ISIS is proof that the 14-year 'war on terror' has been a catastrophic failure

"I tried to book a flight to Baghdad on the same efficient European airline that I had used a year earlier. I was told it had discontinued flights to the Iraqi capital, because it feared that insurgents had obtained shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles originally supplied to anti-Assad forces in Syria and would use them against commercial aircraft flying into Baghdad International Airport. Western support for the Syrian opposition may have failed to overthrow Assad, but it has been successful in destabilizing Iraq, as Iraqi politicians had long predicted."
A series of lies from Cockburn's new book. Cockburn's sectarian friends in the Shia political establishment in Iran may claim that funding Syria's opposition is what has destabilised Iraq, but there never were any anti-aircraft missiles supplied to the Syrian opposition by the US. Quite the opposite, they prevented other states from providing the means to protect civilians from Assad's barrel bomb attacks, which would have slowed the flow of refugees from Syria and the actual destabilisation of neighbouring countries, because the Americans were worried that Syrians would be less interested in defending their communities than attacking Israeli airliners.*This is before we even consider that a people being murdered in their hundreds of thousands, with the help of billions of dollars of Russian weaponry and tens of thousands of Iranian troops should have any attempt to defend themselves seen as the problem.
Cockburn claims that Joe Biden's (that's the same Vice-President Cockburn was recently sourcing the claim that Turkey and Saudi Arabia back ISIS) claim that ISIS and al-Nusra dominate the Syrian opposition means that there is no moderate opposition to receive the $500 million that Obama has promised. And promised, not delivered. An unidentified spook tells us that ISIS can get hold of weapons going to the FSA. This is propaganda, empty of facts. And Cockburn wraps up with the repetition of the lies that it was the attempt by the US to overthrow Assad that destabilised Syria, that the Gulf nations had to be stopped by the US from supporting jihadis in Syria (eliding between anti-Assad groups and ISIS, implying any support really helps the latter), that Assad's control of the centre of most provinces meant he always had the country behind him, that the mass murder of Sunnis by Assad and his Iranian patrons has nothing to do with support for ISIS.
"It was the US, Europe, and their regional allies in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and United Arab Emirates that created the conditions for the rise of ISIS. They kept the war going in Syria, though it was obvious from 2012 that Assad would not fall. He never controlled less than thirteen out of fourteen Syrian provincial capitals and was backed by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah.Nevertheless, the only peace terms he was offered at the Geneva II peace talks in January 2014 was to leave power. He was not about to go, and ideal conditions were created for ISIS to prosper. The US and its allies are now trying to turn the Sunni communities in Iraq and Syria against the militants, but this will be difficult to do while these countries are convulsed by war."
*"The American government became involved, the former American official said, in part because there was a sense that other states would arm the rebels anyhow. The C.I.A. role in facilitating the shipments, he said, gave the United States a degree of influence over the process, including trying to steer weapons away from Islamist groups and persuading donors to withhold portable antiaircraft missiles that might be used in future terrorist attacks on civilian aircraft."[http://claysbeach.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/benghazi.html]