An example of how way-insane the terrorism game — all CIA “lies” the most-fabled al Qaeda has lost its terror-touch (via Reuters):

“Whatever slip-ups or errors (regional branches)…may have committed are limited in number in the midst of mountains of good deeds and successes,” said Hossam Abdul Raouf, an Egyptian veteran of the militant group.
He said compensation and apologies had been given to unintended victims, but gave no details.

Osama’s boys now number two in the killing-innocent-people genre.

(Illustration: Ghassan Ghaib’s ‘My Shadow on Paper,’ found here).

And Mr. Raouf is pissed, feels betrayed probably, as al Qaeda was was knocked off the perch by one of its own ‘branches,’ some of its own boys.
ISIS is now the center of terror in the world — social-media upstarts.
Key note, however, in the Reuters story:

Al Qaeda fell out with IS – whose roots lie in Iraq – in 2013 over its expansion into Syria, where the militants have carried out beheadings, crucifixions, and mass executions.

My underline for emphasis — coming back around to George Jr. and The Dick, and that most-wonderful 2003 Iraqi invasion, which opened the al-Qaeda gate, which in turn spawned the really-heinous ISIS.
Yet apparently President Obama has done it again — another war taking years, with a sinkhole, mission creep that will fuck the world.
And Osama would be proud.

Branko Marcetic at antiwar.com today looks at Osama’s long-term, openly-proclaimed strategy:

Reflecting on his time in Afghanistan a year and a half after the US’ invasion of Iraq, bin Laden noted that his struggle with the Soviet Union had given him and other future al Qaeda fighters “experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers.”
In this way, they had “bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.”
In that same way, he explained, al Qaeda was now “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy” by goading it into involving itself in every skirmish in the region.
“All that we have to do is to send two Mujahedin to the farthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda in order to make the generals race there,” he concluded.
The US would subsequently “suffer human economic and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note.”
…
What makes this particular intervention stand out is how quickly it has escalated.
What began with humanitarian airdrops and the sending of around 300 “advisers” to assist the hapless Iraqi army has, in a matter of months, morphed into airstrikes that will last indefinitely and approximately 1,600 American personnel in Iraq – and if history is any indication, it’s doubtful this mission creep will stop here.
Even more problematic is the fact that these measures are a result of exactly that which bin Laden described 10 years ago — an American overreaction to terrorism that will ultimately cost the US far more than the extremists who incited it.

And today a whole shitload of suits from 30 different countries met in Paris to pull together a plan to battle the fiend of ISIS — and a shitload of politics, too.
A world goaded out again.