Joe Biden admits that us allies financed ISIS in attacks on Assad in Syria. As if the USA did not know this at the time. ISIS is a creation of the West like Pol Pot was in Cambodia. General Martin Dempsey n head of the joint chiefs also backs Biden's remarks.

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/biden-apologizes-turkey-erdogan-isis-comments-2014-10

I used to read occasional articles by John Pilger, but everything I read provoked a deep anger within that a competent journalist could so comprehensively get everything wrong. Over the years nothing has changed and in my opinion John Pilger's view of the world is about as relevant to reality as a block of marble in the dolomites. What annoys me especially is that John Pilger as a journalist would not be able to exist were it not for the existence of the West, including America. An old expression about "soiling one's own nest" springs to mind.

"Care to take it any further?"

Yes. My underlying query is about the justification of any action against ISIS. I'm not denying that there is or could be such a justification. But I'm challenging anyone who is opposed to it, to consider whether they are not contradicting themselves in inconsistently supporting the initiation of aggression for other purposes.

John Pilger is a classic example. When it comes to western states using force to bomb foreign countries, he can see clearly the moral issues, and the wrong of initiating aggression. But then he contradicts himself as concerns domestic policy, because his agenda there is a thorough-going state control of lots of things, all to be backed up by the initiation of aggression which he ignores. And this inconsistency is virtually a taxonomic characteristic of the left wing in general.

Usually when challenged, they fall back to blandishments about "democracy". But isn't it democracy that has, all along, been deciding to bomb Iraq?

"Democracy justifies the exercise of power? Is that a request for a blank cheque?"

Well that's what I'm asking.

"I think I would ask anyone making such a comment for clarification. All sorts of nonsense has gone down behind "democracy" in recent years."

You can say that again.

"I still think multi-party democracy is the way to go, but this has all too often been channelled into a duopoly that is a democracy, as I understand the term, in name only."

So why do you think democracy is the way to go? Why isn't that just a blank warrant for power limited only by what the government can get away with? Which, considering that it has a self-granted legal monopoly of force and fraud, is pretty much every kind of corrupt and oppressive activity?

Dear Jardine K. Jardine,

I think the reality is that whether the government is called democracy, monarchy, dictatorship, theocracy or something else any nation is ruled by an oligarchy or governing class whose main interest is to keep and maintain power. In the case of the Australian duopoly and its attitude to ISIS there is no debate between the the two major parties. Whatever one decides on the other will support.

david f

No doubt you're right.

However "the reality" is that murder, rape and the bombing of innocents also exist, too.

The question is what justifies one's own decision to participate in or support the initiation of aggression, including by political support, which is by far the biggest vector.

The prey develop a state and task it (inter alia) to enact and enforce laws to protect the prey from predators. This infuriates wannabe predators who rail against this restriction of their predation as tyranny of one sort or another. The predators' buzz word is "libertarianism". Watch them straining at the bit. Moslems whine incessantly about Western measures which interfere with their drive to impose Islamic rule untrammelled by law and based on violence. Western apologists are voluble in Islam's defence as it seeks to rule without let or hindrance. Only total unremitting ideological war on the theocratic Moslem cult based on a firm commitment to the values of the Enlightenment will ever solve the ISIS problem.