USAs støtte til terrorister såsom al-Nusra er ikke længere nogen konspirationsteori

Uden undskyldninger vender vi i dag tilbage til det mærkelige tilfælde af "moderate" Jabhat al-Nusra rebeller, halsskærere og bødler, som spiller anti-ISIS kortet for at tillokke USA.

Du husker måske at deres leder fortalte Katars Al Jazeera kanal at hans al-Qaeda affilierede krigere vil bekæmpe både ISIS og Bashar al-Assad - og endog beskytte Syriens kristne og Alawite minoriteter. Den sædvanlige amerikanske nomenklatur siger til verden at det er nonsense. Det er "konspirationsteoretikere" som er skyld i, siger de, at foreslå at USA vil sende vognlæs af våben til sådanne mænd. Nej, USA vil aldrig handle med dem som er på deres berygtede, dog nytteløse, "terroristliste". Og derudover ville Katar aldrig promovere sådanne mordere som moderate - eller ville de?

Lad os først tage endnu et kig på alle disse konspirationsteoretikere. Med held for hånde, så har det estimerede franske blad Le Monde Diplomatique i denne måned en serie af artikler under titlen "Sagde du konspiration?", hvor de med omhu piller en masse falske flag historier fra hinanden som har vist sig at være sande. Der er Mukden tilfældet foreksempel, et kinesisk angreb i 1931 på det emperiske Japan, som siden har vist sig at det var et japansk angreb på Kina og som ledte til Japans invasion af Manchuriet, voldtægten af Nanking, osv.

Så var der Rigsdagsbranden i 1933 som kunne have været påsat af nazisterne og ikke kommunisterne; den succesrige - og virkelige - CIA-MI5 plot til at styrteIran valgte premierminister Mohammad Mossadegh, hvor bomber var tilsyneladende planted af (endnu engang) kommunister; Israels 1954 "Operation Susannah" i hvilken Ægyptiske nationalister blev beskyldt for Israelsk organiserede angeb på britiske og amerikanske bygninger i Kairo og Tonkin sagen i 1964 hvor Amerika rapporterede et totalt fiktivt nordvietnamesisk angreb på et amerikansk krigsskib, hvilket førte til den meget virkelige start på Vietnamkrigen. Interessant nok så giver Latinamerica endog mere beviser for egentlige amerikanske plots: Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, Cuba, og man kunne blive ved.


The French monthly also carries a very fair critique of those who believe George W and his chums engineered the 9/11 attacks - as if a US president who screwed up everything he ever did in the Middle East was capable of bringing down the World Trade Centre - and of the Arab world's obsession with Western conspiracies that allow dictators and nations to duck their own responsibility for terrible events.

Thus, the lie that a female Israeli official had sex with Arab leaders to blackmail them into supporting pro-Israeli policies; the perpetrator of this nonsense, the Egyptian newspaper Al Masry Al Youm, later apologised - but, courtesy of the internet, the lie is still repeated.

Western powers, Arabs are told, conspired to create the 2011 Middle East revolutions to produce instability and civil war in the Arab world. The Americans planned the insurgency against Assad and the coup against Mubarak - the former to rid Israel of its most powerful neighbour, the latter intended to bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power and "diminish the greatness of Egypt". Egyptian activists protesting the brutality of the coup's winners - the army - are accused of taking money from Western intelligence agencies to further their cause. Even Brigadier-General-President al-Sisi believes this stuff. Algerians still claim that the French Deuxième Bureau (an institution that ceased to exist in 1940) is today the puppeteer behind all Algerian political movements.

So I join, I think, the average reader of The Independent in responding to this tomfoolery with a great English expression: what a load of old cobblers! But wait.

When I was in Syria a few days ago, I heard several times that the Iranians, who have lost their own men defending the Assad regime, are stingy when it comes to economic assistance. One source in Damascus told me that they demand guarantees of real estate on any expenditure for the Syrian military. I don't know if this is true, but just take a look at the latest estimates of the extremely undistinguished UN special envoy Staffan de Mistura who now announces that Iran spends, as much as £4bn a year on the Syrian regime - excluding, by the way, the cost of Iranian military personnel, the Hezbollah and Iraqi Shias fighting for Syria - a figure only outdone by a gentleman at the "US Institute of Peace" who puts the amount close to £13bn.

And all this money supposedly comes from a country whose economy has been broken by sanctions? It doesn't take a pea-brain to work out that if Iran still intends to manufacture nuclear weapons - the Israeli line - and has so much money to splurge on its allies, then it remains a far greater threat to Israel and Sunni states than al-Nusra or Isis or any other crackpot Islamists in the region. And thus the Qataris are today officially joining the campaign to "clean" the al-Qaeda killers of al-Nusra. A conspiracy theory, of course.

Think again. Read the words of the Qatari Foreign Minister, Khaled al-Attiyah, in an interview with Le Monde last month. "We are clearly against all extremism," he stated, "but, apart from Daesh [Isis], all [sic] these groups are fighting to overthrow the [Assad] regime. The moderates cannot say to the Nusra Front ... 'We won't work with you'. You have to look at the situation and be realistic."

In other words, al-Nusra's sole aim is to destroy the Assad regime and, ergo, it is on the same side as the "moderates" and worthy of the same military assistance. If the "moderates" can't say to al-Nusra, "We won't work with you", then how could the US?

Intelligence reports to the French government have been recording US air strikes against Isis that have avoided endangering positions held by al-Nusra. When Isis arrived in its thousands to assault Palmyra last month - for the most part, in broad daylight - not one US plane appeared in Syrian skies. And all this when US pilots have been returning from almost 75 per cent of their missions against Isis with bombs still on board because they couldn't find targets.

You don't have to be a reporter, let alone a conspiracy theorist, to see the warning lights around the "war on terror" story in Syria. Because some of the terrorists are soon going to be our terrorists - as long as they fight the even more horrible terrorists and the Assad terrorists at the same time. All they need is more cash and more weapons. And I bet you they'll get them, courtesy of the ol' US of A. Just don't mention the word conspiracy.