William Van Wagenen | The Libertarian Institute

The Role of UK Intelligence Services in the Abduction, Murder of James Foley

by William Van Wagenen | Nov 28, 2022 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

On 19 August, 2014, ISIS released a video of the beheading of American journalist James Foley who was kidnapped by the terrorist organization in 2012 while reporting on the conflict in Syria. Foley’s shocking execution became one of the most widely followed news stories of the Syrian war. Foley’s killer, Mohammed Emwazi, popularly known as “Jihadi John” by the western media, was a Kuwaiti-born Brit from West London. In the Foley execution video, Emwazi’s unmistakable London accent can be heard. [video width="1280" height="720"...

Revisiting the Fall of Mosul: Who Was to Blame?

by William Van Wagenen | Nov 18, 2022 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

On June 5, 2014, hundreds of ISIS militants launched a lightning assault on Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. As a result of the mass surrender and desertion of the Iraqi forces, ISIS took full control of the city on June 10, just 5 days later. The group looted banks, freed prisoners, and captured significant amounts of U.S.-supplied military equipment in the process. But how did Mosul fall so easily? Why did four divisions of the Iraqi army, some 50,000 soldiers, withdraw without a fight in the face of just hundreds of ISIS militants attacking the city? The conventional view argues that...

Saad Hariri and the Collapse of Lebanon

by William Van Wagenen | Sep 12, 2022 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

In 2005, U.S. neoconservatives centered around then-Vice President Dick Cheney’s office began collaborating with Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, defected former Syrian Vice President Abd Al-Halim Khaddam, and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood to topple the Syrian government. Washington did so as part of an effort to topple the governments of seven countries in five years, including Libya and Iran, using the so-called ‘War on Terror’ as a pretext. However another crucial, though overlooked collaborator in the regime change effort was pro-Saudi Lebanese politician Saad Hariri. And his actions...

For 18 Months, as ISIS Advanced, the U.S. Did Nothing to Stop Them

by William Van Wagenen | Sep 2, 2022 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

In 2017, U.S. and allied Kurdish forces bombarded the city of Raqqa, the bastion of ISIS in Syria and the de-facto capital of the terror group’s self-proclaimed caliphate. Concurrent to this, U.S. forces conducted massive air strikes on the Iraqi city of Mosul, to support Iraqi and Kurdish ground forces against ISIS there too. But the U.S.-led campaigns in Mosul and Raqqa falsely suggest that the U.S. and ISIS were implacable enemies. These battles created the perception that the U.S. was committed to fighting Al-Qaeda and its various splinter groups, in a continuation of the so-called “War...

Did the Syrian Revolution Have Popular Support?

by William Van Wagenen | Aug 3, 2022 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

In the mainstream view, the armed groups fighting the Syrian government since 2011, collectively known as the Free Syrian Army (FSA), were part of a Syrian revolution that represented the Syrian people. At the same time, the Syrian government, or Assad regime, allegedly represented only a small number of loyalists, in particular from President Assad’s minority Alawite community. Such a view undergirded demands by Western and Gulf-funded think tank scholars, who claimed that the Syrian people wished for FSA groups to be armed, and even for Western military intervention on behalf of the FSA,...

‘Sarin Doesn’t Slice Throats’: The 2013 Ghouta Massacre Revisited

by William Van Wagenen | Jun 14, 2022 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

"Germ and chemical weapons may often be weak in their battlefield applications but they are always strong in their emotiveness. Accusations of association with them have for centuries, even millennia, been used by well-intentioned as well as unscrupulous people to vilify enemies and to calumniate rivals. Can onlookers protect themselves against the possibility of such assaults upon their common sense today?"- Julian Perry Robinson On the morning of August 21, 2013, a flurry of videos appeared on social media alleging to show the aftermath of a mass chemical attack in Syria. The Obama...

Ambassador Ford Lied About Giving TOW Missiles to Al-Qaeda in Syria

by William Van Wagenen | Jun 1, 2022 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

In September 2017, U.S. official Brett McGurk expressed concern that Syria’s northwest Idlib province had become “the largest Al Qaeda safe haven since 9/11.” Idlib had fallen to al-Qaeda, in the form of a jihadist coalition led by the group’s Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front, in March 2015. Despite acknowledging that Idlib, the last bastion of the supposedly democratic and secular Syrian opposition, was dominated by al-Qaeda, McGurk failed to also note that U.S. planners themselves had played a key role in the terror group’s successful capture of the province. Specifically, he failed to...

The Salafist Roots of the Free Syrian Army

by William Van Wagenen | Feb 28, 2022 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

“At the same time, we see that there is almost no difference between the group called Free Syrian Army or other jihadist groups and ISIS. For instance, these ‘moderate’ opposition groups burned the churches down, when they entered Kessab. They entered Malula, where there is still an ancient Christian community speaking Aramaic. They destroyed that place too. There are many other examples like these.” - Harout Ekmanian In the Western press, the Free Syrian Army (FSA) was viewed as a moderate, secular, rebel force fighting to topple the Syrian government and to establish a democratic state in...