ISIS AND THE IMPLOSION OF IRAQ: AN INDICTMENT TO AMERICAN UNILATERALISM.
"Al Qaeda's trainers are proving the truth of bin Laden's late mentor Shaykh Abdullah Azzam's assertion that the Koran and the AK-47, together, yield the levels of lethality needed for Islam to triumph."- Michael Scheuer "ANONYMOUS", Imperial Hubris - Why the West Is Losing The War on Terror, 2005, page 76.
INTRODUCTION
I use three prisms through which I see the precipitious tumble of the Middle East's Levant region into Dante's Inferno of bloody and murderous terrorism.
The first one is a personal prism.
The first diplomatic tour of duty of the western Middle East (or otherwise known as Levant), including Iraq under Saddam Hussein, I undertook happened in September 2000, not long after I was promoted to the position of Director for the Levant in the then South African Department of Foreign Affairs, now the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO).