"Our rulers, aided by much of the media, are softening us up to accept more US and western intervention in the Middle East with various atrocity stories creating hysteria and fear. No doubt the atrocities are real—the beheading of US journalist James Foley is obviously appalling and must be condemned, as must the slaughter and expulsion of unarmed civilians in Iraq—but these stories are selectively presented to demonise the USA’s current enemies while ignoring equally brutal atrocities from their friends.

"America’s ally, Saudi Arabia, regularly beheads people. It beheaded 19 people in the first half of August 2014 and in January 2013 beheaded a seventeen year old Sri Lankan servant girl. Being beheaded or dismembered by bombs dropped from 30,000 feet, as so many Iraqis and, more recently, the people of Gaza have suffered, is no less inhumane."

The Record of Western Policy
"Something else our rulers and much of the media fail to explain is the background to the sudden rise of the Islamic State Forces (ISF, formerly ISIS). We are supposed not to know that the US and its allies such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia funded and helped them in order to fight Syrian president Assad. Now, because they are threatened by the growing power of the ISF, they turn even to that ‘evil entity’ Iran for assistance, and they also look likely to side with Assad whom only last year they were threatening to bomb.

"If we look at whom the US and the West has supported and whom it has attacked in the region, it is clear there is no moral or political principle involved. In the 1980s the US backed Saddam Hussein against Iran in the Iran Iraq war. Then in the 1990s and in 2003 Saddam became the main enemy, and more recently, Iran has been top of the hit list. In the 1980s the US helped foster the Mujahidin in Afghanistan against the Russian occupation and then in 2001 invaded Afghanistan to try to destroy the Taliban who emerged from the Mujahidin. At first the West denounced Gadaffi in Libya, then cut a deal with him and befriended him. Finally, in the midst of a popular revolt, they intervened to kill him and try to take control of the country.

"After the emergence of the ISF America started to complain that the Maliki government in Iraq was too ‘sectarian’, i.e. too exclusively Shiite, but previously they supported Maliki and encouraged his sectarianism to undermine Iraqi national resistance to the US occupation. Originally the US and Israel aided Hamas as a counterweight to the ‘terrorists’ of the PLO. Now they condemn Hamas.

"The only consistency in all this is that western imperialism cynically practices ‘divide-and-rule’ and backs whichever dictatorship or reactionary movement will help maintain its control of the region. And with each intervention and each manoeuvre it succeeds only in killing more people, creating more bitterness and more sectarian division, and making a bad situation worse for the ordinary people of the Middle East.

"Western Governments also of course back Israel’s war crimes against the people of Palestine. The US, Britain and other western powers display total hypocrisy and duplicity in expressing concern for Yazidis and Christian minorities compared to their lack of concern for the bombarded and besieged people of Gaza, who are suffering horrendous violence and destruction of infrastructure from the US-armed Israeli state."

The Irish Anti-War Movement calls for a different approach
"While expressing solidarity with the victims of war we condemn the logic of the military-industrial-complex and the struggle over the world’s resources which drives the west towards these futile, foreign policies that stoke sectarian tensions and create endless violence and perpetual war. We say that the US, the EU, and NATO have no right whatsoever to impose governments or ‘solutions’ on the Middle East. Humanitarian aid from the west is welcome, but there should be no more bombing, no more military intervention and no more wars.

"We urge the Irish Government to advocate this view and to stop its collaboration with US, NATO and EU imperialism by ending the military use of Shannon Airport, withdrawing Irish troops from NATO-controlled ISAF in Afghanistan, ending its support for Israel and by calling for freedom, justice and human rights for the people of Palestine."