The day before the attacks in Paris, there were attacks with dozens of casualties in Beirut, the press barely mentioned it. What little they said implied an attack on Hezbollah because it's fighting against ISIS and other partners in Syria. Before that, there was the slaughter in Ankara, against a pro-Kurdish protest, which gained little coverage and was presented as retaliation for the struggle of Kurdish militias against ISIS. Even earlier, ISIS claimed shooting down a Russian plane, with 224 people on board, over the Sinai, a tragedy that Charlie Hebdo - 2 blocks away from Bataclan – considered a matter for jokes.

The tragic attacks of ISIS in Paris have the media attention they certainly deserve, but the media avoided referring to the French bombing of Libya, Iraq and Syria or the French intervention in Mali and Central Africa. There was media silence about French Government military, financial and diplomatic support to Islamists in their armed struggle against the secular government of Syria (http://es.awdnews.com/política/quand-hollande-avoue-explicitement-avoir-armé-l-etat-islamique) and tight-lipped silence about the big business with French weapons sold to Saudi Arabia and Qatar, recognized sponsors of ISIS.

It is striking how, when it comes to attacks by ISIS or other Islamic terrorists, there is no blame for the failures of political and administrative heads. They are never removed, let alone resign. It is surreal to see how they remain in their posts as heads of police and military intelligence and security in Mr. Hollande's government. It is that France is not directly engaged in combat operations against terrorists on several fronts? It is not an ally that does business with countries involved in wars in the Middle East? Those responsible for domestic security should have been quite alert and certainly have not done their duty. The leaders of the French police and military apparatus have shown deadly ineptitude and guilty negligence in the performance of their duties.

The same ineptitude also seems to afflict the United States when it comes to their anti-jihad military policy. Deputy Secretary of Defense Christine Wormuth and General Lloyd Austin III, head of the campaign that operates against the ISIS group, admitted before the Armed Services Committee of the Senate, that US Defense Department had spent US $ 500 million to produce 4 soldiers. With so many millions any normal country trains and equips two divisions. Defense Department actually trained 100 or 120, but when they were infiltrated into Syria from Turkey, they joined up, with arms and baggage, with Al-Nusra and ISIS, which are actually the same. In a normal country, the waste of 500 million would have caused the resignation of the Defense Secretary, but Ash Carter is still there. They should have also sacked him because during 14 months of US Air Force air strikes - without authorization from the Syrian government – the terrorists have kept on advancing. What the US bombing has destroyed is Syrian civilian infrastructure and that is mainly what forced Syrians to migrate in a wave of anguish that washes into European shores. But the United States is the indispensable and exceptional country, which is never wrong. Carter will continue there, with Ms. Wormuth and General Austin III. I wonder how it is that they know about the four remaining faithful and expensive warriors, perhaps because they are still on the payroll.

It is astonishing that no one on the Senate objected that training, equipping and paying soldiers to infiltrate a sovereign country for military purposes, is contrary to international law and the United Nations Charter (Article 2, paragraph 4;. Art. 39.). It is also contrary to the UN Charter to officially declare that the legitimate president of a country - in this case Syria - should resign and leave because so says the supposed "international community", read NATO.

The United States should recognize the reality and give up regime-change in Syria and the expensive promotion of civil wars, because in its economic situation it cannot afford those policies. The US has committed all kinds of crimes in Muslim countries, at enormous expense and with no other result than bloody chaos and to enrich the War Industry with trillions of public money.

Recently - in a televised interview - Dave Walker, former head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, said that when all of the US obligations not covered are taken into account, the US national debt is three times higher than those 18 trillion that are officially mentioned. According to him, the real debt is around US $ 65 trillion. [Catsimatidis in "The Cats Roundtable" New York]

The US $ debt of banks, only due to emission of derivatives, according to the International Clearing Bank – BCI – in Basel, is around 760 trillion. With a Gross World Product of 75 trillion in 2014, the entire world production is not enough to pay 10% of that debt.

Unemployment in the US, when taking into account all unemployed people - not just the last year’s registered jobseekers - is about 23% of the working age population. According to US statistics, half of all 25 year-olds are forced to live with their parents. The number of working-age Americans, who do not work, is 101 million, according to the US Bureau of Statistics. Those wasted $ 500 million would have been better spent on creating job opportunities and to repair the decayed physical and social infrastructure of the US, than invested in fighting ISIS & Cº. Let Syria, Iraq, Iran and Russia put an end to ISIS, Al Quaida, Al Nusra and the rest of the Salafists, because in just one month, they managed to do much more than the "anti-ISIS coalition of 40 countries" in two years.

Is ISIS a US proxy?

A question that remains in the air is whether the US really wants to smash ISIS, which is a direct descendant of the Al-Qaida terrorists that the CIA used in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya and perhaps elsewhere.

It is striking that Daesh or ISIS or the Islamic State - without warning or resistance – managed to fully capture and totally equip itself with American weapons and heavy equipment that belonged to two Iraqi divisions, stationed near Mosul.

It is curious that ISIS fighters are transported using thousands of Toyota pickups, made in Japan and taken to Syria or Iraq, armed with high-caliber machine guns or mortars, without the NATO intelligence network being aware of it at all.

It is difficult to explain how ISIS is equipped with TOW anti-tank equipment, which are the latest generation of American weapons against armored vehicles and were sold to Saudi Arabia, the most eminent sponsor of Wahhabism, which is the official religion of ISIS.

Notably, under 14 months of bombing, ISIS has continued to advance, coordinated with modern military communication equipment that does not grow in the desert sands. A suspicious hint was that the anti- ISIS coalition flights were suspended, just as ISIS forces and Al Nusra moved for a simultaneous attack to cut the supply road to the city of Aleppo. Aleppo power plant had also been destroyed, a few days before, by the US Air Force.

Iraqi army officers denounced the provision of supplies and weapons to ISIS troops by the US Air Force. They also reported US air raids – a damaging mistake - against attacking Iraqi troops during the siege of ISIS at Ramadi.

Putin showed at the G-20 meeting, in Turkey, photos of endless lines of ISIS trucks carrying oil into Turkey. The first question is how they managed to get there, unnoticed, those thousands of truck tankers. Faced by the veiled threat that the Russian Air Force would take care of the illegal traffic, on November 16, US planes conducted an attack that destroyed 116 trucks. The US government acknowledged being aware of that motorized ISIS oil trade, but claimed they had not attacked it to avoid civilian casualties (sic). Are those driving ISIS vehicles really common civilians? Then something unprecedented happened: being forced to perform some attack on the oil column, the US planes sprayed it with leaflets warning of the attack: war does not kill forewarned soldiers, says a Spanish proverb.

In my opinion, the primary US goal in Syria is not to attack ISIS, but to impose regime-change in Damascus and to fragment Syria into the bloody and chaotic tribal pattern sown in Libya.

A hot war?

Obama already announced sending special ground troops to Syria. First of all there is the question of the constitutionality of such a move. It is an act of war in Syrian territory, without a previous declaration of war that does not have the indispensable authorization by the US Congress.

It is also an illegitimate decision under international law and under the Charter of the UN. To send troops to Syria without authorization from the legal Syrian government is an act of military aggression.

The aim might be to limit the operation of the Syrian and Russian aircraft supporting the ground offensive of the Syrian Arab Army together with local militias against Islamic fanatics. The United States and its allies know that Syria and Russia do not want to escalate this struggle towards an international confrontation, beyond what it already is. The deaths of Americans soldiers in the course of an operation could be used by NATO as a pretext for an open armed intervention against Syria. It would not be the first time that Washington deliberately victimize their men in order to gain popular support to start a war. It is an old trick used by ambitious psychopaths in government. Since El Alamo (1836) in Texas, or the Maine battleship (1898) in Havana.

Geneva, 17.11.2015

- Umberto Mazzei has a PhD in political science from the University of Florence. He is Director of the Institute of International Economic Relations Sismondi, in Geneva.

www.ireisismondi.org, www.ventanaglobal.info