‘US, UK disgusted only when their enemies chop people’s heads off’

RT Interviews BSN Co-Editor Mike Raddie

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After ignoring beheadings by radical jihadists in Syria for years, as well as legal executions by their Middle Eastern allies, it’s a little hypocritical for Obama and Cameron to voice outrage at ISIS now, antiwar activist Michael Raddie told RT.

RT: What do you make of David Cameron’s response? Should he have said more?

Michael Raddie: There was a lot of untruth in what he said. One of the things he said was that the “UK was a peaceful nation” which is a completely ludicrous lie. But in terms of his response to the latest beheadings, if that’s what they were, he is being cautious at the moment but I think there is a real danger of huge mission creep here. The military, they are all saying they need boots on the ground to fight ISIS, or IS.

That’s already happened with the US. We know that there are US troops, US Special Forces in Iraq. But there is also the problem with UK Special Forces being in Syria. Obviously, that’ll be a full on invasion. So, not only is there still threats, and he basically said that everything is still on the table in terms of what could be done inside Syria; there are threats to invade Syria, threats to bomb Syria.

This is obviously not going to work. The attitude of the UK is predominantly and historically has been to collude with radical Islam. For more than 50 years Britain has colluded with all these groups. It seems to have backfired in their face at the moment, although even today people have been very sceptical about the authenticity of these beheading videos.

So, I am not sure what the plan is. I still think that deep down their aim is to get into Syria and to force a regime change and remove Assad from power. Obviously they can put in their own government, their own vassal puppet government, who would be more willing to allow control of resources, to allow Qatari natural gas pipelines through the region. It’s all deep geopolitics. The fundamental aim is still to remove Assad from the Syrian government.

RT: What’s the way out of this if it’s not a military solution?

MR: Even back to the coup in Iran in1953 – that was born out of Americans and British wanting to protect their own interest, interests of corporations, and their oil companies, that were nationalized when Prime Minister [Mohammad] Mosaddegh was elected into power.

So the British and Americans with collusion from the CIA, they rounded up all the local radicals in the area, and they formed a coup, there were riots in the streets. They were paid to riot effectively, to create the coup. Everyone in the British secret service and American CIA were involved in that coup. Obviously that meant the installation a pro-western friendly Shah government with all the terrible implications for the people of Iran.

An image grab taken from a video released by the Islamic State (IS) and identified by private terrorism monitor SITE Intelligence Group on September 13, 2014 purportedly shows British aid worker David Haines dressed in orange and on his knees in a desert landscape speaking to the camera before being beheaded by a masked militant (R). (AFP Photo)
An image grab taken from a video released by the Islamic State (IS) and identified by private terrorism monitor SITE Intelligence Group on September 13, 2014 purportedly shows British aid worker David Haines dressed in orange and on his knees in a desert landscape speaking to the camera before being beheaded by a masked militant (R). (AFP Photo)

That kind of playbook happened subsequent times. You just have to look at our allies in the region. Saudi Arabia, to which successive British governments have been quite happy to go over for arms deals and things like this. And it’s Saudi Arabia, who in terms of beheading people, they do far more beheadings than ISIS has ever done. But it seems that we are quite happy, we are not disgusted by Saudi Arabia when they chop people’s heads off, it’s only when our enemies do.

But this has been happing in Syria for three of four years now. And we were never disgusted or horrified, and it was never in the corporate media in the west when Syrian civilians or soldiers from the Syrian Arab army were being killed in this way. So it seems a little bit hypocritical for [Barack] Obama and [David] Cameron to start claiming that they are disgusted now, having financed these radical jihadists for two or three years in Syria.

RT: How do you think we can stop more hostages from being killed?

MR: There are countries like France which actually just paid the ransom vents. I don’t know whether that is necessarily the right thing to do, but obviously all the French hostages have been released. It’s unlikely that British and Americans will ever do that. That would set a wrong kind of precedent. But the obvious thing to do is to withdraw funding from all these jihadists. And the funding is obviously coming from countries, which is like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. But they’ve also been receiving arms and training from – the French admitted they’ve been arming the Syrian rebels. And the British have been training them and they’ve been supplying them with so-called non-lethal military equipment. This is been happening for three years now. So the first step would be to cut off the flow of these arms, and the training, and the support that the western governments are giving anti-Syrian forces. That would be number one.

And following that I think there is obviously a lots still to do in Iraq, in terms of stabilizing that country. I think one of the aims with the West in Iraq was to remove the [Nouri al-] Maliki government possibly because there was no formal agreement to allow US troops to stay in the country with immunity from prosecution. That is why Obama actually pulled the troops out. There wasn’t any genuine altruistic offer on his part. That was a cynical move to take the troops out only because they were not allowed any impunity of prosecution. That was Maliki’s decision early on, and his government. He had to go. Possibly for that reason, possibly for others.

The Kurdish region in the north, obviously they are doing deals with western companies already. They are already on side with the West. We don’t mind doing deal with those guys because we have good contracts. We are managing to extract oil very cheaply. So we are quite happy to deal with the Kurds, which is why the West, including the UK, is arming the Kurdish region in the hope that this would form another proxy war and we can rid our enemies by the Kurds.

But historically we’ve always let the Kurdish region down. The Kurdish people have been promised so much in the past and they have always been let down. And I don’t doubt that this would happen again as soon as the west has tied up all the contracts in the region. Then the Kurdish people would never win their autonomy and independence.

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