not entirely sure if the full text goes into it, but there is also an argument to be made that fighting IS (whilst simultaneously supplying them weapons) is part of a strategy of regional destabilisation that is aimed at maintaining affluent petrostates even as the world they depend on dies. Oil-rich Kirkuk is currently in the hands of the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq- a region being defended in part by the now apparently rehabilitated PKK- who are increasingly calling for full autonomy. Israel has publicly announced its in favour of this, while the US has long had plans for the fragmentation of Iraq into distinct ethno-religious states. Why? To secure lasting spheres of influence that could promote long-term oil autonomy from Russia and lead to challenging the regional dominance of Iran. As the petrostate dies, sucking its life blood from the geological strata formed by once living matter, it is prepared to plunge headlong into yet another war in Iraq. If we include that countries history as Mesopotamia, how long is it now that our colonial capitalist governments have occupied its land and terrorised it people? While the fight against IS is be necessary, we shouldn’t forget why it is capital fights any war. Marx’s gothic imaginary of vampiric capitalism has never been more apt.
“Capitalist ‘reformers’ and global warming skeptics both depend on limiting the scope of available evidence to eternally debatable climate ‘science.’ What isn’t debatable is the cumulative environmental impact of capitalist production more broadly considered. Illustrated above by the black dots are the oceanic ‘dead zones’ surrounding the older industrial capitalist nations. Simply put, industrial capitalism has used rivers, streams and oceans as industrial toilets in the same way it has used the atmosphere. Climate change is but one aspect of already existing environmental catastrophe. Given the integrated nature of the biosphere environmental resolution must likewise be integrated. Source: Scientific American.” (from Rob Urie, “Hank Paulson Does Global Warming,”Counterpunch, 30 June 2014)
Note: the following are selections from Rob Urie’s latest piece, “U.S. Wars and the Climate Crisis,” published on Counterpunch, 26 September 2014
“Such now is the place of the early twenty-first century U.S. with systemically generated…
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synthetic zerØ 
I mention the PKK because I’m intrigued with how they have started to achieve a degree of rehabilitation in the eyes of capitalists and the libertarian left at the same time. Ideas and practices of Democratic Confederalism- a Bookchinist riff- not withstanding, how is a group once decried as terrorists from the side of capital and nationalist from the side of internationalist workers now coming to be seen as a kind of noble hero? It can’t be as simple as the necessary defence of bodies.
meh there are no vast/coordinated uber-plans/planners at work here, faced with “failed” states or violently repressive state-govts the powers that be will always choose brutal simplifiers over chaos, Obama is a modernist technocrat in a post-modern world trying to hold water in his hands. As for libertarians I for one won’t ever support social-darwinists of any stripe.
I don’t think the existence of long-term plans means that there are uber-plans or planners at work; it does however mean that circumstances shape and are shaped by various nuclei of chaos in such a way that they tend to create spaces in which operators are able to realign themselves in accordance with new parameters. The same simplifications can be adjusted and redeployed again and again; it’s not a question of conspiracy but coordination (in the tottering infant sense).
Plans are abstract machines, diagrams rather than predictions.
The libertarian in the “libertarian eco-socialism” is used to designate it as opposed to some authoritarian eco-socialism in just the same way that “libertarian socialism” is often used as synonymous with class struggle and/or communalist anarchism.