Anyone who believes the United States is not fighting enough wars in the Middle East can be happy this week. We have just plunged into another one. Twice in recent days, cruise missiles fired from an American destroyer have rained down on Yemen. The Pentagon, a practiced master of Orwellian language, calls this bombing “limited self-defense.”
Tag: Middle East
This Took Way Too Long
The US has finally expressed reservations about the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets by Saudi Arabia in Yemen:
The US said its security cooperation with Saudi Arabia was not a “blank cheque” as Riyadh agreed to mount an investigation into a widely condemned air raid on funeral in Yemen that killed 140 people.
In one of the deadliest attacks of the country’s civil war, which Saudi Arabia entered in March 2015, airstrikes on Saturday hit a funeral hall packed with thousands of mourners in Yemen’s rebel-held capital, Sana’a. More than 525 people were wounded.
The Saudi-led coalition has not acknowledged responsibility for the attack, even as it announced an investigation, but is the only force with such air power in the conflict.
The White House issued a statement saying it had begun an “immediate review” of its support for Saudi Arabia in Yemen. The attack has been condemned by the UN, the European Union and the United States.
The issue is embarrassing for the US since it has decried the Russian failure to be more open about its role in the air attack on a UN aid convoy in Syria, and it will face allegations of double standards if it allows the Saudis to delay an inquiry.
So, now even the United States “has concerns.”
It only took months of bombing civilian targets and this particularly egregious example.
BTW, in case you were wondering if the House of Saud still had some some hooks in ISIS, get a load of this:
In an unexpected twist, Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attacks even though it is thought the deaths were caused by an air raid, and Isis has no access to aircraft.’
How convenient of them!
Why the US chooses to defend the clusterf%$# or a war that is Yemen, and the clusterf%$# of a government that is the House of Saud is beyond me.
It serves no one but Riyadh.
Grownups in the Room, My Ass!
In Syria, at least, it appears that the United States only takes action in its own interest or in that of the Syrian people when they are shamed into doing so.
It appears that our state security apparatus has been thoroughly captured by the House of Saud:
Russia has now managed twice to shame the U.S. into action against Jihadis by publicly demonstrating that the U.S. is not really committed to its promises.
During 2014 and 2015 the U.S. did very little to attack the Islamic State. U.S. strikes hit irrelevant targets like an “ISIS excavator” or some lone truck. Meanwhile ISIS was making millions per day from pumping oil out of the Syrian desert and selling it to Turkish contacts. Hundreds of Turkish tanker trucks assembled near the oil wells in south-east Syria waiting to load. No airstrike would hit them.
The Russians saw this and were appalled. The loudmouth U.S. spoke about its big coalition and attacking ISIS but did essentially nothing. The Russian President Putin then decided to shame the U.S. and Obama personally. On November 15 2015 at the G20 meeting in Turkey he walked around the table and showed satellite pictures to his international colleagues. Hundreds of trucks waiting in the Syrian desert for loading without fear that anyone would harm them:
“I’ve demonstrated the pictures from space to our colleagues, which clearly show the true size of the illegal trade of oil and petroleum products market. Car convoys stretching for dozens of kilometers, going beyond the horizon when seen from a height of four-five thousand meters,” Putin told reporters after the G20 summit.
The very next day on November 16 U.S. airplanes, for the first time, hit truck assemblies near ISIS oil wells in south-east Syria:
………
Something similar happened Friday and today. First the Russian Foreign Minister accused the U.S. of complicity with al-Qaeda:
The Russian foreign minister said Russia has “more and more reasons to believe that from the very beginning the plan was to spare Al-Nusra and to keep it just in case for Plan B or stage two, when it would be time to change the regime.”
At the daily State Department press briefing on Friday, State spokesman Toner was grilled by multiple reporters over Lavrov’s accusations and the lack of U.S. attacks on al-Qaeda in Syria (aka Jabhat al-Nusra aka Jabhat Fateh al-Sham):
………
State spoks Mark Toner admits that no U.S. strike had hit Nusra since March this year. His excuses are paltry and in the end he punts to the Pentagon. He really got his balls squeezed.
But that pressure, initiated by the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, created results. The U.S. was shamed into action and today killed some Nusra number 2: Pentagon: US targets ‘core al-Qaida’ member in Syria strike.
Al-Qaeda confirmed the strike:Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, former Nusra Front, says Egyptian alQaeda cleric Abu al-Faraj al-Masri killed in #US led coalition strike in #Idlib— LBCI News English (@LBCI_News_EN) October 3, 2016
This is the very first strike on al-Qaeda in Syria, a UN designated terrorist organization which the U.S. vowed to fight, since March 2016. It comes a weekend after Lavrov accused the U.S. of not striking Nusra and a grilling at the State Department briefing.
The Russian shaming has again worked.
And in the context of all this, now there are reports that U.S. has abandoned even the pretense of working with the Russians to fix the situation:
U.S.-Russia relations fell to a new post-Cold War low Monday as the Obama administration abandoned efforts to cooperate with Russia on ending the Syrian civil war and forming a common front against terrorists there, and Moscow suspended a landmark nuclear agreement.
The latter move, scuttling a deal the two countries signed in 2000 to dispose of their stocks of weapons-grade plutonium, was largely symbolic. But it provided the Kremlin with an opportunity to cite a series of what it called “unfriendly actions” toward Russia — from Ukraine-related and human rights sanctions to the deployment of NATO forces in the Baltics.
The United States, the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement, has “done all it could to destroy the atmosphere encouraging cooperation.”
Of far more immediate concern, the end of the Syria deal left the administration with no apparent diplomatic options remaining to stop the carnage in Aleppo and beyond after the collapse of a short-lived cease-fire deal negotiated last month.
The State Department announced that it was withdrawing U.S. personnel who have been meeting in Geneva over the past several weeks with Russian counterparts to plan coordinated airstrikes against al-Qaeda and Islamic State terrorists in Syria. The coordination was to start as soon as a cease-fire, begun Sept. 12, took hold and humanitarian aid began to flow to besieged communities where civilians have borne the brunt of Russian-backed President Bashar al-Assad’s response to a five-year effort to oust him.
The House of Saud wants Assad gone, so the US wants Assad gone, even though it it’s clear that this would be a complete disaster for the US, NATO, and the Syrian people.
You know that a situation has been well and truly f%$#ed when Bashar al-Assad is the best alternative available.
At every single stage of this catastrophe, the Obama administration has made the worst possible choices.
This is why there is no good alternative.
I Believed That This Is a Well Deserved Instance of Kicking a Man While He Is Down
Parliament has released a report on the decision to depose Muammar Gaddafi by the British and French, and they pillory David Cameron’s actions.
I think that it is no accident that this happened months after the former PM announced his resignation:
David Cameron’s intervention in Libya was carried out with no proper intelligence analysis, drifted into an unannounced goal of regime change and shirked its moral responsibility to help reconstruct the country following the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, according to a scathing report by the foreign affairs select committee.
The failures led to the country becoming a failed a state on the verge of all-out civil war, the report adds.
The report, the product of a parliamentary equivalent of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war, closely echoes the criticisms widely made of Tony Blair’s intervention in Iraq, and may yet come to be as damaging to Cameron’s foreign policy legacy.
Situation has deteriorated since David Cameron’s upbeat visit after Gaddafi fell, with latest administration on the brink
It concurs with Barack Obama’s assessment that the intervention was “a sh%$show”, and repeats the US president’s claim that France and Britain lost interest in Libya after Gaddafi was overthrown. The findings are also likely to be seized on by Donald Trump, who has tried to undermine Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy credentials by repeatedly condemning her handling of the Libyan intervention in 2011, when she was US secretary of state.
(%$ mine)
This has been known for some time, but it is interesting how his former Tory colleagues have been so eager to throw him under the bus, even while half of the Labour party continues to try and shield Tony Blair from the consequences of his even more heinous acts.