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Barack Obama and the US political establishment — Democrats and Republicans alike — are whipping up support for a new war drive in the Middle East.

Obama gave a televised speech on September 10 outlining plans to escalate US military intervention, one month after American warplanes began dropping bombs on Iraq in the latest chapter in almost a quarter century of warfare against the Iraqi people.

Obama claims the US is responding to a grave new threat: the Sunni fundamentalists of the Islamic State (IS — formerly Islamic State in Iraq and Syria). Its recent military offensive has given them control over large parts of northern and western Iraq, as well as their base in eastern Syria.

But the US is aiming its weaponry at a force that arose as a direct consequence of imperialism — in particular, the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and Washington's divide-and-conquer policies to stoke sectarian hatred between Sunni and Shia Muslims.

Revving up the war machine will only add to the suffering and violence.

IS has horrified people around the world with its beheadings of captured journalists, its murderous violence toward ethnic and religious minorities, and the reactionary dictates it wants to apply to everyone within its self-declared “caliphate”.

This makes it the perfect enemy to help US imperialism rally support, domestically and internationally.

The confrontation with IS will become the pretext for greater military intervention by US forces; for bolstering reactionary and repressive allies in the region; for increasing Pentagon spending; for intensifying the Big Brother surveillance state; and who knows what else.

The US may or may not re-invade Iraq with ground troops or expand its bombing to Syria in the near term, but make no mistake, Obama is declaring a new war — or at least a new phase in an old one: the decade-old “war on terror”.

This war will be waged in the name of stopping more horrors in the Middle East and protecting the security of the US. But the American empire will do nothing of the sort. The warmakers of Washington will only make the world more unstable, oppressive and violent.

The double standards and hypocrisy of the US case for action against IS beg to be exposed — though you won't hear much about them from a corporate media that never tires of cheerleading the next US war.

IS has killed thousands of people during its recent military operations in Iraq and Syria. The US government, on the other hand, has killed millions in Iraq alone over more than 20 years, in the process of reducing a once developing industrial society to one of the poorest and most violent countries in the world.

IS fighters are fanatical fundamentalists who tolerate no dissent, including among fellow Sunni Muslims. But what about the Religious Right maniacs who murder doctors and women's clinic workers in the US — not to mention the reactionary “neocons” who justified their post-September 11 “war on terror” as a part of a “clash of civilisations” between the West and the Arab world?

IS has declared a Sunni Muslim caliphate. Israel, America's main ally in the Middle East, is explicitly a Jewish state, formed by the dispossession of the Arab population of Palestine.

IS targets journalists. So does Egypt, the US government's second-largest aid recipient in the Middle East. The military regime is prosecuting and jailing journalists for reporting on anti-government demonstrations — those journalists who weren't killed by rampaging security forces, that is.

Then there is the videotaped execution of two US reporters by beheading. But when it comes to this sickening act, IS doesn't hold a candle to US ally Saudi Arabia.

Private Eye magazine said during the 21 months between photojournalist James Foley's abduction by IS and his murder in August, at least 113 people were beheaded in Saudi Arabia — in public executions.

Among the “crimes” punishable by beheading in Saudi Arabia are blasphemy, adultery, drug smuggling, sedition, sorcery and witchcraft — though authorities may order those accused of adultery to be stoned to death.

Far from threatening war against these reactionary fundamentalist tyrants, Obama went on a state visit to Riyadh in March to emphasise: “Saudi Arabia is a close partner of the United States.”

The US is preparing to go to war against an enemy it brought to life and allowed to flourish, directly and indirectly — not once, not twice, but many times.

The roots of IS lie in the al-Qaeda network once led by Osama bin Laden — though the remnants of al-Qaeda now disavow IS as “extremists”.

Bin Laden and what would become al-Qaeda got their first military experience in Afghanistan during the 1980s as international recruits to the armed resistance against the USSR's invasion. The US funded and supplied the Sunni fundamentalist mujahedeen in Afghanistan. Then-president Ronald Reagan called bin Laden and his fellow insurgents “courageous freedom fighters”.

When the USSR withdrew, the US lost interest in the rebels they had supported. Bin Laden later turned on the US as al-Qaeda's overarching enemy, especially after Washington increased its military presence in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War of 1991.

After al-Qaeda's September 11 attacks, the Bush administration exploited the opportunity to launch a “war on terror” with targets that went far beyond al-Qaeda. One target was Saddam Hussein's Iraq — even though Iraq neither possessed weapons of mass destruction nor harboured al-Qaeda, as US officials claimed.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq only emerged after the US invasion in 2003, once opposition to Washington's colonial occupation had spread. Even so, al-Qaeda in Iraq was a small part of the developing resistance.

It stood apart from the broader armed opposition because of its deadly attacks, often targeting Shia Muslims, rather than US soldiers.

When the wider Sunni resistance briefly threatened to unite with Shia opposition to occupation, the US didn't hesitate to stoke sectarian divisions between Sunni and Shia, with al-Qaeda in Iraq as a handy villain. The consequences of the civil war and ethnic cleansing that followed were catastrophic.

Within a few short years, al-Qaeda in Iraq was politically marginalised and militarily defeated by the so-called Awakening Councils formed by Sunni tribal leaders. These were financed by the US, which promised that Sunni leaders would be integrated into the central government, now dominated by Shia political parties.

But the Shia-run state reneged on the bargain. Former prime minister Nuri al-Maliki made sure the re-established Iraqi army and police were dominated by Shia militias. These were turned loose against Sunnis.

Even after US combat troops were withdrawn from Iraq at the end of 2011, the US remained implicated in the government's war on Sunnis. Police and military carried out repression against Sunni dissent — including the wave of largely non-violent demonstrations dubbed the “Iraqi Spring” — they used Hellfire missiles, attack helicopters and other weapons supplied by the US.

If IS has at least passive support from much of the Sunni population, it isn't because IS's reactionary and authoritarian ideology is widely embraced. Rather, its fighters have succeeded in defending Sunnis from attack by the US-backed central government in Iraq.

The rise of IS is a product of the violence and repression unleashed by US imperialism and the other powers of the region.

Obama has been under pressure to escalate US action against IS, including calls to expand air strikes in Iraq and extend them into Syria. This would effectively place the US on the same side as Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whose regime the US supposedly wants to overthrow.

Both Republicans and Democrats are demanding that the US go after IS, but the pressure on Obama doesn't stop there. A poll conducted for ABC News found support for air strikes against IS in Iraq grew from 45% in June to 71% now — with 65% supporting extending air strikes into Syria. An overwhelming 91% of people believe IS is “a serious threat to US vital interests”.

No wonder the Obama administration is pushing ahead with a new Middle East war drive. It can count on ideological ground well prepared by the “war on terror” over more than a decade. This new war drive will further stoke Islamophobia.

Example number one: Linda Sarsour, director of the Arab American Association of New York, reported that she was attacked while leaving the group's Brooklyn headquarters in early September by a man who threw a trash can at her and another woman — and threatened to behead her to “see how your people feel about it”.

Obama's “game plan” to confront IS won't stop the disaster that the US itself created in the Middle East — still less will it make ordinary people in the US safer. On the contrary, the new drive to war is making the world more dangerous.

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