If the Donald had thrown a dart at the world map blindfolded, he could not have picked a worse stop than Riyadh for his maiden foreign journey. That’s because there isn’t one anywhere on the planet.
The Saudi capital is the very heart of darkness – the seat of an absolutist tyranny that has nothing to do with America’s interests or ideals and has everything to do with fomenting the violent conflicts and economic deformations that plague the region.
The House of Saud fosters Wahhabi fanaticism, exports jihadi violence and completely disenfranchises its 32 million inhabitants. So doing, it squanders its magnificent geologic patrimony on the unspeakable opulence of the royal family and an insane level of arms purchases and military capability that inherently and unnecessarily destabilizes the region.
As Justin Raimondo so cogently summarized,
Has there been a more disgusting spectacle during the four months of this presidency than the sight of Donald Trump slobbering all over the barbarous Saudi monarch and his murderous family of petty princelings? It’s enough to make any normal American retch, especially when one remembers what Trump said about them during the election……
The old Trump told us that the Saudis were “mouth pieces, bullies, cowards,” who were “paying ISIS” but now they’re our partners in the “war on terrorism.”
So the rambling platitudes of Trump’s speech did not essay a way forward to eliminate ISIS or stanch the fires of war, ruin, death and dispossession that are consuming Muslim lands from Tripoli to Kabul. To the contrary, they amounted to strategic mush and hypocritical pandering that could have been written by Saudi Arabia’s PR agency or maybe its hired Washington flaks. Tony Podesta and his $200k per month retainer anyone?
Worse still, the speech’s final peroration vilifying Iran came straight from the Bibi Netanyahu branch of the War Party. It was not only a gratuitous rebuke to the 40 million Iranians who Friday overwhelmingly voted to continue the enlightened, outward looking policies of President Rouhani, but also was effectively a clarion call to more sectarian warfare and terrorism in the region, not its diminution.
The reason is elemental. The American people have no dog in the hunt when it comes to the clash between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and the ancient Sunni/Shiite divide which animates it.
The way out of Washington’s ruinous, 27-year military intervention in the middle east is to stay out of a sectarian battle and political rivalry that fuels Sunni jihadism, weakens the natural Shiite resistance and fosters the kind of vengeful blowback that can eventuate in terrorist threats to the US homeland.
The heart of the matter is the War Party’s claim that Iran is a massive and relentless state sponsor of terrorism. That is a giant lie, yet Trump lip- synched it’s deceitful anthem chapter and verse:
But no discussion of stamping out [the threat of terrorism] would be complete without mentioning the government that gives terrorists all three – safe harbor, financial backing, and the social standing needed for recruitment. It is a regime that is responsible for so much instability in the region. I am speaking of course of Iran.
From Lebanon to Iraq to Yemen, Iran funds, arms, and trains terrorists, militias, and other extremist groups that spread destruction and chaos across the region. For decades, Iran has fueled the fires of sectarian conflict and terror.
The place to start is with the map below – a picture worth a thousand words if there ever was such. Not one of the 40 US bases pictured below adds to the safety and security of the citizens of Springfield MA, Lincoln NE or Spokane WA.
They are merely outposts of Imperial Washington’s half-century old error that treats the Persian Gulf as an American Lake and supposes that meddling in the internecine political, ethnic and sectarian conflicts of the region engenders peace and stability. In fact, it has left behind a trail of broken states, ruined economies, demolished cities and towns and disposed peoples, desperate refugees and revenge-obsessed young men.
At the same time, this implacably threatening military encirclement does explain the Iranian regime’s hostility to America and fear that it is the next target for one of Washington’s bloody exercises in regime change. That’s been especially true ever since George Bush’s idiotic consignment of Iran to the "Axis of Evil" in his 2002 speech to Congress – at the very time after the 9/11 attack by Sunni jihadists that Shiite Iran had come to America’s aid in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Indeed, even a passing acquaintance with recent history reminds us of why the halls of government in Tehran do not ring with encomiums to America’s great works in the region. After all, it was the CIA coup of 1953 which overthrow Iran’s elected government and saddled it’s people with the brutal, plunderous rule of the Shah for the next 25-years.
Likewise, it was Washington that sided with Saddam Hussein’s 1980’s war on Iran. In fact, the CIA provided the satellite reconnaissance that enabled him to drop horrific chemical weapons on Iran’s unprotected and often barely armed teen-aged armies.
So too, it was the neocon doctrines confected by Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz in the early 1990s that designated Iran as the surrogate enemy for the departed Soviet Union; and which went on to endlessly accuse it of a dangerous nuclear weaponization program which it never had – even by the lights of the NIE’s (National Intelligence Estimates) produced by Washington’s 17 intelligence agencies in 2008 and thereafter.
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