John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ROBERT FISK IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

“A year on from Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, and Saudi Arabia is lurching towards hysterical chaos

“This whole wretched saga is beginning to look less like ‘War in the Middle East’ and more like ‘Carry On Up the Gulf’”

 

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/saudi-arabia-iran-jamal-khashoggi-donald-trump-middle-east-a9126601.html

 

A good piece, and deadly accurate.

The truth is, I’m sure, that America’s government has no great affection for the Crown Prince or for Saudi Arabia.

He is a useful tool for Israeli and American imperial intentions.

A key new part of America’s great bloody effort to remake the face of the Middle East, “the birth of a new Middle East” as Condoleezza Rice charmingly put it when the bombs and screams started to be heard.

All the Neocon Wars – which have killed a couple of million people, created immense floods of refugees, and destroyed several well-functioning states – are part of that plan.

The effort resembles something like trying to pave over everything within hundreds of miles of Israel, America’s de facto colony in the region.

The new Crown Prince was a blessed discovery in the cause, someone suddenly appearing, unbelievably ambitious and willing to kill and kill, and someone who covertly gets along just fine with pals in Israel.

The Crown Prince knows very well that the key to excellent relations with Washington’s power establishment is demonstrating excellent relations with Israel, something Saudi Arabia never did, say, twenty years ago.

It’s only because of the Crown Prince’s attitudes and inclinations that Israel permitted the United States to sell him tens of billions in new armaments, something that wouldn’t have been tolerated not that many years ago.

So, the Prince gets to play powerful ruler of a kind of regional power, something, along with killing, he clearly enjoys.

Only trouble is, there’s that basic reality of traditional Saudi corruption and incompetence showing through, perhaps ultimately threatening the whole house of cards.

Saudi corruption and incompetence flow directly from the fact that the country’s rulers are a gang of immensely rich and spoiled people who want to soil their hands with nothing ordinary or menial. What could you expect in a fairly closed and authoritarian society where hundreds of billions of dollars change hands regularly and in secret? The Saudis try buying everything.

Well, the death the other day of the old King’s faithful bodyguard at Jeddah, Major General Abdul-Aziz Al-Faghm, someone who knew a lot of secrets and an event assigned a highly implausible explanation, accompanied by a huge fire at the new high-speed Jeddah rail station may well signal a new chapter in the Kingdom’s ongoing bloody melodrama.

Saudi Arabia’s disastrous recent failures involving Yemen and Iran’s heroic resistance to America’s undeclared and unwarranted war, “maximum pressure,” against it may indeed signal the coming of a new Middle East, one the United States may not like.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY RICHARD SPENCER IN THE TELEGRAPH

“All bizarre and nonsensical conspiracy theory of course.”

It is not at all clear why you should say that. The “of course” only emphasizes the lack of analytical basis for your total dismissal.

Especially when one considers that in the end you yourself suggest a theme to the material.

“Ultimately, they put the onus on Middle Eastern countries to explain themselves. The cables are America’s own explanations. Neither Iran nor many of its Arab friends and enemies like being held to account overmuch.”

In our own lifetimes, we have learned of many dark operations more impressive than the selected release of some not-all-that-secret documents, many of them having release dates of not too many years in the future. The term “conspiracy theory” is now consistently used to disparage those who are genuinely puzzled about the official explanations of certain big events.

Yes, we have the paranoid extreme, but that extends into the mainstream too, even into politics.

In the end you must judge major news events by the standards of the late I.F. Stone. You must read different versions and explanations and make comparisons and weightings. You must judge the purport of the material itself, what it is intended to say or not say.

We live in a shadow world as never before in human history with vast intelligence establishments working day and night and a press now reduced to a small number of owners who have their own reasons for giving slants to affairs or even completely misrepresenting them.

Truth is perceived infrequently, but there are immensely well-financed establishments busy “getting out the story” and even creating it in some cases. To say otherwise is to admit to extreme naiveté or perhaps dishonesty.

When was the last time a paper like your Telegraph or even the New York Times did some serious investigative journalism for readers? Especially where the earth-shaking matters are concerned, rather than mother’s milk stuff like the abuse of parliamentary expenses. Almost never.

Where were you with Blair’s countless lies? Bush’s lies and absurdities? We lived through a set of events in which, after the greatest peace march in history, Blair managed to twist the truth and lie his way into doing something against the overwhelming sense of the British people. And the press pretty well let it happen.

We only have a few genuine investigative journalists in the world, and they include notably Seymour Hersh and Robert Fisk. But even their work must be subject to evaluation. They can have things planted on them, and they make mistakes.

The WikiLeaks material is undoubtedly authentic, but that does not at all exclude an underlying purpose in its release.

It is a well-known practice of intelligence agencies to give large bits of genuine material, none of it too compromising, in order to get either an important piece of intelligence in return or to “bury” some damaging deception like a fish hook planted in a minnow.

The CIA used to brag of having a huge house organ whose keys could be played to create the sense of a Bach fugue of seeming news. It was talking about all the publications, both compliant and duped, in which it could plant a story and have it reverberate ultimately as a convincing event.

I’m not sure whether WikiLeaks itself falls into the compliant or duped category, but the nature of the material, the main themes plus the many important things undoubtedly missing, say something important to those listening carefully.

I am completely underwhelmed by the content of the military WikiLeaks, both this time and previously.

Very little there that well-informed people did not already know. Yes, of course, the juicy tidbits about so-and-so said are fun, and so they are meant to be, but they are not all that informative.

I am sure there are countless lies and atrocities contained in the universe covered so far by WikiLeaks, but they are not in the material released.

The idea that no one knows where Assange is also strikes me as slightly ridiculous in this age of massive intelligence operations and the trampling of individual rights in the name of fighting terror.

If you think otherwise because of Osama bin Laden, you are rather late in learning he has been dead since the bombing of Tora Bora. The United States has kept him alive, as it were, for a focus in its insane War on Terror.

Cui bono?

The US looks like an innocent victim, just guilty of some unpleasant gossip here and there. Who wouldn’t know that? Israel gains support for an attack on Iran.

The leaks serve Israeli-Pentagon interests.

And do so in a convincing, seemingly disinterested way.

These leaks also serve America’s now cancerously-swollen intelligence apparatus in seeking more repression and secrecy within American society.

Your off-hand dismissal is unfair and unwarranted.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY ROBERT FISK IN THE INDEPENDENT

But this is the story of every genuine revolution.

By genuine I’m excluding events such as the American Revolution or Britain’s Glorious Revolution, important and rather violent events but only rather loosely called revolutions.

True revolutions are always explosive, violent, life-changing events. That’s why we can use the word for events like the Industrial Revolution, a world-changing set of events that hurt numberless people.

Indeed, when you are familiar with the history of such events, the word revolution takes on the kind of connotations of earthquake or natural disaster.

But most political revolutions are completely avoidable. They always come out of an environment of abuse and excessive privilege and trampling on others. The signs are always there to read too, requiring only changes in policy or reforms. This was absolutely true in such revolutions as the French and the Russian.

The policies of the United States, it should be remembered, bear a great responsibility for the extremes of Iran’s Revolution. It overthrew the first democratic government in the Middle East to install the bloody Shah, and they supported that vampire for years in every way they could.

He was sold what then was an amazing pile of armaments, being equipped to serve as an American surrogate in the region.

Meanwhile Savak, his secret police, pulled out the finger nails of victims and murdered thousands.

The U.S. has never stopped playing such dirty games.

It supported Hussein in his horrible war against Iran, an 8-year long horror that in terms of the proportion of population killed or hurt compares to the Great War for major European countries.

Today it supports Israel’s endless threats against Iran for the sin of entering the modern age with satellites and nuclear power stations. And it says nothing of Israel’s horrible abuses and of its nuclear arsenal threatening everyone in the Middle East.