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We Need to Talk About Saudi Arabia

January 6, 2016

We Need to Talk About Saudi Arabia

Canadians may decry its executions and power moves, but we’re locked in an alliance.

SaudiSecurity_610px.jpg

Iranians protest executions outside the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Tehran, Jan. 3, 2016. Raheb Homavanti, Reuters Media Express.

Dealing with Saudi Arabia is becoming a mug’s game for almost everyone in the West — Europe, the U.S. and Canada, among others. Time and again, the House of Saud makes us look like suckers, and the recent Saudi execution of 47 people in one day (mostly by beheading, a few by firing squad) is just the latest example. We know the Saudis are crooked, but they’re the only game in town.

Historically, the House of Saud has a lot of legitimacy. It ruled much of the Arabian peninsula in the 18th century, before the Ottoman Empire took over, and after the First World War it waged an Islamic State-style war against other factions and founded modern Saudi Arabia in 1932.

Well, “modern” is going too far. The House of Saud has been a close ally of the Wahhabis, who promote a fundamentalist version of Sunni Islam, and that version is far from modern. But Muhammad ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia, was smart enough to strike a deal with the British after oil was discovered in 1938. That deal gave him British protection as well as a huge market; after the Second World War, the U.S. took over.

Thanks to such deals, the West has relied on cheap Saudi oil through almost 80 years of war and growth. But the moral price has been high: we have had to tolerate some pretty bad behaviour by the Saudis.

Recall the Saudi oil embargo imposed on the West after the Yom Kippur War of 1973. America, Europe and Japan staggered under the soaring cost of oil and gasoline.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Pathetic Zombie Wars

June 22, 2015

Pathetic Zombie Wars

Our New Friend, al-Qaeda

The wars go on!

We’re not against them. We might as well be against stomach gas – it will happen whether we like it or not. Real wars, as we’ve been exploring recently, are glorious and moronic. But zombie wars are just sordid are pathetic.

A new item in the Wall Street Journal tells us that our enemy’s enemy is becoming our friend.

“In the three-way war ravaging Syria, should the local al-Qaeda branch be seen as the lesser evil to be wooed rather than bombed?

This is increasingly the view of some of America’s regional allies and even some Western officials. In a war now in its fifth year, in which 230,000 people have been killed and another 7.6 million uprooted, few good options remain for how to tackle the crisis.”

These are not real wars. There are no real war aims, no enemy worthy of the name, and no real victories. Instead, they are zombie wars. They go on and on… with changing targets and shifting alliances. Why do we never win?

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Vetting process …

Cartoon by Steve Breen

Because too many people benefit from losing… The media, the military, the contractors, the politicians, the lowlife defense contractors in Northern Virginia, the grandstanders in Congress, the CIA, the NSA … all have been zombified.

Jon Basil Utley in the American Conservative:

“America doesn’t “win” its wars, because winning a war is secondary to other goals in our war making. Winning or losing has little immediate consequence for the United States, because the wars we start, Wars of Choice, are not of vital national interest; losing doesn’t mean getting invaded or our cities being destroyed.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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