Keeping America’s Baghdad Swimming Pools Safe From Fanatics

[marmar]

from truthdig:


Keeping America’s Baghdad Swimming Pools Safe From Fanatics

Posted on Jun 17, 2014
By William Pfaff


The Marines—250 of them, together with carrier air support and Marine Corps Osprey support craft—have been dispatched to save the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, the “biggest in the world,” “the size of the Vatican City,” with its swimming pools and skating rinks, from the menace of the offensive directed at Baghdad by the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—the new Islamic Caliphate sought by the religiously rigorous Sunni counter-crusade.

ISIS already has taken Mosul and a large chunk of northeastern Iraq, and is aimed now at the Shia shrine city of Samarra and Baghdad itself. Some of us who witnessed the announcement and ambitions of that embassy when it was built had the premonitory thought that it might eventually end as the capitol of that Muslim Caliphate which the ISIS fanatics now have proclaimed, and which, in Washington, only the paranoid imagined.

The Baghdad Embassy was intended to become the proconsular headquarters of an American-Israeli-conceived new western empire that was announced in Israel in June 2006 jointly by the American Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, and the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Its announcement coincided with an Israeli attack on Lebanon, foreseen as becoming the western Mediterranean access to what the two officials announced would become a “New Middle East” extending from Mediterranean Lebanon and Syria, through a federal Iraq of Sunni, Shia and Kurdish statelets, proceeding through a conquered Iran in Central Asia, to a “Free Baluchistan,” a NATO-ized Afghanistan, and an allied Pakistan, to the approaches of the Himalayas, and beyond them, to the rising counter-empire of the Chinese. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/keeping_americas_baghdad_swimming_pools_safe_from_fanatics_20140617