Tag: Saudi Arabia

Yemen, Saudi Arabia & War

The September 19th precision  attacks on  the  oil processing facility  at  Abqaiq  in Eastern  Saudi  Arabia  have raised many questions for the Saudis and their allies in  UAE, the United States and Israel. How did the attackers ( whether they be  Houthi, Iranian or  Saudi  dissidents or a combination of any of those),manage to  breach  what  should have a very  well protected  site from  air borne attack.

The attacks should not have come as a surprise however.  The  Houthi  “rebels’ in Yemen  (against  which  the Saudis  and their British, U.S. , Al Qaeda and UAE allies  have been conducting a barbaric  war of attrition for the past  4 years ) have both  threatened and carried out increasingly  ambitious attacks on Saudi  infrastructure  in  the past year with  drones and missiles to  varying effect. (note the map below showing earlier Houthi  drone  attacks on the oil pipeline leading to  Abqaiq.)

Drone attacks on Saudi Pipeline

Recent  news releases from  the Houthi  indicate major military  successes against  the  Saudi  mercenaries on  the front line.;  and the latest  report of 500  Saudi  mercenaries  killed and  2000  captured  in  ongoing  Houthi/Yemen  Army raids into  Saudi  territory  is  outlined here.

The U.K., France and Germany have all joined the chorus of condemnation of Iran  from  the Saudis and United States  for the  Abqaiq attacks, despite any evidence. As noted in  previous blogs here ,  the ability of the Iranians to  ship   quantities of large missiles and drone components to  Yemen  through  a very  tight naval  blockade of its ports and coastline  is problematic to  say  the least. That  blockade  is part of the deliberate  humanitarian  disaster  that  the Saudis and their allies have inflicted for 4 years  against   the population of Yemen. That genocide  is compounded by the deliberate  bombing of civilian  infrastructure  with  active  military support  and coordination by  the British  and the Americans. Those actions are war crimes on a  massive scale.

Going back  to how the Abqaiq could have possibly happened; given the massive investment the Saudi  clan have put into  war  machinery  from the U.S.  and U.K. , Craig Murray  notes: Saudi Arabia’s entire weapons capacity is massively focused on Iran, as are the manifold detection devices of the numerous US bases. Besides modern air defence systems are omnidirectional

Saudi oil refinery drone hit
Note the precision of the holes in the distillery tanks from the South -West (not from from Iran in the East)

 The Patriot missile defence system is not the best in the world, though it is the most expensive; however you cannot just creep up behind it and shout “boo!” Not even the Saudis would pay billions of dollars for that.

So  if by  some absurd chance , what  Western  governments are saying is true;  how did the Iranians fly drones and missiles  at  Abqaq from  across the Persian  Gulf directly in  the face of large  batteries of Saudi  and American  air defenses? The analysis by “Juliet Guy Oscar” clearly shows that  Houthi   manufactured Quds1 cruise missiles have both  the capacity and range to  have attacked Abqaiq and beyond.

The Americans, using brutal  sanctions, theft of Iranian  assets  and threats, want to   bludgeon  Iran into  both  pulling back  on its extensive and very  effective missile programme,  and its support for   its local  allies in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen  and Palestine above all. As E.J. Magnier notes- pulling back  on  either of those two  programmes is simply not an option for the Iranians.

For  U.S. Secretary of State  Pompeo  to  state  that “the foreign minister of Iran is threatening all-out war and to fight to the last American,(and) we’re here to build out a coalition aimed at achieving peace and a peaceful resolution to this,” is of course pure nonsense and lies. America wants to  make Iran once again a client state like the Saudis , Egypt  or Jordan,  which  can bend to  the expansionist  whims of the Israelis.

While its very  likely that  the Houthis have  been using and adapting Iranian  missile and drone technology, the evidence suggests that  the Yemen military,  supported by  the Houthis,  have also been  making their own or adapting  military  equipment salvaged from  the Saudi/UAE conflict – with  perhaps technological advice from Iran.

The Saudis,  amusingly enough,  cannot believe that   Houthi  “savages” could  develop  and  deliver such  weapons. ( the  same kind of sad racist  mistake that  the Americans have continuously made against  the Russians, Chinese,  North Koreans and many other nations. (“If they   have such  weapons then  they must  have stolen the technology  from us”.)

The Yemen ‘rebel’  commentary on  the attacks is however interesting,  noting that “various kinds of combat drones were used in the Second Deterrent Balance Operation, noting that they were launched from three different locations according to their flight endurance and designated targets.   He underlined that the third generation of domestically-designed and -manufactured Qasef (Striker) combat drones, long-endurance Sammad-3 (Invincible-3) drones – which have an operational range of 1,500 kilometers to 1,700 kilometers and newly-developed drones equipped with jet engines.

 

Houthi drone
Houthi drone

 Each of the new drones can carry four precision-guided bombs with fissionable heads every time, and can monitor and hit their targets from several angles.“Other aircraft were also used so the main combat drones could hide in their shadow without being detected, and signal jamming devices effectively disabled the enemy’s air missile defense systems.” 

Like the Iranians,  the Houthi  and the Yemen military are fighting for their survival  against  much better equipped and financed  opponents. Opponents whose  ruthlessness and  commitment to  war crimes on  a grand scale is known to  all.

This will  not end well  for all  sides…but the writing is on th wall  for the Saudi  clan if Pepe Escobar’s analysis is anything to  go  by

Links

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201909201076843665-saudi-coalition-initiates-operations-yemen/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/19/us-dials-back-iran-rhetoric-and-seeks-peaceful-resolution-over-saudi-attack

http://thesaker.is/how-the-houthis-overturned-the-chessboard/

Why Evidence of Iran’s Role in Attack Doesn’t Matter

 

http://www.unz.com/pcockburn/the-saudi-arabia-drone-attacks-have-changed-global-warfare/

Who Really Benefits From ‘Iranian Attack’ On Saudi Arabia?

 

New Antarctica  Relevant Links

America’s Exceptional Interest in Wars

The Saudi created hell in Yemen

America’s Exceptional Interest in Wars

We have often heard that  it is in  America’s “interests”  to  start this or that  war, to   “defend democracy and human  rights”  or some other  envisioning of the United States as that  Shining City on the Hill  of freedom  and light.  However when  we come to  examine what  particular Interests  are at  stake for the United States in  these  aggressions,  we somehow fail  to  note that  those interest  are solely business interests-  –  and not just  any businesses-  but big business-  large powerful corporations  with  tentacles in  many countries  whose financial  interests  may  either be jeopardized or opportunities   lost  if this or that  country  is not subjugated  once again  by  the U.S.  military  for  the profit margins of United States’ businesses.

Pity the poor country  that  dares to not bend its knee to  U.S.  corporate interest…it will be  sanctioned,  ridiculed,  its minority  groups funded and trained to  create  instability,  (or worse),  and if that  doesn’t succeed in  bringing that  recalcitrant country  to  the ‘negotiating’  table-  then  a little genocidal  war might help.

As U.S Major-General  Smedley  Butler has often been  quoted:

War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. (1933)…

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism….

Supporting big business in  any way the U.S.  military  can ( regardless of international  conventions,  human  rights, human  lives,  human  decency  or any other ‘soft’  issue) is and always has been,  therefore the complete and total  sum  of United States international  relations-  it has no  other purpose.

We may  wonder who  profits from  the apparently senseless endless war  waged by  the United States in  Afghanistan-  could it be that  the CIA is once again filling its coffers with  the blood of  the drug-addicted? -or who  profits  from  supporting Israel’s slow genocide of the Palestinian  people,  or who  profits from  the human  catastrophe that  is the Saudi  war on Yemen?

“Foolish”  and soft issues like  the global  emergency ( maybe more like global  ‘catastrophe’?) are therefore a complete irrelevance. American exceptionalism  is seen in its true form-  red in  tooth  and claw as Alfred Lord Tennyson  wrote about nature. No  morality,  no ethics,  pure barbarism  and pure profit.

It is small  wonder that those poor American  soldiers coming back  from  America’s pointless and endless wars  of total  barbarism,  struggle  to  come to  terms with their “moral  injury” to  the propaganda they  have been  force-fed from  an  early age,  of the United States being a civilizing  and enlightened country in  a world of barbarism.

U.S. bases surrounding Iran
U.S. bases surrounding Iran

Peculiar to  those  pink-skinned Americans who  front for big business in  the military  and  in Washington, is a deeply entrenched racism  of those who  are “other” and darker skinned:-   whether they  be  Plains Indians,   Filipinos,  Japanese,  Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqi’s, Libyans, Syrians-  even  the Slavic Russian  and Serbian nations ..  the list  goes on  and on  and on….

It is time for the world to  recognise the savagery  and brutality of United States’  international  relations.  It is time to press for reparations for the  environmental  destruction,   the war destruction,  war crimes,  loss of life,  the torture  and the  murders  that  the United States has inflicted on  the world in  the fictitious name of “democracy  and freedom” in  the past  100  years. It is time to  end this  barbarism  and stupidity.

The United States is indeed ‘exceptional’,  but not quite in the way  that  their propagandists planned it. The American  state is  exceptional  in  it being a war  machine;  the government’s role is largely to  fund and plan  wars which  will  assist  the American  armament industry to  sell more weapons at  home abroad.

Links

https://original.antiwar.com/andy_corbley/2019/07/01/how-does-the-war-on-terror-stack-up-to-some-of-historys-most-infamous-genocides/

https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-united-states-of-genocide-putting-the-us-on-trial-for-genocide-against-the-peoples-of-korea-laos-viet-nam-cambodia-iraq-and-elsewhere/5352227

https://www.thenation.com/article/naming-americas-own-genocide/

https://www.globalresearch.ca/united-states-war-crimes/5561468

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/meet-american-empires-dr-death/

The Sick Men of Washington

President Trump,  has now  officially pulled the United States out of the Iran  nuclear deal , officially known  as the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action ( JCPOA) 

Negotiated via U.N.  auspices, the Iran deal limited Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium and thus limit any potential  for Iran to develop  nuclear weapons;  something it has always said is has not intended  nor planned to  do. UN inspections prove that  Iran has indeed complied with  the JCPOA in  full  since its inception in 2015. The deal  in no way  prohibits Iran’s develop  of missile technology,  which would be seen by  any state as a   sovereign  right to protect  itself from  aggressors.

And Iran has many threatening states  to protect  itself from. These include Israel, who  sees Iran  as its major  spoiler to the  ongoing expansion of Israeli  territory  in  the Middle East;  particularly  because of Iranian support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, who  roundly  defeated  Israel in its last  attempt to  occupy Lebanon in   2006 . Then  there is Saudi Arabia,  the despotic regime which  pretends to be a ‘monarchy” who  actively supports protects and funds the Salafist terrorists  across the Middle East  and beyond.  Salafists believe that  all  other Islamic and other religious  beliefs   other than  their own  are ‘heretical”, and therefore those people who  hold such beliefs need to be either forcibly converted or disposed of. Hence the  millions of Shiite peoples of Iran   and its Shi-ite theocracy are anathema to  the Saudi  ‘princes’. Iran is a  large country of over 80  million people,  and while its economy has been made vulnerable by  years of U.S. and other Western countries sanctions, it has managed to develop a wide range of responses to those sanctions,  and particularly  a  home grown defence industry.

Iran is therefore not  significantly vulnerable to  attack  by  Saudi Arabia ,  despite S.A.s huge defence spending ($76 billion in 2017 – third  highest in  the world after the U.S.  and China) ,  as opposed to Iran’s approximately $14 billion), largely because of its very  effective home grown  ballistic missile systems. (it is always amusing to note that U.S. military ‘specialists  always attribute this or that countries’  home grown  military capabilities to some other country – implying in some way  that the specific  country does not have the  technology ,  research  capability and technical know-how that  only  the great and exceptional  U.S.  has!)

And finally,   Iran’s perhaps most significant threat  comes from  the United States,  who has desperately tried to destabilize Iran’s theocracy  in  every  way  possible way since its inception in  1979, after overthrowing the U.S.  and and U.K. installed  despot, the ‘Shah’  of Iran .

The U.K.  has also  played a supporting role to the U.S.  since 1953 in supporting the salafist regimes in the Persian Gulf  and encouraging the export of  Saudi  and Qatari  jihadist  terrorists to  Middle East  states  which  are not active supporters of Western colonialism or Israeli  expansionism.

Thus the latest  move by  the Trump administration to  undermine the U.N.  JCPOA agreement  and threaten sanctions against  countries  and companies that do  not comply with its renewed sanctions against  Iran, is simply part of the ongoing war  by the United States against  Iran that had its inception in  the overthrow of its  brutal dictator ,  the Shah.

The drivers for this  ongoing  war against  Iran are  largely economic:  primarily  re-acquisition of the huge Iranian  oil  market  by  American oil  companies  will  buffer the U.S.  against  the imminent collapse of the local  shale oil  market, whilst  ensuring that Iranian owned oil  and gas is not pipe-lined through to  Europe and Turkey.

However the other major U.S.   impetus for Iranian destabilisation and overthrow of its  independent theocracy is the role of Israel  and its Zionist  lobbyists in  Washington.  Now that Saudi Arabia has been bought into  the Zionist  fold and accepts  the Israeli   theft of Palestinian  lands since 1948 as legitimate, there is only Iran  as a significant power player in  the Middle East  who is  able to  confront Israeli  expansionism.  A tame Iranian regime that supported both  Israel  and  U.S.  colonial policy in  the Middle East  would mean Chinese and Russian commercial and strategic   ambitions  there could be thwarted, and  U.S.  and U.K.  (and to  a smaller degree, French) companies could make billions exploiting the region. With  the truly psychopathic John Bolton now  as Trumps defence advisor, drooling for war  with Iran, and Israel’s Netanyahu frothing at  the mouth for the U.S.  to bomb Iran, all  options are truly on  the table.

While Iran does not have an  effective airforce, due to the  long-standing sanctions against it; it’s ballistic missile  capacity is  indeed formidable,  although largely deprecated by  U.S.  defence analysts . Should the U.S. launch  an attack on  Iran’s infrastructure, as it has continually threatened to do  over the years, the U.S.  would undoubtedly be able to , over time,  obliterate much of Tehran  and  its  key urban  centres as it has done in North Korea,  Vietnam Libya and Iraq in  the past, along  with the consequent  huge suffering and civilian casualties  that  entails. However in  the first  days and weeks of such  a war, Iran’s  widely  dispersed military units, and particularly its missile and anti-ship  units, will  be able to  inflict  massive damage on  U.S.  military bases and aircraft  carriers in  the Gulf because of their close proximity to Iran. An ongoing guerilla war against  U.S.   economic and military  interests in  the Middle East   could well  last  for years. In  comparison  to  the U.S.  war against  Iraq,  Iran’s military capabilities cannot be under-rated as American  defence  analysts  are wont to do  in  their arrogance. This would not be the  “cake-walk” that  the neocons pretended the Iraqi  invasion would be!

Should Israel  also enter the war,  as it has often promised to,  then Tel Aviv is now  well  within  missile striking distance by  Iran’s  Lebanese allies.  Hezbollah.

One would hope that  the crazies like Netanyahu  and John Bolton will  finally be locked away  somewhere safe for the rest of humanity’s sake ,  and the fools like Donald Trump  fade into  quiet  oblivion,  but sadly it seems , that may not be the case…

Links

The Deep State First – Madness On Both Ends of the Acela Corridor

How Hezbollah Defeated Israel

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/05/countdown-to-war-on-iran.html

No flies in Syria

The recent cruise missile attack  by  the U.S.  and its allies the U.K.  and France ( former colonial exploiters  in  the region) raises some interesting dilemmas for Western  military planners .

If we are to believe the Russian military  assessment of the strike, 71 of the of 103 cruise missiles  were brought down  by  Syrian  air defence systems,  particular via the Russian made Pantsir surface-to-air missile  systems.

While the United States and its two allies have claimed that  the missile  attack  was in  response to  their espoused  view that there had been  a gas attack  by  the Assad military in Douma against  the  civilians trapped there, the evidence seems to  suggest  that  this attack was aimed at  eliminating the air support threat  from  the Syrian  Air Force for the jihadists those 3  Western governments have been extensively supporting since the start  of the war to  overthrow the Assad regime.

Having failed in  their bid to  convince the United Nations of a ‘no-fly’ zone in  Syria  on  multiple occasions ( ie elimination of Syrian  government aircraft from the skies above rebel-held territory) ; the use of a chemical  weapons attack  as a pretext  for bombing airfields  has become the next  best  option. Using  The American   government  ( and Muslim Brotherhood)  funded Syrian American Medical  Society (SAMS),  and the largely British intelligence funded and managed White Helmets to  produce videos purporting to  show a chemical  weapons attack  in  Douma, Western media has been united in  showing moral  outrage at  ‘animal Assad’s” killing of his own people, and baying for more attacks on the Syrian military.

The apparent logic given  by  Western media and politicians  for ‘animal Assad”  to  drop  barrel  bombs filed with   toxic chemicals on  the people of   Douma was to demonstrate that there was no  hope for the rebels there and they  should surrender. According to  this logic, it was worth  the risk of a repeat of the previous cruise missile attacks  ordered by  President Trump  last  year  for the Assad regime to drop a few barrels of toxic chemicals on  Douma  to  dislodge the few remaining  “rebels’  there who  were already negotiating an  exit  with the Syrian government from the enclave . One assumes those politicians and the Western media think  their publics are very  very  stupid….Unfortunately for Western intelligence, the overrunning of the last  of the rebel enclaves in Ghouta  and their departure in  buses to  Idlib came far sooner than they expected,  allowing the Syrians and Russians and journalists like the respected British Robert Fisk, to enter the area where the supposed gas attack  had occurred and interview civilians and medics there .

One finds it strange that  neither Western media nor their governments have bayed for large cruise missile attacks on the Al  Qaeda affiliate Al Nusra,  or ISIS, or any  of the other  head-choppers supported by  Gulf and Western states. And that in  fact there have been no  reported cruise missile attacks by  Western countries on ISIS throughout this entire war. How could this be  one wonders?

The chemical  weapons scam is largely similar to  the earlier and still  ongoing farce  in  the Western media about Assad’s “barrel bombs”. “Barrel  bombs’  are nothing but impromptu explosives packed in   drums  and  dropped from government helicopters and  fixed wing aircraft. They  are in  fact, unguided ordinance, which the majority  of the  aerial  weapons  at play  in Syria by  the United States and its allies,  as well as the Russians and the Syrian government, are. But  we are somehow expected to  believe that  packing  munitions into  oil  drums and dropping them  on  targets creates   far worse  dangers,  chaos, injury  and death   than those caused by  other unguided munitions. But again  the ‘barrel  bomb’  farce is one more attempt by  the Western  media and politicians to  remove the threat  to their tunnel  based jihadists from  aerial  warfare of any kind. If the Syrian airforce can be removed and then  the Russian airforce, then  ISIS and the other Al  Qaeda affiliates and salafists out to  exterminate all  Christians , Allawites, Shi-ites and other non  fundamentalist  Sunni sects in Syria, will  have a much free-er hand on the ground.

Despite American  denials, it would appear that in  fact  the  vast majority of the cruise missiles were therefore  aimed at  Syrian  airfields, rather than the alleged chemical  weapons storage and production facilities ( which had been vetted by  the OPCW as ‘clean’  just  last  October 2017). The Syrian and Russians had in  fact deployed most of their more effective anti-missile stations around those airfields; and if they  are to believed,   destroyed the vast  majority of the incoming missiles at  those airfields. There is some speculation that  Russian  electromagnetic interference jamming   systems may have played a part in  the incoming missiles’ lack  of effectiveness,  but that  cant be confirmed as yet.

It would appear  that  the Americans ,French  and British  are relying on  their NATO fellow members of the OPCW to  influence  the public statements of the OPCW in  regards to the alleged Douma gas attack , whilst acknowledging that the inspectors themselves will  draw their own conclusions which  they  can not publicly release as OPCW staff ( but will  likely leak  to  the public or Wikileaks if they  do  not coincide with the political narrative) .  Note that  the most recent media release by  the OPCW on  their survey  of the Dhouma site in Syria states that  “On arrival at Site 1, a large crowd gathered and the advice provided by the UNDSS was that the reconnaissance team should withdraw. At Site 2, the team came under small arms fire and an explosive was detonated. The reconnaissance team returned to Damascus. “

Very clearly, the battle to partition Syria by  the West and its Gulf allies using jihadists is far from over.

But -as in  previous unilateral totally illegal strikes  ( ie not approved by  the U.N. Security Council) by  Western governments on  states that do   not comply with the Western political  and economic agenda , this latest missile attack  provides ample rationale  to  China, as the upcoming dominant global  power,  that  missile   strikes on  countries who  do  not acquiesce to its political  and economic agenda, are a completely legitimate response, in  the future.

It  may not be too  long before China’s aircraft  carrier armada are patrolling the seas off  the United States, the U.K and France..

 

Postscript

A more detailed assessment of the cruise missile numbers and targets from  Joe Quinn at  sott.net

https://www.sott.net/article/382908-About-Those-Nice-New-Smart-Missiles-And-The-Chemical-Weapons-Sites-in-Syria

Links

https://russianmilitaryanalysis.wordpress.com/2017/04/10/u-s-cruise-missile-strikes-in-syria-brief-analysis/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_bomb

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/syria-chemical-attack-gas-douma-robert-fisk-ghouta-damascus-a8307726.html

http://eng.mil.ru/en/news_page/country/more.htm?id=12171300@egNews

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/04/syria-pentagon-hides-attack-failure-70-cruise-missiles-shot-down-.html#more

https://www.opcw.org/

Robert Fisk’s Douma Report Rips Away Excuses for Air Strike on Syria

America First – R.I.P.

Christmas 2017 & The Dishonest Broker

In the last few months we have seen the Trump administration reeling from one extraordinarily stupid move in foreign policy, to another.

Firstly  we have the tragedy and farce of the declaration that the US will ‘accept’ Jerusalem as Israel’s capital; somewhere that all Western nations have been loathe to go (officially) whilst fully accepting and unconditionally supporting the reality of the triumphalism of the apartheid racist Israeli entity.  A two state solution has, since 1948, been known to  all  parties  as a totally non-viable option, and will never happen.

It is of course possible that the Israelis finally realise that the nation of Israel has no future in the long term , unless it grants full right of return to all Palestinian and full compensation for lands stolen since 1948 and lives destroyed… The alternative for Israel does not bear thinking about.

It is not that Trump’s declaration changes anything;  what is upsetting for the West and for China and Russia, is that it makes plain that there never was a two state option- and that the United States has always been the Dishonest Broker in the ‘peace process’ .

Now we can start to face reality in Palestine- and it is not a pretty picture for the Israelis.

The ludicrous aspect of this, is that for those modern day Israelis whose ancestors came from the Levant; they are of exactly the same ethnic Semitic lineage as the ‘dirty Arabs’ they despise . We have seen more than 60 years of completely farcical “peace’ negotiations; the Israelis have never had any intention of returning any of the lands stolen by war or genocide, and both the ‘disinterested” broker and the Palestinian negotiators have always known that.

Then  we have the  ongoing playground bully tactics to North Korea by  the United States president and his policy  advisors and chiefs of staff.  A country that knows full well the epic scale of barbarity the American nation is capable of;  having endured American genocide in the Korean War and the continuous threats from various U.S. presidents and US generals since that time to blast them back into the stone-age. With its back against the wall, North Korea has only one option- to continue to develop enough nuclear ICBMs to substantially debilitate the American economy ( Given that of course from the American side, there will be no negotiations with North Korea until they ‘behave’ )

And then we have dear Nikki Haley the United States ambassador to the United Nations displaying bits of what are supposedly Iranian made missiles launched by the Yemenese Houthis against their Saudi aggressors ,who are currently killing thousands of Yemen citizens with cholera and millions through starvation…

But hey Nikki!- what ‘s more important? -the lives of a few million Yemenese? Or the need to destroy Iran to serve the interests of the Israeli supporters and Saudis who pay Congress and the Washington ‘think-tanks’ ? One hopes that karma is not for real:- Nikki’s future lives are not going to be exactly pretty…nor will it be in this life should true international justice be finally served.

It is not that Trump has really changed anything;- the brutality, cynicism, duplicitiousness and lack of humanity of United States foreign policy has remained largely unchanged since the Second World War. Trump has simply made it very clear what it  has always been about for the United States:- money!

The facade has been removed…We have  seen  a dramatic transition from  a President able to so  plausibly lie through his teeth  (and win  a Nobel peace prize for it), to  one who  seems  to  say  (or tweet) whatever  fleeting thought is on  his mind at  the time ,  but whose sole  immediate directive for decision-making is money  and power, rather than  a longer term strategy of deceit  to reach  the desired same end.

It is disturbing to think that these great leaders of the ‘Free World’ are supposedly the best of humankind- a sad indictment on us all

Links

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/world-will-not-mourn-decline-u-s-hegemony/ 

Brothers in Arms – Saudis and Israelis

On July 10th  2017  the U.K. High  Court rejected a bid by  the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) that ‘Britain’s multi-billion-pound arms sales to Saudi Arabia should be halted because they were being used in Yemen in violation of international humanitarian law. ‘

The British  High  Court judges claimed that the Saudis had “sought positively to address concerns about International Humanitarian Law”…..”Saudi Arabia has been, and remains, genuinely committed to compliance with International Humanitarian Law; and there was no ‘real risk’ that there might be ‘serious violations’ of International Humanitarian Law (in its various manifestations) such that UK arm sales to Saudi Arabia should be suspended or cancelled,” the court said. “

One wonders whether judges can be indicted for perjury? Those judges would have known  full  well  that  their legal  judgement  was a total  and outright lie. The Saudis have in  fact  done everything possible to  exacerbate the suffering  of the Yemen population over the past two years,  with  massive starvation and typhoid outbreaks the consequence of  Saudi bombing of civilian  infrastructure and a blockade of aid and food to Yemen (using British  and U.S. aircraft  ordinance, guidance and coordination) .

One might put this ruling alongside the  eagerness of the U.K. to   continue to  pour millions into  the Israeli  military, which  has for the past 60  years engaged in  a war of not-so- slow motion genocide of the Palestinian  people, for whom  it has  legal  responsibilty as the occupying entity . One has only to  read John Pilger’s account  of the horrendous ordeal  of the Palestinian  people, to be shamed  by  our complicity in  Israeli  war crimes. What  do  these two  delightful  pariah  states have in  common?-  firstly an overweaning desire for  expansion and power; secondly the destruction of the Iranian state,  and thirdly the use of religion to  justify  their  expansionist  goals; with  the Saudis using  their  Wahhabist dogma  to  promote sectarian violence against those who  do  not subscribe to  their bizarre version of  the muslim faith,  while the Zionists use the Jewish  religion as a weapon  against  all  those who  defy  their expansionist  policies and  appropriation of other people’s lands.   As the Boycott,  Divestment Sanctions  (BDS) movement gathers steam  against  the  Israeli  entity, having at least some friends  Israel  can  rely on, may prove rather useful…

It is no  wonder then that  the long-standing secret  alliance between the Saudis and Israel  is now becoming visible, as  political  and moral  pressure  continues to  escalate against  both of them. The Saudi ‘princes’ have continued to  publicly preach  their opposition to  Israeli  occupation of Palestinian  lands , whilst  clandestinely supporting Israel. As the article in Investigaction notes: With some exceptions, support for the Palestinian cause in the Arab world is overwhelming. And regimes like Saudi Arabia have happily betrayed the Palestinian cause over and over again because they are aware that key to their survival is subservience to the United States, and that an alliance with Israel may boost their regional hegemony prospects. But because their legitimacy to rule is incredibly thin to say the least, royals and officials need to keep pretending in public that they are defending and fighting for the Palestinians.

As the economic and military  power of Iran continues to grow,  (despite the best efforts of most of the Western world; with sanctions and  attempted coups and assassinations and wars), the  anti-Iran hysteria within  the ruling classes in these two  regimes continues to  escalate. For the Saudis,  Iran , a largely Shi-ite theocracy ( i.e.  decidely more democratic than  the Saudis,  but  with brutal  political  oversight by  its religious governing bodies) is  a complete anathema to  Saudi Wahhabist  Sunni  ideology,  which holds that all  non-Sunni  muslims are in  fact not muslim  at  all.  In addition  Iran’s rapid development of an internal  arms industry (particularly in  missile development) totally unreliant on  Western imports, along with an economic  structure largely  independent  from  the West ( largely as a result of Western  sanctions based on  fraudulent claims of its  development of nuclear weapons) has allowed it to pursue a totally independent foreign policy line-  unlike the Saudis who  remain completely reliant on  U.K.  and U.S.  weaponry  and therefore required to  be  largely compliant  to U.S.  and U.K military   and political  objectives in  the Middle East.

For the Israelis,  Iran  remains the one  major threat   to its goals of a larger and all-powerful  Israel;  the Middle East  country with the largest  military (courtesy  of the United States)  and  a nuclear arsenal . Iran continues to  support fund and train  Hezbollah  in Lebanon,  and to some degree Hamas  in  the Occupied Territories of Palestine itself. Both Hezbollah,  with its devastating victory over the Israeli  Army in  Lebanon in 2006, and to  a smaller degree Hamas, with its ongoing resistance to  Israel’s brutal military incursions into  the West  Bank, have been  a thorn in  the side of Israeli  expansionism, and hence have been deemed ‘terrorist  organisations’  by the West.  Hezbollah  has again  played a significant role  against  Al Qaeda (Al Nusra) and ISIS ( funded and armed by  the Saudis and to  some degree by  Turkey, Qatar   and Israel in  the Syrian  war, with coordination and logistics provided by  British and United States intelligence agencies).  And while Israel  knows that  Iran is not going to  acquire nuclear weapons,  it is fearful  of the increasingly advanced home-grown missile technology  that Iran  posseses which now poses a significant deterrant to Israeli  expansion.

Thus  Israel  and  the Saudi  regimes; both rapidly becoming pariah states,  have  increasingly cosied up to each other, (just  as Israel  did with  apartheid South  Africa in  the 1960s) with Israel  providing overt  support to  the Saudi  war  in Yemen,  along with the British and Americans,  on the premise that somehow/somewhere  the Iranians must  be supporting the Yemenese Houthi forces there.  This most un-holy of alliances will  inevitably be the undoing of both  regimes…

Links

https://www.caat.org.uk/campaigns/stop-arming-saudi/judicial-review

http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-saudi-arms-idUKKBN19V0YR

http://johnpilger.com/articles/palestine-is-still-the-issue

http://wolvestuc.org.uk/index.php/local-campaigns/wolves-palestine-solidarity/256-wolverhampton-link-to-arms-exports-to-israel

Yemen: The War That Isn’t Happening Even as It’s Happening

http://www.investigaction.net/en/israel-and-saudi-arabia-a-match-made-in-heaven-or-in-washington/

 

 

Yemen: The War That Isn’t Happening Even as It’s Happening

Qatari questions…

As Donald Trump  has announced: ‘Qatar has  been funding terrorism  at a very high level”. Trump is of course correct;  Qatar has been funding training and arming  jihadists across the Middle East  and the Western world for many years. However, funding  terrorists is not Qatar’s sin  for the Saudis ,  the Americans and the British.  Qatar’s crime is that they not only support Hamas to    respond to Israeli  terror against  the  Palestinians ,  but they also have a  distant alliance with  Iran promarily via  their shared Pars field gas resource; and,  to cap  it all  off, are  now agreeing to sell some gas  in non-US dollars!

The reality is that   a few  deaths on  London  Bridge  or somewhere else in  Europe are simply collateral  damage;  worth it,  in  the bigger interest of huge kickbacks  from  the Saudis,  and Israel’s backers in  the States  and the U.K. .. This is purely and simply about money. The  festering cesspool  of  British/American  mainstream  politics and their respective ‘intelligence’  units , is all  about money- what’s a few blown-up  innocent citizens compared to  the billions that  can be made through arms deals,   oil  deals and kickbacks?-with  the added benefit of  de-stabilising the one final   disruptor  to  Israel’s’ plans  to  once and for good  ‘solve’  the Palestinian question-  by removing Iran  and their allies Hezbollah and to some degree Hamas.

As Angry Arab notes:  If Western media want to really serve their readers in their (lousy) coverage of the Gulf crisis, they would adhere to those two basic standards of professional journalism:
1) they would tell their readers while interviewing academics, journalists, or “citizens” in UAE or Saudi Arabia or Qatar that opposition the government or disagreeing with the government in tweets or in retweets would land you in jail for up to 15 years with a hefty fine. They would tell them people in those countries are not free to express views different form the government.
2) they would tell readers when they cite “experts” at DC think thanks that those think tanks are all funded by UAE and/or Saudi Arabia (except Brookings which is funded by Qatar).  These are basics.’

 

Links

https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/qatar-linked-terror-list-issued-saudi-arabia-allies/

http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13960320000109

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/391853-qatar-riyadh-plan-backfires/

https://wikileaks.org/saudi-cables/buying-silence

https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/iraq-reinforces-border-saudi-arabia-amid-deepening-qatari-saudi-rift-video/

http://angryarab.blogspot.co.nz/

 

Dance of the Macabre

We are now treated to the spectacle of President Trump  dancing a sword dance with  Saudi  princes after signing  a multi  billion dollar arms deal  with  the Saudi  regime..
We  have indisputable evidence that  the Saudis and Qataris are not only funding training and even  providing  jihadist manpower to  terrorists in  the Middle East  ( including both  Al Qaeda and ISIS), but that  the Saudi  regime is also  the sole source of the Wahhabist  ideology  that drives foolish young men to commit terrorist crimes,  both in the West  and as  jihadist  mercenaries in  the Middle East.
We know also  that  Britain  (remember Lawrence of Arabia) and now the United States, have continued to  prop  up  this brutal  sectarian and misogynist regime on the Arabian  peninsula for the past 100  years,  because it serves their interest  to do  so. Interests that include  oil of course and the sale of superfluous  armaments , but also  the capacity to combat  those states in  the Middle East  who  do  not bow down  to  Western interests;  eg Iraq, Libya, Syria,  and the ultimate prize,  Iran.
Thus, as academic Christopher Davidson  meticulously records in  his 2016 book, “The Shadow Wars”; ongoing U.K.  and U.S.  support for the Saudi regime and its terrorist activities is very  much in  their interests.
For how much longer will  this macabre dance continue?