JEAN BRICMONT, jean. bricmont at uclouvain.be, @ JeanBricmont

Bricmont is based in Brussels and is now in Paris. He is author of Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War. He is also a mathematical and statistical physicist at the University of Louvain, and the co-author of Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science [PDF].

He said today: “The Western governments used these violent Islamist forces for their purposes, to destabilize the Syrian and Libyan governments, largely because they did not like those government who had not attacked us in any way. Now, the people of the West are directly facing some of the consequences of these actions which are negative to them. It’s the same pattern as what happened in Afghanistan when the West used the Mujaheddin against the Soviet Union, leading to the 9/11 attacks.

“Now, much of the establishment in the West are adamant in their denunciations of the Syrian government, Hezbollah and Iran, which form a block against these violent jihadists. But, again the U.S. and Western Europe will not work with them because they are opposed to what Israel is doing. If the U.S. and Western Europe actually want to change this situation, they must seriously re-examine their government’s constant bombings and interventions in the Mideast and backing of Israeli policies no matter how aggressive or oppressive.” He appeared today on RT International.

See Bricmont’s pieces and interviews on CounterPunch: “How Humanitarian Imperialism Led to Europe’s Refugee Crisis,” “The Wishful Thinking Left,” and with The Real News: “War Mongers Join Forces in Syria, But Can They Defeat ISIS?“