Paris Attacks: Are we reaping what we sow?

Even as the French and other European authorities continue to track down all the perpetrators of the Paris atrocities, there is a question few seem to want to confront until now: Are we reaping what we sow?

It's a difficult question not least because conflation between the barbarism that occurred in Paris, to the US, French and Russian bombing in Syria is often characterised as 'wooly liberal politics, or an 'apologist for extremism'.

But now a group of senior military personnel have dared to break cover and write an open letter to President Barack Obama calling for a rethink of a military strategy that they say has "fuelled the feelings of hatred that ignited terrorism and groups like Isis, while also serving as a fundamental recruitment tool similar to Guantánamo Bay".

They also argue the killing of innocent civilians in drone airstrikes has acted as one of the most "devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the world".

Closer to home the Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, has found himself being absolutely pilloried by all sides of the political divide for merely suggesting that past interventions had "unleashed" terrorist forces, making the current situation one "we have created".

So is there any truth in Corbyn's and the US military personnel's words?

Some greater understanding of what is occurring in the name of the West, particularly the US, but also including in part France, and to a lesser extent the UK can be gleaned from the brilliant documentary film 'Dirty Wars'. This is a film made by investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill. 'Dirty Wars' documents a gripping often tragic journey into one of the most important and under-reported stories of our time.

A secretive and powerful US military unit know as Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) undertakes covert operations to "find, fix, and finish" their targets, who are selected through a secret process. No target is off limits for the "kill list," including U.S. citizens. No borders are respected in their reach which includes Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and now Syria.

Scahill first reported on a Drone attack in Afghanistan in which the US said it had struck the Taliban, but pictures on the ground saw 46 dead bodies of women, some pregnant, children, and old men, but no militants.  The Human Rights group Reprieve have calculated that of the 47 militants killed by Drones over the past year, but  at least another 1400 civilians have been killed. Sadly we don't even have the number of those injured.

With no Western troops on the ground - that we know - again the preferred weapon of choice is the 'play station' drone bombing that has contributed to 250,000 individuals dead in Syria and more than 2 million people displaced across the region, and increasingly heading towards Europe.

France is one of the few European countries who have supported the US in the air strikes in Syria, long before they declared war on ISIS this past weekend.

President Assad, no doubt a brutal leader, but one, who in recent times has always had ISIS as his enemy, stated shortly after the Parisian attacks that:
"Wrong [policies] adopted by Western states, particularly France, toward events in the region and its ignorance of the support of a number of its allies to terrorists are reasons behind the expansion of terrorism."

America's 'Dirty Wars', that have embroiled many other EU countries, has now become clear, giving the extremists a strong narrative that the, 'West kill more innocent people than they do their so-called 'enemy targets'.

In the past this news and proof of it would often go no further than the locality in which it was perpetrated, but now with social media there is a parallel news agenda in which young Muslims, and anyone else across the world can see the deeds of those  'surgical strikes'.

We know that ISIS are all over social media with their poisoned ideology looking to recruit impressionable minds, using the mountain of evidence rarely shown, much less discussed in mainstream news outlets of the innocent civilians, killed, maimed and slaughtered.

In the film 'Dirty War's', an extremist US preacher is killed during a Drone attack, but some weeks later his completely innocent 15 year old son and his friends are targeted in a separate attack killing them all instantly.

For some it might be too crude to state we're reaping what we sow, but we'd be naive to think that these actions that are occurring in Paris, Sharm el Sheik, and Tunisia are in isolation. And the more extra-judicial killings with zero accountability, coupled with the mountainous body count of civilians killed, leaves us wide open to be labelled by our ideological enemies 'wicked and evil'.

'Dirty Wars' can be seen on Netflix and Youtube. It's a good entry point for greater understanding of this.

Simon Woolley