Bloodshed is just a cost of doing business

I saw this headline at Fox News.

Secret Iranian unit fueling Mideast bloodshed with illicit arms shipments

I thought to myself, couldn’t it just as easily have been this.

Secret Iranian CIA unit fueling Mideast bloodshed with illicit arms shipments

Why? Because the CIA has been playing both sides of the fence going back to Vietnam. That is business as usual in the military-industrial-corporate complex. The CIA played a large part in the creation of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. In subsequent years, we have periodically supported them and attacked them depending upon the extenuating circumstances.

That’s not to say that the secret Iranian Unit 190 hasn’t done exactly as the headline suggests. Rather it means that conducting proxy wars as a matter of foreign policy is dirty business and the U.S. participates every day just as its opponents do.

U.S. policy throughout the Bush Administration had been to support Fatah in Palestine to throw out Hamas by any means necessary. That included attempts through the democratic process and holding elections, which backfired. Hamas has been backed by Iran for many years and Fatah was seen as the best means to achieve a Israeli-Palestine settlement.

The failure of the process is recounted in an article in Vanity Fair by David Rose.

How could the U.S. have played Gaza so wrong? Neocon critics of the administration—who until last year were inside it—blame an old State Department vice: the rush to anoint a strongman instead of solving problems directly. This ploy has failed in places as diverse as Vietnam, the Philippines, Central America, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, during its war against Iran. To rely on proxies such as Muhammad Dahlan, says former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, is “an institutional failure, a failure of strategy.” Its author, he says, was Rice, “who, like others in the dying days of this administration, is looking for legacy.

It was Iran-Contra all over again. Just as it was in Libya. The U.S, played both sides in Libya resulting in the deaths of 4 Americans at Benghazi. The U.A.E. financed funneling arms through Qatar into Libya to topple Qaddafi. That was conducted primarily by an al-Qaeda affiliates including the Muslim Brotherhood. Once accomplished, the U.S. switched sides and began funneling arms from Libya via Turkey to Syria to enable a take down attempt of Bassad, again by al-Qaeda affiliates.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton discussed the strategy in an interview in 2012.

Sometimes overturning brutal regimes takes time and costs lives.

Yes, it is a dirty business, is it not?

Clinton: Well, I think Wyatt, if you take just a moment to imagine all the terrible conflicts that go on in the world, we have seen in the last 15 years millions of people killed in the Eastern Congo, in the most brutal terrible despicable ways. It wasn’t on TV. There were no Skyping of the jungles that were the killing fields. And I could point to many other places where governments oppress people, where governments are turning against their own people. And you have to be very clear-eyed about what is possible and what the consequences of anything you might wish to do could be.

I am incredibly sympathetic to the calls that somebody do something. But it is also important to stop and ask what that is and who is going to do it and how capable anybody is of doing it. And I like to get to the second-, third- and fourth-order questions, and those are very difficult ones.

She never details just what those questions are when it comes to overthrowing dictators. She does point out that conducting ops was much easier since we had a base established there.

This is not Libya where you had a base of operations in Benghazi, where you had people who were representing the entire opposition to Libya, who were on the road meeting with me, rather, constantly meeting with others. You could get your arms around what it is you were being asked to do, and with whom. We don’t have any clarity on that.

The base and the others refers to Ambassador Chris Stevens and the CIA compound in Benghazi. When asked about arming the Syrian rebels, she said this.

Well, first of all as I just said, what are we going to arm them with and against what? We’re not going to bring tanks over the borders of Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. That’s not going to happen. So maybe at best you can smuggle in, you know, automatic weapons. Maybe some other weapons that you could get in. To whom? Where do you go? You can’t get into Homs. Where do you go? And to whom are you delivering them?

We know al Qaeda – Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria. Are we supporting al Qaeda in Syria? Hamas is now supporting the opposition. Are we supporting Hamas in Syria?

Yes Mrs. Clinton, in fact, we are. We get into bed with any and all players if it fits our objectives. Turkey was utilized as the transfer agent for funneling arms into Syria and they have directly funded Hamas. On the other hand, we assisted Israel in bombing a Sudanese weapons factory that served to store Iranian supplied weapons bound for Hamas and Hezbollah.

Such is the business of foreign policy in the Middle East. Sometimes you turn a blind eye and support your enemy if it fits the overall objective. This may cost lives as Clinton alluded to. This may mean you’re writing checks to someone you’ll take out with a drone strike next week.

Those are the stark realities, yet we can’t openly embrace them. Ambassador Stevens was ‘allowed’ to die in Benghazi along with 3 others and despite a multitude of investigations, the truth hasn’t come to light. It never will as treason isn’t any place either political party wishes to go.

Iran is secretly fueling bloodshed by exporting its religious ideology? Big deal. If we aren’t in bed with the same players today, we just might be tomorrow.