It Was Twenty Years Ago: "Infinite Justice".

A Promise Of Justice? I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people - and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!
- President George W. Bush, 14 September 2001.

WHEN AN EVENT as large and resonant as the terror attacks of 11 September imprint themselves on the memories of millions, journalism is momentarily rendered speechless. The sheer enormity of the destruction of the World Trade Centre exposed what has been called “a poverty of eloquence” on the part of those whose job it was to describe reality.

Not only were the wordsmiths lost for words, but they were also bereft of explanations. Nowhere was this more evident than on the American television networks, where stunned anchor-people struggled, in real time, to interpret what their fellow citizens, with mounting horror and disbelief, were witnessing through a hundred million television sets.

The only people who seemed equal to the task of putting words to the images were politicians. Almost instantaneously, the US political and security establishment found the phrases that have subsequently come to frame the issue.

The terrorist attacks were described as the opening salvo of a global war between Good and Evil, a war which the United States would prosecute with the utmost severity - no matter what the cost. Those responsible for this outrage, and any who gave them shelter or support, would be pursued to the very ends of the earth. Within days, this cosmic struggle had a code-name: it was called “Infinite Justice”.

But now journalism is beginning to respond to the Bush Administration’s rhetoric. Upon the unreflective surface of the mainstream media monolith, hairline cracks of doubt and disagreement are appearing. Above the patriotic clamour for vengeance, dissenting voices are beginning to be heard.

Sometimes they come from the most unlikely sources. Stephen Schwartz writing in the right-wing weekly magazine, The Spectator, points an accusing finger not simply at Osama bin Laden, but also at the fanatical Islamic sect known as the Wahhabis (of which bin Laden is a follower). “Not all Muslims are suicide bombers,” observes Schwartz, “but all suicide bombers are Wahhabis.”

Founded in the 18th Century by the Arabian cleric Ibn Abdul Wahhab, the sect’s teachings were taken up by the founder of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia – Ibn Saud – who cleverly exploited its austere puritanism in his World War I struggle against what he regarded (encouraged by T.E. Lawrence – “Lawrence of Arabia”) as the decadence of his Turkish overlords.

As Schwartz notes, Wahhabism remains the official creed of the Saudi royal family: “One major question is never asked in American discussions of Arab terrorism: what is the role of Saudi Arabia? The question cannot be asked because American companies depend too much on the continued flow of Saudi oil, while American politicians have become too cosy with the Saudi rulers.”

Just how cosy, is revealed by John Mecklin, a US investigative reporter formerly based in Houston, Texas. Back in the late 1980s, Mecklin was running down leads on the connections between prominent Texans and the Bank of Credit and Commerce International – an institution later implicated in money laundering, arms dealing and, tangentially, in the Iran-Contra ‘arms-for-hostages’ scandal that rocked the Reagan White House.

One of the key figures at the Texas end of Mecklin’s BCCI investigation was businessman James R. Bath. Among Mr Bath’s clients were a number of wealthy Saudi Arabians – including one Salim bin Laden, heir to a vast construction fortune and half-brother to Osama. According to a Time magazine report, James Bath also had a 5% stake in two limited partnerships, Arbusto 79 and Arbusto 80, both controlled by his old Air National Guard buddy, George - eldest son of a former CIA Chief. (Arbusto is Spanish for ‘bush’.)

That son is now President of the United States – and the mortal foe of Osama bin Laden.

Infinite justice indeed.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion of Friday, 28 September 2001.

America's Bitter Legacy In The Middle East.

Bitter Lake, Bitter Legacy: The Saudi King, Abdul Aziz, guarantees the United States access to Arabia's almost limitless oil reserves and, in return, President Franklin Roosevelt guarantees the Saudi monarchy's security. The photograph was taken aboard the USS Quincy, moored in the Great Bitter Lake, on 14 February 1945. The so-called "Quincy Agreement" set the course of US policy in the Middle East for the next 70 years.

THE QUESTION CONFRONTING the Democratic Party when it next takes control of the White House will, simply, be: “What now?” The next Democratic President will likely enter office with the two most powerful Islamic nations in the Middle East, Iran and Saudi Arabia, locked in a nuclear arms race. Faced with the prospect of two bitter foes acquiring the means to wipe it off the face of the earth, Israel (which already possesses its own nuclear arsenal) will be screaming at the new Democratic administration to: “Do something – or we will!” Doing something will be unavoidable – but what is it that the United States should do?

On his way home from the Yalta Conference aboard the USS Quincy, in February 1945, President Franklin Roosevelt paused briefly in the Great Bitter Lake (half-way along the Suez Canal) to meet with Abdul Aziz, King of Saudi Arabia. In many respects this meeting on Great Bitter Lake was as important to the world’s future as Roosevelt’s meeting at Yalta with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. Arising out of the secret conclave between President and King was the so-called “Quincy Agreement”, by which the United States guaranteed the security of the Saudi monarchy, and the Saudi monarchy guaranteed the United States access to its almost limitless oil reserves.

The tragedy of the Quincy Agreement is that it simply wasn’t necessary. In 1945 the US was the most powerful nation on earth and just a few months away from producing the world’s first nuclear weapons. Under Roosevelt, the Americans had already set in motion the dismantling of the British Empire: a process which would, in the space of two years, force Great Britain to relinquish the “jewel” in its imperial crown – India. That Roosevelt, the Roosevelt of 1940, would not have vouchsafed US protection to the deeply reactionary Saudi dynasty; not when he could have had it swept away by forces dedicated to establishing a modern, secular, democratic republic with just a flick of Uncle Sam’s finger. Unfortunately, that Roosevelt no longer existed. In his place was the gaunt, exhausted figure of the Yalta newsreels: a man barely two months away from death.

It was this dying Roosevelt who resigned himself to preserving not only the Saudi king (and his oil) but also the King of Egypt and the Emperor of Ethiopia. Churchill and the British had convinced him that US strategic interests would be best served by keeping in place every one of the petty kings and potentates that Britain had installed across the Middle East in the aftermath of World War I.

It was a fatal error. For the next seventy years the Americans (aided and abetted at every turn by the British) found themselves obliged to prop-up a corrupt collection of quasi-medieval reactionaries who had set their faces against all the emancipatory forces of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and who were doing everything in their power to advance the most extreme and retrograde interpretations of the Prophet Mohammed’s religious teachings.

The alternative course of action: the road not taken; would have seen the full weight of the US thrown behind the secular forces of Middle Eastern nationalism and their quest for cultural and economic independence. Yes, many of these nationalist leaders may have been mildly socialist, like Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Mohammad Mosaddegh of Iran, but no more so that the leaders of Sweden or India. With the encouragement and support of the United States, the Arab and Iranian peoples could have constructed modern, open societies to match the magnificent civilisations of their past. Moderate Islamic democracies, forever beholden to the United States for underwriting their freedom, prosperity and independence.

What actually happened, of course, was that when the aforementioned Mosaddegh attempted to establish just such a government in Iran, the CIA (represented, ironically, by Roosevelt’s son, Kermit) and the British secret service, MI6, colluded in mobilising the reactionary Muslim clergy against him and restored to the Peacock Throne the craven and vicious Mohammad Reza Pahlavi – Iran’s hereditary (and now absolute) ruler.

That this anti-democratic behaviour has remained a constant of US policy in the Middle East is due in no small part to the State of Israel. Born out of the acquisition and, later, the expropriation of Arab properties in the former British mandate of Palestine, Israel’s existence has always constituted a major obstacle to the peaceful evolution of a modern and moderate Middle East.

Had the US and Britain been willing to stand behind secular Arab nationalism and the establishment of democratic governments in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Arabia, the Gulf States and Iran, it is possible that Israel may have felt sufficiently secure to negotiate a lasting modus vivendi between the Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews. From 1956 onwards, however, Britain and America were happy to use Israel as a battering ram against Arab nationalism and, at need, the entire Muslim world. A strategy which has positioned Israel as a nuclear-armed obstacle squarely athwart every path to Middle Eastern peace.

How to respond when the next Democratic President of the United States asks: “What now?” Tell her to reverse every policy the United States has followed in the Middle East since the USS Quincy hove-to in the Great Bitter Lake in February 1945. Yes, it’s a little late for such a radical realignment of US policy – but better late than never.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 11 May 2018.

Gas Attack In Khan Sheikhoun! But Why Would Bashar al-Assad Blow Himself Up?

A War Crime? Yes - But Whose? The most obvious interpretation of the chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun is that it was intended to inflict as much damage on the Syrian Government as possible. Stopping in their tracks all moves towards accepting that the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must be involved in the peace-making process. Ensuring that the flow of arms to Assad’s enemies continues – or is increased. Placing the Russians under massive international pressure to abandon their alliance with the Assad regime. And forcing the Trump Administration to back away smartly from its “Assad can stay” position.
 

JUST ONCE, it would be nice to encounter a Western journalist willing to challenge the “International Community’s” official line. Someone willing to acknowledge that the term “International Community” is, itself, a cynical misnomer intended to cloak the self-interested policies of the United States and its Nato allies in the highfalutin language of global solidarity. A journalist willing to have a crack at sifting a nugget or two of truth from the dross of convenient lies.
 

Take this latest story about the use of poison gas against Syrian civilians. It seems certain that on 4 April 2017, the deadly nerve agent Sarin was released in in the rebel stronghold of Khan Sheikhoun, killing scores of civilians, including women and children. Before the last victim of the attack had been loaded into an ambulance, however, the world was being told that the party responsible for this unlawful attack was the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
 

Nobody thought to ask the obvious question: “Why would Assad do such a thing?” Syria was en route to a new round of peace talks. More importantly, she was about to enter negotiations in which the usual American, British and French demands that “Assad must go!” were to be, for the first time since the Syrian Civil War broke out in earnest, quietly put to one side. Having won the war on the ground, the Assad regime was on the brink of clearing away its enemies’ unrealistic preconditions. Finally, a serious conversation about Syria’s future could begin.
 

And yet, we are being invited to believe that, with all this at stake, President Assad ordered the use of Sarin gas on his own citizens. Somehow, instigating a reprehensible war crime against women and children was going to strengthen his moral authority. Somehow, by revolting the entire world, he would improve his chances of being accepted as Syria’s legitimate ruler. Somehow, by embarrassing the Russian Federation, his country’s most valuable military ally, he would enhance Syria’s national security. The whole notion is absurd.
 

The much more obvious interpretation of the chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun is that it was intended to inflict as much damage on the Syrian Government as possible. Stopping in their tracks all moves towards accepting that Assad must be involved in the peace-making process. Ensuring that the flow of arms to Assad’s enemies continues – or is increased. Placing the Russians under massive international pressure to abandon their alliance with the Assad regime. And forcing the Trump Administration to back away smartly from its “Assad can stay” position.
 

So many birds with just one, Sarin-smeared stone.
 

The failure of Western journalism to ask “cui bono?” (who benefits?) is made all the greater by the fact that its “Assad uses poison gas on his own people!” headline has been used before. On 22 August 2013, the world awoke to the news that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Syrian civilians living in the rebel-controlled Ghouta suburb of the Syrian capital, Damascus, had been attacked with what appeared to be chemical weapons, specifically, the deadly nerve agent Sarin. The author of the attack? Yes, you guessed it, Bashar al-Assad!
 

Surely, the International Community, opined (through its journalistic mouthpieces) President Barack Obama’s “red line” had been crossed? Surely, it was time for the USA to intervene?
 

Then a story appeared on the Mint Press News website based in the US state of Minnesota. Following numerous interviews with doctors, Ghouta residents, rebel fighters and their families, two freelance journalists, Dale Gavlak and Yahya Ababneh, concluded that the attack had been carried out by rebel forces using chemical weapons supplied by Saudi Intelligence.
 

The International Community and its flacks weren’t buying any of it. And yet, for some reason, Obama declined to be stampeded into war by the Ghouta outrage. Could it be that US intelligence officers and their Israeli counterparts uncovered exactly the same evidence as Gavlak and Ababneh? Did Russian Intelligence come forward with corroborative intercepts? Whatever the explanation, the USA declined to escalate the Syrian conflict.
 

Those peddling the same “Assad did it!” line in 2017 should, perhaps, ask themselves whether the person currently occupying the White House; the man who believes himself besieged by his own intelligence agencies; the man whose quick temper and sensitivity to criticism is legendary; the man currently in the market for a major political distraction; will, like Barack Obama, allow himself to be steered away from diplomatic and military responses that could only further inflame an already critical situation in the Middle East?
 

Just once, I wish the Western news media would use its fucking head!
 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 5 April 2017.

A Howling Moral Vacuum: America’s Syrian Policy.

The Other Side Of The Story: A rebel fighter from the Jaish al-Fatah (or Army of Conquest) prepares to fire artillery during clashes with Syrian pro-government forces earlier this year. Why is it that the Western news media provides so little coverage of the Jihadists' artillery bombardment of West Aleppo? Perhaps it's because we might  start asking embarrassing questions about where these big guns come from.

 

AVID FANS of the US television series Homeland are already familiar with the drill. People in the White House, people in the Pentagon, people in the State Department let it be known to people working in the Central Intelligence Agency that certain things must be made to happen. None of these people will ever tell (or admit to) the world what it is that they want to make happen. That’s because what the US actually wants to happen is very often the opposite of what the US says it wants to happen. And that, of course, is the whole point of an outfit like the CIA. It allows the American Government to enjoy its diplomatic cake while blowing everybody else’s cake to Kingdom Come.

 

Take Syria, for example. In the earliest days of the uprising that became the Syrian Civil War the CIA was hard at work on the ground. It’s job was to build up the armed resistance to the regime of Bashar al-Assad as quickly as possible. Money and weapons flowed freely – even though the CIA’s knowledge of exactly who it was funding and equipping was, at best, sketchy. At worst, the CIA helped to funnel American aid to individuals and groups who had a much greater interest in Salafist Islam than they did in liberal secular democracy.

 

Of course the creation of a liberal secular democracy was not the real reason the CIA was in Syria. The real reason they were working so hard to make civil war inevitable was because they wanted to prevent Syria and its neighbours, Lebanon and Iraq, from getting any closer to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

 

In pursuing this objective the United States wasn’t only acting in its own interests, but also in the interests of the governments of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel.

 

Turkey was paranoid that the quasi-autonomous Kurdish enclave in Northern Iraq might one day morph into an independent Kurdistan. Such a development would make the task of repressing its own Kurdish minority ten times harder.

 

Saudi Arabia was determined to free the Sunni Syrian majority from the tutelage of Assad’s Shi’a allies - thereby preventing the creation of a powerful and antagonistic crescent of Shi’a-dominated states stretching from the Pakistani border to the Mediterranean Sea.

 

Israel’s motives for fomenting an intractable civil war may have been no more reputable than preferring a Syria racked by the agonies of civil and religious strife, to a Syria peaceful and prosperous enough to once again attempt to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Once again? Oh yes, in the early 2000s the Assad regime, with help from the North Koreans, undertook the construction of its own nuclear reactor. In 2007, Israeli jets blew the reactor to smithereens before it could come on line.

 

The motives of the people in the White House, Pentagon and State Department were much the same as the Israelis. US strategic objectives in the Middle-East have remained remarkably consistent since the end of World War II. First and foremost there’s the region’s oil reserves. These must, at all costs, remain under the control of regimes friendly to the United States. Even the remotest possibility that the emergence of a dominant regional power, or combination of regional powers, might threaten US access to Middle eastern oil will cause the potential threat to be “terminated with extreme prejudice” (as they say in the CIA).

 

Whether the potential leader of such an emergent entity be a Persian (as in the case of the Iranian Prime Minister, Mossadegh) or Arab (as in the case of the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein) the United States has demonstrated that it will stop at nothing to preserve its hegemony in the Middle East.

 

So, the next time you’re wincing at horrific images broadcast out of East Aleppo, ask yourself why the civilian population hasn’t left the war zone for somewhere safer. While you’re at it, you might also ask yourself how it is that the Jihadis dug into the rubble never seem to run out of arms and ammunition. And, why it is that only the Assad Government and its Russian allies are being ordered to stop the shelling and the bombing of civilian targets?

 

Could it be that the men, women and children under fire in East Aleppo are much too valuable to the Jihadis as human shields to be allowed to leave their shattered homes? Or is it simply their immense value as propaganda weapons? Especially East Aleppo’s children, whose tiny broken bodies are beamed into the living-rooms of Western households practically every night of the week. Absent from our news bulletins, however, are the images of the men, women and children being killed by the Jihadi artillery shells exploding every day in the streets of West Aleppo. Funny that.

 

The US Secretary of State, John Kerry, just like his predecessor, Hillary Clinton, may say America wants peace in Syria. But if that was really the case, then the US Government would have ordered the CIA out of Syria, and stopped shipping arms to the rebel units dug into the rubble of East Aleppo. If ending the Syrian civil war was America’s true objective in the Middle East, then it would be making peace at the side of the Russian Federation – not casting it as the principal obstacle to a successful resolution of the conflict.

 

What makes the Homeland series so compelling is the howling moral vacuum at the heart of American foreign and defence policy. It sucks the characters into its emptiness and leaves them breathing dirt in the dark. They are expendable instruments who would like to do good, but can’t. Because doing good is not what serving a superpower is all about.

 

President Ronald Reagan may have presented America as “a shining city on a hill”, but it was Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, who came closest to describing her true character. “America”, he said, “has no friends – only interests.”

 

Remember that next time you watch the news.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 17 October 2016.

If America Refuses To End The Syrian Civil War, Then Russia Will Have To Win It.

Aleppo's Agony: More than anything else, global opinion is demanding an end to the siege of Aleppo. Surely, who rules Syria matters less than bringing this seemingly interminable and indiscriminate destruction to an end? Why can’t those doing the fighting see that? Why won’t they stop?

 

THE IMAGES EMERGING FROM ALEPPO are gut-wrenching. Tiny babies, dust-covered and ominously silent, are pulled from the rubble of their homes. The cries of anguished parents mingle with the wailing of ambulance sirens as their broken children are carried away. A young man on Skype warns the world of Aleppo’s “annihilation”. A water-treatment plant is bombed, and in retaliation the only other functioning plant is shut down. Two million people are left without safe drinking water. This is the Syrian Civil War up-close and personal. Unbelievably horrible.

 

More than anything else, the global audience confronted with these horrors wants the war to stop. Surely, who rules Syria matters less than bringing such indiscriminate death and destruction to an end? Why can’t those doing the fighting see that? Why won’t they stop?

 

The warring parties won’t stop because they can’t stop. Not until the government of Bashar Al-Assad either triumphs over, or is decisively defeated by, its enemies.

 

If he chose to, the American Secretary of State, John Kerry, whose lugubrious features are so well suited to his repeated expressions of sympathy for the Syrian people, could end the war in a moment. All he has to do is halt the supply of weapons to Assad’s enemies. Yes, that would involve placing a restraining hand on the shoulders of America’s Saudi and Turkish allies. But if his government was genuinely committed  to ending the fighting, that is what it would do.

 

Because Assad’s regime is still recognised as the legitimate government of Syria. Its representatives continue to take their seats in the General Assembly of the United Nations, and its ambassadors continue to be recognised in the world’s capital cities – including Washington DC.

 

That’s because there was a time when the West was only too happy to have Syria’s friendship. It was 2003, and US forces were busy overthrowing Assad’s fellow Baathist, Saddam Hussein. No one had too much to say back then about the brutally authoritarian character of the “murderous Syrian regime”.

 

On the contrary, in the decade following the Iraq invasion, the Western powers were at pains to point out how very different Bashar was from his hard-line Baathist father, Hafez Al-Assad. Bashar’s western education was played up, as were the charitable works of his glamorous wife, Asma. The general diplomatic consensus up until 2011 was that a gradual liberalisation of the regime was underway. Elections had been held. Political prisoners had been freed. All Assad needed, said the Middle East-watchers, was time.

 

He didn’t get it. The Arab Spring of 2011 unleashed a wave of popular uprisings across the Middle East. Assad watched with growing alarm as first Tunisia, then Egypt and finally Libya succumbed to politico-military putsches that saw heads-of-state roll – sometimes literally.

 

This was the point at which an intelligent American administration would have made it clear to the world that it was committed to preserving the reforming government of Bashar al-Assad. Unfortunately, the then US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, fresh from her “triumph” in Libya, prevailed upon President Barack Obama to figuratively hold the cloaks of the Syrian rebels while they stoned the Assad regime to death.

 

Tragically, the Obama Administration had reckoned without the Assad family’s grim reputation for holding on to power at any cost. Like his father before him, Bashar looked not to Syrian civil society for salvation, but to the Syrian military. Civil war, with all of its attendant fratricidal slaughter, was unleashed. Syria was ripped apart.

 

Wrong-footed by Assad’s bloodthirsty response, Obama dithered. As he cast about for a solution that did not involve putting American boots on the ground, Saudi Arabia did all it could to ensure that it would be an Islamic, and not a secular, state that grew out of the rubble of Baathism.

 

Meanwhile, in eastern Syria, something even more deadly was rising. Remnants of Saddam’s disbanded army had crossed the Iraqi border; ruthlessly eliminated the student groups responsible for the democratic rebellion; and allowed their fanatical Salafist understudies to announce the return of the long-dead Caliphate – the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

 

Enter Vladimir Putin. As long-time allies of the Syrians, and with radical Islamic terrorists of its own to worry about, Putin’s Russian Federation was willing to embrace what the Americans consistently refused to endorse – foreign military intervention.

 

Whatever else they may be criticised for, the Russians cannot be faulted for their grasp of war’s greatest priority: securing victory as swiftly as possible. Were the Americans only willing to immediately staunch the flow of arms to Assad’s enemies, then the slow torture of Aleppo could cease, and its interminable siege be lifted.

 

In the absence of decisive American action, however, the Russian and Syrian bombers will continue their deadly sorties.

 

And the awful images of war will continue to assault our eyes.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 27 September 2016.

Serbia/Syria - The Parallels Are Frightening.

Two Shots Heard Round The World: Gavrilo Princip's assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, was the necessary provocation that allowed the Entente powers to set in motion the General European War that they - and Serbia - had been planning for more than a decade. In Syria, today, there are frighteningly strong parallels with the Great Power intrigues and transformative territorial ambitions that led to the outbreak of war in 1914.

 

SYRIA HAS BECOME the Serbia of the early Twenty-First Century. In the early years of the Twentieth Century, Serbia was Europe’s tinder-box. All the major powers understood the risk Serbia posed, but each of them had too much at stake in the Balkans to hazard bringing the criminal Belgrade regime to heel. The same can be said of Syria. The major powers all have a great deal to lose by ending the Syrian civil war and restoring peace to the Middle East.

 

What this means, however, is that the seething rivalries fuelling the Syrian civil war could, at any moment, draw the major powers into a military confrontation – with profound consequences for the whole world. Just as Britain, France and Russia knew that Serbia could very easily be made the pretext for a war against Germany and Austria-Hungary, the United States and its key Middle Eastern allies know that Syria could very easily be turned into a shooting war against the Russian Federation and Iran.

 

The fatal flaw in the great powers’ relationship with Serbia in the early Twentieth Century was that Serbia had geopolitical aspirations that could only be satisfied by a general European War. The Serbian dream was to become the leader of a new South Slav (Yugoslav) kingdom carved out of the Balkan provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That was never going to happen while Austria-Hungary endured. Serbia wanted – Serbia needed – a general European war.

 

In Syria, the raging fratricidal battles are being driven by two, mutually exclusive, geopolitical and religious visions of the region’s future.

 

For Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s beleaguered President, the best outcome of the civil war would be the creation of a Shia Islam alliance extending all the way from Syria’s Mediterranean coast, through Iraq, to Iran’s borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan.

 

For Syria’s Sunni majority, the ultimate goal is the creation of a Sunni Islam alliance embracing Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.

 

The success of either of these arrangements would fundamentally derange the geopolitics of the Middle East. It is, therefore, unsurprising that the two leading nuclear powers, the USA and the Russian Federation, both have planes in the air and (some) boots on the ground in Syria.

 

Tipping The Scales: The intrusion of Russian air power in support of President Bashar al-Assad's government has dramatically upset military calculations across the Middle East.

 

President Vladimir Putin would dearly love to have a friendly Shia confederation stretching protectively along the Russian Federation’s southern flank. That the increasingly erratic regime of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would find itself squeezed between the two (and, quite possibly, a newly created independent Kurdish state) only adds to the attractiveness of this outcome.

 

For President Barack Obama, the situation is a great deal murkier. Washington’s unshakeable alliance with the State of Israel leaves it in something of a quandary. Jerusalem already lives in existential fear of an assertive (i.e. nuclear-capable) Iran. It’s reaction to an Iran-dominated Shia confederation stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean can only be imagined! But a vertical alliance of Takfiri-driven Sunni states, stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Black Sea, would, if anything, be worse! How long could it be before nuclear-armed Pakistan applied to join this incipient Caliphate?

 

Russia’s much clearer set of objectives is reflected in its much clearer foreign and military policies in the Middle East. It’s straightforward goal is to keep Bashar al-Assad in power and destroy the Turks’ and the Saudis’ Takfiri proxies – which include the Al Qaeda aligned al-Nusra Front as well as the murderous Islamic State. [The Takfiris are Muslims who claim the right to brand as apostate, and make war upon, every Muslim who, according to the Takfiris’ radically literal interpretation of the Quran, is guilty of deviating from the “true” path of the Prophet.]

 

So far, the Russians and their Syrian Government allies are doing pretty well. Thanks largely to Russia’s fighter-bombers, the strategic rebel stronghold of Aleppo is on the point of falling to Assad’s army.

 

To the Turks and the Saudis, the fall of Aleppo would be a disaster. Not only would the rebels’ crucial supply lines to Turkey be severed, but the road to the Islamic State’s Syrian “capital”, Raqqa, would lie open. But, as Ankara and Riyadh both know, the moment the “moderate” rebels and the Islamic State are defeated, the Syrian civil war is over. And if that happens, there will be nothing to prevent the extension of Iranian power all the way to the Syrian coast.

 

Hence the Saudi-Arabian Crown Prince’s excited talk about sending tens-of-thousands of ground troops to Syria via Turkey, ostensibly to destroy Islamic State, but actually to establish a “buffer zone” along Turkey’s southern border with Syria. Russia has warned that any such breach of international law will be answered with military force.

 

On Sunday, Turkish artillery began shelling Kurdish positions across the Syrian border.

 

The parallels with Serbia in 1914 are frightening.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 16 February 2016.

Blair's Bilious Bloviating. Or, Jeez Tony, Haven't You Done Enough Damage?

Purveyor of Hot Air Since 1997: Tony Blair's latest essay on the Middle East was so bad that even London's Tory mayor, Boris Johnson, told him to "put a sock in it". The terms "self-deluding" and "self-serving" are barely adequate to describe Blair's bilious bloviating.

FOR NEARLY A WEEK the world has been retching over Tony Blair’s essay on Iraq. Having read it, even London’s Tory Mayor, Boris Johnson, curtly instructed him to “put a sock in it”.

This global revulsion is not solely attributable to the fact that Mr Blair, the second-most-culpable person associated with the bloody Iraqi omnishambles, is still presuming to tell the world how to fix it – though that would be reason enough. It’s because his recipe for peace and progress in the Middle East is exactly the same as it was back in 2003. Invasion, occupation and the imposition of Western values.

 

The formula that worked so tremendously well the first time!

 

According to Mr Blair, the Islamic world, being “inherently unstable”, cannot actually be damaged by anything “we” (by which he presumably means the Anglo-American imperium and its assorted hangers-on) do to it. Iraq, Libya, Syria: they’d all have gone bad regardless of “our” actions. None of it is down to “us”.

 

“The problems of the Middle East are the product of bad systems of politics mixed with a bad abuse of religion going back over a long time. Poor governance, weak institutions, oppressive rule and a failure within parts of Islam to work out a sensible relationship between religion and Government have combined to create countries which are simply unprepared for the modern world. Put into that mix, young populations with no effective job opportunities and education systems that do not correspond to the requirements of the future economy, and you have a toxic, inherently unstable matrix of factors that was always – repeat always - going to lead to a revolution.”

 

So, you see, the “international community” has nothing to reproach itself for when it comes to the Middle East. Those fine fellows, Sykes and Picot, drawing lines all over the maps of the dying Ottoman Empire back in 1916, were entirely blameless. War, after all, is war. And if you’re foolish enough to thrown in with the losing side, then you can hardly complain when your territory is carved up like a (ahem) Turkey.

 

Yes, yes, yes – alright! His Majesty’s Government may have encouraged Colonel T.E. Lawrence to stir up the Arabs against the Turks by promising them their own independent kingdom if they threw in with the winning side. But that was a wartime promise – and everyone knows (or should know) what a wartime promise is worth.

 

And, no, on balance, Mr Blair clearly does not agree that the Royal Air Force’s deployment of poison gas bombs against rebellious Iraqi tribespeople in the 1920s and 30s is in any way evidence of “poor governance” or “oppressive rule” on the part of the British Empire. Any more than the 1918 Balfour Declaration, which, by promising the Jewish people their own homeland in Palestine laid the foundations for the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, could be described as the product of “bad systems of politics mixed with a bad abuse of religion”.

 

Mr Blair’s essay is not burdened with such irrelevant historical detail. “We have to put aside the differences of the past”, he warns, “and act now to save the future.”

 

Brave words. And yet, among the 2,833 words of Mr Blair’s bilious essay two very important words are missing – Saudi Arabia.

 

Which is really rather odd, because it is the Wahhabism of the Saudis, coupled with the Kingdom’s extraordinary oil wealth, which is inspiring, resourcing and providing diplomatic cover for terrorist militia all over the Middle East.

 

A Caliphate of the Righteous? Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) jihadists pose for the cameras. While Western Imperialism continues to dictate the fate of the Middle East, ISIS will never want for recruits.

 

If “saving the future” does not involve imposing UN sanctions upon the Saudis. If it does not include the “international community” stepping away from the feudal potentates and military dictators it has been pleased to call “moderate Arab opinion”. If it is not about openly sponsoring comprehensive democratic reforms. Then, Mr Blair’s self-righteous and self-serving exhortations notwithstanding, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and its shimmering mirage of a borderless caliphate of the righteous, will never lack for followers.

 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, June 20, 2014.

Prince of Darkness?

Dangerous Man: Prince Bandar bin Sultan, former Saudi Ambassador to the United States, now Chief of the Saudi Intelligence Agency and prime diplomatic mover in the battle to topple Bashar al Assad, now stands accused of being behind the chemical warfare attacks against Syrian civilians on 21 August 2013.

 

HE IS ARGUABLY one of the most dangerous men on the planet. He has counselled presidents and kings, militants and terrorists, and the almost unlimited resources at his disposal means that his words are all-too-readily translated into deeds. The regime he serves stands high among the world’s most reactionary and corrupt. He is Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Director-General of the Saudi Intelligence Agency.

 

In early-August, the Prince met with President Vladimir Putin on the outskirts of Moscow where he allegedly attempted to broker an increased-oil-price for acquiescence-over-Syria deal with the Russian President.

 

According to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, writing in The Telegraph, the Saudi intelligence chief offered Putin a “mix of inducements and threats” to end the impasse over Syria.

 

Among the latter was the following chilling statement: “I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics next year. The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are controlled by us.”

 

No Mafia boss could have spelled out more clearly the consequences of not accepting the Prince’s “guarantee”. In the crude language of the criminal underworld, the Russians were being told: “Give us a free hand in Syria or Sochi 2014 will be bloodier than Munich 1972.”

 

Prince Bandar may have underestimated President Putin (a former intelligence director himself) whose ice-cold ruthlessness has been demonstrated on many occasions since becoming Russia’s leader in 2000. Within hours of his supposedly secret discussions with Putin, the Prince’s threats and inducements were in the hands of the state-controlled Russian media. Attempts to blackmail Russia are seldom successful.

 

That was in early August. Two weeks later, on 21-22 August, the world woke up to the news that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Syrian civilians living in the rebel-controlled Ghouta suburb of the Syrian capital, Damascus, had been attacked with what appeared to be chemical weapons, specifically, the deadly nerve agent Sarin. The author of the attack was said to be Bashar al Assad, the Syrian President.

 

The prohibitive “red line” announced by US President Barack Obama more than a year earlier, had been crossed.

 

But was President Assad really so foolish as to order the use of a weapons system which he knew would bring the United States and (most of) its allies into the battle against his government?

 

Transmissions originally intercepted by the Israeli security agency, Mossad, and released by the US military as “proof” of the Syrian government’s complicity in the chemical attack are actually capable of multiple interpretations.

 

What the recording contains are the panicked responses of senior Syrian officers desperate to clarify what has happened. Have chemical weapons been used? On whose authority? To what effect?

 

The intercept, far from providing conclusive evidence of Syrian Government involvement, suggests exactly the opposite. What the Israelis overheard sounds much more like the terrified response of a government whose worst nightmare has just become a reality.

 

Even the American intelligence officer responding to Foreign Policy magazine admitted: “We don’t know exactly why it happened. We just know it was pretty fucking stupid.”

 

And now the world is learning that what happened in Damascus on 21 August may not have originated in President Assad’s bunker, but hundreds of kilometres away, in Saudi Arabia.

 

On the Mint Press News website, a legitimate US media outlet based in Minnesota, freelance journalists Dale Gavlak and Yahya Ababneh have posted a story alleging that: “[F]rom numerous interviews with doctors, Ghouta residents, rebel fighters and their families, a different picture emerges. Many believe that certain rebels received chemical weapons via the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were responsible for carrying out the deadly gas attack.”

 

If true, this report casts the events of the past fortnight in an entirely different light. Gavlak’s story (and we are dealing here with a reputable journalist whose work has been published by the Associated Press, the BBC, PBS and Salon.com) offers us an explanation that makes a great deal more sense than the USA’s or the Saudi-dominated Arab League’s version of events.

 

After all, who had the most to gain by the introduction of chemical weapons to the Syrian conflict? Certainly not the beleaguered Syrian government. The Saudis, on the other hand, have long been the implacable foes of the secular Baathist political movements that once held sway in Iraq and Syria.

 

Almost before the ashes of the twin towers had cooled, it was the Saudis who were urging President George W. Bush to direct the righteous wrath of the American people not only against the hapless Afghans, but upon Saudi Arabia’s most hated enemy, Iraq. The American journalist, Bob Woodward, has even asserted that the decision to invade Iraq was communicated to the Saudi Ambassador to the US before President Bush’s own Secretary of State, Colin Powell.

 

The name of that Saudi Ambassador? Prince Bandar bin Sultan.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 3 September 2013.