Gulf Monarchies In the News + Ferguson Outrage Ongoing

I like to catch up on my reading while watching the Sunday NFL games. What I do is print out stories from Counterpunch, Robert Parry's Consortium News, select articles from the Sunday Gray Lady, etc. -- the type is big, 12-14 pts., with lots of leading -- which I read during the innumerable commercials and penalty delays.

There were two particularly good offerings on the Counterpunch web site over the weekend: Rannie Amiri's "Attack of the Five Monarchies: An Alliance of Dictators and Despots" and Ben Reynolds' "There are No Moderate Syrian Rebels: We've Seen This Play Before." The Reynolds piece is refreshing because he reminds us of something we don't hear very often: U.S. deep state intelligence agencies are actually quite good at what they do:

The Obama administration’s new plan hinges on Saudi Arabia’s support for the training effort, including an offer to host training camps on Saudi soil. The Saudis are in no way a reliable partner for the U.S. in the Syrian conflict. Even discounting the fact that Saudi-purchased anti-tank rockets somehow found their way into ISIS’s hands, the Saudis have a notorious history of supporting unsavory groups in the Syrian conflict, including Salafists in the Islamic Front. The greater Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the training program is, the greater pressure there will be for Islamic Front fighters to receive U.S. arms and training. After Congress balked at the Obama Administration’s request for $500 million, the Saudis offered to fund the training and arming of the Syrian rebels. This means that there is a large chance the U.S. will directly support groups who work closely with Jabhat al-Nusra. 

There is no doubt that the Obama administration knows this. Classified U.S. intelligence is simply better than publicly available sources, particularly in the case of an important conflict like Syria. It defies common sense that the administration would somehow be unaware that the “moderate opposition” exists in name only. Contrary to popular belief, the United States does not stumble blindly and hopelessly through the Middle East. It stands to reason that there is an important motive behind choosing to back the non-ISIS Syrian opposition, rather than tacitly supporting the Assad regime, to counter ISIS.

The United States wants the Assad regime to fall because it is the lynchpin of the regional alliance between Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah. U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Qatar overwhelmingly desire Assad’s overthrow because they feel significantly more threatened by Iran than they do by any Islamist militant group, even ISIS. Even though the U.S. wants to destroy ISIS, it faces significant pressures to avoid aiding Assad’s regime, and Iran by proxy. While hardline Islamists stand less of a chance of eliminating ISIS than the Syrian Army, they will still certainly weaken Assad and require both Hezbollah and Iran to continue pouring resources into Syria. If this is correct, the United States may rather support al-Qaeda aligned forces than give the Iranian axis a victory in Syria. 

We’ve seen this play before. The U.S. often turns a blind eye to the activities of local “allies” if they seem to provide a means of countering regional adversaries. In the 1980s, the U.S. supported the mujaheddin fighting in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, only to ultimately see the Taliban win the resulting civil war and provide a safe haven for al-Qaeda. During the Libyan civil war, the U.S. and its allies bombed Qaddafi’s forces while providing arms to the opposition. Libya has now descended into a bloody civil war, and arms from Libya have flooded the Syrian conflict for years, oftentimes with the aid of the U.S. and its allies. Once they are dispersed, the use and transfer of arms cannot be controlled. Like those in Libya, arms sent to Syria will ultimately find their way to future conflicts throughout the region. 

American policymakers have been protected from the consequences of these decisions by virtue of the U.S.’s geographic position, but the Middle East has not. Libya is in tatters. Afghanistan is awash in violence and the Taliban will probably make significant gains there when U.S. forces ultimately depart. There is no end in sight for the Syrian civil war, and there is little confidence even in Washington that the administration’s new strategy will bring an end to the conflict. Expanding the arming and training of the Syrian opposition would be a disastrous mistake. Unfortunately, the administration’s plan passed Congress. If the U.S. program goes forward, the blood from a renewed wave of violence in the Middle East will be on America’s hands.

Rannie Amiri highlights the absurdity of the conservative, anti-democratic Arab sheikhdoms bombing their Islamic State offspring:

It is the irony of ironies. A cadre of repressive monarchies is chosen to liberate the captive peoples of Iraq and Syria from the tyranny of ISIS. 

Combating a group known for its violent sectarianism, the five Arab allies ordered by the United States to participate in the bombing campaign against ISIS are themselves the region’s worst sectarian agitators. Jordan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are now at the vanguard of efforts to dismantle an organization that is essentially of their own creation. 

After the downfall of Saddam Hussein, it was King Abdullah II of Jordan who raised the sectarian specter, warning of the emergence of a “Shiite crescent” in the Middle East, sending panic throughout the monarchies of the Gulf and beyond. It was a rallying cry; a call to arms which heralded operations to destabilize Iraq, and in less than ten years time, Syria. 

Bahrain has been a true standout in its brutal crackdown against pro-democracy activists and reformers who hope to see the unchecked powers of the al-Khalifa royal family restrained. For its part, the regime has hidden nothing. Their brazen oppression is very much out in the open for its Western allies to witness: torture, show trials, arbitrary detentions, revocation of citizenship, deportations and media blackouts. All are daily occurrences and come in the backdrop of longstanding socioeconomic and political disenfranchisement. 

Mark Landler reports today that vice president Joe Biden has embarked on an "apology tour" of the Middle East because of remarks made last week in a talk he gave at Harvard. Apparently Biden had the temerity to repeat information that appears in newspapers throughout the world, that Turkey has had an open borders policy for jihadis wanting to enter Syria to battle the Assad government and that jihadi organizations receive funding from the Gulf Arab emirates. This is all basic stuff, common knowledge to anyone who has paid the tiniest bit of attention to what has been going on in the Middle East since the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011. But as Landler makes clear in "Saudis Are Next on Biden’s Mideast Apology List After Harvard Remarks," a vice president is not allowed to speak publicly about what is on the front page of the newspaper:

WASHINGTON — Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has one more stop on what has become a Middle East apology tour in the wake of his impolitic answer to a Harvard student’s question: Saudi Arabia. 

After apologizing to officials from Turkey and the United Arab Emirates over the weekend, Mr. Biden is trying to connect with Saudi leaders, a senior official said, to clarify that he did not mean to suggest that Saudi Arabia backed Al Qaeda or other extremist groups in Syria. 

The vice president’s troubles began Thursday when he declared, in a question-and-answer session at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, that the biggest problem the United States faced in dealing with Syria and the rise of the Islamic State was America’s allies in the region. 

Turkey, Mr. Biden said, has admitted allowing foreign fighters to cross into Syria, while Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia funneled weapons and other aid to Syrian rebels that ended up in the hands of Al Nusra, Al Qaeda and other extremist groups. 

The White House expressed relief on Monday over Mr. Biden’s apologies, with the press secretary, Josh Earnest, noting that “the vice president is somebody who has enough character to admit when he’s made a mistake.” But asked repeatedly about the substance of his remarks, Mr. Earnest did not say the vice president was wrong. 

In fact, neither of Mr. Biden’s claims is inaccurate. The United States has been pressing the Turkish government for months to seal off its border to prevent would-be jihadists from using Turkey as a transit route to join the ranks of the Islamic State. And experts say aid from the Persian Gulf monarchies has wound up with extremist groups in Syria.
President Obama made a similar point in August about Syria’s Arab neighbors fueling extremist organizations in their zeal to oust President Bashar al-Assad, though he did not name the culprits.

“There are factual mistakes, and then there are political mistakes,” said Andrew J. Tabler, an expert on Syria at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “This is a political mistake.”

If it is a political mistake to repeat what is on the front page of the newspaper, and what has been front-page news for years, then I say we've crossed over into unstable, bizarre territory, the territory where U.S. leadership can't even voice basic truth.

The fact that such absurdity is accepted as rational behavior is proof that there is no decency or accountability left in USG. It is free floating. It goes to war without the consent of the governed. Its public elections are post-modern plutocratic charades.

Now that the Umbrella Revolution has sputtered to a close (zero Honk Kong stories in the Gray Lady this morning). it is worthwhile to remember that the Michael Brown, Ferguson-based revolt is ongoing. The Gray Lady publishes a tepid story today by Julie Bosman, "Bruised and Weary, Ferguson Struggles to Heal." Composed of man-on-the-street interviews, Bosman doesn't provide any context in her piece. I would think the main point is that protests have never ended since the August murder of an unarmed teenager. Reporters have moved on but the demand remains to bring to justice the police officer who gunned down Mike Brown. Bosman obliquely inserts this idea that the protests never ended by repeating that Ferguson residents are tired of the unrest and agitation in their city. And to her credit, there are several revealing quotes, including this one:

Some Ferguson residents — most of them white, but not all — insisted that Mr. Brown’s death had revealed racial tensions that they had not realized were there. Last week, Doug Hindle, who is white, paused from mowing his front lawn on a side street in Ferguson, where he has lived for 30 years. Mr. Hindle said that before Mr. Brown was killed, he thought that whites and African-Americans in Ferguson got along just fine. Both of his next-door neighbors are black, he said, and while they all don’t socialize, they always wave and say hello. For years, Mr. Hindle said, he has driven the older woman across the street, who is African-American, to church, the grocery store or wherever she needs to go. 

“Everything was fine before,” Mr. Hindle said. “People are making this look like a bad place to live. We can hear them chanting at night. You can’t leave, you can’t open your windows at night. People are shooting their guns off. It’s never been like that. If they let Wilson go, all hell’s going to break loose. I really hope he goes to jail, just so people can get their justice. This has got to stop.”