Grand Mufti Al-Hussieni meets with Hitler in Berlin in 1943.
Beginning the early 1950’s as the Cold war with the Soviet Union was in full bloom, the CIA made what was to be a fateful move to bring that outlawed Muslim Brotherhood leadership out of Egypt and into exile in Saudi Arabia.
There began a marriage made in Hell–fundamentalist Bedouin Salafist Islam known as Sunni Wahhabism and the secret death cult called the Muslim Brotherhood. With unlimited Saudi oil money, the Brotherhod began a worldwide expansion into Pakistan, Afghanistan and other Sunni Islam regions. By the end of the 1970’s in Pakistan they were building one of the best-financed terror organizations in history, later named Al Qaeda or The Base. The Saudi Wahhabist Muslim Brother who was picked by the CIA and by the head of the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate, Prince Turki Al Faisal, was a scion of one of the most wealthy Saudi families. His name was Osama bin Laden.
I have traced the origins of the Islamic State (IS) or in Arabic, DAESH, previously known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), itself previously known as Al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria, to Afghan Mujahideen recruited for the CIA to wage its covert wars after the collapse of the Soviet Union in former Soviet and oil-rich Azerbaijan, in Bosnia, in Russian autonomous Chechnya and across the Caucasus and beyond.
In the 1990s that Washington strategy of using the Muslim Brotherhood offshoots to wage their dirty wars seemed to be working brilliantly. The United States could claim innocence as the newly-declared Russian Federation was thrown into the chaos of internal terror wars in Chechnya and Yeltsin-era economic chaos and collapse.
By 2011 and the launching of the Arab Spring regime change destabilizations, under the tenure of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, it became clear that the war faction in the United States was using the Muslim Brotherhood secret organizations across the oil-rich Arab world to bring those lands and their oilfields–Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain and even Kuwait and Saudi Arabia itself–into direct USA military control. In Egypt they briefly succeeded bringing Muslim Brother member, Mohammed Morsi, in as President. The Obama Administration and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were fully backing the Muslim Brotherhood as “their” surrogates.
Yet in the course of events since 2013, it became increasingly clear that Washington’s bold strategy of the Arab Spring and weaponizing their trusted Muslim Brotherhood to secure that aim of oil control, was a manifest failure. With the entry of Russia into the Syria battle in September, 2015 it became starkly obvious to the thinking world that Washington’s “war on ISIS” in Syria was a war for and with ISIS against Syria’s Bashar al Assad. The Washington “democratic” Emperor had no clothes.
Everywhere by the early days of 2016, Washington’s Islamic Terrorism game was a failure. The Saudi monarchy was becoming estranged and distrustful of Washington as never since the alliance began in 1945. Israel, another trusted US “vassal” in the Mideast, was distancing from the US Obama Administration. Russia and China, far from being disrupted by the CIA’s Islamic terror in Chechnya, Xinjiang and elsewhere, were forging a strategic partnership to resist that US-backed Islam-named terror.
The Hegemon, the United States that emerged in 1990 as sole Superpower, was by 2016 truly “the lost Hegemon.” She was increasingly unable to find a winning strategy to expand its global hegemony. Everywhere the sole hegemon of 1990 was losing world power, losing influence, losing even its soft power. Its financial system was in ruins after the crisis of 2007 and still had not recovered nine years after. Its economy had been outsourced to the low-cost regions of Asia and elsewhere.
This lost hegemony is the significance of the very feint, fading grey color on white of the main title, The Lost Hegemon.
Then Antje and I, after much discussion, decided to add an American flag to indicate immediately, visually, to the new reader that the hegemon meant was the United States. We deliberately chose a very ragged, battered almost destroyed American flag. It allegedly had been recovered in the rubble of the downed World Trade towers in September 11, 2001.
The flag beside the title had a double significance. After the events of September 11, 2001 the United States Congress began to effectively tear up the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights, passing Orwellian laws with names like the Patriots’ Act, the Homeland Security Act, the USA Freedom Act, which among other things allowed the Government agencies to conduct roving wiretaps, searches of business records, and conducting surveillance of “lone wolves”—individuals suspected of terrorist-related activities not linked to terrorist groups. President Obama signed into law a bill permitting indefinite detention without charge or trial, a clear violation of the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights. Powers of Government, including of the NSA spy agency, were expanded to an unprecedented degree, turning any vestige of American democracy under an order of law into what was becoming a de facto police state.
Most Americans realized not what was happening. They were fear-struck, one might say even traumatized after the events of 911. Under that collective hypnosis of fear and rage, the laws were passed virtually without debate. No Congressman dared to be seen in the emergency days after 911 as “unpatriotic.”
Then in designing the cover we came to the subtitle, “Whom the gods would destroy…” The quote is attributed to the Greek writer Euripides some 2,400 years ago, as “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” That succinctly captured the growing sense of desperation in Washington and in Wall Street. Not only lost, but also desperate and increasingly mad or insane in a feverish try to regain that fading hegemony. The dropping image like blood in black from the final letter, “y”, in destroy, is meant to capture that vanishing, the self-destruction of the once formidable American Century proclaimed in 1941 by Henry Luce.
I hope this makes the dramatic image of the final cover Antje Abisch finally created more vivid for you.
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—F. William Engdahl
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