reason why Blair's views are taken so seriously 'isn't immediately obvious'.On the contrary, it is immediately evident that Blair did not set out any real policy but was concerned with drawing up the correct battle lines, the propaganda framework for some cosmic struggle.

The substance of Blair's speech was less signification than the way language was used. When Blair referred to 'extremist Islamism' he meant the sort that threatens Britain's interests and so conflated the Muslim Briotherhood In Egypt with malign and openly terroristic forces such as Al Qaida.

However, Milne, himself no stranger to propaganda riffs, then claims,

'..he ( Blair ) also demanded military intervention against Syria – backed by Russia – along with more "active measures" to help the armed opposition, which is dominated by Islamists and jihadists. It's a crazy combination with an openly anti-democratic core'.

The 'Opposition' ( Blair's term for the anti-Assad insurgents ) may be dominated by Islamists and jihadists but the official line of the Coalition government until late 2013 was that the 'rebels' in the Free Syrian Army were mostly democrats fighting against Assad's tyranny and that he 'must go'.

However, if it is clear that the many of the insurgents in Syria are not democrats but many affiliated to Al Nustra and Al Qaida, it raises the question of whether Milne agrees with Blair that the Muslim Brotherhood should be supported or not ( or, at least, in word if not deed ).

After all, it's deeply contradictory of Milne to complain that Blair is demanding 'active support' be given to 'Islamists and jihadists' in Syria while supporting their being crushed in Egypt, unless the supposed purpose of that foreign policy is made plain.

After all, it could be argued that the opponents of the interventionist foreign policy in Britain such as Milne often use doublethink in lauding Islamists when they are being oppressed and condemning them as tools of imperialism when the same Muslim Brotherhood members are against a government Britain dislikes.

British foreign policy does have blatant double standards and has demonstrated a weird Orwellian schizophrenia, supporting the anti-Assad insurgents when it was clear they were dominated by bloodthirsty fanatics who elsewhere would have been portrayed as the existential enemy at home and abroad.

However, it is curious that 'anti-war' activists often demonstrate the same double standards without the even the excuse of being in government. They have the luxury of having things both ways, that when Britain accepts Egypt's coup against Islamists it's evil and when it supports them in Syria it's evil too.

Evidently, the best foreign policy would be one where Britain would not interfere or meddle in the internal affairs of Middle Eastern states, in which case the policy of realpolitik would be preferable (but that's condemned as well ). It which case no attempt should be made to have a foreign policy at all.

When it comes down to it, Western states are embroiled in the affairs of the Middle East because of geopolitical concerns and the fact it contains huge supplies of oil and gas. Until energy independence is aimed at, the region is going to be the site of intense geopolitical and Great Power rivalries.

There are certain 'anti-war' journalists, such as Milne, who prefer the Cold War period and who praise the Soviet Union in retrospect as a check on Western power in the Middle East and its support for the secular dictator Assad. But its not clear why they have the pretence of being concerned with democracy.

The "Islamist Plot" in Britain-The Domestic Impact of Foreign Policy.

It's possible fanatical ideologues such as Education secretary Michael Gove have tried to exploit the existence of a plan to push school academies towards 'Islamisation' for political gain and to try to steal votes from Ukip and co-opt support for an interventionist British foreign policy against 'extreme Islamism'.

But it does not follow that Milne is corrrect in this,

'In Britain, the campaign against Islamist "extremism" is once again in full flow. In fact, it is open season on the Muslim community. For the past few weeks reports have multiplied about an alleged "Islamic plot", code-named Operation Trojan Horse, to take control of 25 state schools in Birmingham and run them on strict religious principles'.

Even if the the Operation Trojan Horse statement comes from a shadowy anonymous source, the evidence of the DfE Report does seem to prove there is a serious basis to the allegations that cannot be routinely dismissed as part of an 'Islamphobic' propaganda campaign.

Andrew Gilligan in the Telegraph writes,

'A separate report, by inspectors from the DfE, has substantiated many of the allegations. The report, disclosed in The Telegraph on Friday, accused Park View, Nansen and Golden Hillock of illegally segregating pupils, discriminating against non-Muslim students and “restricting” the GCSE syllabus to “comply with conservative Islamic teaching”.The report said girls at Park View and Golden Hillock were made to sit at the back of the class; some Christian pupils at Golden Hillock were left to “teach themselves” and at Park View a supporter of al-Qaeda was invited to speak at assembly. Aspects of the GCSE curriculum were ignored as un-Islamic, even though needed by pupils for exams..'

More than that radical Islamists such as Salma Yaqoob , formerly of George Galloway's Respect Party, has tried to use the language of the Iraq War in calling the Operation Trojan Horse statement a 'dodgy dossier' and part of a campaign of 'McCarthyism”

So it is not only Gove that is trying to score political propaganda points by linking plan to 'Islamise' schools to foreign policy and a global threat. Yaqoob is simply doing the same but spinning the narrative the other way; that this is part of a plot to 'demonise' Muslims and so justify interfering in Muslim lands.

That claim is handy is if the political agenda is to compare the Ofsted inspectors 'interference' with Brimingham schools with an interventionist foreign policy and so put forth propaganda about a plan to order Muslims about and so create a siege mentality and swell supporters for Islamist organisations.

The claims in the Ofsted Report are either true or they are not true and trying to put a spin on them one way or another cannot change that, unless it is supposed that the report itself was part of a 'political witch-hunt' and ordered to find out what they wanted to to back up the allegations of an Islamist plot.

The danger with this foolish shadow boxing between politicians in government and Islamists is that it could indeed polarise British society. In that sense ideologues such as Milne, who backs any movement or force so long as its anti-Western, and Yaqoob are part of the problem no less than Gove.

After all, Gove in his appalling Celsius 7/7 writes of Islamism as 'one seamless totalitarian threat', one that extends from Afghanistan and the Middle East into Europe and Britain, a vast planetary struggle between Good and Evil that actually sounds quite as paranoid as the ideology of radical Islamists.

Blair: Energy Geopolitics and the Global Struggle with 'Islamist Extremism'.

Blair's speech on the need to combat 'Islamist extremism' on a global scale is both deluded and dangerous. For a start, Islamism is a broad political trend. By adding the flexible word 'extremism' as a means to differentiate which Islamists are acceptible ( or not extreme ) is a formula for open ended conflict.

Far from Blair being an irrelevance in this sense, the former Prime Minister is advocating a foreign policy that many are in fact pursuing at present but with a more robust attitude. As with anything Blair proclaims, the aim is to safeguard his legacy and to make out that he was right all along about the need for a 'Global War on Terror'.

In order to do that Blair empahasises the need for correct propaganda and framing of the global conflict, one quite obviously about western access to resources such as oil and gas from the Middle East and Africa. Thereby, opinion can be mobilised on the basis of a moral cause and purpose instead of being seen as ruthless realpolitik.

"The important point for western opinion is that this is a struggle with two sides. So when we look at the Middle East and beyond it to Pakistan or Iran and elsewhere, it isn't just a vast unfathomable mess with no end in sight and no one worthy of our support. It is in fact a struggle in which our own strategic interests are intimately involved; where there are indeed people we should support and who, ironically, are probably in the majority if only that majority were mobilised, organised and helped.

Amidst the evident absurdity ( a struggle by definition involves two sides and not one, though it may involve more than two ), Blair is agitating for western intervention ( i.e meddling ) in the affairs of all states where Islamism is a force to try and impose the right ( that is to say pro-western ) government in power.

There is an Orwellian doublethink inherent in a strategy which means supporting Qatari and Saudi Arabian use of Islamist jihadists in Syria to fight Assad but backing the Egyptian military against the Muslim Brotherhood, even when it carries out a coup and guns down protesters in the streets of Cairo.

The reason why that freedom to define Islamists as 'extremists' or not is important for Blair is clear; those Islamist militants who threaten western oil and gas interests across the globe ( Algeria, Somalia, Yemen, Egypt ) are 'extremists' who pose a danger to energy security.

However, those Islamists in lands such as Syria who are used as proxies to remove leaders such as Assad who leans towards Russia and Iran are not 'extremists'. No, the jihadists in Syria are part of a battle for freedom. Not least, the pipeline interests Qatar and Turkey have for a Syria without Assad.

This is what is meant when Blair opines,

'what is absolutely necessary is that we first liberate ourselves from our own attitude. We have to take sides. We have to stop treating each country on the basis of whatever seems to make for the easiest life for us at any one time. We have to have an approach to the region that is coherent and sees it as a whole. And above all, we have to commit. We have to engage".

Whether British people like it or not, Blair still represents the way global politics is heading ( at least as far as British politicians are concerned ). Spouting 'warmonger' or 'Bliar' is both boring and doltish. The need is to understand what Blair means and what interests are truly at stake.

For the fact is that Blair joined the 2003 invasion of Iraq as part of a geopolitical move to control it's large oil reserves in the period before shale oil and gas had become big business in the US and energy independence a goal. Put bluntly, unless alternatives to oil and gas are found, western intervention in the Middle East is set to go on.

Blair, after all, makes energy security the first and foremost of his reason to 'engage' with the Middle East, as,

'it is still where a large part of the world’s energy supplies are generated, and whatever the long term implications of the USA energy revolution, the world’s dependence on the Middle East is not going to disappear any time soon. In any event, it has a determining effect on the price of oil; and thus on the stability and working of the global economy.'

While Blair can be criticised for Iraq, it's no use turning him into a hate figure as though British people could pretend their high octane consumer lifestyles where somehow disconnected with the need for stable and falling oil prices. That's a lesson Blair learned after the road haulier's strike of 2000 over petrol prices threatened his government

Covert Arms Operations from Bosnia to Syria.

On Syria, radical journalist Neil Clark has commented back in 2012,

'The only way we can have a peaceful solution to this is if the Western powers and countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia say to the rebels “look, stop,” and stop supplying them with arms.

But unfortunately the stakes are so high here, because what happens in Syria is of enormous global importance, because the West wants this regime to go. They want a pro-Western regime that will come in, that will be more pro-Israel, that will be anti-Iranian, and that would prepare the way for an attack on Iran. So the stakes are incredibly high here. And unfortunately I don’t see the West backing down here. I think, unfortunately, we are going to get more and more aggressive behavior from the West, more and more backing the rebels

The continuities in Western foreign policy also lie in the use of CIA operatives to funnel arms to the "rebels", who would otherwise be termed "insurgents" or even, in the case of some of the militias, "terrorists" if they were fighting in Iraq on sectarian/ethnic lines ( against one another and not Saddam ).

The covert policy of channelling arms, as well as tacitly allowing British born jihadists to go and fight our proxy war in Syria, is a pure example of Orwellian doublethink. Arms are being diverted by covert forces from the Balkans through Turkey into Syria. That was done in order to topple the regime in Baku in 1993 and jihadists were deployed by US in Bosnia and Serbia.

The catastrophic result may well not merely be the possibility for a conflagration of war across the Middle East but also the "blowback" of British born jihadists returning to Britain and with the potential to cause terrorist atrocities as emphasised by historian Michael Burleigh, though it's a pity he tends to overlook the evidence whereby jihadists are used to advance our geopolitcal interests.

As Burleigh wrote, Dewsbury to Damascus: The danger of young British Muslims learning to wage Jihad in Syria,

 'All it takes is a cheap air ticket to Turkey, and then a ride over the border into northern Syria. That is the route being taken by British-based jihadists from London and the Midlands, who are making their presence felt in the fight against Assad.

Mediocre politicians playing at being "global statemen" such as William Hague need to return to a more realistic and pragmatic foreign policy and stop uncritically following the top down revolutionary strategies that the world's remain superpower is trying to foist on the area.

If British foreign policy is riddled with contradictions it is between the post colonial guit over the condition of the Middle Eastern settlement created after 18 in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the greedy for resources which, alas, our wasteful consumer economies depend upon