House of Saud Destabilizes Lebanon

While taking in the final Sunday of regular season NFL action I finally got around to reading Dahr Jamail's devastating summary piece on the current predictions of some climate scientists who see a massive dying coming our way in the not-to-distant future because of huge releases of trapped methane and carbon as the Arctic permafrost thaws.

The dystopia presented by Jamail is a world where the places food is now grown will no longer be able to support crops. Most people will die and those remaining will migrate north and south to the Arctic and Antarctica. It is a dire forecast but one that is grounded in science. The only way to avoid further warming is to have a reduction in growth, something antithetical to the global capitalist order. So get ready for dystopia.

What is being peddled by the capitalists is "technology will save us." A book that has been recommended to me, one which I recently checked out at the library and plan to get started on this weekend, is Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think (2012) by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler. It seems manifestly like snake oil to me, this idea that we can come up with a quick and dirty tech solution to global system failure brought on by a couple of centuries of industrial capitalism; but I'll report back once I read the book.

In any event, the Jamail piece has an impact on the way one looks at the world; it makes it hard to not look at the world as a Manichean. There are forces of dark and there are forces of light. The purveyors of darkness want to maintain the current corrupt capitalist world order with its extraction of wealth and plenty for the 1%. They are arrayed against the rest of us, who while currently benighted at least have a yearning (in various stages of consciousness) for a little peace and calm.

The United States as principal architect of our current doomed paradigm is the demiurge. But the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is stepping up its devilish activities to fill the void the shrinking hyperpower leaves as it pivots to Asia to confront China.

The latest installments in bloody Saudi skullduggery are in Lebanon. Anne Barnard, the Gray Lady's Beirut bureau chief, has a useful summary today, "Lebanon, Worried About Border, Fires on Syrian Helicopters in Its Airspace," of some of the recent spillover effects from the war in Syria. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia recently announced that it has made a $3 billion purchase of the Lebanese Army:

On Sunday, the Lebanese president, Michel Suleiman, said the government had accepted a $3 billion aid package for the army from Saudi Arabia, an amount believed to be larger than the country’s defense budget. 

The move was welcomed by some as a way to strengthen the army, which is facing a growing array of threats from militants inside Lebanon. But it was viewed as provocative by supporters of Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group, who saw it as a bid to reduce the group’s influence over the army. Hezbollah, backed by Iran, supports the Syrian government, while Saudi Arabia is one of the main financiers of the Syrian insurgency. 

Speculation arose Monday that the army’s new assertiveness against the Syrian airspace violation was at Saudi Arabia’s bidding in response to the aid package. Security officials said it was policy to respond to any violation of Lebanese territory. The army has also pursued and killed Syrian insurgents on Lebanese territory in recent weeks, according to the official National News Agency.

Couple this with a rocket fired Sunday, likely by Al Qaeda, into Israel from Lebanon (not to mention the series of terror bombings in Beirut) and the prodigious shadows of the sheikhs become visible. Isabel Kershner reporting from Jerusalem yesterday had the story, "Rocket Fire From Lebanon Prompts Shelling by Israel":

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack on Sunday, though those in recent years generally appear to have been the work of small militant groups in Lebanon rather than of Hezbollah. 

In August, four rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel for the first time in two years. A militant group called the Brigades of Abdullah Azzam, an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq, claimed responsibility. Israel responded to that attack by bombing what military officials here described as a “terrorist site” between the Lebanese cities of Beirut and Sidon. 

The Israeli defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, said Sunday that Israel would not tolerate fire from Lebanese territory and would use more force if necessary. “I do not recommend that anyone test our patience and our determination to preserve the security of Israeli citizens,” he said in a statement. 

Notwithstanding the heightened tensions and harsh talk, an Israeli expert said that neither Israel nor Hezbollah, which is embroiled in the civil war in Syria, had an interest now in a full-blown confrontation on the Israeli-Lebanese front. 

Aviv Oreg, a former head of the Al Qaeda and Global Jihad desk in Israel’s military intelligence department, told reporters that some kind of radical Islamic “global jihad” organization was probably behind the rocket fire on Sunday and that the attackers might have been trying to provoke Israel into retaliating against Hezbollah, since jihadist groups and Hezbollah are fighting on opposite sides of the conflict in Syria.

Nonetheless Netanyahu, working seamlessly per usual with his Saudi allies, blamed Hezbollah of war crimes.

As the planet pitches toward a methane burp of "great dying," the Saudis are moving full speed ahead with a "smash and grab" of the Middle East.