WikiLeaks releases more than half a million US diplomatic cables from the momentous year of 1979 By Julian Assange -- Press Release
If any year could be said to be the "year zero" of our modern era, 1979 is it.
In the Middle East, the Iranian revolution, the Saudi Islamic uprising
and the Egrypt-Israel Camp David accord led not only to the present
regional power dynamic but decisively changed the relationship between
oil, militant Islam and the world.
The uprising at Mecca
permanently shifted Saudi Arabia towards Wahhabism, leading to the
transnational spread of Islamic fundamentalism and the US-Saudi
destabilisation of Afghanistan.
Osama bin Laden would leave his native Saudi Arabia for Pakistan to support the Afghan Mujahideen.
The invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR would see Saudi Arabia and the
CIA push billions to Mujahideen fighters as part of Operation Cyclone,
fomenting the rise of al-Qaeda and the eventual collapse of the Soviet
Union.
The 1979 current of Islamification spread to Pakistan
where the US embassy was burned to the ground and Pakistan Prime
Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was executed.
The Iranian hostage crisis would go on to fatally undermine Jimmy Carter's presidency and see the election of Ronald Reagan.
Saddam Hussein? Took power in 1979.
The rise of al-Qaeda eventually bore the September 11, 2001 attacks in
the United States, enabling the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and
over a decade of war, leaving, at its end, the ideological, financial
and geographic basis for ISIS.
