......

Amaryllis Fox, a former CIA Clandestine Services Officer

If I learned one lesson from my time with the CIA it is this: everybody believes
they are the good guy. I was an officer with the CIA Clandestine Service and wo
rked undercover on counterterrorism and intelligence all around the world for al
most ten years. The conversation thats going on in the United States right now ab
out ISIS and the United States overseas is more oversimplified than ever.
Ask most Americans whether ISIS poses an existential threat to this country and
theyll say yes. Thats where the conversation stops. If youre walking down the stree
t in Iraq or Syria and ask anybody why America dropped bombs, you get: They were
waging a war on Islam. And you walk in America and you ask why we were attacked o
n 9/11, and you get They hate us because were free. Those are stories, manufactured
by a really small number of people on both sides who amass a great deal of powe
r and wealth by convincing the rest of us to keep killing each other.
I think the question we need to be asking, as Americans examining our foreign po
licy, is whether or not we are pouring kerosene on a candle. The only real way t
o disarm your enemy is to listen to them. If you hear them out, if youre brave en
ough to really listen to their story, you can see that more often than not, you
might have made some of the same choices if youd lived their life instead of your
s. An al-Qaeda fighter made a point once during a debriefing. He said all these
movies that America makes, like Independence Day, and Hunger Games and Star Wars
, theyre all about a small scrappy band of rebels who will do anything in their p
ower with the limited resources available to them to expel and outside, technolo
gically advanced invader. And what you dont realize, he said, is that to us, to t
he rest of the world, you are the empire, and we are Luke and Han. You are the a
liens and we are Will Smith.
But the truth is when you talk to the people who are really fighting on the grou
nd on both sides, and ask them why theyre there, they answer with hopes for their
children, specific policies that they think are cruel or unfair. And while it m
ay be easier to dismiss your enemy as evil, hearing them out on policy concerns
is actually an amazing thing. Because as long as your enemy is a subhuman psycho
path thats going to attack you no matter what you do, this never ends. But if you
r enemy is an organization made up of people...it can be disorganized and defeat
ed.
------------------------------------While Fox makes a number of good points regarding the fact that the narrative su
rrounding al-Qaeda and the situation in Syria and Iraq is indeed manufactured by
a small number of people in high places, Fox herself makes an incredibly wrong
description of the conflict, equating average Syrians and Iraqis with jihadists
in terms of their mindset and suggesting that the upsurge of terrorism is a resu
lt of blowback as opposed to outright funding and conspiracy to overthrow sovere
ign states in search of world hegemony.
The world does not need anymore Empires, but who actually controls most governm
ents... the Global banking cartel and multi-national corporations? Need to be su
re and not put the cart ahead of the horse!