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Page added on December 22, 2018
The Great Saudi Muddle
Does the Senate want Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman to own up to the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi? Is it really seeking an end to Saudi Arabia’s war of aggression against Yemen? The answer to both questions is: kind of, sort of, not really.
That’s the takeaway from a couple of resolutions the chamber approved amid great fanfare last week.
The first, sponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders, calls on Trump “to remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities in or affecting the Republic of Yemen” by, among other things, putting an end to in-flight refueling of Saudi and the United Arab Emirate war planes. The resolution, which passed 56 to 41, was a small step toward ending a war of aggression that has claimed as many as 80,000 lives – although it would have been stronger and less self-serving if it had also called for cutting off arms sales that have allowed US weapons manufacturers to reap vast profits off human misery.
But the second resolution, which passed on a unanimous voice vote, was a muddle that shows just how self-defeating US policy has become. Sponsored by Republican Senator Bob Corker, it began by holding the crown prince responsible for Khashoggi’s murder in an Istanbul consulate on Oct. 2, an act, it said, that has “undermined trust and confidence in the longstanding friendship between the United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”
MbS: Are his days numbered?
This generated excited headlines to the effect that the U.S. might at last be breaking with MbS, as Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman is universally known. But news outlets failed to mention what the resolution said next. It declared, for instance, that the U.S.-Saudi relationship is “an essential element of regional security.” While saying nothing about arms shipments to Saudi allies, it condemned Iran for supplying rebel forces with “advanced lethal weapons.” It blamed the Houthis “for egregious human rights abuses, including torture, use of human shields, and interference with, and diversion of, humanitarian aid shipments” – this while remaining silent about Saudi-UAE atrocities, which reportedly include a string of torture chambers in which political opponents are roasted over open fires, among other horrors.
Most bizarrely of all, the resolution warned the Saudis that “increasing purchases of military equipment from, and cooperation with, the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China challenges the strength and integrity of the long-standing military-to-military relationship” between Washington and Riyadh. The Senate is thus angry with MBS not only because he sent a seventeen-member hit squad to knock off a US resident in the middle of a European capital, but because he’s consorting with America’s business rivals. The resolution further warns that such purchases “may introduce significant national security and economic risks to both parties,” language that is every bit as threatening as it sounds.
The result is a ball of confusion, one that tries to distance the US from a murderous Saudi prince while at the same time demanding closer relations with the government he heads. It calls on the Saudis to behave more nicely to their neighbors, wind down the war in Yemen, and cease murdering people in broad daylight so that the clock can be turned back a few years and the process starts all over again. To quote Giuseppe de Lampedusa’s famous line in his novel, The Leopard, it wants everything to change so that everything can remain the same.
Incoherence
This is as incoherent as anything Trump has come up with, including his notorious Nov. 20 statement with regard to MbS’s guilt or innocence that “maybe he did and maybe he didn’t.” Trump can’t let go of his Saudi ties. But, then, the Senate can’t let go and not let go at the same time.
No one knows what to do, which is why the resolution tried to play both sides of the net. In describing MbS as “a wrecking ball,” one whom it is “very difficult to be able to do business” with, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham was essentially calling on the crown prince to step down.
He could be replaced, under U.S. pressure, perhaps with the former crown prince he replaced, Muhammad bin Nayef, said to be favored by the CIA, which publicly blamed MbS for Khashoggi’s murder.
But it could also mean a destabilizing factional feud within the ruling clan leading to a messy regime change, which, as Washington foreign-policy experts have learned all too painfully since the Arab Spring, could well lead to chaos.
To be sure, there is always the hope that a senior member of the Al-Saud will step in once MbS is removed and re-establish order. Indeed, Saudi experts already have a candidate for the job in mind: King Salman’s younger brother Ahmed bin Abdulaziz, who, while living in self-imposed exile in London, startled Saudi watchers by telling a small group of hecklers not to blame the Al-Saud for the Yemen war, only the king and crown prince. “They are responsible for crimes in Yemen,” he said. “Tell Mohammed bin Salman to stop the war.”
Since public criticism of this sort is unprecedented, it was assumed that when Prince Ahmed flew back to Riyadh a few weeks after the Khashoggi murder under a US-UK promise of protection, it was with the goal of putting the Al-Saud on a new footing.
But no one knows what might bubble up if he were to try. Things might return to normal after a royal shake-up – assuming one is in the works – or they may not. After all, it was assumed that Libya would return to normal once a former prime minister named Ali Zeidan took over from deposed strongman Muammar Gaddafi. When that didn’t work out, it was hoped that an ex-academic named Omar al-Hassi would have better luck. But when he fell too, it was clear that only anarchy would reign.
Hence the fear in Saudi Arabia is that something similar might occur post-MbS – that, as a source told The New Yorker’s Robin Wright, “[s]omeone from outside the system could make it collapse,” whereupon the kingdom would succumb to “instability like elsewhere in the region.”
Homemade in Washington
FDR: Making deal with Saudis that still governs the nations’ relations.
If so, it’s a problem entirely of Washington’s own making. Democratic and Republican administrations alike have continued to build up Saudi Arabia despite repeated warnings that it was creating a monster.
In 1945, FDR granted Saudi King Ibn Saud a blanket security guarantee in return for unrestricted oil access. A few years later, Truman used the newly-established Marshall Fund to finance massive Saudi oil shipments to war-torn western Europe, thereby establishing the kingdom as the world’s leading exporter. Following the epic price increases and Oil Embargo of the 1973, Washington hit upon yet another deal, this time to recycle excess petrodollars by exchanging Saudi oil profits for U.S. weaponry. A regional military colossus was thus born, one that felt free to attack whomever it pleased thanks to colossal oil wealth, vast quantities of high-tech arms, and an unlimited U.S. security guarantee and political cover.
Aggression and repression were the inevitable result. Unwilling to upset a vital strategic partner, the Obama administration said nothing when Riyadh sent troops into neighboring Bahrain to bloodily suppress democratic protests; when it flooded Syria with bloodthirsty Sunni jihadis, and when, in March 2015, it declared war on Yemen, its neighbor to the south. Indeed, the administration felt it had no choice but to help out.
Thus, a top general signaled his assent even while admitting that he had only been given a few hours’ notice while a State Department spokesman added forlornly: “We don’t want this to be an open-ended military campaign.” Nearly four years later, with as many as 13 million people teetering on the brink of starvation, that’s exactly what it’s turned out to be.
Joined at the hip with the Saudis, the U.S. appears to have no idea how to go about severing an increasingly toxic relationship, as last week’s incoherent Senate resolutions make clear.
The U.S. was happy to build Saudi Arabia up, but it’s clueless now that Saudi Arabia is dragging it down.
18 Comments on "The Great Saudi Muddle"
Cloggie on Sat, 22nd Dec 2018 8:06 am
Seeing Roosevelt in that pictures reminds me of “Her Majesty’s Fool, Sir Lancelot Oliphant”:
https://deepresource.wordpress.com/2014/11/09/her-majestys-fool-sir-lancelot-oliphant/
KSA could have been Britain’s rather than America’s bitch, but was snubbed by the former in the thirties, the days that Britain, not America was officially the world’s premier geopolitical address. The “experts” in the Foreign Office didn’t believe the visiting camel jockeys that their desert was chock full of oil.
The second choice Americans did. Americans were always better with oil than the British, whose “cup-of-tea” historically is coal and steam.
But the end of the days of European and American colonialism are in sight, Islam is experiencing a revival and a new Caliphate, probably under Turkish leadership, isn’t very far off.
DerHundistLos on Sat, 22nd Dec 2018 10:14 am
SOCIETY RISKS GLOBAL ECOLOGICAL CATASTROPHE DUE TO DOMINO EFFECT OF TIPPING POINTS
According to a recently published article in the journal “Nature”, scientists warn policymakers severely underestimate or fail to consider the ever-escalating risks of ecological tipping points due to the amplification effect of natural systems.
For example, the deforestation of the Amazon is responsible for multiple “cascading effects” – weakening rain systems, forests becoming savannah, and reduced water supplies for cities like São Paulo and crops in the foothills of the Andes. This, in turn, exacerbates deforestation as people look to replace degraded environments.
Gee what a surprise. We will wake-up one morning to discover we finally ushered in ecological armageddon. The fucking signs are everywhere……
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/20/risks-of-domino-effect-of-tipping-points-greater-than-thought-study-says
Sissyfuss on Sat, 22nd Dec 2018 10:19 am
When you lay down with dogs you get fleas. The Sauds form of govt is anathema to what our established principles of govt by, for and of represent. But those principles have been exorcised by the power-mad protagonists that reside in both dictatorships because oil rules above all else.
Duncan Idaho on Sat, 22nd Dec 2018 10:31 am
Donald and the Clown Prince are quite a pair.
TV possibilities?
onlooker on Sat, 22nd Dec 2018 12:27 pm
Ironic, that on this peak oil site as we debate the demise of Oil, it is appearing more and more that PO and energy scarcity are not going to do us in. For we are and will continue to burn anything and everything for Energy. No, as Derhund, article apprises us, ecological tipping points are ever so close now They will be what will get the Dieoff really going. A few billion of us are not going to disappear overnight, nor are we willing to stop our environmentally destructive ways of living
DerHundistLos on Sat, 22nd Dec 2018 12:49 pm
So true, Onlooker. The signs are everywhere……
“Trees That Have Lived for Millennia Are Suddenly Dying”
“This isn’t an isolated event. Of the 13 oldest known baobabs in the world, four have completely died in the last dozen years, and another five are on the way, having lost their oldest stems. “These large and monumental trees, which can live for 2,000 years or more, were dying one after another,” says Adrian Patrut from Babes-Bolyai University in Romania, who has cataloged the deaths. “It’s sad that in our short lives, we are able to live through such an experience.”
It’s not just the baobabs, either. Around the world, the creaking deaths of ancient trees are testifying to the period of extraordinary environmental change that we are living through. “In Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana, I’ve come across whole forests of trees that have died since 2001,” says Wise. “While they are not as old as the baobabs, they are 400 to 500 years old. The die-off has other immediate causes, like insects, but a 500-year-old tree has experienced a lot of insect outbreaks and lived through them. Something is pushing them over the brink this time around.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/baobab-trees-dying-climate-change/562499/
Sissyfuss on Sat, 22nd Dec 2018 5:23 pm
Derhund, Gaia gave us a balanced and incredibly fecund playground but she also layered it with automatic braking systems such as BOE, the clathrate gun firing, and hydrogen sulfide oceans. Give her a hundred million years after us and maybe She won’t be so careless next time.
Dooma on Sat, 22nd Dec 2018 5:56 pm
DerHundistLos, as I am sure that you know, we are going to (IMO) destroy all of our ecosystems well before peak oil.
Deforestation, destruction of biodiversity, raping of the oceans, clearing of the Amazon, damming of rivers, draining of aquifers and plenty more. It all but completely ignored by MSM.
Man is the cruellest and most invasive animal on the planet. No other species even comes close. Mother nature will have the final say; I believe unless we nuke ourselves first.
makati1 on Sat, 22nd Dec 2018 6:12 pm
The last four comments above cover the topic well. The earth will recover with a new ecosystem that is not likely to resemble the one we are destroying, but humans will not be part of it. Even the effects of a nuclear war will be gone by then, although it may be the event that starts the new system by deciding which microbes, virus and insects survive to seed the new Gaia.
DerHundistLos on Sat, 22nd Dec 2018 6:57 pm
Yes, thoughtful and accurate replies all. Thank you.
“Something is pushing them over the brink this time around.”
This statement was made in reference to trees, but same can be said about, as an example, honey bees and North American bats. A perfect storm of invasive parasites, pollution, modern agricultural practices, climate change, loss of native habitat have conspired to cause the immune system of bees and bats to crash. In the case of bats, the US Agriculture Department stated the deaths of tens of millions of bats-Mother Nature’s most powerful insectivore- due to White Nose Syndrome is causing farmers to spend billions of dollars more on poisonous pesticides. More pesticides = More pollution released into the environment = Even fewer bats. Repeat cycle due to increased amplification.
onlooker on Sat, 22nd Dec 2018 7:06 pm
Yes and look at the oceans, they are faltering at a rapid pace
makati1 on Sat, 22nd Dec 2018 9:39 pm
Two articles I suggest for holiday reading:
“… Something extremely significant occurred at the Bush funeral…”
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2018/12/22/desperate-deep-state/#more-188975
“Two recent reports from the United States strongly suggest the United States is planning a major war with Russia and China, but are far from certain that they could in fact succeed in such a war….These two reports demonstrate that the United States has lost its previous technological and military superiority…”
https://journal-neo.org/2018/12/22/two-new-reports-point-to-further-us-decline-higher-risk-of-war/
“https://www.scribd.com/document/393215196/Providing-for-the-Common-Defense”
https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-19-204SP (“Long Range Emerging…”)
Sorry! Nothing positive to post for your holiday. Keep safe!
Antius on Sat, 22nd Dec 2018 10:39 pm
Makati, quite a lot of conjecture in the posts that you link to. A lot of speculation over the content of envelopes.
Conspiracy theory nuts tend to see conspiracy everywhere. Sometimes its real, sometimes it isn’t.
makati1 on Sat, 22nd Dec 2018 11:39 pm
Antius, and most “conspiracies” prove to be true down the road. Only a brainwashed American would deny the insanity of American leadership these days or the possibilities.
For instance the JFK killings or the 9/11 bullshit ( building 7)?
How about the he said/she said freak sideshow Americans are saturated with every day?
The fact that the US infrastructure and economy is being destroyed so that the Neocons can try for their OWG?
Maybe you have not lived long enough to have perspective, but I have. I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK’s murder, Vietnam, and 9/11. Not one has proven to be anywhere near the lies/propaganda that was published at the time. Not one.
I look at independent ‘news’ sources and weigh them against the USMSM and find their analysis is more likely true than the ‘official’ bullshit fed to the serfs 24/7/365. Believe what you want. It doesn’t change anything.
Cloggie on Sat, 22nd Dec 2018 11:59 pm
Two recent reports from the United States strongly suggest the United States is planning a major war with Russia and China, but are far from certain that they could in fact succeed in such a war
Who is “the United States”?
Trump? No.
Pentagon? Yes, that’s their job.
(((Deep State))) No, they admitted defeat.
I think that Juncker, Putin and Xi have decided among each other that the American Era is over and that Eurasia is next and that they have informed Trump and that he complied.
That matches with his sudden retreat from Afghanistan and Syria. Representatives of 2 billion people can decide these things and next inform 0.3 billion upstarts that time is up and that those who are around for thousands of years are retaking their natural place in the grand scheme of things.
This smart CFR-jew knows what is coming:
https://www.amazon.com/End-American-Era-Geopolitics-Twenty-first-ebook/dp/B000XUDGTY/ref=sr_1_1
(I read that book in 2002)
makati1 on Sun, 23rd Dec 2018 3:01 am
A holiday present for the traveler without money: “Photito Travel” See some of the 21st century world without leaving home.
https://www.photito.com/Destinations
Descriptions of what you are seeing with every picture. Sorry, no Philippines.
DerHundistLos on Sun, 23rd Dec 2018 8:28 am
onlooker
Dr. Jeremy Jackson, “Ocean Apocalypse”, US Naval Academy Presentation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zMN3dTvrwY&t=12s
onlooker on Sun, 23rd Dec 2018 9:17 am
Yes, Derhund. Heard of this work, not read it though. But articles it seems now every day of disturbing happenings in the oceans and to the oceans. 3 main ways, ocean’s are besieged. Pollution/contamination. Overfishing. Ocean warming, acidification. Remember, the Ocean’s are intaking lots of the CO2 being emitted. It is so ominous and so sad, hard to not realize we are paving the way for a true Mass Extinction Event. You can say it has already been underway.