Tag Archives: middle east

Noam Chomsky on Biden, Saudi Arabia, and Israel

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Noam Chomsky is 93 as I write this, so who knows how much longer we will hear his first-person commentary on current events? I’ll keep reading and reporting it as long as we do.

On Saudi Arabia:

In the case of Biden’s visit, first things presumably include renewed efforts to persuade MBS to increase production so as to reduce high gas prices in the U.S. There would be other ways, for example, a windfall tax on the fossil fuel industries that are drowning in profits, with the revenues distributed to those who have been gouged by the neoliberal class war of the past 40 years, which has transferred some $50 trillion to the pockets of the top 1%. That, however, is “politically impossible.”

Politically even more impossible in elite calculations would be the feasible measures to try to stave off catastrophe by moving rapidly to cut off the flow of these poisons. These need not, however, be the calculations of those who have some interest in leaving a decent world to their children and grandchildren. Time is short.

There are broader considerations in Biden’s Middle East tour. One goal surely is to firm up Trump’s one great geopolitical achievement: the Abraham Accords, which raised tacit relations among the most brutal and criminal states of the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region to formal alliance. The accords have been widely hailed as a contribution to peace and prosperity, though not all are delighted. Not, for example, Sahrawis, handed over to the Moroccan dictatorship to secure its agreement to join the accords — in violation of international law, but in conformity to the “rules-based international order” that the U.S. and its allies prefer to the archaic and unacceptable UN-based order.

Truthout

So there you have it. I have suspected for awhile that the UN is dead, with U.S. politicians mostly not even talking about it. Bernie Sanders talked about it, but he didn’t get elected as I recall. I am not sure how much longer we will have the benefit of Bernie Sanders’ commentary on current events…

And it is not obvious to me whether a next generation of leaders is emerging to replace these voices. The next generation of “liberal” leaders, it seems to me, is more focused on rhetoric and symbolic action around race and gender issues, rather than fundamental issues of social and economic fairness, equal opportunity, and peace. There is a risk that coming generations will be affected by a sort of shifting baseline syndrome where they will not even be aware that these issues even exist or how much the median conversation has shifted from meaningful to meaningless.

Iran attacking its own customers? Why?

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I try to avoid commenting on rapidly unfolding current events, but I’ll make an exception for this supposed attack by Iran on Japanese and Norwegian oil tankers. I can’t actually find this in news stories, but it seems that these tankers must be either on their way to pick up Iranian oil for delivery to world markets, or on their way to world markets with Iranian oil. So what incentive could Iran possibly have for attacking its customers? None that I can see, and this makes the U.S. claim that Iran is responsible completely incoherent. Part of the U.S. claim, if I can understand it correctly, is based on seeing Iranian boats in the area that were involved in rescuing survivors of the attacks. The only possible incentive I can think of for Iran is to demonstrate they can disrupt ships at the mouth of the Persian Gulf if they want to. But there is no need for that – the entire area is bristling with advanced anti-ship missiles and this is not a secret. So to sneak out and secretly attach mines to these ships, then secretly remove them, then rescue the survivors – well, I already said it a couple times, and it is not making any more sense to me the more I think about it.

Who would have an incentive to give Iran’s customers pause in doing business with it. Well, any of Iran’s enemies. This list would include Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the United States, and Israel.

Or any non-state terrorist group that just wants to sew chaos and make states and oil companies nervous. Sneaking out to secretly attach a mine sounds like their playbook to me. These groups have a tendency to want people to know they are responsible though, and it is strange that there is no mention of that happening.

U.S. officials aren’t even trying to make a plausible case here. It’s embarrassing. The other thing people are point out is the U.S. making the case that Iran is breaching the agreement it made in 2015 to limit uranium enrichment, when it is the U.S. that has declared that agreement null and void.

(U.S.) national security stories of 2018 (The Intercept)

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The Intercept, which doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a left-leaning investigative news organization, has a round-up of national security stories from 2018. The biggest bombshell is a well-sourced claim that Saudi Arabia and UAE were on the verge of launching a military invasion of Qatar and were talked out of it by Rex Tillerson, who was then fired under pressure for Saudi and UAE lobbyists in Washington. Another interesting one claims that large AT&T buildings in major cities are hubs for NSA surveillance, including domestic surveillance. That’s just the tip of an iceberg consisting of allegations of lots of war crimes and torture, all backed up by a fair amount of evidence.

10 million Yemenis could face starvation

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The UN is warning as many as 10 million people in Yemen could face starvation by the end of 2018 due to the ongoing invasion by Saudi Arabia. There is no food there, no ability to grow food, and no food able to go in because of the war.

This is staggering, approaching the body count of the worst crimes against humanity in history including the Holocaust, deliberate mass starvation in eastern Europe under the Soviet Union, and the massive rural starvation in China triggered by misguided Communist policies.

the numbers on Syria

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Syria might not be grabbing the U.S. headlines right now, but the conflict is grinding on. The Week has some staggering numbers. Out of a population of about 20 million, 5.6 million are refugees inside the country and 6.2 million have left the country as refugees. That’s 60% of the population. Estimates of the death toll vary but the most widely accepted is around half a million. That’s 2-3% of the population.

Saudi Arabia’s motives for war

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I was musing recently about what possible motive Saudi Arabia could have for provoking war with Iran. Joschka Fischer suggests one answer:

As part of his agenda, MBS has also launched an aggressive new foreign policy, particularly toward Iran. The modernizers around MBS know that the revolution’s success will require breaking the power of Wahhabism by replacing it with Saudi nationalism. And in order to do that, they need a compelling enemy. Shia Iran, with which the Kingdom is competing for regional hegemony, is the ideal foil.

These domestic considerations help to explain why Saudi Arabia has thrown down the gauntlet and escalated tensions with Iran in recent months. Of course, from the Saudis’ perspective, they are merely picking up the gauntlet that Iran already threw down by interfering in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen, and other countries.

So far, the battle for regional hegemony between Saudi Arabia and Iran has been limited to proxy wars in Syria and Yemen, with disastrous humanitarian consequences. Neither side, it seems, wants a direct military conflict. And yet that outcome can hardly be ruled out, given recent developments. In the Middle East, a cold war can turn hot rather quickly.

Middle East “on a knife’s edge”?

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Steve Bannon describes the Middle East as on a knife’s edge. It’s clear to me the U.S. is just being lured deeper and deeper into a regional Arab-Iran conflict, with Syria at the center and maybe about to spill into Lebanon. Tying all Islamic fundamentalist-inspired violence to Iran seems to be an effective strategy for drawing the U.S. in. Russia seems happy to see the U.S. bleed even though they are bleeding too. Israel is happy to see Iran and Lebanon bleed. It is hard to envision the end game that hard liners on any of the sides are trying to achieve, other than enriching the arms industry.

http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2017/11/06/bannon-middle-east-knife-edge-last-48-72-hours/

 

Frontline in Yemen and Mosul

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PBS Frontline probably makes the most consistently depressing documentaries. They also somehow get consistently amazing access to war zones. They did an episode on Yemen recently, and they have one on Mosul coming up. I find these extremely disturbing – if the measure of success in fighting terrorism were taken to be the cost in civilian lives and human rights, I am not sure any of these wars would be worth it. Humanitarian war is an oxymoron – if our political leaders are waging war to achieve geopolitical objectives with little regard to human rights, the people need to understand how horrific that is and try to come to terms with it. These documentaries do a pretty good job at that.

Saudi Arabia and Qatar

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Here is a professor of Middle East history at UCLA explaining some of the history between Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The Saudi-Qatari quarrel can be traced to back to the conquests that led to the founding of Saudi Arabia in 1932. Only the fact that Qatar was a British protectorate at that time dissuaded the emerging Saudi state from swallowing up the small spit of land on which Qatar is situated.

In the years following Qatari independence in 1971, Qatar and Saudi Arabia quarreled over boundaries. Qatar also struck out on its own in foreign affairs in an effort to wriggle out from under the thumb of its neighbor.

Then, in 1995, Sheikh Tammin bin Hamad, the current ruler of Qatar, took power from his father in a coup d’état. Monarchs in Saudi Arabia and the UAE viewed the coup as a dangerous precedent and plotted a countercoup. The sheikh was to be assassinated. Tammin caught wind of the plot and crushed it, but the bad blood remained.

Fast forward to 2010-11. During the Arab uprisings, Saudi Arabia and Qatar again found themselves at loggerheads. Qatar became a cheerleader for the uprisings through its news empire, al-Jazeera, and through financial and even military assistance to a number of opposition movements. Saudi Arabia became the epicenter of the counter-revolution.

Qatar

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One thing my limited experience living abroad taught me is humility about my ability to interpret geopolitical events. The facts themselves are not always accessible through media reports, and even if the facts are clear there are points of view to take into account. I have read media accounts of events I personally experienced, like elections and demonstrations, in both the foreign media and the U.S. media, and often felt that they were not an accurate depiction of what I saw with my own eyes. So taking all that into account, I am somewhat agnostic when trying to interpret events in countries I have never set foot in, where local media is tightly controlled, and where U.S. media and government probably have limited access to accurate local information. All that said, I am interested and trying to make sense of the events surrounding Qatar and Saudi Arabia. For one thing, I have a ticket on Qatar Airways later in the year so it does affect me personally. And for another, any risk of war and especially nuclear war in the Middle East affects everyone on Earth personally. So here goes:

I have always assumed that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Bahrain, Oman and Qatar represented a monolithic geopolitical force. And I generally thought the United States, Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey were part of this block for most purposes most of the time. Clearly I was wrong about that. Saudi Arabia’s alliances are contradictory. For one thing, they are publicly an enemy of Israel. But they and Israel have a common ally in the United States and a common enemy in Iran, the Syrian government, elements in Iraq, Hezbollah, and to some extent Russia. Saudi Arabia is closely allied with Pakistan’s military and according to many independent media accounts has bankrolled Pakistan’s nuclear program. During the Cold War the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan worked together to fund and equip the Afghan resistance, elements of which later mutated into the Taliban, Al Qaeda and ISIS, and became public enemy #1 for the United States. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the rest of the Arab world seem to have a complex relationship with these groups, where governments see them as a threat but portions of the population support them. Then you have the complex relationships between the United States and various groups in Iraq and Syria, wars that seemingly have three or more sides. Then of course there is the complicated Israel-Palestine situation, which fuels a lot of anger in populations throughout the region, and which governments talk a lot about but seem to take very little action.

So the Middle East is a mess and very hard for those of us outside the region to interpret. And none of what I just said comes close to explaining the situation in Qatar. Those of us outside the region should all have a certain humility in understanding that there is a lot we don’t understand. My two cents is that the United States should err on the side of not interfering militarily but also work very hard through the UN to work on arms reductions and especially prevent nuclear proliferation.