Canada’s electronic surveillance agency has secretly developed an arsenal of cyberweapons capable of stealing data and destroying adversaries’ infrastructure, according to newly revealed classified documents.

Communications Security Establishment, or CSE, has also covertly hacked into computers across the world to gather intelligence, breaking into networks in Europe, Mexico, the Middle East and North Africa, the documents show.

The revelations, reported Monday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept, shine a light for the first time on how Canada has adopted aggressive tactics to attack, sabotage and infiltrate targeted computer systems.

The latest disclosures come as the Canadian government debates whether to hand over more powers to its spies to disrupt threats as part of the controversial anti-terrorism law, Bill C-51.

Christopher Parsons, a surveillance expert at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, told CBC News that the new revelations showed that Canada’s computer networks had already been “turned into a battlefield without any Canadian being asked: Should it be done? How should it be done?”

According to documents obtained by The Intercept from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, CSE has a wide range of powerful tools to perform “computer network exploitation” and “computer network attack” operations. These involve hacking into networks to either gather intelligence or to damage adversaries’ infrastructure, potentially including electricity, transportation or banking systems. The most well-known example of a state-sponsored “attack” operation involved the use of Stuxnet, a computer worm that was reportedly developed by the United States and Israel to sabotage Iranian nuclear facilities.

One document from CSE, dated from 2011, outlines the range of methods the Canadian agency has at its disposal as part of a “cyber activity spectrum” to both defend against hacking attacks and to perpetrate them. CSE says in the document that it can “disable adversary infrastructure,” “control adversary infrastructure,” or “destroy adversary infrastructure” using the attack techniques. It can also insert malware “implants” on computers to steal data.

...

https://www.hackread.com/new-snowden-documents-expose-canadas-hidden-cyber-warfare-strength/

240 years ago today, March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry famously addressed the Virginia Convention:

“Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but for me, give me liberty, or give me death!”

Henry’s passionate declaration for independence from Britain is widely acknowledged as the catalyst for the convention’s decision to deliver Virginian troops to help fight the Revolutionary War.

“Liberty or death!” became the rallying cry throughout the colonies. Not all, but enough of the founding generation cared enough to risk their lives fighting the War for Independence. To them, it indeed amounted to a choice between liberty or death.

Much has changed since. Today, most Americans clearly care for many things other than liberty. If this were not true, Americans would by now have thrown off the chains of the Federal Reserve. Likewise for the fear-mongered, liberty-suppressing “wars” on drugs, terror, poverty, etc., and the host of other policies, programs, agencies, bureaucracies, and departments comprising the unsustainable American welfare/warfare state. “Fear is the passion of slaves” said Henry. By and large then, are Americans not slaves? Are Americans not afraid of liberty itself?

“When the American spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different: Liberty, sir, was the primary object.” By 1775, the trend was running away from liberty. Henry’s generation helped slow it, if only temporarily. How do Britain’s punitive “Intolerable Acts” (or “Coercive Acts”), imposed upon the colonies – the final straw of-sorts before revolution – stack up to today’s abuses against Americans by their federal government? The lying, the spying, the inflation, the taxes, the regulations, the wars, the groping by the TSA at airports, the domestic militarization, the multitudinous assaults on civil liberties and the pervasive disdain and utter disrespect for private property and voluntary economic transactions? If alive today Henry would be the first to thunder “Liberty or death!”

More...http://www.voicesofliberty.com/article/240-years-after-patrick-henrys-liberty-or-death-speech/

[In fact, neoconservatives usually avoid discussing abortion, immigration, gay marriage, race, and the proper place for religion in a civil society because they find themselves on the progressive side of the argument. They are also light on the ground when it comes to constitutionalism and civil liberties, concerns of traditional conservatives, preferring instead to back the warfare state coupled with a unitary executive, which frees up the president to exercise the military option in international relations.]

Beyond foreign policy, things get a bit fuzzy with large variations regarding the kinds of social issues that energize many actual conservatives. In fact, neoconservatives usually avoid discussing abortion, immigration, gay marriage, race, and the proper place for religion in a civil society because they find themselves on the progressive side of the argument. They are also light on the ground when it comes to constitutionalism and civil liberties, concerns of traditional conservatives, preferring instead to back the warfare state coupled with a unitary executive, which frees up the president to exercise the military option in international relations.

This ambivalence is because, as it has been observed, many neoconservatives are former leftists or even radicals who have by their own account “been mugged by reality,” leading to a gradual shift away from the Scoop Jackson Democratic nest where many of them were nurtured to the Republicanism of Ronald Reagan, where they focused more practically on obtaining positions in the Pentagon. Many eventually supported John McCain before gravitating to the George W. Bush administration, where some of them found senior-level government positions in both the White House and Defense Department.

Neoconservatives largely mix with other neoconservatives, which means that they operate with considerable internal cohesion, but that does not fully explain their success in selling a product that has begun to smell very bad if one judges by results rather than marketing. But perhaps the answer lies in understanding how the bubble around Washington works, which the neoconservatives have mastered. They are particularly adept at resume building within their clique, understanding full well that a Fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies is more likely to find space on a friendly editorial page than someone without that cachet who has a large audience on the alternative media, particularly if that someone is diverging from status quo policies or staking out a position that differs substantially from foreign-policy groupthink. Their ability to seek out and build relationships with friends in the mainstream media, which the Guardian describes as “extraordinary,” has significantly contributed to their success. In 2002 alone the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), an AIPAC spin-off, by itself placed 90 op-eds in the mainstream media. They also enjoy, for the same reason, unchallenged access to government committees and advisory commissions.

More...http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-neoconservative-cursus-honorum/

NEW YORK - Ahead of next week’s visit of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to the United States, a leading American newspaper reported Friday that the Obama administration States is nearing a decision to keep more troops in Afghanistan next year than over five thousand it had intended.

In a front page dispatch from Washington, The New York Times said the move effectively upends its drawdown plans in response to roiling violence in the country and another false start in the effort to open peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government.

President Ghani, a former World Bank executive, will meet with President Barack Obama as well as Secretary of State John Kerry to discuss possible changes to the U.S. timetable to withdraw the bulk of American troops helping to bolster Afghanistan’s still-struggling military.

More...http://nation.com.pk/international/21-Mar-2015/us-may-not-reduce-troops-in-afghanistan

Just weeks after a European-brokered ceasefire greatly reduced the violence in Ukraine, the US House of Representatives today takes a big step toward re-igniting -- and expanding -- the bloody civil war.

A Resolution, "Calling on the President to provide Ukraine with military assistance to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity," stealthily made its way to the House Floor today without having been debated in the relevant House Committees and without even being given a bill number before appearing on the Floor!

Now titled H. Res. 162, the bill demands that President Obama send lethal military equipment to the US-backed government in Kiev and makes it clear that the weapons are to be used to take military action to return Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine to Kiev's rule.

Congress wants a war in Ukraine and will not settle for a ceasefire!

The real world effect of this Resolution must be made clear: The US Congress is giving Kiev the green light to begin a war with Russia, with the implicit guarantee of US backing. This is moral hazard on steroids and could well spark World War III.

The Resolution conveniently ignores that the current crisis in Ukraine was ignited by the US-backed coup which overthrew the elected government of Viktor Yanukovych. The secession of Crimea and eastern Ukraine were a reaction to the illegal coup engineered by US officials such as Victoria Nuland and Geoff Pyatt. Congress instead acts as if one morning the Russians woke up and decided to invade Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

There is no mention at all of US backing for the coup -- or even that a coup took place!

...

More...http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2015/march/23/congress-demands-war-in-ukraine/

After Bibi Netanyahu’s provocative speech to Congress, The New York Times provided helpful clarifications in an article headlined “What Iran Won’t Say About the Bomb.” Written by two superbly expert reporters, William Broad and David Sanger, the piece walked through the technical complexities for non-experts (myself included) and explained key questions Iranians have failed to answer.

But this leads me to ask a different question: What about Israel’s bomb? Why isn’t that also part of the discussion?

In the flood of news stories about Iran’s nuclear intentions, I have yet to see mention of Israel’s nuclear arsenal (if I missed some mentions, they must have been rare).

Yet Israel’s bomb is obviously relevant to the controversy. The facts are deliberately murky, but Israel has had nuclear weapons for at least forty years, though it has never officially acknowledged their existence. The Israeli diplomatic approach has been called “nuclear ambiguity.”

I asked a friend who’s a national-security correspondent in Washington why news stories don’t mention Israel’s bomb. He shrugged off my question. “Because everybody knows that,” he said. Probably that’s true among policy elites and politicians, though I am not so sure this is widely known among average Americans.

In any case, if everyone knows Israel has the bomb, why not acknowledge this in the public debate?

I asked another friend (a well-informed journalist sympathetic to the Palestinian cause) why reporters don’t talk about the Israeli bomb. “Groupthink,” he said. “It’s almost as though Israel gets a bye from the media.”

More...http://www.thenation.com/blog/201369/what-about-israels-nuclear-bomb

A pattern is emerging across current events from Syria to Iran to Ukraine. The pattern has two parts. In the first, America is increasingly in conflict with her natural allies. America, contrary to its mythical image as the cops of the world, fans the flames of conflict and finds itself in conflict with the Europeans who are running from flame to flame trying to put them out. Just as unnatural and surprising is that, in the second part, the President of the United States sides with Europe and finds himself in conflict with a US government – either the congress or the State Department – over which he has lost control.

The pattern began in Syria. America wanted regime change and, as in Iraq, clothed it in a push to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. So chemical weapons became the red line in Syria. But it was never really about chemical weapons.

The chemical weapons were never the red line that, if crossed, would lead to US intervention and regime change in Syria. Regime change was the goal long before the chemical weapons. On July 30, 2006, the Jerusalem Post reported that, during the Israeli-Lebanese war, “Defense officials told the Post . . . that they were receiving indications from the US that America would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria”. As early as May 23, Robert Parry says, Bush “urged Israel to attack Syria”. Stephen Zunes says that the American push to extend the war beyond Lebanon into Syria was no secret. “In support of the Israeli offensive, the office of the White House Press Secretary released a list of talking points that included reference to a Los Angeles Times op-ed . . . . The article . . . urges an Israeli attack against Syria”: “Israel needs to hit the Assad regime. Hard,” the op-ed argues.

More...http://original.antiwar.com/Ted_Snider/2015/03/20/america-fans-the-flames-while-europe-puts-out-the-fire/

When the Senate Intelligence Committee passed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act by a vote of 14 to 1, committee chairman Senator Richard Burr argued that it successfully balanced security and privacy. Fifteen new amendments to the bill, he said, were designed to protect internet users’ personal information while enabling new ways for companies and federal agencies to coordinate responses to cyberattacks. But critics within the security and privacy communities still have two fundamental problems with the legislation: First, they say, the proposed cybersecurity act won’t actually boost security. And second, the “information sharing” it describes sounds more than ever like a backchannel for surveillance.

On Tuesday the bill’s authors released the full, updated text of the CISA legislation passed last week, and critics say the changes have done little to assuage their fears about wanton sharing of Americans’ private data. In fact, legal analysts say the changes actually widen the backdoor leading from private firms to intelligence agencies. “It’s a complete failure to strengthen the privacy protections of the bill,” says Robyn Greene, a policy lawyer for the Open Technology Institute, which joined a coalition of dozens of non-profits and cybersecurity experts criticizing the bill in an open letter earlier this month. “None of the [privacy-related] points we raised in our coalition letter to the committee was effectively addressed.”

The central concern of that letter was how the same data sharing meant to bolster cybersecurity for companies and the government opens massive surveillance loopholes. The bill, as worded, lets a private company share with the Department of Homeland Security any information construed as a cybersecurity threat “notwithstanding any other provision of law.” That means CISA trumps privacy laws like the Electronic Communication Privacy Act of 1986 and the Privacy Act of 1974, which restrict eavesdropping and sharing of users’ communications. And once the DHS obtains the information, it would automatically be shared with the NSA, the Department of Defense (including Cyber Command), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

More...http://www.wired.com/2015/03/cisa-security-bill-gets-f-security-spying/

Could a deal to normalize Western relations with Iran and set limits on Iran’s development of nuclear technology lead to a more peaceful and less-weaponized Middle East?

That’s what supporters of the Iran negotiations certainly hope to achieve. But the prospect of stability has at least one financial analyst concerned about its impact on one of the world’s biggest defense contractors.

The possibility of an Iran nuclear deal depressing weapons sales was raised by Myles Walton, an analyst from Germany’s Deutsche Bank, during a Lockheed earnings call this past January 27th. Walton asked Marillyn Hewson, the chief executive of Lockheed Martin, if an Iran agreement could “impede what you see as progress in foreign military sales.” Financial industry analysts such as Walton use earnings calls as an opportunity to ask publicly-traded corporations like Lockheed about issues that might harm profitability.

More...https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/20/asked-iran-deal-potentially-slowing-military-sales-lockheed-martin-ceo-says-volatility-brings-growth/

Cuba is using the internet to experiment with toning down its political censorship in a sign that a glimmer of glasnost has arrived on the Communist-run Caribbean island.

Havana’s decision to open up on the once-taboo subjects of the electoral system and civil society — by allowing Cubans to question policy in two online forums — is reminiscent of the early days of free speech in what was the Soviet Union in the 1980s/

For a number of years there has been public discussion over the pros and cons of market-oriented reforms in Cuba, and ample criticism of the bureaucracy. But public criticism has stopped short of questioning the political status quo, aside from a fledgling dissident press, such as the online newspaper 14ymedio.com, run by writer Yoani Sánchez.

More...http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/02ebf912-cef1-11e4-893d-00144feab7de.html#axzz3VASe8YYR

The federal government said the number of undocumented immigrants failing to appear at deportation hearings is on the rise.

According to the Executive Office of Immigration Review, the number of people who did not show after being released on bond or on their own recognizance grew by 153 percent in the last four years.

Immigration judges ordered deportations for those no-shows.

About 30 to 40 percent of undocumented immigrants failed to appear at their hearings last year.

http://www.krgv.com/news/local-news/Undocumented-Immigrants-Failing-To-Appear-At-Hearings-Increasing/31937898

Sen. Ted Cruz plans to announce Monday that he will run for president of the United States, accelerating his already rapid three-year rise from a tea party insurgent in Texas into a divisive political force in Washington.

Cruz will launch a presidential bid outright rather than form an exploratory committee, said senior advisers with direct knowledge of his plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity because an official announcement had not been made yet. They say he is done exploring and is now ready to become the first Republican presidential candidate.

The senator is scheduled to speak Monday at a convocation ceremony at Liberty University in Virginia, where he is expected to declare his campaign for the presidency.

Over the course of the primary campaign, Cruz will aim to raise between $40 million and $50 million, according to advisers, and dominate with the same tea party voters who supported his underdog Senate campaign in 2012. But the key to victory, Cruz advisers believe, is to be the second choice of enough voters in the party's libertarian and social conservative wings to cobble together a coalition to defeat the chosen candidate of the Republican establishment.

The firebrand Texan may have few Senate colleagues who will back his White House bid, but his appeal to his party's base who vote disproportionately in Republican primaries could make him competitive in Iowa and beyond.

More...http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/us/article/Ted-Cruz-to-announce-presidential-bid-Monday-6150894.php?t=ec04aca79d29c86149&cmpid=twitter-premium

Looks like he'll be the first one to declare, let the games begin.

The Obama administration announced Friday that 80,000 corrected tax forms for people on plans through ObamaCare have still not gone out.

It's unclear how many people will be affected by the delay, but the administration said people who have not received the corrected forms do not have to wait to file their taxes and will not have to pay any additional tax due to the effort.

The issues stem from the announcement last month that 800,000 people on insurance plans through ObamaCare received incorrect tax information. At the time, the administration said forms with corrected information would be sent out in the first week of March.

Republicans pounced on the news, arguing it showed the burdens the Affordable Care Act is placing on families during tax season. They also said it showed the administration was having trouble administering its own law.

More...http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/236443-many-on-obamacare-may-need-to-refile-their-tax-forms

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Islamic State has posted online what it says are the names, U.S. addresses and photos of 100 American military service members, and called upon its "brothers residing in America" to kill them.

The Pentagon said after the information was posted on the Internet that it was investigating the matter. "I can't confirm the validity of the information, but we are looking into it," a U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Saturday.

"We always encourage our personnel to exercise appropriate OPSEC (operations security) and force protection procedures," the official added.

More...http://news.yahoo.com/islamic-state-calls-backers-kill-100-u-military-210018987.html;_ylt=AwrSyCQWDA5VzgQAk7vQtDMD

Low inflation, bond yields and interest rates around the world will push the boundaries of economic and political stability to breaking point if they continue on their downward trajectory, the Bank for International Settlements has warned.

The Swiss-based "bank of central banks" said the "sinking trend" of global rates would push countries further into uncharted territory.

It highlighted that $2.4 trillion (£1.6 trillion) of long-term global sovereign debt was now trading at negative yields, with an increasing number of investors willing to pay governments for the privilege of lending to them.
...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11479425/Low-rates-will-trigger-civil-unrest-as-central-banks-lose-control-BIS.html

[For small-town America, new immigrants pose linguistic, cultural challenges]

For small-town America, new immigrants pose linguistic, cultural challenges

On a warm July evening in 2012, while Marshalltown, Iowa, celebrated Independence Day, three refugee children from Myanmar (Burma) drowned in the Iowa River. The drownings at Riverview Park cast a grim light on the challenges facing both the city and its newest immigrants, most of whom spoke little English and had scant understanding of life in their new home – including the perils, known to more established residents, of the river’s treacherous currents.

“We preach to kids all the time: You don’t swim in the river. You don’t play around the river,” says Kay Beach, president of the Marshalltown school board. “But they didn’t know that.”

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2015/0314/For-small-town-America-new-immigrants-pose-linguistic-cultural-challenges

Urban transportation company Uber is having a rough week. The company is encountering legal struggles in a few of its international markets. On Monday, around 25 armed police officers searched the company’s office in Paris. In Germany, a court ordered a nationwide ban on Uber’s cheaper ride-sharing service UberPOP. In South Korea, executives and employees were charged with violating the transportation laws and many items were seized.

If you have been following the news, legal struggles are nothing new for Uber. But today’s news shows that it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier.

And it’s easy to understand why. According to its website, Uber is now available in 55 countries. Each country has its own legislation. Some very active local governments also have their say in Uber’s way of doing things.

In many cases, Uber launches a new branch and then figures out if it complies with existing laws. It’s a smart strategy as there are many ways to interpret a piece of legislation. But it doesn’t always work.

In France, there have been many attempts to limit Uber’s entire business. The so-called ‘15-minute law‘ was supposed to give an edge to taxi drivers. One month later, the law was suspended.

Uber then launched UberPOP in Paris. It was the company’s first rollout for its new ride-sharing service. As you don’t need a specific driver’s license to become an UberPOP driver, many professional drivers saw the new service as unfair competition. UberPOP was banned in Brussels, the Netherlands and, yes, France.

Yet, a court recently ruled that the French government couldn’t ban UberPOP that easily. That might explain the reason why 25 police officers were looking for evidence in Uber’s office.

More...http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/19/uber-faces-legal-challenges-in-france-south-korea-and-germany/

...

"There was an insufficient critical skepticism about some of the source material," he now says about the unredacted NIE. "I think there should have been agnosticism expressed in the main judgments. It would have been a better paper if it were more carefully drafted in that sort of direction."

But Pillar, now a visiting professor at Georgetown University, added that the Bush administration had already made the decision to go to war in Iraq, so the NIE "didn't influence [their] decision." Pillar added that he was told by congressional aides that only a half-dozen senators and a few House members read past the NIE's five-page summary.

David Kay, a former Iraq weapons inspector who also headed the Iraq Survey Group, told Frontline that the intelligence community did a "poor job" on the NIE, "probably the worst of the modern NIE's, partly explained by the pressure, but more importantly explained by the lack of information they had. And it was trying to drive towards a policy conclusion where the information just simply didn't support it."

The most controversial part of the NIE, which has been picked apart hundreds of times over the past decade and has been thoroughly debunked, pertained to a section about Iraq's attempts to acquire aluminum tubes. The Bush administration claimed that this was evidence that Iraq was pursuing a nuclear weapon.

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice stated at the time on CNN that the tubes "are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs," and that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

The version of the NIE released in 2004 redacted the aluminum tubes section in its entirety. But the newly declassified assessment unredacts a majority of it and shows that the intelligence community was unsure why "Saddam is personally interested in the procurement of aluminum tubes." The US Department of Energy concluded that the dimensions of the aluminum tubes were "consistent with applications to rocket motors" and "this is the more likely end use." The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research also disagreed with the intelligence community's assertions that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program.

...


According to the latest figures compiled by Iraq Body Count, to date more than 200,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed, although other sources say the casualties are twice as high. More than 4,000 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq, and tens of thousands more have been injured and maimed. The war has cost US taxpayers more than $800 billion.

...

https://news.vice.com/article/the-cia-just-declassified-the-document-that-supposedly-justified-the-iraq-invasion

It happens so often you wonder whether it is due to total ineptness or a deliberate policy to undermine our efforts overseas. It’s most likely a result of corruption and unintended consequences, combined with a foreign policy that makes it impossible to determine who are our friends are and who are our enemies. One would think that so many failures in arming others to do our bidding in our effort to control an empire would awaken our leaders and the American people and prompt policy changes.

A recent headline in Mother Jones read: “US Weapons Have A Nasty Habit of Going AWOL.” The report was about $500 million worth of military equipment that is unaccounted for in Yemen. Just as in so many other places, our policy of provoking civil strife in Yemen has been a complete failure. At one time it was announced that there was a great victory in a war being won with drones assisting groups that claimed to be on our side in the Yemen Civil War. As usual, we could have expected that these weapons would end up in the hands of the militants not on the side of United States and would never be accounted for.

There are numerous examples of how our foreign intervention backfires and actually helps the enemy. Just recently a headline announced: “CIA cash sometimes refills al-Qaeda coffers.” This was a story of our government helping pay ransom to al-Qaeda for the release an Afghan diplomat. However this was a measly $5 million so it was not considered a big deal. Another headline just recently announced that, “Iraqi army downs two UK planes carrying weapons for ISIL.” The Iraqi army is supposed to be on our side, and many people believe the UK is also on our side as well. One thing for sure the American taxpayer pays for all this nonsense.

Building weapons and seeing them end up in the hands of the enemy is almost a routine event and one should expect it to continue to happen under the circumstances of the chaos in the Middle East. This represents a cost to the American taxpayer and is obviously a major contributing factor in what will be the ultimate failure of our plan to remake the Middle East. This is bad enough, and the only people who seem to benefit from it are those who are earning profits in the military-industrial complex. But there is something every bit as bad as our weapons ending up in the hands of the jihadists and being used against us. That is, the fact that our presence there, our weapons, and our bombs, are the best recruiting tool for getting individuals to join the fight against America’s presence in so many conflicts around the world.

If our leaders cannot understand the arguments against our current policies based on the Constitutional and moral principles, they ought to at least be willing to pay attention to the impracticality of a policy that almost always seems to backfire, is always very expensive, and is always detrimental to our national defense.

Someday out of necessity we will be forced to consider a policy that the Founders advocated. Friendship with all nations, peace, commerce, and avoidance of all entangling alliances while staying out of the internal affairs of other nations. Unless something miraculous happens, I fear that this will not be accomplished until we are forced to come to our knees in the midst of a colossal bankruptcy.

https://www.facebook.com/ronpaul/posts/10153798681616686:0

O.K., so we learn to live with Iran on the edge of a bomb, but shouldn’t we at least bomb the Islamic State to smithereens and help destroy this head-chopping menace? Now I despise ISIS as much as anyone, but let me just toss out a different question: Should we be arming ISIS? Or let me ask that differently: Why are we, for the third time since 9/11, fighting a war on behalf of Iran?

In 2002, we destroyed Iran’s main Sunni foe in Afghanistan (the Taliban regime). In 2003, we destroyed Iran’s main Sunni foe in the Arab world (Saddam Hussein). But because we failed to erect a self-sustaining pluralistic order, which could have been a durable counterbalance to Iran, we created a vacuum in both Iraq and the wider Sunni Arab world. That is why Tehran’s proxies now indirectly dominate four Arab capitals: Beirut, Damascus, Sana and Baghdad.

ISIS, with all its awfulness, emerged as the homegrown Sunni Arab response to this crushing defeat of Sunni Arabism — mixing old pro-Saddam Baathists with medieval Sunni religious fanatics with a collection of ideologues, misfits and adventure-seekers from around the Sunni Muslim world. Obviously, I abhor ISIS and don’t want to see it spread or take over Iraq. I simply raise this question rhetorically because no one else is: Why is it in our interest to destroy the last Sunni bulwark to a total Iranian takeover of Iraq? Because the Shiite militias now leading the fight against ISIS will rule better? Really?

More..http://digbysblog.blogspot.de/2015/03/objectively-pro-isis.html