Starting with the CIA's overthrow (and some would say murder) of Iran's democratically-elected
president in the 1950s and continuing through our serial invasions of Iraq
and our arming of Al Qaeda and ISIS, American policy in the Middle East has
been a textbook case of a superpower with more money than brains, making things
vastly worse with every move and counter-move.
Now, at last, people are starting to figure this out. On a recent Daily Show,
John Stewart uses some evocative language to illustrate the incoherence of
today's Middle East "policy".
"The Iran that we're currently crippling with sanctions and periodically
threatening to bomb is now our...I don't wanna say ally," Stewart said. "Battle
buddy?"
At the same time, America supported a coalition led by
Saudi Arabia striking Iranian-backed fighters in another Middle Eastern nation,
Yemen.
"Holy shit!" Stewart said. "It took decades of destablizing conflict, but
we finally figured out how to wage a proxy war against ourselves."
Political cartoonists, meanwhile, recognize good material when they see it.
A couple of examples, courtesy of Ed
Steer's gold & silver daily:
Now that the US media is catching onto what the rest of the world has known
for decades, a few questions:
Is this even legal? Can we just randomly bomb or otherwise intervene
in other countries? Ron
Paul of course has been saying no forever. And the following from Ajamu
Baraka of the Institute for Policy Studies updates the argument for the current
war in Yemen:
Saudi Arabia has commenced military operations against the Ansarullah fighters
of the Houthi movement in Yemen.
The Saudi intervention was not unexpected. Over the last few weeks, there
were signs that the United States and the Saudis were preparing the ground
for direct military intervention in Yemen in response to the Houthis' seizing
the Yemeni capital of Sana'a last January.
With the fall of al-Anad air base, where the U.S. military and CIA conducted
drone warfare in Yemen, and the seige of the port city of Aden, where disposed
President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi had fled, it was almost certain that the
U.S. would greenlight its client states to intervene.
Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir cloaked the role of Saudi Arabia within
the fictitious context of another grand coalition, this time led by the Gulf
Cooperation Council (GCC) -- the corrupt collection of authoritarian monarchies
allied with the United States and the other Western colonial powers.
Al-Jubeir added that before launching operations in Yemen, all of Saudi
Arabia's allies were consulted. The meaning of that statement is that the
U.S. was fully invested in the operation.
Even though the ambassador stressed that Washington was not directly involved
in the military component of the assault, CNN reported that an interagency
U.S. coordination team was in Saudi Arabia. A U.S. official subsequently
confirmed that Washington would be providing logistical and intelligence
support for the operation.
The intervention by the Saudis and the GCC continues the international lawlessness
that the United States precipitated with its "War on Terror" over the last
decade and a half. Violations of the UN Charter and international law modeled
by the powerful states of the West has now become normalized, resulting in
an overall diminution of international law and morality over the last 15
years.
The double standard and hypocrisy of U.S. support for the Saudi intervention
in Yemen, compared to Western and U.S. condemnation of Russia's regional
security concerns in response to the coup in Ukraine, will not be missed
by most people.
What exactly do we hope to get for the ~ $2 trillion we've spent on recent
Middle East wars?
Obviously it's mostly about oil. But does propping up "friendly" regimes actually
affect this market? Can unfriendlies like Iran refuse to sell us oil? Not really.
Oil is a fungible commodity, with each barrel of a given type being more or
less identical to every other. If sold to, say, China, it enters the global
marketplace and affects price and supply in exactly the same way as if it were
sold to Germany or the US. In short, if an OPEC country wants to pay its bills
it has to sell oil on the global market, which means in effect selling to the
US. So while short-term disruptions like the embargoes of the 1970s are possible,
they end up hurting the sellers as much as the buyers and can't be sustained.
Our interventions thus end up having virtually no impact on the long-term price
of gas for American SUVs.
Meanwhile, for the cost of the past few wars, the US could have put solar
panels on every Sun Belt rooftop, electric cars in every garage, and weather
stripping on every New England window, obviating the need for imported oil
(and for most of the coal that we now get from blowing up Appalachian mountains).
Are we protecting Israel?
One of the interesting things about ISIS, the latest Mortal Enemy to bubble
up, is that it doesn't spend much time or energy combating Zionism. It's way
more focused on stamping out heresy within Islam. In this sense it is reminiscent
of 16th century European Catholics and Protestants who took turns burning each
other at the stake. So a case can be made that even if Israel didn't exist,
Islam would still need its own Reformation (see There
Is No God But God, by Reza Aslan).
And even if our main goal in the Middle East is to protect Israel, simply
giving them $2 trillion would do the trick, without all the planes full of
coffins and VA hospitals full of young soldiers with missing arms and legs.
The inescapable conclusion is that we have no idea what we're doing. We're
simply an empire on autopilot, blundering around protecting "interests" that
were defined decades ago by long-dead politicians and generals and remain unquestioned
in mainstream strategic circles. We're the Roman empire, in other words, trying
to keep the barbarians at bay without the slightest idea how to do it.
Why is this appearing on DollarCollapse.com?
Because Rome ended up inflating
away its currency in an attempt to pay for its empire, and the US is
traveling a very similar road.
