Imran Khan’s Comment about the Non-Existence of a Group that Calls itself Khorasan — American Lemmings Off to War

02 October 2014

Lemmings flogged to frenzy

We Americans indulge our affection for war by attacking anything that scares our evidently tiny brains. This time it’s ISIL and Khorasan.

What is darkly amusing is that Khorasan doesn’t even exist in a meaningfully separate way. Government just made the term up, probably for reasons of agency convenience. The media then used it to whip the public’s war-embracing bent.

The name’s Japanese-like ring connotes fearsomely dark and uncapturable ninjas, cavorting around the landscape, wreaking havoc against small children and chaste Christian decency.

The alleged basics from CNN:

Among the targets of U.S. strikes across Syria early Tuesday was the Khorasan Group -- a collection of senior al Qaeda members who have moved into Syria.

President Obama called them "seasoned al Qaeda operatives."

The group was actively plotting against a U.S. homeland target and Western targets, a senior U.S. official told CNN on Tuesday. The United States hoped to surprise the group by mixing strikes against it with strikes against ISIS targets.

The official said the group posed an "imminent" threat. Another U.S. official later said the threat was not imminent in the sense that there were no known targets or attacks expected in the next few weeks.

The plots were believed to be in an advanced stage, the second U.S. official said.

A glimpse of reality from Mother Jones:

Khorasan, according to press reports, has about 50 jihadist fighters, mostly from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Quasi-hysteria from CBS News:

Sources confirm that the al Qaeda cell goes by the name "Khorasan."

Unlike ISIS, which is believed at present to be largely engulfed in its fight for territory, Khorasan is developing fresh plots to target U.S. aviation, and it's trying to recruit Westerners who have flocked to the fight in Syria, some of whom have joined the al Qaeda franchise in the country, known as the al-Nusra Front.

Sources tell CBS News the group includes technicians trained by al Qaeda's master bomb-builder, Ibrahim al-Asiri. The Yemen-based Asiri built the infamous but ultimately unsuccessful underwear bombs and two cargo bombs concealed in printer cartridges.

At the moment, U.S. officials say there is no specific, credible threat to the homeland. But as information about Khorasan becomes available, it's clear that al Qaeda remains obsessed with bombs, airplanes, and attacking the United States.

The fear is that U.S. and European passport holders could more easily smuggle explosives onto airplanes.

A thoughtful assessment from Imran Khan:

A few days ago I began to see news reports quoting US ‎military and government officials talking up a group called Khorasan.

This piqued my interest. In 14 years of covering this region this was a new name for me. Then the reports began to paint them as a shadowy super group of hardcore terrorists that are experimenting with technology and new, ever more fiendish ways of attacking civilians in the US.

Khorasan is almost certainly a term that the US government has coined. It's suitably exotic.

Geographically [see here], it's a historical region in the north east of Iran and includes Afghanistan and what is now Pakistan. This tallies with what I've been ‎told by my sources, and who the Americans claim, make up the group: a hardcore of former al-Qeada fighters who come from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran.

Khorasan doesn't have a flag, it doesn't have a media operation, or a brand name which people recognise. In short, it doesn't have the things that ISIL and other groups ‎have, that turn them into a rallying call for others.

It's classic self-fulfilling prophecy theory. Call something a problem and eventually it will become a problem.

Boiled down

There is nothing new in the thought that extremists, Americans included, will target American planes. And, as the quoted officials admit, Khorasan does not currently pose a credible threat to the homeland.

In other words, the Khorasan hype is propagandized bullshit. As is the allegedly similar imminency of the ISIL threat.

What is true (or not) seems not to matter to us

Americans, generally, don’t know “squat” about world affairs. And our leaders are not much more informed. Yet, we routinely believe leadership’s usually inaccurate and frequently silly pronouncements.

The President admitted — to Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes (28 September 2014) — that we did not know about the threat that ISIL allegedly poses, until after the alleged menace had taken over large expanses of Iraq. The Commander in Chief also said that we did not know that Iraq’s American-created army was worthless. Despite the fact that we trained and presumably have been watching it.

In spite of this self-confessed record of surprising incompetence, the Administration now wants us to think that our intelligence services know something both genuine and menacing about a formerly invisible and exceedingly low-numbered Khorasan group. And, further, that the Administration’s perspective about ISIL is also accurate, despite the fact that up until a few weeks ago it was not.

Note

In fairness to the intelligence community, I suspect that the President was intentionally misleading about those agencies’ purported ignorance. Not everyone looking out for our American wellbeing is an idiot.

The moral? — Political demagoguery rides the giant lemming called America

We the People should be embarrassed to think that we regularly succumb to this comic book nonsense.

I am not saying that there are not threats out there. Just that militaristically overreacting to them, the way we do year after year, is a bad idea. If we leave morality aside, it is also undignified. We repetitively behave like a bunch of shrilling Pansy Ninnies.

Unfortunately, there appear to be no currently operating geopolitical mechanisms that might make the world’s only superpower cowboy up into rationality. We seem destined to follow the Roman Empire’s decline into the moral and economic decadence. And we appear to be determined to spread our brand of deadly destruction around the planet, until we sink beneath Time’s waves.

It looks as if we are en route to proving that Chairman Mao was correct in predicting the ultimate fate of “imperialists and their running dogs”.

See Marxists.org, Quotations from Mao tse Tung, Chapter 5: War and Peace (quoting "On the Chungking Negotiations" (October 17, 1945), Selected Works, Vol. IV. p. 59)

I had hoped that that our centuries old democratic experiment would fare better, as a model for others to emulate. Instead, our adversaries have a more accurate picture of our self-destructive dysfunctions than we do. So much for America’s understanding of the spirit of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.

Perhaps it takes facile minds to grasp the book’s applicable principles. On the spectrum of subtle understanding and geopolitical nuances, Americans are (generally) not even on Cognition’s Map.

Our pretend democracy is being out-Sun-Tzu’ed on a daily basis. You can predict how this is eventually going to wind up.

PeteFree.com

Imran Khan’s Comment about the Non-Existence of a Group that Calls itself Khorasan — American Lemmings Off to War