The world is changing: the Middle East and the next American President

So I'm going to come out of the deep freeze at least momentarily because I think there's a big picture worth talking about that I haven't really seen anyone put the dots together on yet.

Wow, a lot of really seismic shifts have occurred in the world and the Middle East over the past few months.  I wouldn't say the fact that any one of them has occurred has shocked me, though the fact that so many have occurred so quickly certainly ranks as a big surprise.  And the thing is, as I watch the US presidential election (which is looking more and more likely that Obama will win), I don't see either candidate as particularly well prepared for the world and the Middle East and the US position in both.  Some of that will probably work out for the best for the peoples of the Middle East, world, and even ultimately the US ("ultimately" being a very long term phrase meant to convey that Americans aren't likely going to like the way it feels at first, but in the end will probably wake them up to the new realities of the world and help them find their place in it).

So what's changed?  Let's put these things into two categories which are closely intertwined: (1) Global strategic shifts impacting the position of the United States, and (2) changes in the Middle Eastern landscape.  And let's start with items in category 1 first:

• The collapse of the US financial system: A lot of the world is half smugly declaring "I told you so" that the US was going to run into financial trouble.  Some of it was stupid meaningless blather such as what comes from Bin Ladenite and salafi bozos who still think the world is flat, but the more serious part of it was from a group of second- and third-tier strategic competitors such as Russia (second-tier), Venezuela, Iran, Cuba and their ilk (all third-tier).  The China's, India's, Gulf OPEC states, and Brazil's of the world are to busy hoping that the flu doesn't spread to their own economies (though Brazil has good reason to be less worried than the rest even if they are not totally immune thanks to not only the commodity boom but also massive new hydrocarbon discoveries in previously inaccessible sub-salt regions), but ultimately this plays to their benefit even if the short- to medium-term could turn very painful for them.  Why do I bring it up?  Because this isn't just an ordinary recession, it marks a true turning of the global economic and financial order.  The US has been jacked up on financial steroids for well over a decade now (plenty of blame to go around here starting with the Clinton era right alongside all the Bush mismanagement, to say nothing of Congress and Greenspan/the Fed) with massive amounts of cheap money, lax lending standards, and generally far too much destruction of the necessary modest amounts of regulation that are needed for a capitalist system to function effectively without imploding.  Well, it's imploding as we speak.  Do I think it's the next Great Depression?  Probably not, probably more like a very long, very deep, very painful recession (where exactly the line between that and a depression is I don't precisely know, but I guess I'm saying I don't envision 25% unemployment and dust bowls in the US, or at least I hope there won't be).  But strategically it comes at a time where we have already set up the global economic balance into a position where not only are the EU and Japan virtual economic power equals with the US already, but for the past decade to half decade the resource exporters of the world have been receiving one of the most massive transfers of wealth in human history.  Russia has been revitalized (though more fragilely than China's more substantial growth), China has turned itself into the cheap goods factory of the US and the world (building that factory has been the single most important factor in driving up energy, agriculture, base metals, and commodities generally which produced the giant transfer of wealth to the resource exporters), India is rising solidly if haphazardly, the Gulf OPEC countries have become one of the key emerging markets with cities that look more modern than anything the US or Europe has to offer (if you ignore the virtual slave labor building them - but hey, no different than how most big cities get built I suppose), and Brazil is quietly but steadily prepping to become a major force in the world and on and on.  The US has kept itself on top strategically and militarily, but economically was ripe for reaching a position where alternative players would start to be in a position to dictate terms.  And that is what is happening.  All of a sudden the US' complaints about sovereign wealth funds have dried up and Wall Street and the Fed are hoping and praying the dollars can flow in from Abu Dhabi and Singapore to prevent the failure of more major institutions.  We're going to hear more and more of this.  And of course the Chinese are in a major position of power holding a trillion dollars of US debt.  They are as always prudent and cautious about that power knowing that an aggressive misuse of it will just shoot themselves in the foot, but they are in a position to dictate more terms instead of being dictated too.  And while strategically no one can touch US military spending yet and hence all remain militarily inferior, the trajectories are pretty clear with Russian and Chinese military spending advancing rapidly each year and each seeking to step by step assert a more global presence (India too, but as with their economy, in more fits and starts).  These are little things right now which compared to US military might look laughable (Russia in South Ossettia and conducting maneuvers in Venezuela, China deploying peacekeepers to Darfur, etc.), but I assert they are clearly the start of a trend of expanding military presence by these powers around the globe while the US' increasingly expensive and economically unsustainable wars (in the face of a declining tax revenue base and massively ballooning national debt/deficits) mean the start of a reduced US presence around the world very much akin to the decline of the European empires post-WWII (though it will likely be more gradual as at present there is no one else to step into the vacuum with the EU still having no coordinated military and foreign policy and China/India/Russia still not having effective enough militaries with the necessary transport capabilities to have a truly global reach).  Bottom line: the collapse of the US economic system was overdue, will be long lived, and will reduce US strategic (not just economic) influence around the world even as that of an array of competitors rises.

I guess I ended up throwing all the "global strategic issues" into that one bullet :)  Ok, so on to section 2, shifts in the Middle Eastern landscape that an increasingly constrained US is going to face:

• Not quite the Middle East (guess it depends whose map you're looking at), but nobody seems to have really noticed that the US is now at war in Pakistan.  Didn't notice it did you?  There's no getting around it, we now regularly attack Pakistan, the Taliban had already made the Northwest Frontier Province a major base for their Afghan insurgency and the Pakistani Taliban had grown increasingly assertive and violent inside Pakistan.  I've long said I have no idea what you really do to right Pakistan, but geez, it's really turning into a direct mess for the US right now.  Obama thinks he's really smart on Pakistan and will carry on or even deepen the current military action despite the obvious intractability of the situation.  McCain is a trigger-happy nutzoid who I'm sure will take whatever is not working and double down having taken all the wrong lessons from the current comparative calm in Iraq (hint: the "surge" wasn't the key at all to what happened there).  Ultimately it's about finding as graceful an exit as possible, but with the US now backing a clearly failed Karzai in Afghanistan and the single most corrupt politician in Pakistan who has become president with US support (along with the thousands of people Zardari bribed), the US is neck-deep in blame for everything going wrong and it will be even tougher to find that graceful exit than it is in Iraq because you can only leave if there is a coalition of forces somehow sharing power in these regions who consider Al-Qaeda an enemy (which btw, is what has happened in Iraq, the politicians just don't seem capable of acknowledging they still despise the US).  I don't envy the next President, they're coming in with poor options and a lousy deteriorating situation which is nowhere near peak.
• Phantom Iraqi calm.  Admittedly the biggest surprise to me in the past year in Iraq has been the collapse of Sadrist power.  Well, I shouldn't take that too far, the man is nowhere near from gone or able to be written off.  I wrote a couple years ago I think about how at some point the Sadrists might morph into the kind of disciplined force that Hizbullah has become in Lebanon.  What we've seen was that the hotheaded young Sadr was unable to contain the people acting in his name from their orgy of violence.  The possibility of a broad-based nationalist coalition of forces never came together, Sadr was being increasingly discredited on the streets because of his thugs violence (especially once the ethnic cleansing which took place under buffoon-like American supervision was basically completed), and he finally had to admit to himself he had to clean house.  I'm sure there were all sorts of back-room conversations, threats, cajolings, and deals as well with Tehran, the Americans, ISCI, Fadhila, etc. as well, but bottom line was that Sadr's path as it was fell apart.  The question for him is, what comes next?  His name continues to carry great weight, his organizations have been largely purged it would seem of those not under his control, so what is he planning next and what are his constraints?  I presume his constraints include a much reduced organization now that people really do have to take orders, ISCI/Fadhila/other Shi'a sectarian rivals having had the purse strings and reins of power locally and nationally for a while giving them an incumbents bribery and familiarity advantage, and likely Tehran telling him to keep his jets cool still for a while.  On the other hand, I would presume that those still with him are receiving more disciplined, advanced military training and armaments should he so choose to unleash them and that politically he could still garner a large enough bloc of votes to quell pure ISCI power plays.  Anyway, Sadr is one leg and the point is he is down but not out and highly likely to come back as a violent key player against the Americans at some point.  At the same time, the former Sunni-dominated insurgency fighters in the west of the country and Baghdad grow increasingly uppity with their lack of inclusion in the new power structures of the state Maliki is trying to build and control.  Their distrust and hatred of the Americans never went away, it just took a temporary back seat to their distrust and hatred of Al-Qaeda who tried to rule them like Taliban and at which they violently and successfully balked.  Then of course there's the eternal question of the Kirkuk tinderbox, but more importantly as a potential flashpoint is that the entire border of Kurdistan is now and open and sore question with the Peshmerga having taken chunks of land they did not have pre-invasion and loathe to give them up even as the Maliki state seeks to get them to back off.  Bottom line to all of this: while violence is down for now (notice I use the relative "down", it's still incredibly bad if you're an Iraqi, you or I wouldn't want to live there), there are not just potential sources of fresh flames, there are many that the gas is already turned up to high on even as we never know when someone will light the next match.
• The collapse of the two-state Palestinian-Israeli peace option and the imploding contradictions of Israeli society.  The "peace process" has been a dead letter for some time now.  To truly bring peace requires either complete Palestinian surrender to Bantustans (won't happen) or an Israeli willingness to literally dismantle or abandon the entire first-world road, power, water, communications, sewer, housing and other physical infrastructure of a population of settlers bigger than that of about 1/3 of the countries in the world (i.e., about 1/3 of the countries in the world each individually have fewer people in them than the number of illegal Israeli colonizers living on stolen Palestinian land in the 1967-Occupied Territories).  And that's without even touching on the biggest but most important issue, the Palestinian right of return for their ethnically cleansed refugees of 60+ years (an issue the US and Israelis keep naively hoping they can wish away as they have done since 1948 especially after the Israelis assassinated Swedish diplomat and UN mediator Folke Bernadotte for having tried to get the Israelis in practical terms to live up to their promise and obligation to let the refugees back home instead of shooting them dead as "infiltrators" when they tried to go back home or even just briefly tend to their farms).  But that's not what's new, everyone serious involved in those diplomatic processes (which btw includes neither Bush, Rice, Ross, Olmert, Livni, or Abbas) has known the peace process is dead as Carolina roadkill (and less tasty) for a long time and just kept around to make it look like something is happening to cover the top politicians political rears.  What is new are two trends, one each from the Palestinian and Israeli sides.  On the Palestinian side the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada I would argue while expressing on one level hopeless but justified rage at the Israeli occupation, was still ultimately aimed for most folks at the hope/possibility of getting a real two-state solution.  But somewhere along the line, or metamorphosis has begun to occur.   A lot of ordinary Palestinians around the world and in Palestine itself are starting to really first demand a genuine right of return and rightly spit in Abbas' and Dahlan's faces when they tell them they're going to have to give that up.  They're finally standing up and saying it is their inalienable right in a louder more organized voice, I would argue largely because the Israelis have shown they have no interest in a two-state peace.  That of necessity will entail considering a one-state solution.  While not a lot of folks in Palestine have fully thought this through and its practical implications, the wheels of motion are starting to churn.  While Abbas-and-Dahlan-bootlickers join Olmert-the-anti-Arab-racist in bringing it up more as a threat ("oh no, oh no, if you don't give Abbas enough crumbs to stay in power and call it a final peace deal, Palestinianss will have to be treated as equal human beings with the same guaranteed rights as Israelis and *that* would be a disaster!" the proponents say), more parties are starting to think in practical terms of what it would mean.  The growing solidarity between Palestinian citizens of Israel and their cousins in the 1967-Occupied Territories is a positive trend in this sense as they are a population that understands (even if in a discriminated-against manner) what such co-existence will entail on a more practical level, though obviously a genuine solution will require far great equality than Palestinian citizens of Israel currently receive.  That's the Palestinian side, on the Israeli side, the long train of the Al-Aqsa Intifada and the Hamas takeover of Gaza (especially with its exposure of Abbas and Dahlan increasingly as Palestinian Quislings for Israel) is finally starting to have an effect exposing the contradictions of the Israeli system's notion of a "Jewish democracy".  While most mainstream Israelis have long felt you can have both, the reality that this is impossible without another mass Palestinian ethnic cleansing is becoming more and more obvious.  The fault line it is showing up on most obviously is the increasingly violent (as if they weren't incredibly violent to begin with, but they have gotten noticeably worse) behavior of the Israeli settlers.  Even mainstream Israelis who have an attitude remarkably similar to old-school South African Afrikaner racists (no, I don't think all South African Afrikaners are racists, but obviously there was a pretty hefty core who were and who kept that system going for so long before it collapsed under its own contradictions just as Israeli Apartheid is going to) that permits a huge amount of anti-Palestinian official violence, are increasingly put off by the actions of Israeli settlers who are burning Palestinian olive groves in greater numbers, beating Palestinians senseless in greater numbers for no reason, and generally violently rioting while the Israeli Army stands by and does nothing (as a reference point, non-armed peaceful Palestinian demonstrators are regularly fired upon with live ammunition, rubber-coated steel musket balls, and a broad array of other lab-experiment supposedly-but-by-no-means-always non-lethal weapons).  Suddenly Israelis who had convinced themselves for over a decade that a two-state solution could exist with them stealing most of the prime land from the already tiny 1967-Occupied Territories (chopping it up into isolated bits by grabbing a key strategic 1% here and 1% there) and with them denying Palestinians their fundamental human right of return to their homes, are realizing that the settlers whose state-subsidized job it is to create those conditions, are increasingly running amok of even the racist laws set up in their favor.  Moreover, those settlers themselves are talking very clearly about being above any secular law of the state (something most Israelis think however naively is a real bedrock principle of Israel) and some are even talking about creating their own state.  More than a few shades of the Colones in Algeria here in their dying days.   I won't draw that parallel too far as the outcome here will clearly take a different form.  Bottom line: Israelis are starting to realize that something is starting to not work in their plan to try and steal maximum Palestinian land without the Palestinians.  Olmert said it flat out when he stated his "fear" that Palestinians would start a civil rights movement to demand equal rights in one state, and the increased settler rioting is at least showing most Israelis that something they can't quite identify yet (but which in reality is the fact that the settlements have inextricably and permanently tied the entire country into one contiguous Israeli-Palestinian state already de facto just not de jure) is not sustainable in the way things are going.  Somehow sending fanatical settlers who think they are God's law incarnate (and that oddly they think God's law is to steal and murder...did these guys never read the 10 commandments?) is not meshing with the notion of producing a sufficiently ethnically-pure Israel that can claim to be a "democracy" by controlling Palestinian population levels.  They're not willing to admit how disgustingly racist the notion has been all along yet, but they're realizing that somehow it's not working because the settlers are embarrassing their notions of themselves and how civilized they thought they were (even as they quietly and systematically have carried out incredibly inhumane, uncivilized brutality for decades but managed to convince themselves it was ok because they institutionalized the brutality which they thought made it acceptable).

I'm not even getting into Iran, that's an ongoing story.  Maybe Ahmadinejad will be booted out in the next Presidential elections there and more sensible face of the regime will show up, maybe the nuclear issue will worsen or improve, I don't know, but that one at present doesn't change the basic dynamics of the region much from what we already know.

What am I saying with all this?  While each story is fascinating in its own right the big picture point I am trying to make is that the next US President is facing the imminent end of the US' brief-lived (only about 2 decades) sole-superpower-status and that this will have huge implications for the Middle East as well as the fact that US-overzealousness in multiple Middle East issues has been part of the factors which have weakened the US.  Is it imminent collapse and replacement by China in a year?  No, of course not.  But the pace of the shift to a multi-polar world has picked up subsantially from what I would have expected a year ago.  China and the developing world will have to whether this US economic slowdown too, but with multiple no-end-in-sight and ultimately-pointless-but-we're-too-fearful-of-the-world-and-insularly-stubborn-to-admit-it wars draining US coffers and influence, the process is in full swing and shows no signs of abating even if there will be plenty of bumps in the road.

The question for the US is this in the years ahead: can the country find itself a new role as one of the many key players in a more balanced multipolar world, or will it bury itself in insularity, fear, and claims of eternal righteousness until it is literally a third rate power in a couple of decades?  I would think that the US system has enough flexibility in it to end up in the more positive former scenario after it takes a few lumps, but heaven help the poor innocents who are going to lose their lives and livelihoods in the process.

And then there's the Middle East (and virtually every region of the globe) where declining US power is going to have all sorts of localized effects.  What does Israel do if US power (both direct and indirect through munitions shipments) can't stop Iran getting nukes?  I don't forecast Armageddon, I forecast a very changed regional strategic balance (this is assuming we don't have a merged single state by then in which case a regional nuclear-free zone becomes much easier to achieve).  And in the near term a more assertive Russia is already changing Israel's strategic balance as it's more effective anti-tank weapons and even intelligence finds its way via third party channels to Israel's most effective foe in Hizbullah, plus Syria's military gets an upgrade and implicit protection from the now official more frequent Russian Navy usage of the Syrian port of Tartous.  Iran gets more willing fat on economic rents to play an assertive role.  All things already happening to one degree or another and changing calculations.  And what happens if the US and NATO are forced to withdraw from Afghanistan and Pakistan?  More realistically in the next President's term, how bad do things get before the US and NATO start trying to figure out how they get out of there?  And more immediately, what does Iraq look like post-pullout?  Who fills the vacuum?  Are Maliki and ISCI strong enough with Iranian support to survive?  How much regional competition gets funneled into Iraq?  Does a new round of the Civil War ignite ala Lebanon's on-again-off-again 15 years of fighting?

More questions than answers, but sensible answers have to start with knowing the right questions first.  Something utterly lacking in the past 8 years of "no questions, I'm busy shooting" US policy.

On Inequality

Abdur-Rahman  al-Kawakibi, a Muslim revivalist and Sayyid (claimant of lineage descended from the Prophet) from Aleppo, Syria of the late 19th century affectionately known as Abu Du'afa or "Father of the Weak" for his arguments on behalf of the downtrodden (quoted from Hanna Batatu's seminal work "The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq", p. 368):

Human beings share the hardships of life in an unjust way...for men of politics and religion and their hangers-on--and their number does not exceed one percent--enjoy half or more of what congeals from the blood of humanity, and squander it in self-indulgent luxury...And those who trade in precious and luxurious commodities and the avaricious merchants and the monopolists and the like of this class, and they number also around one percent, live each of them as live tens, or hundreds, or thousands of workers and peasants...It is not a question of equating...the active and enterprising with the indolent and the sluggard, but justice requires other than that inequality, and humaneness imposes that the elevated should take the lowly by his hand and bring him close to his rank and mode of life.

That last bold emphasis is my own, and extreme laissez faire, Adam-Smith-invisible-hand advocates should take note (be they western or eastern).  Let's face it, the poor tend to work much harder than the rich, they simply don't have the money and power to aggrandize and praise themselves for it.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the real issue in the Middle East is nothing to do with this stupid "moderates" versus "extremists" talk.  Anytime that framework pops up it is either a gross misunderstanding of symptoms versus causes or else a deliberate smokescreen by the powers that be in Washington and Middle Eastern capitals.  The real issue is the needs of the people for ma'kal, malbas, and maskan (food, clothing, and shelter), personal safety and dignity, and free expression -- against the elites who want to hoard those things for themselves.  It is no different than the struggles in many other countries.  The attempts to suppress those demands are what produce the warped economic circumstances, repressive political systems, and twisted ideologies of rulers and rebels.  Seek to honestly address the basic issues al-Kawakibi pointed to over a century ago, and open up the public space for all to have their say in dealing with those issues, and only then will you start to see solutions emerge.  Preferably through gradualism (honest, not fake as despots and elites usually trick people into), or otherwise Thomas Jefferson's quote rings true enough anywhere in the world where the circumstances become too dire: "A little revolution now and then is a good thing; the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Some notes on Al-Jazeera these days

So, I don’t get to watch much TV these days, but I do try to tune into Al-Jazeera every once in a while. There has been a lot of talk about the Saudi-Qatari political rapprochement and how this has supposedly led the channel to be less critical of both the Saudis and the Americans. Marc Lynch at Abu Aardvark thinks there’s not much to that argument, As’ad Abu Khalil of Angry Arab fame is convinced it is true. Personally in my snippets of watching, I tend to believe it is true, but that the thesis' applicability is only in certain spheres. They are much more circumspect in their Iraq coverage, tending to give more credence to Iraqi government and American officials and not as much to the various armed and unarmed opposition as they used to, and seem to be neutering their language/word-choice to American sensibilities. This is not absolute by any means, they did a groundbreaking interview with Muqtada al-Sadr just recently, but it does seem to me to be a trend that stands out. Removing the Sami al-Hajj irritant seen in this light could very well be an American olive branch attempting to get Al-Jazeera to be that much more compliant now that they sense the propaganda winds blowing in their direction.

I guess the more I think of it, the more it seems the point mostly is about Jazeera's Iraq, Saudi and American coverage. Outside of that (granted, those are big important topics not to be lightly dismissed), I don’t sense any backing down on topics such as Hizbullah, Hamas, Iran, and resistance to the Israelis or further American “projects” in the region (though their coverage of the deployment of American-trained Fatah security forces to Jenin today was more than a little irksome and uncritical). The broader Palestinian issue is particularly noteworthy. The 60th anniversary of the Nakba (“disaster” in Arabic, referring to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948 and Israel’s independence) is being covered prominently with lots of historical notes on events of those times, interviews with the few surviving old men and women refugees, coverage of anniversary conferences (one today in Denmark of European Palestinians seeking their right of return to their homeland), and general discussion of Palestinians’ and their right to return home. Indeed, they are playing a very positive role in helping I think to refocus the Arab world’s attention on the key issue – that right of return. Americans, Israelis, and Abbas & co. are at best willing to talk about borders, settlements, etc., but they’re all perfectly willing to leave the 6 million refugees out in the cold and ignore their most fundamental human rights. That in many ways is what caused the collapse of peace talks in 2000 – the Americans and Israelis considered the topic forbidden to even bring up, Palestinians when push came to shove insisted their basic humanity represented in the right of return was the core issue and not for sale. Al-Jazeera is certainly reminding people of that basic human right these days and deserve a lot of credit for that since Arab regimes are so in cahoots with the Israelis and Americans in trying to bury it.

Anyhow, I am admittedly only an occasional viewer of Al-Jazeera these days, so if others are watching it more and disagree, feel free to chime in. That is my take from my limited sample these days.

[UPDATE: I forgot to mention something else I've noticed lately around the time of the Saudi-Qatari rapproachment. Suddenly Al-Jazeera's broadcast and website have more advertising than before. See, the Saudis being ticked at the Qataris for so long were able to basically enforce an advertising ban on the channel. Saudi Arabia is the biggest advertising market in the region, so anyone who put commercials on Jazeera would get blackballed in Saudi, so they didn't. The result was you typically only saw ads from Qatari state-owned companies. I mean, Rasgas and Qapco are cool and all in their own way, but let's face it, not many Egyptians or Moroccans or Palestinians are making dire household consumer choices over where the plastic in their kids toys comes from, and none of the above has ever likely consumed a drop of Qatari LNG. No offense, but in the face of the Saudi advert blackout, those were just Qatari state subsidies to the channel. Anyhow, it wasn't for lack of eyeballs, Jazeera obviously in a truly free market has the ability to capture huge advertising revenue. Well, now suddenly one does see international companies starting to advertise more and even Saudi and UAE (the Saudi's bestest buddies) events and companies a bit. The blacklisting is thawing along with relations, while meanwhile the coverage on some key issues (see above) is geting dumbed down.]

CIA In the Mideast from "Legacy of Ashes"

Haven't really been applying myself to writing much of real value-added for a while on the blog as you can tell. That said, it turns out if one turns off the computer and opens up some of those wild pre-industrial inventions known as "books", one often finds interesting things not available online. In the hopes of bringing a bit of that to you, I want to give some outtakes from Tim Weiner's book on the history of the CIA "Legacy of Ashes". Suffice it to say, while I've known many of the stories on some less-detailed level for a long time, it is rather breathtaking to see the sheer scale of screwups, illegalities, murders, lack of intelligence, and such that are the backbone of the CIA's history (not the fringe, the backbone, the core). I'm only up to the Kennedy Administration in my reading so far, but chapter 14 gave a brief review of some of the early CIA dirty work in the Middle East (beyond the coup that overthrew Mossadeqh in Iran and brought the Shah to power, that got a chapter of its own). I thought I'd reprint a few excerpts here. So without further ado and with my own comments in [] brackets.

*****

"If you go and live with these Arabs," President Eisenhower told Allen Dulles and the assembled members of the National Security Council, "you will find that they simply cannot understand our ideas of freedom and human dignity. They have lived so long under dictatorships of one kind or another, how can we expect them to run sucessfully a free government?"

[Ah, nice to know that even in the 50s the same old racist canards we have about Arabs today were alive in the upper reaches of American government and the same utter ignorance of the realities of the Arab world pervaded US decision-making.]

The CIA set out to answer that question by trying to convert, coerce, or control governments throughout Asia and teh Middle East. It saw itself wrestling with Moscow for the loyalties of millions of people, grappling to gain political and economic sway over the nations that geological accident had given billions of barrels of oil. The new battle line was a great crescent reaching from Indonesia across the Indian Ocean, through the deserts of Iran and Iraq, to the ancient capitals of the Middle East.

The agency saw every Muslim political chief who would not pledge allegiance to the United States as "a target legally authorized by statute for CIA political action," said Archie Roosevelt, the chief of station in Turkey and a cousin to Kim Roosevelt, the CIA's Near East czar. Many of the most powerful men in the Islamic world took the CIA's cash and counsel. The agency swayed them when it could. But few CIA officers spoke the language, knew the customs, or understood the people they sought to support or suborn.

The president said he wanted to promote the idea of an Islamic jihad against godless communism. [So, it wasn't just in Afghanistan in the 80s that a US administration *liked* the idea of promoting jihad...seems there is a bit more American history, no?] "We should do everything possible to stress the 'holy war' aspect," he said at a September 1957 White House meeting attended by Frank Wisner, Foster Dulles, assistant secretary of state for the Near East William Rountree, and members of the Joint Chiefs. Foster Dulles proposed "a secret task force," under whose auspices the CIA would deliver American guns, money, and intelligence to King Saud of Saudi Arabia, King Hussein of Jordan, President Camille Chamoun of Lebanon, and President Nuri Said of Iraq.

[Read more about King Saud in Robert Vitalis' "America's Kingdom". Today he is considered a lunatic who the Saudi royal family quickly bumped aside, but Vitalis points out he was held up as a great American ally who was put on the cover of Time magazine (or was it Life? I forget, read the book) but then fell out of American graces and was showed aside for being politically inconvenient. King Hussein and the Jordanian Hashemites have of course long been conspirators in league with the Brits, Israelis, and Americans by the admission of all parties concerned. Camille Chamoun, an attempt to split Christians and Muslims in the typical fashion of foreign parties meddling in Lebanon and internal parties of all sects gladly willing to be used by foreigners to try and get a domestic leg up. And Nuri Said - who was Prime Minister, not President of Iraq - was once an Arab nationalist in Ottoman army ranks who went on to have a long career as a British and American stooge under the Iraqi monarchy before finally being toppled along with the monarchy in the 1958 coup that brought Abdul Karim Qassem to power.]

"These four mongrels were supposed to be our defense against communism and the extremes of Arab nationalism in the MIddle east," said Harrison Symmes, who worked closely with the CIA as Rountree's right-hand man and later served as ambassador to Jordan. The only lasting legacy of the "secret task force" was the fulfillment of Frank Wisner's proposal to put King Hussein of Jordan on the CIA's payroll. The agency created a Jordanian intelligence service, which lives today as its liaison to much of the Arab world. ["liaison" meaning not just source of intelligence, but "friends" willing to brutally torture "renditioned" people the CIA illegally kidnaps to this day around the world, including totally-innocent Canadian citizen Maher Arar who was kidnapped by the US government at JFK airport in transit home to Canada from his in-laws in Tunisia, and sent first to Jordan on a CIA plane and then to Syria by road under Jordanian mukhabarat custody being tortured the whole way.] The king received a secret subsidy for the next twenty years.

If arms could not buy loyalty in the Middle East, the almighty dollar was still the CIA's secret weapon. Cash for political warfare and power plays was always welcome. If it could help create an American imperium in Arab and Asian lands, Foster was all for it. [John Foster Dulles was the Secretary of State and worked hand-in-hand with his brother Allan Dulles who was the head of the CIA.] "let's put it this way," said Ambassador Symmes. "John Foster Dulles had taken the view that anything we can do to bring down these neutralists--anti-imperialists, anti-colonialists, extreme nationalist regimes--should be done. [hmmm...conflating a natural desire of oppressed peoples to be free of oppression with the (communist) boogeyman of the day and then lumping them in with the bad guys when they insist on hewing an independent path instead of becoming an American lapdog (or sometimes rejecting their pleas for American help at first, and then treating them as enemies when they went to somebody else for their legitimately and badly needed help). Just a few parallels to today methinks.]

"He had given a mandate to Allen Dulles to do this....And, of course, Allen Dulles just unleashed people." As a result, "we were caught out in attempted coups, ham-handed operations of all kinds." He and his fellow diplomats tried "to keep track of some of these dirty tricks that were being planned in the Middle East so that if they were just utterly impossible, we'd get them killed before they got any further. And we succeeded in doing that in some cases. But we couldn't get all of them killed."

*****

That's just the intro to the chapter, there's then a few pages getting into a decade of CIA coup-mongering in Syria and the dirty CIA tricks in Iraq that brought the Ba'ath party to power. I'll include that final little quote from Iraq here too:

*****

"We came to power on a CIA train," said Ali Saleh Sa'adi, the Ba'ath Party interior minister in the 1960s. One of the passengers on that train was an up-and-coming assassin named Saddam Hussein.

Video: Sinan Antoon on Charlie Rose discusses Iraq

Watch this, Sinan Antoon is one of the best Iraqi commentators on his own countries travails (not just since 2003), the meaning of it all for Iraqis, Americans, and humanity. Ali Fadhil makes a couple decent points, but he's clearly not as deeply versed as Sinan, though he shares some good personal experiences.



And here's another link if the embedded video above doesn't work for some reason:

http://www.charlierose.com/shows/2008/03/19/2/continued-discussion-about-the-war-in-iraq

Comparing Suffering

"I think that foreigners tend to show all too comparable pity towards people who have suffered misfortunes not at all comparable, as if the pity were more important than the misfortune." -- Marie Louise Kagoyire. Genocide survivor. Nyamata, Rwanda. Quoted from Jean Hatzfeld's "Into the Quick of Life, The Rwandan Genocide: The Survivors Speak"

Ms. Kagoyire was referring to foreigners who saw the Hutu refugees fleeing to the camps of Goma following the genocide and had lots of pity and provided lots of aid for them, but who didn't seem to have much pity and certainly very little aid to the surviving victims of the genocide. There were innocents among the Hutus certainly, and there was horrible suffering in the camps, but the camps were run by genocidaires, much of the aid went to the genocidaires in one fashion or another, and the world seemed to think that somehow aiding those whom the perpetrators had pushed into camps (and in many instances the perpetrators themselves!) absolved them of guilt towards the actual victims.

The same imbalance of pity applies to Palestinians and Israelis and Americans and Iraqis. Palestinians suffer far more, yet the west's pity goes overwhelmingly to the Israelis. Westerners act like at best these are two equal sides with equal suffering when the reality is that while there is suffering on both sides, Palestinians suffer 100 fold or more worse. Likewise Americans worry about their loved ones in the US military in Iraq and yet somehow fail to care 1/100th as much about the 100 times or more number of Iraqi victims they have created. At best there is token acknowledgement of Iraqi suffering, but where billions are spent to protect Americans sent to occupy Iraq or to aid injured soldiers, Americans fail to even acknowledge our overwhelming responsibility for the mass graves of Iraqis we have filled (more than Saddam now - think of that) and we don't pour hundreds of billions into aiding Iraqi victims of the violence we brought them. Don't get me wrong, I don't want Israelis or Americans to suffer, all human beings are equal - but that's the point, 1 Israeli is of equal value as 1 Palestinian, but somehow westerners fail to acknowledge that the suffering of 100 Palestinians IS greater suffering (simple math folks) than the suffering of 1 Israeli. Americans and Israelis overwhelmingly refuse to acknowledge the vastly greater suffering they create on the other side of the fence and they most certainly refuse to expend the same amount of resources to ease the suffering they have created (they're usually too busy spending resources to cause more suffering). This is why those suffering turn to increasingly desperate measures, they know no one cares about them, so they grasp at straws for anything to try and pull them out of the hole they've been thrust down into.

Brief Thoughts On Iraq

I was in a meeting today with an old friend who has spent many years in the Gulf and Washington. He is a private citizen, always has been, i.e., not part of the power structures in either place. But he knows and is privy to the thoughts of many of the power brokers. I have respected him as an individual and an analyst for many years, he is far less hot-headed than I am and is always deeply insightful.

He was asked by someone in the meeting his views on current state of Iraq. In a nutshell his view can be summarized as:

• The Saudi-US relationship is badly soured, they have lost respect for the United States as a nation deeply in debt to China (i.e., squandering global influence to the rising new power), and for having deliberately harmed the Palestinians and now the Iraqis with the invasion that the Saudis openly warned them would be a disaster.
• The Saudis want the US out of Iraq, they’re just making a mess of it, but they want the Americans out on their terms.
• The Iranians feel almost exactly the same – they want the US out, but on their terms.
• So the Saudis and Iranians have found common ground and have more or less struck a deal to help calm Iraq so that the Americans can “claim victory” and get out. The Saudis and Iranians are meeting regularly behind the scenes and closely coordinating their efforts.
• So the Saudis are funneling huge support to anti-Al-Qaeda Sunni elements to tamp those hotheads down, and the Iranians have used their influence to calm down Sadr. So each side is calming down their respective sectors.
• They are perfectly happy to let the Americans pretend the “surge” is what has caused the recent calming as it will let Americans feel good about themselves then skidaddle quicker.
• Nobody in Washington has a clue what’s really going on on the ground. He thinks Petraeus and a few others likely do, but of course it serves their interests to pretend and let Washington think that they brought about the success instead of other actors beyond their control.

So, realist power politics in the Gulf, and yet more incompetence in Washington.

Baghdad Wall Pics

[click on images to see larger versions]

Walls are becoming fashionable now in countries where the US, Israel or its allies are involved. The Israelis are almost done building one, the US wants to build a bigger one on the Mexican border, the Saudis are building one on their Iraqi border, and now inside Baghdad the US is putting one up to block off predominantly Sunni Adhamiya from surrounding Shi'a neighborhoods. No comment from me this time, but a friend in Iraq in the US Army was kind enough to send along the photos above - thanks, you know who you are - and a couple of his own comments which I copy unedited below with his view:

I'm sending you two pics of the wall. They were the best i could do this week. It was hard to get over to that part of the city this week for some reason. Anyhow. In one of the pics you can see two different walls running top left to bottom right, the one further in the distance is the western wall that runs north south that entraps the entire area, the other wall that is in the foreground is just a local wall keeping neighborhoods seperate. There are crazy events that still are happening in these neighborhoods, but the statistics have proven it a much safer place than before.

[Correction: An Iraqi friend emailed to point out I had mistakenly said these pictures were of Adhamiya. His comments - "Thanks a lot for these photos. These are from Dora, not Adhamiya. I didn't even know they built a wall over there. The empty street blocked by the wall in the northern wall photo was the place of a vast outdoors market, and you can see the Chaldean and Nestorian churches of St. John the Baptist and Mar Georges in the background and a mosque farther south. Sad."]