Al-Qaida Just won’t Go Away

How did al-Qaida, a tiny anti-Communist group in Afghanistan that had no more than 200 active members in 2001 become a supposed worldwide threat?

How can al-Qaida be all over the Mideast, North Africa, and now much of black Africa? This after the US spent over $1 trillion trying to stamp out al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

The answer is simple. As an organization and threat, al-Qaida barely exists. But as a name, al-Qaida and “terrorism” have become the west’s handy universal term for armed groups fighting western influence, corruption or repression in Asia and Africa. Al-Qaida is nowhere – but everywhere.

If you’re a rebel group seeking publicity, the fastest way is by pledging allegiance to the shadowy, nowhere al-Qaida.

Take Iraq, where fighting currently rages between the Shia government and Sunni militias in Anbar Province. Interestingly, the Sunni uprising is centered on Fallujah, which was almost flattened by US Marines and blasted apart by depleted uranium shells and illegal white phosphorus as a dire warning to Iraqis who resisted.

After the US invaded Iraq in 2003, over a dozen Iraqi resistance groups rose to fight the Americans and their new-found Shia allies. Chief among them were Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party and Iraqi military veterans. As I kept saying at the time on major US TV networks, there was no al-Qaida and no nuclear weapons in Iraq. Thank George W. Bush for Iraq’s so-called al-Qaida.

Thanks to the magic of mass media manipulation, Washington was able to divert attention from all of the Sunni resistance groups – or “terrorists” as they were branded - to a single group of cutthroats led by a mysterious, renegade Jordanian, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The rest of the resistance groups simply vanished from our view.

A few have now resurfaced in western Iraq, notably the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Syria), or ISIS. It is always branded “al-Qaida linked” by western media, though no evidence is offered. Iraq’s increasingly brutal regime has also claimed it is fighting al-Qaida in Anbar Province.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/01/eric-margolis/terrorist-baloney/