US needs ISIL threat to advance its agenda in Iraq and Syria

An American peace activist says the United States probably wants to maintain the threat of the ISIL terrorist group both in Iraq and Syria to advance its interventionist agenda in the Middle East.

“At the two-day NATO summit in Newport, which concluded yesterday, US President Barack Obama reversed course eventually,” Rick Rozoff, manager of the Stop NATO International Network, told Press TV on Saturday.

“And whereas few days earlier he stated that in fact the US doesn’t have an effective strategy for combating the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), now [he] stated that he was working with North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies to develop just such a strategy. So it appears on the surface to be a 180-degree reversal of what he has said earlier,” he said, using an alternate acronym for the terrorist group.

Rozoff said Obama was probably telling the truth when he said that “he has no practical strategy for fighting ISIS.” “I think that was probably an honest assessment.”

“We have reasons to believe, however, that ending the ISIS threat may not be entirely the US’s strategy either, that’s the extremist effort in Iraq and Syria seems to serve US purposes quite effectively,” he stated. “It’s already been the effective cause of the downfall of the Maliki government in Iraq which we know that the US wanted to replace [and] has now succeeded in effecting.”