Put the blame where it belongs: Bush, Reagan, Kissinger and the real history of the rise of ISIS

Everyone has an opinion and they really are just like a$$holes, aren't they?

Salon, 'nuff said.

"It’s well-known that al Qaeda grew out of the U.S.-funded proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, a war designed to give them their own Vietnam. ISIS, in turn, came out of our invasion of Iraq and subsequent actions, including the destruction of the Iraqi army. In the article linked to where Linker claims a Marxist heritage for “such polemicists as Sayyid Qutb and Abul Ala Maududi,” we find nothing more detailed to substantiate the claim. There is some truth in it, but as Mahmood Mamdani makes clear in his book “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror,” it’s equally true that their ideas gained a foothold in large part because they were useful in the Cold War fight against Soviet Communism. Moreover, the U.S. turned to supporting terrorism as a Cold War stratagem before things got started in Afghanistan. A summary of some of Mamdani’s key arguments can be found in this like-named essay, where he cites 1975 as a turning-point year: America’s defeat in Indochina, the collapse of the Portuguese empire in Africa, and the shift in Cold War focus to apply the Nixon Doctrine, that “Asian boys must fight Asian wars,” in Southern Africa, both to prop up apartheid South Africa, and to partner with them:

South Africa became both conduit and partner of the U.S. in the hot war against those governments in the region considered pro-Soviet. This partnership bolstered a number of terrorist movements: Renamo in Mozambique, and Unita in Angola. Their terrorism was of a type Africa had never seen before. It was not simply that they were willing to tolerate a higher level of civilian casualties in military confrontations — what official America nowadays calls collateral damage. The new thing was that these terrorist movements specifically targeted civilians. It sought specifically to kill and maim civilians, but not all of them. Always, the idea was to leave a few to go and tell the story, to spread fear. The object of spreading fear was to paralyze government."