ISIS Still USA

If you're asking did the US form, equip and train ISIS my answer is an emphatic no. Still, there are conspiracy theorists out there who might contend otherwise. But then there are some who believe 9/11 was a government plot. Ah well.

I do believe, however, that the US had a big hand in creating the conditions that enabled ISIS to emerge. This is a classic example of how to invoke the Law of Unintended Consequences.

When the US led Coalition drove Saddam from power they moved quickly to establish an interim civil government structure pending the formation of a permanent Iraqi political authority. They made several decisions that might have seemed right at the time but they backfired spectacularly. 

First they decided to purge the Ba'ath party from the government. Now under Saddam the Socialist Ba'ath party had been used by the minority Sunni Muslims as an instrument to extend their power throughout the regime.  Basically membership in the party was a prerequisite for holding coveted positions in the Iraqi civil service. 

Consequently, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA)  had eliminated the core of experienced senior bureaucrats, thus seriously undermining the continuity of vital services to the Iraqi people. Simultaneously, this move alienated the Sunnis, who were fearful that they would lose their privileged status and be subject to a Shiite dominated government.

The CPA committed another misstep as they tried to cobble together a new constitution and provisional Iraqi political authority. Here they attempted to insert into prominent positions a number of Iraqis who had been living in exile in the United States. By doing this they managed to alienate everyone, regardless of religious affiliation, who rejected these people as outsiders and American backed outsiders at that.

Third, they committed possibly the most fatal error by disbanding the Iraqi armed forces. Thousands of trained soldiers were tossed into the street with no employment prospects. By this time there were already a number of resistance  organizations forming. Among them was an organization calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). A solid number of the disbanded soldiers drifted into various largely Sunni factions, including the ISI. 

By about 2008-10, the resistance was in full swing  The ISI began to build momentum, extending into Syria as well. With a little arm twisting and plain bargaining some of the resistance groups folded into ISI which ultimately became ISIS. Their ranks were augmented by many former Ba'athists and by now very angry soldiers.

In summary, the US and their Coalition partners created a lot of resentment and open anger among the Sunni population by some well intended but ultimately unfortunate decisions. As I said at the beginning, they invoked the often fatal Law of Unintended Consequences that contributed to the rise of ISIS.  

Now history is always 20/20 and it's easy to cast aspersions upon the US. Yet the CPA was in a bind and had to make some hard judgements on the ground. They might have foreseen the downstream consequences but they were, after all, only human. Now we have to live with the consequences.

This was when AQI re-emerged as ISIL, finding a foothold among the disenfranchised Sunni population while simultaneously growing in the eastern part of Syria while Syrian security forces were busy putting down their insurrection.

To review:

ISIL was born Jama'at al Tawhid to collapse the Jordanian government sometime before 1999.

Jama'at al Tawhid existed in Iraq before the US invaded.

Jama'at al Tawhid became AQI during the US occupation but focused mainly on oppressing the Sunni population and exterminating the Shi'a population.

AQI was effectively eliminated by 2008.A number of different nations were instrumental in the creation of the political vacuum that allowed groups like ISIS to establish a fixed presence in the region. If one were to look at the past two decades objectively, one cannot deny that the US - among others - were a major factor in the formation of ISIS. They didn't do this deliberately, though; it's simply one of a number of unintended consequences.

While there are quite a few answers that go into details how the U.S. foreign policies in the Middle East in the last 15–20 years contributed, I think the cornerstone was laid by the UK and the USA in the 50ies of the last century.

Iran, a very influential country in the region, had a democratically elected government. It got there through its own efforts, the first country like that in the Middle East. (Israel didn’t quite get there through its own efforts…) And what did the UK and the USA do? Topple that pesky democratic government, to reinstate a monarch, of all things: 1953 Iranian coup d'état.

Now imagine the Middle East with a democratic Iran since 1953. I think it is safe to say that it would be different. Pretty much every country in the region is a dictatorship, in one way or another. They are in the middle of a century of revolutions, upheavals, and back in the 50ies, the revolutionary philosophy was somewhat leftish: “power to the people”. Where I come from, that’s a whole lot better than the revolutionary philosophy in that area during the last 30 years or so: fundamentalist Islam.

If we had given the democratic movements in the 50ies their space (and — heavens forbid — maybe even our support), there may not have been a wave of fundamentalist Islam. In my opinion, fundamentalist Islam is a result of the need to fight oppression. So, by fighting (and helping fight) democratic movements some 60 years ago, we laid one cornerstone for the rise of fundamentalist Islam.

We can devide ISIS into 3 groups

1. Top leaders: nobody from the public knows who they are. They represent 1 to 2 percent of ISIS. They are formed from iraqi (mainly Al Baath) and iranian secret services. There is a small penetration from western countries on this level
2. 2nd level leaders represent 5–7 percent: these are Khawarij. These are the controllers/leaders of ISIS troops. They are also penetrated from different secret services mainly Russians and Americans
3. Soldiers: theses are a group of misleaded people. They are either real ignorants or very young (under 19). These kind of people are easy to manipulate

Who created them? Point 1 will answer

However, such big thing could never be created without the green light of USA

If you go back 20 years in history, the exact same thing happened in Algeria

1. Military dictature oppressed te population to force the maximum number to join the rebellion
2. Government took thousands of people to prisons, tortured and killed thousands
3. One day, 4000 men miraculously escaped from a high security prison. They were a mix of authentic rebels and secret service agent who were being tortured so the story will work
4. These 4000 joined the rebellion, unified at that time
5. Few months later the rebellion split into 2, then 4, then X goups
6. The new X-1 goup started to make massacres killing thousand of civilians in the name of Islam
7. Government was oppressing civilians to keep the “shock doctrine” working
8. Civilians hated the original rebellion
9. The government “successfully” made peace treaty with all X-1 groups
10. These X-1 new groups collapsed
11. X-1 groups’ rebels started to surrender
12. X-1 groups’ rebels were surprised to see that their leaders, their most pious camarades, sitting in military bases, wearing military uniforms, smoking cigarettes and loughing at their faces. “You have been screwed, dude”

Egyptian government tried and still trying the same strategy, but it seems they understood Algeria lesson

Somehow similar story happened in Afganistan during Russian invasion

Another very similar story is happening in Libya

Syrian gov tried the same thing at the beginning of the rebellion, but people understood the Algerian lesson. Nobody carried weapons untill after 6–7 months when some official army officers split

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What are some of the biggest lies in history that are still being taught in modern day schools?

The idea that Columbus set out west from Spain to prove that the Earth wasn't flat (as everyone supposedly thought) and that he discovered the continent of North America.

Everyone at that time with any education knew the Earth was round. The Greeks had calculated the size of the Earth long before with a reasonable degree of accuracy. People doubted Columbus' expedition because, had the Americas not been there, he would have run out of supplies long before reaching Asia.

Columbus never set foot on the continent. He landed in what's today known as the Bahamas.

The Viking explorer Leif Ericson  had reached modern Canada 500 years earlier- there's a confirmed Viking camp at L'anse aux Meadows. Never mind that the native population already knew it was there.

Even worse is that Columbus is hailed as some sort of hero in the USA, when he was actually a fairly nasty piece of work. Like 

That the "Middle Ages" and the "Renaissance" existed in the sense that is commonly given to them.
To call someting barbaric "Medieval" is preposterous for example. Compared to the "modern world", it was an era of religious tolerance.

Just recently, I spoke to a friend who talked about how much farther we’ve come in terms of the human lifespan and said that the old men in any given city in America in the 19th century would be in their forties.

Many history teachers confuse the average for the whole variance. They deduced that the mean or median age in a particular period of time being forty, or fifty, meant that that was the actual lifespan of a given adult in a town.

The problem, of course, is child mortality. Ancient societies had very high rates of infants and young children dying due to disease, accidents, injuries, violence, famine, and other issues. Moreover, as a result of these issues, women in traditional societies frequently had to give birth many times, just to insure that any children would survive to adulthood (let alone enough children to insure the prosperity of the family). As a Live Science article summarizes,

Discussions about life expectancy often involve how it has improved over time. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, life expectancy for men in 1907 was 45.6 years; by 1957 it rose to 66.4; in 2007 it reached 75.5. Unlike the most recent increase in life expectancy(which was attributable largely to a decline in half of the leading causes of death including heart disease, homicide, and influenza), the increase in life expectancy between 1907 and 2007 was largely due to a decreasing infant mortality rate, which was 9.99 percent in 1907; 2.63 percent in 1957; and 0.68 percent in 2007.

But the inclusion of infant mortality rates in calculating life expectancy creates the mistaken impression that earlier generations died at a young age; Americans were not dying en masse at the age of 46 in 1907. The fact is that the maximum human lifespan — a concept often confused with "life expectancy" — has remained more or less the same for thousands of years. The idea that our ancestors routinely died young (say, at age 40) has no basis in scientific fact.

With those problems largely resolved, the average lifespan did indeed explode upwards, but not because people were living that much longer in terms of the maximum lifespan. If you go look at gravestones for the 18th and 19th centuries, you will see plenty of people in their seventies, eighties and nineties. And, of course, as societies industrialize and women get opportunities outside of the home, population growth tends to plummet, with most people choosing by preference to have only one or two children, leading to net zero or even negative population growth.

Is ongoing medical advance useless? Of course not. For one thing, I have no doubt that people will usefully begin living easily into the triple digits, with many reaching 120 to 140. For another, even if that doesn’t occur, what will occur is that quality of life will improve. Gerontological care may not have made the elderly life very much longer on average, but it sure as heck made that living less painful and more functional. And if we can resolve Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative disorders, we’ll make it so more and more elderly adults live their last decades on Earth completely in charge of their faculties.

I suspect that we’re probably at the point where we’re not going to see too much improvement in lifespans from mere social improvement. Yes, there are major inequalities that still remain, and we’re going to improve a lot on issues like pollution, lead contamination, heavy metals of all kinds, and so forth. But, barring global warming being truly insoluble, these efforts will plateau in the near future.

But the reality does remain that, historically, it was the death of children that kept societies’ average lifespan so abysmally low, and it took major collective social improvements, not just individualistic technological and medical care advances, to really see human care improve. And history teachers who indicate otherwise are unwittingly advancing a particular individualist, scientistic, pro-capitalist agenda.

A great example on the topic can be found in Lewontin’s analysis of tuberculosis, worth seeing in his review of Lewis’ book on TB. Noteworthily, even Lewis, who thinks that chemical treatments certainly had some effect, grants readily that “There is no doubt that major changes in our mortality from infectious disease in general have occurred over the past two centuries, long before the sulfonamides and penicillin, and it is quite likely that these benefits came along with improvements in the standard of living in the western world, perhaps by improved nutrition as he suggests, perhaps also because of better housing and sanitation and less crowding. We are rid of typhoid and cholera in this country largely because of modern plumbing”. I think Lewontin is making a point that is strong in order to drive home a more political point while Lewis is mostly agreeing but being less of a polemicist, and that’s essentially the state of medicine on this dispute. Many people engaged with this response as if the claim is controversial, but Blum’s model is fairly well-accepted and it puts medical care dead last as a causal driver of the development of a disease.

Some people came to the New England colonies seeking the religious freedom to discriminate and oppress anyone who did not share their religious views. Parts of two different colonies were founded by people driven out of Massachusetts Bay Colony because of the residents of Massachusetts Bay Colony wanting to exercise their religious freedom to hang people of differing religious views.
Roger Williams was driven out of Massachusetts Bay Colony for the "crime" of being a Baptist - and founded Rhode Island.
Some of my ancestors helped found Waterbury, Connecticut because they had been driven out of Massachusetts Bay Colony for the "crime" of being Quakers.

For those who refused to leave Boston or Massachusetts Bay Colony, their fate was different. Mary Dyer, was hanged on the Boston Common in 1660 for the "crime" of being a Quaker by people who came to the colonies for "religious freedom"

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