Afghanistan

Painful as it is to admit, the West, especially the United States, bears significant responsibility for creating the conditions in which ISIS has flourished. The recent attacks should be understood as “blowback terrorism”: a dreadful unintended result of repeated US and European covert and overt military actions throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and Central Asia that aimed to overthrow governments and install regimes compliant with Western interests. These operations have not only destabilized the targeted regions, causing great suffering; they have also put populations in the US, the European Union, Russia, and the Middle East at significant risk of terror.

History takes no prisoners. It shows, with absolute lucidity, that the Islamic extremism ravaging the world today was borne out of the Western foreign policy of yesteryear.

It seems it is high time for a strategic rethink in the Global War On Terror, but powerful forces are arrayed against it. Apart from the fact that a truly huge racket is at stake, the situation is also reminiscent of the proverbial guy with the hammer – everything looks like a nail to him. So we should reasonably expect more of the same, only in even grander style (as the so-called “surge” has shown, any successes tend not only to be temporary, but have a habit to soon give way to even greater disasters).

From both a political and economic perspective, the terrorists could hardly have chosen a more vulnerable moment to strike, with Europe wearied by years of crisis, paralysed by political indecision and shipwrecked by incompetent policy.

"Paris prosecutor says Abaaoud was been identified dead at the scene by his fingerprints. His body was found "riddled with impacts."

The 9 Ways to Stop Terrorism

Here are some of the lessons we in the United States learned too late about allowing our freedoms to be eviscerated in exchange for the phantom promise of security. The over-arching principle is simply this: once you start down the road towards a police state, it will be very difficult to turn back.

Bombing wont stop them; it will just make more of them. Ironically, what can stop them is the Assad government and the ground forces of its Hezbollah and the Iranian Republican Guard allies. Its time to let them settle an ancient quarrel that has never been any of America’s business anyway. But Imperial Washington is so caught up in its myths, lies and hegemonic stupidity that it can not see the obvious. And that is why a quarter century after the cold war ended peace still hasn’t been given a chance and the reason that horrific events like last week’s barbarism in Paris still keep happening.

America’s leading Sunni ally is proving how easily hubris, delusion, and old-fashioned ineptitude can trump even bottomless wealth.

The Islamic State’s horrific attacks in Paris provide a stark reminder that Western powers cannot contain – let alone insulate themselves from – the unintended consequences of their interventions in the Middle East. The unraveling of Syria, Iraq, and Libya, together with the civil war that is tearing Yemen apart, have created vast killing fields, generated waves of refugees, and spawned Islamist militants who will remain a threat to international security for years to come. And the West has had more than a little to do with it.

"The worldwide collection of phone calls, emails, text messages and our total loss of privacy is all about taxes – NOT terrorism. With all this power, and the demand that encryption be outlawed, none of this surveillance has stopped one terrorist act... Let’s knock off the bullshit and stop the Stasi tactic of building files on everyone. Focus on just the targets to protect society sand we just might stop something like this if we tried."

Earlier this week, the “independent” anti-doping commission WADA found that Russia engaged in state-sponsored doping and more importantly, recommended that Russia’s track and field athletes be suspended from Olympic competition in 2016. On Friday evening, that’s exactly what happened because as WSJ reports, “track and field’s world governing body provisionally suspended Russia’s athletes from international competition indefinitely."