The CIA’s Cloddish ISIS Attack on Duterte
By F. William Engdahl
30 May 2017
The only word I find for it is cloddish. I refer to the latest CIA-instigated attempt to initiate regime change against outspoken Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. The so-called ISIS terror attack in the minerals-rich southern Philippines island of Mindanao, a predominately Muslim part of the mostly Christian nation of 100 million people, took place literally in the midst of President Duterte’s talks in Moscow with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Duterte Putin talks in turn followed Duterte’s attendance in Beijing on May 15 for the first New Silk Road or Belt Road Forum. America’s colonial asset since 1898 was clearly walking away from the Washington “reservation” .
The terrorist siege in Marawi City is blatantly a desperate Washington try to topple the very popular (80% popularity in polls) Duterte, who successfully won the Presidency last June over a US-backed Mar Roxas, a US-educated former Wall Street banker. Since taking office Duterte has made bold and quite courageous steps to steer the former US Colony towards a Eurasian alliance with China and Russia as his major supporters. In Beijing in October last year, Duterte met China’s Xi Jinping and signed numerous trade deals with China. Critically, taking an opposite policy to his pro-US predecessor Benigno Aquino III, Duterte agreed to resolve the South China Sea dispute between Philippines and China through peaceful diplomatic talks, and to as he put it, “seek a separation from the United States.”
Since then Duterte has sought closer ties with Russia as well, in a further effort to bring his nation out from under the yoke of a de facto US control. This does not sit well with the circles of the so-called Deep State in Washington –the CIA and their nefarious friends. Should the US lose the Philippines, it would pose a devastating strategic geopolitical loss to the US military containment strategy against China and Russia in the Pacific. Devastating.
The recent attacks and siege in Mindanao were nominally done by the terrorist Maute gang and Abu Sayyaf criminal terrorist organizations, both nominally tied to the US-created ISIS fake Islamist operation, a CIA terrorist project created with Saudi money going back to the CIA’s Osama Bin Laden Al Qaeda Mujahideen Operation Cyclone during the 1980’s against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Duterte’s Eurasian Pivot
It comes as no surprise to anyone closely following the evolving dialogues between Duterte and the leaders of China and now, Russia that the CIA would try to destabilize Duterte at this critical time. They simply hide behind the black skirts of their psychopathic drug-running Maute and Abu Sayyaf, both now tied to the CIA and Mossad-created and Saudi-financed ISIS.
In Moscow, despite having to cut short his talks with Putin to fly back home and deal with the terrorist crisis in Mindanao, the Philippine leader and his Secretaries of Defense and Foreign Affairs managed to sign a number of critical agreements with Russia. These included 10 major agreements aimed at deepening bilateral defense, strategic and economic relations. The two countries signed an Agreement on Defense Cooperation, a legal framework for military-to-military exchanges, training, intelligence-sharing. The Philippines and Russia also signed an intelligence exchange agreement to bolster counter-terror cooperation. That does not please Washington at all.
A ‘Country Bumpkin’ Not
Western mainstream media has delighted in portraying the 71-year-old veteran politician Duterte as a crude country bumpkin, a lower-than-peasant creature who is only capable of vulgar statements, such as when shortly after his inauguration he called the US Ambassador to Manila a ”gay son of a bitch“ for criticizing Duterte’s war on drug lords and dealers plaguing the country. Whether Duterte was factually correct, he clearly won sympathy of millions of his countrymen for having the courage to stand up against the American power.
After closely watching Duterte and his choice of close advisers now for almost a year, I’ve come to the conclusion a country bumpkin Duterte is definitely not. Rather, he is a shrewd political actor who is determined to bring his country out of the colonial servitude status it has held since the first Spanish colonialization in 1565.
Duterte is the first Mindanaoan to hold the Presidential office. Ethnically he is of Visayan descent. This fact is not irrelevant. The Visayans in Mindanao and other Philippine islands led a war for independence against Spanish occupation in 1896.
The United States, posing as the supporter of the Visayan-led war of independence from Spain, betrayed the trust assured the Philippines, double-crossed them and signed a Treaty with Spain, the Treaty of Paris of 1898, under which Spain ceded Cuba and The Philippines to the United States. The USA refused to recognize the independence of their erstwhile ally, the Philippines, and took the country by military force, America’s first genuine imperial grab. The nascent First Philippine Republic then formally declared war against the United States in 1899, unsuccessfully. It was put under US military control. It took until 1946 before the country could be recognized as an independent sovereign state, at least in name.
That historical heritage of Duterte as a Visayan clearly is a living fact for Duterte. He graduated Philippines University and earned a degree in law in 1972. As a lawyer, he was prosecutor in Davao City in Mindanao and later Mayor, one of the longest-serving mayors of the Philippines with seven terms over 22 years. As Mayor, Duterte passed the city’s Women Development Code, the only such code in the country. Its aim is “to uphold the rights of women and the belief in their worth and dignity as human beings.” He pushed for the Magna Carta for Women in Davao, a comprehensive women’s human rights law that seeks to eliminate discrimination against women. As President he has made a domestic focus on poverty reduction.
There is clearly more to the man than lurid western media reports reveal. Now this very popular President is determined to make his country a sovereign nation able to choose with whom it allies and for what ends, and how its economy develops. This is why the CIA and its fake Jihadist networks are being jacked up to try to get rid of Rodrigo Duterte.
ISIS: Bloody Pawprints of CIA and Mossad
The networks of the US Deep State, primarily the CIA have chosen their favorite cover, the otherwise laughable deception of head-choppers calling itself the Islamic State or ISIS or ISIL or DAESH (CIA central casting seems to have trouble settling on a name). In reality IS, or the groups that spring up conveniently in Syria, in Iraq, in Chechnya–wherever the CIA decides it needs a terror hit squad–are trained mercenary killers, trained variously by CIA or Pentagon Special Forces; by Pakistani ISI intelligence, at least formerly, or by Mossad, also known as Israeli Secret intelligence Service, or by MI-6. In the Philippines, the IS alleged affiliates, especially the Maute group that has laid siege to Marawi City, are little more than a criminal band that finances itself by terror, occasional beheading to exert ransom in a protection racket, recruiting child fighters. Recently the networks of the CIA have been pouring in their foreign mercenaries from Syria, Libya and other places to beef up Maute’s gang for the attack on Duterte’s rule, portraying it as a religious-based “liberation struggle.”
ISIS came out of the CIA’s Al Qaeda franchise called Al Qaeda in Iraq. In 2010 its name was changed to ISIS. Then as Israeli journalists pointed out the embarrassing fact that the English acronym for the Hebrew spelling of Mossad was ISIS (Israeli Secret Intelligence Services abruptly they decided to call their band of mercenaries with their black flags and US M16 assault rifles, IS for Islamic State. Conveniently in Syria they control the very territory where competing Qatari and Iran gas pipelines to the Mediterranean would run. Curiously, despite the fact they are active in the Golan Heights where Israel has its eye on stealing a huge amount of newly-discovered Syrian oil, they have never attacked Israel. The one time an accidental hit on an Israeli target took place, IS apologized…Do real head-choppers ever apologize?
When the fake CIA Sarin gas attack in Ghouta in 2013 failed to get a UN mandate for all-out war to depose Bashar al Assad–Obama’s infamous “red line”–the NATO and NATO-linked networks created the monster they now call IS in 2014.
Today the CIA uses IS as the cover to justify keeping US forces in Iraq after the government asked them to leave; a cover to bomb Syria in order to topple Assad, something Russian presence has made embarrassingly difficult since September, 2015. And they use it to recruit thousands of young psycho recruits from over the Muslim work, train them and send them back to places like Chechnya in Russia or Xinjiang in China, or Balochistan Province in Pakistan where the Chinese have built a new deep water port at Gwadar on the Arabian Sea near Iran, the heart of its $46 billion China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a strategic part of its One Belt, One Road Eurasian infrastructure project.
Now the West’s favorite terrorist mercenaries are being told to take down Duterte in the Philippines. They probably are too late and have badly underestimated their adversaries. But then with the deterioration over recent decades in the quality of American university education, the current generation of strategists at Langley likely missed the basic course in Sun Tzu’s the Art of War, especially the part that cautions generals who wish to be victorious to “know yourself and know your enemy,” something that Duterte seems to have thought about. How the IS destabilization try in the Philippines unfolds in coming weeks may well determine a major turning point towards creation of the emerging China-Russia-centered Eurasian Century.
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”