John Chuckman

COMMENT TO AN ARTICLE BY PHILIP GIRALDI IN UNZ REVIEW

 

“America’s Unreliable Friends: Today’s Allies Are Tomorrow’s Enemies”

 

As usual, Philip Giraldi provides good writing and food for thought.

 “but the Alshamrani [Pensacola] incident suggests that there is more dissidence bubbling beneath the surface than is apparent from the rosy assurances about The Kingdom coming out of the White House and the Royal Palace in Riyadh.”

Indeed. It is a very conservative country dominated by a very conservative branch of its religion.

Those are real forces inside any society and things which do not evolve or change with any speed.

We have to think in terms of lifetimes.

And the country’s leadership, the House of Saud, is not part of the region’s ancient, stable history but a relatively new addition, going back only a decade or so before Israel’s founding. It really represents another interloper.

I am sure many ordinary Saudis are offended at the increased American presence in their country, representing, as it does to them, a sacred place like no other.

And the new close cooperation with Israel, acting much as allies, while largely kept secret, couldn’t help but offend some who would become aware of it.

Playing with fire? Quite possibly. There may already have been some unknown events in Saudi Arabia with the mysterious murder of the King’s faithful chief bodyguard and a fire at the new Jeddah high-speed rail station recently plus the sending of significant new American forces, likely as bodyguards more than as countering any (nonexistent) threat from Iran.

“In 2015, Israeli defense minister Moshe Ya’alon explained how Israel might have to strike Iran hard to prevent a long war. He cited the examples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki…”

I am reminded of a remark Hitler once made about whether anyone even remembered the Armenian genocide.

America is playing dangerous games with dangerous people.

Instead, it should be the one to represent and enforce the rule of law in the region.

But it cannot do so because Israel is something like an undeveloped Siamese twin attached in vital ways to America’s body.

Israel exhibits no respect for the rule of law, caring only for narrowly-defined interests of control and expansion. We must never forget for the long-term, no matter what Israel does for temporary advantage, those five or six million Palestinians aren’t going anywhere.

Of course, the relationship with Saudi Arabia derives in many ways from the relationship with Israel. The Crown Prince is seen in Israel as part of a new relationship with the region, almost a parody of making good neighbors out of old enemies.

The Crown Prince has done so many dirty deeds to ingratiate himself with Israel (and, ergo, the United States), from the horrors in Syria to the horrors in Yemen. He has earned Israel’s good will, so much so that it supported the sale of tens of billions in American armaments to the Crown Prince, something it would never have done in the past.

It’s the kind of sale Trump loves, believing he’s making America richer and spreading American influence in the region, all while crowing about his own incomparable “salesmanship,” but that’s a very superficial view.

Such weapons are nothing on which to build a future. They only increase overall uncertainty and risk. Just look at what they encouraged the Crown Prince to do in Yemen, earning himself surprise attacks and a very prominent black eye, adding to everyone’s sense of greater instability.

Without even touching on the unwarranted hostility against that major, ancient country of Iran, the United States is doing nothing helpful or creative in the region. It is building only the possibility for more war and destruction, a badly distorted mirror image of China’s efforts abroad to build infrastructure, promoting trade and prosperity for billions of people.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

WHAT DOES IT REALLY MEAN TO GIVE UNQUALIFIED SUPPORT TO ISRAEL?

 

It means supporting a man who has never once been directly elected by people. A man with a perpetual minority who rules through deals with other smaller minority parties, most of which are about as prejudiced and anti-democratic as you will find anywhere on the planet.

Only recently, there were reports of Netanyahu’s trying to strike a deal for some restrictions on women being on streets in return for the support of an ultra-orthodox party whose enlightenment values are zero. He didn’t succeed, but not for lack of trying, so he has called another election.

This is also a man whose entire record is fanatical, stained many times over with the blood of thousands and thousands of people, people in Gaza, on the Mediterranean Sea, in the West Bank, in Southern Lebanon, and it is overwhelmingly the case that his victims have been civilians, a great many of them women and children.

A man not interested in peace as most people understand it but with the “peace” that comes in dominating others. He also has always shown an inclination to steal yet more of the property of others than he already has. His desire to dominate is why he has such a shared spirit with Donald Trump, why they admire each other. Of course, It would not be so if these two political scorpions had to share the same political arena.

Netanyahu’s years-long aggressive struggles for dominance and expansion may not have been anything on a scale with the world wars in Europe, but they have been unceasing, persistent, and bloody. And they all have been concerned with similar goals as the brutal wars in Europe, suppressing people you don’t like and taking their property. In philosophical and ethical terms, Netanyahu represents the same values as the jackboot crowd.

But you cannot look at this man’s drives and efforts only inside the geography of Israel and Palestine.

Here is a keen supporter of the bloodiest tyrant we have seen in a while, the new Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. A man who slaughters women and children in Yemen, who slaughters women and children in Syria, a man who openly has opponents brutally murdered, who oppresses the Shia Muslim minority in his own country, and a man supporting record numbers of bloody executions, including the executions of some teen-agers.

Netanyahu is also a keen supporter of President (Generalissimo) el-Sisi in Egypt, a man who holds Egypt’s only former elected president, Mohammed Morsi, in prison under death sentence. A man who regularly imprisons and tortures opponents by the hundreds and sometimes shoots people in the streets. Countless people rot in jails, forgotten. He is a man who was secretly sponsored to become leader of Egypt by Netanyahu. Indeed, it is known that a good deal of pressure was applied to Obama to help topple Egypt’s only democratically-elected government, that of Morsi, because Netanyahu simply loathed it.

Netanyahu is a man who has supported America’s long series of bloody, offensive wars in the Middle East, the so-called Neo-con Wars, whose purpose, through massive amounts of killing, has been to create “a rebirth of the Middle East,” one along lines acceptable to Israel and its imperial protector, the United States. He has been deeply involved in supporting such terrorists as al-Nusra and ISIS in Syria, both directly and through support of the efforts of Saudi Arabia, a country which has secretly paid much of the costs of the dirty work of these terrorists.

Over the years, many caches of Israeli-made weapons have been uncovered by Syria’s army. And Netanyahu openly has served wounded terrorists in Northern Israeli hospitals as well as at times having hundreds of them shifted around from one location to another by helicopter. His objectives in Syria have always been to make permanent Israel’s theft of the Golan Heights, to expand that holding even further, with, if possible, another slice of Syria, and to see the reasonable leader of the religiously-pluralistic society, Syria, eliminated and replaced by someone more along the lines of the Arab leaders he so fervently embraces.

Now, he has underway one of his biggest projects, either the toppling of Iran or the start of a war against it, a war led by the United States with Israel just enjoying the show from the sidelines. He has, inside Israel, vociferously taken credit for guiding Donald Trump on the destructive course he has taken.

This is an extremely dangerous project, a threat to all the people of the region, but Netanyahu is able, as is so often the case with various dirty projects, to keep his head down and let others assume center stage. The United States endorses such behavior because it knows how much antipathetic feeling there would be against Israel were it obvious to everyone who really leads the charge. And a Donald Trump is just the kind of warped personality only too happy to take credit for anything, no matter how destructive, which casts him in the light of someone who gets things done.