Home » Posts tagged 'arab spring'

Tag Archives: arab spring

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

How the U.S. Shattered the Middle East

September 10, 2019

How the U.S. Shattered the Middle East

How the U.S. Shattered the Middle East
The guided missile destroyer USS Porter conducts strike operations against a target in Syria while in the Mediterranean Sea in April 2017. (Petty Officer 3rd Class Ford Williams / U.S. Navy)

Yemen is a nightmare, a catastrophe, a mess—and the United States is highly complicit in the whole disaster. Refueling Saudi aircraft in-flight, providing targeting intelligence to the kingdom and selling the requisite bombs that have been dropped for years now on Yemeni civilians places the 100,000-plus deaths, millions of refugees, and (still) starving children squarely on the American conscience. If, that is, Washington can still claim to have a conscience.

The back story in Yemen, already the Arab world’s poorest country, is relevant. Briefly, the cataclysm went something like this: Protests against the U.S.-backed dictator during the Arab Spring broke out in 2011. After a bit, an indecisive and hesitant President Obama called for President Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down. A Saudi-backed transitional government took over but governed (surprise, surprise) poorly. Then, from 2014 to 2015, a vaguely Shiite militia from Yemen’s north swarmed southward and seized the capital, along with half the country. At that point, rather than broker a peace, the U.S. quietly went along with, and militarily supported, a Saudi terror-bombing campaign, starvation blockade and mercenary invasion that mainly affected Yemeni civilians. At that point, Yemen had broken in two.

Now, as the Saudi campaign has clearly faltered—despite killing tens of thousands of civilians and starving at least 85,000 children to death along the way—stalemate reigns. Until this past week, that is, when southern separatists (there was once, before 1990, a South and North Yemen) seized the major port city of Yemen, backed by the Saudis’ ostensible partners in crime, the United Arab Emirates. So it was that there were then threeYemens, and ever more fracture. In the last few days, the Saudi-backed transitional government retook Aden, but southern separatism seems stronger than ever in the region.

Will the Yellow Vests Protests Come to the US?

January 11, 2019

Will the Yellow Vests Protests Come to the US?

A truth about movements is, they move. They morph, evolve and move around a country or even around the globe. This occurs over months and often over years.

The US Occupy encampment era occurred ten months after the Arab Spring and six months after the Spanish Indignado movement – early versions of occupy. It started in New York and then spread across the United States and to other countries. It was a global revolt against the 1% that changed politics in the United States and continues to have impacts today.

The Yellow Vest (Gilets Jaunes) movement in France is having a major impact and gaining international attention, already spreading to other nations, with some nations like Egypt banning the sale of yellow vests to prevent the protest from spreading there. The movement is showing that disrupting business-as-usual gets results. Will it come to the United States? What form would it take here? What could spark the equivalent of the Yellow Vests in the US?

Social Movements Create Global Waves Of Protest

It is common for a protest to develop in one part of the world and move to another country. This is even more common in modern times as the economy has become globalized and communication across different countries has become easier.

The US revolution against Great Britain was part of the Age of Enlightenment, which questioned traditional authority and emphasized natural rights of life, liberty, and equality as well as sought self-government and religious freedom. The French Revolution followed 13 years after the US in 1789. It led to political changes in the UK, Germany and across Europe. This coincided with the Great Liberator, Simon Bolivar, freeing colonies from the Spanish Empire including Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, and Peru. They became independent and briefly united as a single nation.

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

How the U.N. Joined America’s War Against Syria

September 20, 2018

How the U.N. Joined America’s War Against Syria

America has been at war to transfer control of Syria over to the Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia; and America has been trying to do this ever since the first of the CIA’s coups against Syria failed in 1949. But only during the U.S. Presidency of Barack Obama did the United Nations become a tool in this American enterprise. Obama entered the White House in 2009 secretly hoping to be able to overthrow Syria’s Government; and when the CIA-assisted “Arab Spring” uprisings in the Arab world started flowering in 2011, the U.S. Government had the important U.N. operatives fully on-board assisting the U.S. Government to assist this overthrow — to hand Syria to the Sauds (the Sauds being America’s most important international ally, and the world’s richest family) to control.

By the time of June 2011, the Obama State Department, under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was already deep into planning the overthrow not only of Syria’s Government (planning the international recruitment of jihadists to do that), but of Ukraine’s Government (planning international recruitment of nazis to do that).

Although the common view is that America’s main allies are European, that viewpoint is no longer true. Today’s America is allied mainly with the Sauds, and with Israel, which latter is the Sauds’ chief lobbying arm both in North America and in Europe, because Christian-majority populations are far more sympathetic to Jews than to Moslems. For a politician to be publicly sympathetic to Jews is much better for a politician than for him/her to be publicly sympathetic to Muslims. So, Israel carries the Sauds’ lobbying water, not only their own.

On 3 December 2011 (near the end of the year when the “Arab Spring” started), the independent investigative journalist Sibel Edmonds headlined “US Media: Distorters of Reality & Gravediggers of Truth”, and she reported:

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

Do Ongoing Global Events Prove the World Is Ready for Revolution?

April 14, 2016

Do Ongoing Global Events Prove the World Is Ready for Revolution?

(ANTIMEDIA) Earth — Paralleling the increasingly draconian policies marking a worldwide descent into fascism, are massive protests — born in the Arab Spring, but arguably an angrier, more potent extension of the Occupy movement — indicative of an unprecedented tipping point.

We, the people of this planet, now stand together, gazing over the precipice whose murky depths of State repression demand we ask one imperative question: have we finally had enough?

“[W]e have lost the way,” Charlie Chaplin implores us to consider in his renowned and timeless monologue from The Great Dictator, because “Greed has poisoned men’s souls — has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.”

And now, 76 years after Chaplin cautioned us to scrutinize our collective humanity, that avarice — evidenced in imperialism championed by the U.S. government — has ossified a lazy apathy in the populace, of seeming impenetrable resolve. Until now.

Chaplin revolution

Though sparks of revolution have sporadically ignited people’s movements countless times before, our present tipping point most likely began with the self-immolation of a young fruit cart vendor in Tunisia in 2011. So incensed by an unjust law and a policewoman’s disrespectful public slap as she attempted to confiscate his only means of supporting a large family, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in front of a government building  — and set off the tremendous wave of protests for democracy and human rights, which came to be monikered the Arab Spring.

Occupy followed shortly afterward in a moment many believed with certainty would force an unparalleled shift toward freedom. But the government, keen to maintain its maniacal chokehold of control, also knew this — and infiltrated the movement to impart divisive infighting and confusion to effectively quash the threat.

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

Always Attack the Wrong Country

March 30, 2016

Always Attack the Wrong Country

Chor Boogie

There are numerous tactics available to those who aim to make problems worse while pretending to solve them, but misdirection is always a favorite. The reason to want to make problems worse is that problems are profitable—for someone. And the reason to pretend to be solving them is that causing problems, then making them worse, makes those who profit from them look bad.

In the international arena, this type of misdirection tends to take on a farcical aspect. The ones profiting from the world’s problems are the members of the US foreign policy and military establishments, the defense contractors and the politicians around the world, and especially in the EU, who have been bought off by them. Their tactic of misdirection is conditioned by a certain quirk of the American public, which is that it doesn’t concern itself too much with the rest of the world. The average member of the American public has no idea where various countries are, can’t tell Sweden from Switzerland, thinks that Iran is full of Arabs and can’t distinguish any of the countries that end in -stan. And so a handy trick has evolved, which amounts to the following dictum: “Always attack the wrong country.”

Need some examples? After 9/11, which, according to the official story (which is probably nonsense) was carried out by “suicide bombers” (some of them, amusingly, still alive today) who were mostly from Saudi Arabia, the US chose to retaliate by attacking Saudi ArabiaAfghanistan and Iraq.

When Arab Spring erupted (because a heat wave in Russia drove up wheat prices) the obvious place to concentrate efforts, to avoid a seriously bad outcome for the region, was Egypt—the most populous Arab country and an anchor for the entire region. And so the US and NATO decided to attack EgyptLibya.

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

Protesters Set The Streets On Fire In Bahrain After Saudis Kill Top Shiite Cleric

January 2, 2016

Protesters Set The Streets On Fire In Bahrain After Saudis Kill Top Shiite Cleric

Earlier today, we documented Saudi Arabia’s largest mass execution in 25 years.

In what was billed as an effort to rid the world of 47 “terrorists”, the Saudis killed dozens of al-Qaeda affiliates and four Shiites who stood accused of shooting policemen in the anti-government protests which broke out during the Arab Spring.

Among the Shiites killed was prominent cleric Nimr al-Nimr. The Sheikh was an outspoken supporter of the anti-government movement and his death drew sharp condemnation from Iran, Hezbollah, and the Houthis on Saturday.

In the wake of the execution, “scores marched through Nimr’s home district of Qatif shouting ‘down with the Al Saud’ and, in neighboring Bahrain, police fired tear gas at several dozen people who gathered to protest the news,” AP reported.

“Bahrain’s Saudi-backed Sunni authorities crushed protests led by its majority Shia shortly after they erupted on February 14, 2011, taking their cue from Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa,” al-Jazeera wrote back in February when hundreds took to the streets of Manama to commemorate the anniversary of the Arab Spring uprising. “Tensions are running high in the kingdom where a sectarian divide is deepening and there is a growing gap between the Sunni minority government and the Island’s Shia majority.”

Below, find the searing (literally) images from Bahrain where police fired tear gas at protesters to disperse the crowds.

Are the days of the Gulf monarchies numbered?

The Middle East Meltdown and Global Risk

October 4, 2015

The Middle East Meltdown and Global Risk

Among today’s geopolitical risks, none is greater than the long arc of instability stretching from the Maghreb to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. With the Arab Spring an increasingly distant memory, the instability along this arc is deepening. Indeed, of the three initial Arab Spring countries, Libya has become a failed state, Egypt has returned to authoritarian rule, and Tunisia is being economically and politically destabilized by terrorist attacks.

The violence and instability of North Africa is now spreading into Sub-Saharan Africa, with the Sahel – one of the world’s poorest and most environmentally damaged regions – now gripped by jihadism, which is also seeping into the Horn of Africa to its east. And, as in Libya, civil wars are raging in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia, all of which increasingly look like failed states.

The region’s turmoil (which the United States and its allies, in their pursuit of regime change in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Egypt and elsewhere, helped to fuel) is also undermining previously secure states. The influx of refugees from Syria and Iraq is destabilizing Jordan, Lebanon, and now even Turkey, which is becoming increasingly authoritarian under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Meanwhile, with the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians unresolved, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon represent a chronic threat of violent clashes with Israel.

In this fluid regional environment, a great proxy struggle for regional dominance between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran is playing out violently in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and Lebanon. And while the recent nuclear deal with Iran may reduce the proliferation risk, the lifting of economic sanctions on Iran will provide its leaders with more financial resources to support their Shia proxies. Further east, Afghanistan (where the resurgent Taliban could return to power) and Pakistan (where domestic Islamists pose a continued security threat) risk becoming semi-failed states.

Read more at https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/middle-east-meltdown-global-risk-by-nouriel-roubini-2015-10#uwWCfTGqdixqPq41.99

The Death Of The Petrodollar Was Finally Noticed

February 7, 2015

The Death Of The Petrodollar Was Finally Noticed

Three months ago, we wrote “How The Petrodollar Quietly Died, And Nobody Noticed“, in which we explained in painful detail why far from the simple macroeconomic dogma which immediately prompted the macro tourists to scream that “oil prices dropping are good for US consumers“, the collapse in the price of crude is not only a disaster for oil exporting nations – one which will lead to a series of violent “Arab Springs” across the oil-producing developed world – but far more importantly, have a massive impact on capital markets as a result of the plunge in the most financialized commodity in history.

On the death of the Petrodollar we commented that unlike previously, when petrodollar recycling funneled the proceeds from oil-exports into financial markets, helping to boost asset prices and keep the cost of borrowing down, henceforth “oil producers will effectively import capital amounting to $7.6 billion.” We added that “oil exporters are now pulling liquidity out of financial markets rather than putting money in. That could result in higher borrowing costs for governments, companies, and ultimately, consumers as money becomes scarcer.”

The conclusion was simple: “net capital flows will be negative for EM, representing the first net inflow of capital (USD8bn) for the first time in eighteen years. This compares with USD60bn last year, which itself was down from USD248bn in 2012. At its peak, recycled EM petro dollars amounted to USD511bn back in 2006. The declines seen since 2006 not only reflect the changed  global environment, but also the propensity of underlying exporters to begin investing the money domestically rather than save. The implications for financial markets liquidity – not to mention related downward pressure on US Treasury yields – is negative.”

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

 

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress