Not to be outdone in #hyperbole, Attorney-General George Brandis declared IS to be an “existential threat to us”. Prime Minister #Tony_Abbott said the dangers were “unprecedented”. Foreign Minister #Julie_Bishop claimed these particular Islamists were:
“… the most significant threat to the global rules-based order to emerge in the past 70 years – and included in my considerations is the rise of communism and the Cold War.”
This was an extraordinary suggestion. But Bishop’s speech was apparently insufficient to mobilise public fear about the scale of the threat the nation suddenly faced. It wasn’t long before she invoked the spectre of IS terrorists with weapons of mass destruction – chemical weapons and dirty uranium bombs – again, as in 2003, without producing any evidence for such claims.
In a recent speech, Bishop also explained IS’s origins. But missing entirely from her analysis was an acknowledgement that the West’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, and its subsequent occupation, had any role in fomenting the conditions that gave rise to IS.
Omitted too from Bishop’s account were the financial contributions of Saudi, Kuwaiti and Qatari elites to their Sunni co-religionists, presumably because they are now posing as the West’s allies in this latest Babylonian struggle. Turkey’s porous border, across which oil, arms and militants freely flow into IS-held territory, also fails to gain a mention.
Instead, it is the democratic uprisings in North Africa and the Persian Gulf in 2010 and 2011 that produced fertile conditions for IS’s rise. According to Bishop:
“The Arab Spring for all its potential as an example of grass roots democracy movements rising up against authoritarian regimes, in fact left behind chaos and instability – creating a breeding ground for terrorist cells. One of the most brutal was al-Qaeda in Iraq under the ruthless leadership of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was among the first to use beheadings as a tool of terror. ”
Bishop did not explain the mystery of who al-Zarqawi was actually fighting in Iraq, presumably because the illegal invasion and occupation by Western military forces remains taboo. It cannot be easy delivering a major speech on the war against IS without mentioning what was happening in the country between 2003 and 2011. Or how so many former members of Saddam Hussein’s army ended up fighting for IS.
However dubious her historical narrative, Bishop’s invocation of the Arab Spring is nevertheless a perspicacious lens through which to examine the relationship between the West and radical Islam. It reveals a very different history to the one framed by official orthodoxy. It tells us a good deal more about the main currents of contemporary US foreign policy than the moral panic that currently prevails.
