Most Popular
1. Banking Crisis is Stocks Bull Market Buying Opportunity - Nadeem_Walayat
2.The Crypto Signal for the Precious Metals Market - P_Radomski_CFA
3. One Possible Outcome to a New World Order - Raymond_Matison
4.Nvidia Blow Off Top - Flying High like the Phoenix too Close to the Sun - Nadeem_Walayat
5. Apple AAPL Stock Trend and Earnings Analysis - Nadeem_Walayat
6.AI, Stocks, and Gold Stocks – Connected After All - P_Radomski_CFA
7.Stock Market CHEAT SHEET - - Nadeem_Walayat
8.US Debt Ceiling Crisis Smoke and Mirrors Circus - Nadeem_Walayat
9.Silver Price May Explode - Avi_Gilburt
10.More US Banks Could Collapse -- A Lot More- EWI
Last 7 days
Stock Market Volatility (VIX) - 25th Mar 24
Stock Market Investor Sentiment - 25th Mar 24
The Federal Reserve Didn't Do Anything But It Had Plenty to Say - 25th Mar 24
Stock Market Breadth - 24th Mar 24
Stock Market Margin Debt Indicator - 24th Mar 24
It’s Easy to Scream Stocks Bubble! - 24th Mar 24
Stocks: What to Make of All This Insider Selling- 24th Mar 24
Money Supply Continues To Fall, Economy Worsens – Investors Don’t Care - 24th Mar 24
Get an Edge in the Crypto Market with Order Flow - 24th Mar 24
US Presidential Election Cycle and Recessions - 18th Mar 24
US Recession Already Happened in 2022! - 18th Mar 24
AI can now remember everything you say - 18th Mar 24
Bitcoin Crypto Mania 2024 - MicroStrategy MSTR Blow off Top! - 14th Mar 24
Bitcoin Gravy Train Trend Forecast 2024 - 11th Mar 24
Gold and the Long-Term Inflation Cycle - 11th Mar 24
Fed’s Next Intertest Rate Move might not align with popular consensus - 11th Mar 24
Two Reasons The Fed Manipulates Interest Rates - 11th Mar 24
US Dollar Trend 2024 - 9th Mar 2024
The Bond Trade and Interest Rates - 9th Mar 2024
Investors Don’t Believe the Gold Rally, Still Prefer General Stocks - 9th Mar 2024
Paper Gold Vs. Real Gold: It's Important to Know the Difference - 9th Mar 2024
Stocks: What This "Record Extreme" Indicator May Be Signaling - 9th Mar 2024
My 3 Favorite Trade Setups - Elliott Wave Course - 9th Mar 2024
Bitcoin Crypto Bubble Mania! - 4th Mar 2024
US Interest Rates - When WIll the Fed Pivot - 1st Mar 2024
S&P Stock Market Real Earnings Yield - 29th Feb 2024
US Unemployment is a Fake Statistic - 29th Feb 2024
U.S. financial market’s “Weimar phase” impact to your fiat and digital assets - 29th Feb 2024
What a Breakdown in Silver Mining Stocks! What an Opportunity! - 29th Feb 2024
Why AI will Soon become SA - Synthetic Intelligence - The Machine Learning Megatrend - 29th Feb 2024
Keep Calm and Carry on Buying Quantum AI Tech Stocks - 19th Feb 24

Market Oracle FREE Newsletter

How to Protect your Wealth by Investing in AI Tech Stocks

America Clueless In The Middle East

Politics / Middle East Apr 01, 2015 - 06:32 PM GMT

By: John_Rubino

Politics

Starting with the CIA’s overthrow (and some would say murder) of Iran’s democratically-elected president in the 1950s and continuing through our serial invasions of Iraq and our arming of Al Qaeda and ISIS, American policy in the Middle East has been a textbook case of a superpower with more money than brains, making things vastly worse with every move and counter-move.


Now, at last, people are starting to figure this out. On a recent Daily Show, John Stewart uses some evocative language to illustrate the incoherence of today’s Middle East “policy”.

Stewart middle east)

“The Iran that we’re currently crippling with sanctions and periodically threatening to bomb is now our…I don’t wanna say ally,” Stewart said. “Battle buddy?”

At the same time, America supported a coalition led by Saudi Arabia striking Iranian-backed fighters in another Middle Eastern nation, Yemen.

“Holy shit!” Stewart said. “It took decades of destablizing conflict, but we finally figured out how to wage a proxy war against ourselves.”

Now that the US media is catching onto what the rest of the world has known for decades, a few questions:

Is this even legal? Can we just randomly bomb or otherwise intervene in other countries? Ron Paul of course has been saying no forever. And the following from Ajamu Baraka of the Institute for Policy Studies updates the argument for the current war in Yemen:

Another Illegal War in the Middle East

Saudi Arabia has commenced military operations against the Ansarullah fighters of the Houthi movement in Yemen.

The Saudi intervention was not unexpected. Over the last few weeks, there were signs that the United States and the Saudis were preparing the ground for direct military intervention in Yemen in response to the Houthis’ seizing the Yemeni capital of Sana’a last January.

With the fall of al-Anad air base, where the U.S. military and CIA conducted drone warfare in Yemen, and the seige of the port city of Aden, where disposed President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi had fled, it was almost certain that the U.S. would greenlight its client states to intervene.

Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir cloaked the role of Saudi Arabia within the fictitious context of another grand coalition, this time led by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) — the corrupt collection of authoritarian monarchies allied with the United States and the other Western colonial powers.

Al-Jubeir added that before launching operations in Yemen, all of Saudi Arabia’s allies were consulted. The meaning of that statement is that the U.S. was fully invested in the operation.

Even though the ambassador stressed that Washington was not directly involved in the military component of the assault, CNN reported that an interagency U.S. coordination team was in Saudi Arabia. A U.S. official subsequently confirmed that Washington would be providing logistical and intelligence support for the operation.

The intervention by the Saudis and the GCC continues the international lawlessness that the United States precipitated with its “War on Terror” over the last decade and a half. Violations of the UN Charter and international law modeled by the powerful states of the West has now become normalized, resulting in an overall diminution of international law and morality over the last 15 years.

The double standard and hypocrisy of U.S. support for the Saudi intervention in Yemen, compared to Western and U.S. condemnation of Russia’s regional security concerns in response to the coup in Ukraine, will not be missed by most people.

What exactly do we hope to get for the ~ $2 trillion we’ve spent on recent Middle East wars?
Obviously it’s mostly about oil. But does propping up “friendly” regimes actually affect this market? Can unfriendlies like Iran refuse to sell us oil? Not really. Oil is a fungible commodity, with each barrel of a given type being more or less identical to every other. If sold to, say, China, it enters the global marketplace and affects price and supply in exactly the same way as if it were sold to Germany or the US. In short, if an OPEC country wants to pay its bills it has to sell oil on the global market, which means in effect selling to the US. So while short-term disruptions like the embargoes of the 1970s are possible, they end up hurting the sellers as much as the buyers and can’t be sustained. Our interventions thus end up having virtually no impact on the long-term price of gas for American SUVs.

Meanwhile, for the cost of the past few wars, the US could have put solar panels on every Sun Belt rooftop, electric cars in every garage, and weather stripping on every New England window, obviating the need for imported oil (and for most of the coal that we now get from blowing up Appalachian mountains).

Are we protecting Israel?
One of the interesting things about ISIS, the latest Mortal Enemy to bubble up, is that it doesn’t spend much time or energy combating Zionism. It’s way more focused on stamping out heresy within Islam. In this sense it is reminiscent of 16th century European Catholics and Protestants who took turns burning each other at the stake. So a case can be made that even if Israel didn’t exist, Islam would still need its own Reformation (see There Is No God But God, by Reza Aslan).

And even if our main goal in the Middle East is to protect Israel, simply giving them $2 trillion would do the trick, without all the planes full of coffins and VA hospitals full of young soldiers with missing arms and legs.

The inescapable conclusion is that we have no idea what we’re doing. We’re simply an empire on autopilot, blundering around protecting “interests” that were defined decades ago by long-dead politicians and generals and remain unquestioned in mainstream strategic circles. We’re the Roman empire, in other words, trying to keep the barbarians at bay without the slightest idea how to do it.

Why is this appearing on DollarCollapse.com?
Because Rome ended up inflating away its currency in an attempt to pay for its empire, and the US is traveling a very similar road.

By John Rubino

dollarcollapse.com

Copyright 2015 © John Rubino - All Rights Reserved

Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors.


© 2005-2022 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.


Post Comment

Only logged in users are allowed to post comments. Register/ Log in