Yesterday I put up a piece commenting on Secular Talk’s video about the drone strikes on the Saudi oilfields. The host, Kyle Kulinski, stated that he believed the media would start lying and claim that these attacks were completely unprovoked. The reality is that they were committed by the Houthis in Yemen in retaliation for the genocidal war the Saudis are waging against their country. Kulinski also predicted that the media, including the Beeb, would tell us all that Iran, and only Iran, was responsible. He states that it’s possible that the Iranians have helped them, and that elements in Iran do support and celebrate it. But he fears a push for war, and doesn’t trust any of the actors – Trump, Netanyahu or the Saudis – to draw back.
I share his fears. And so, I believe, do very many other people. On my YouTube page the other day I found the video below from that old rocker, Neil Young. It’s of him playing ‘Rocking in the Free World’. I think its from the Michael Moore documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11. In it the Capped Crusader showed how George Dubya, the American-Saudi oil interests and the military industrial complex pushed for war in the Middle East following the terror attack on 9/11. Wars that they were very careful not to let their sons or daughters become physically involved, while actively recruiting the working class, and particularly the Black working class, to be their cannon fodder.
The film ends with Neil Young’s ‘Rocking in the Free World’.
I know people, who don’t like the song because they think it’s actually a celebration of the capitalist west. So did the late Radio 1 DJ John Peel. He chose it as one of his favourite tracks in an interview on Radio 4 I can remember listening to in the ’90s. He didn’t like it for the same reason, until he listened to it properly. It’s an angry, bitter song, and as flag-wavingly patriotic as Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’. They’re both about how America gives working people nothing but poverty while sending them to fight wars.
Consider the lyrics to Young’s song:
There are warning signs on the road ahead
Some people are saying that we’re better off dead….
That’s another kid,
Who’ll never go to school,
Never fall in love,
Never get to be cool….
We got a thousand points of light
for the homeless man.
We got a kinder, gentler machine gun ham.
The tunes played over footage of demonstrations in America against Bush, Young and his band in concert, recruiting sergeants going round Black neighbourhoods, and the chaos, grief and warfare in Iraq and the Middle East.
The clip begins with Dubya stumbling his way through the saying ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.’ But he couldn’t remember it properly, and so ends with stating the saying’s message ‘Don’t get fooled again’. To which Moore adds, ‘For once, we agree’. Then into the song.
Moore’s absolutely right, as has been corroborated by the former Guardian journo, Greg Palast, in his book, Armed Madhouse. In it he provides copious proof that the Iraq invasion was started, not because Saddam Hussein backed Osama bin Laden, or to liberate the Iraqi people from his dictatorship, but because the Saudi and American oil interests wanted the Iraqi oil reserves. The multinationals wanted to get their grubby hands on Iraqi state enterprises, the Neocons wanted to remove another source of support for the Palestinians, and create the low tax, free market utopia of the kind they want to introduce in the US. The result was absolute chaos. Apart from the carnage of the war, the Iraqi economy was decimated under the impact of foreign imports. Iraqi domestic firms couldn’t compete and collapsed. There was 60 per cent unemployment.
This is what will happen to Iran if we get fooled by the right-wing political elite, the oil industry and the military-industrial complex. It won’t be to liberate the Iranian people from their despotic government, nor to defend an innocent Saudi Arabia. The Saudis are Wahhabis – militant Sunnis – who despise and fear the Shi’a. That’s why they invaded Yemen: the Shi’a Houthi had overthrown the Sunni government. A few years ago one high-ranking Saudi cleric, the Sharif of Mecca or Grand Mufti, declared that Shi’a Muslims were ‘heretics and worthy of death’. Iran supports the Shi’a nations in the Middle East, hence Saudi determination to destroy the country’s regime. Israel and its supporters here also wants the Iranian government overthrown, because they are intensely hostile to Israel, expressing their hate in genocidal language, and support the Palestinians. Western oil interests want to get their hands on the Iranian oil industry, because we used to own it before Prime Minister Mossadeq nationalised it briefly in the 1950s before we had him overthrown, and it was nationalised against during the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Our multinationals want to seize Iranian industries, as under current Iranian legislation they cannot be invested in or owned by foreign companies. And this includes the 51 per cent of the economy held by the state or the bonyads, the Islamic charitable funds. In fact, Forbes was whining about how unfree Iranian industry was, meaning that westerners couldn’t get their mitts on it, a few years ago.
These are the forces pressing for war with Iran.
They fooled many people 18 years ago after 9/11. But not everyone. One million people in Britain marched against the invasion of Iraq, including our local priest. Since then, I’ve no doubt more people know how spurious the cause for war was. More people realise that the two chiefly responsible for the war, George Dubya Bush and Tony Blair, are liars and war criminals.
Don’t let them fool our people again!
Not one courageous squaddie should be sent to his or her death killing ordinary Iranians, just to make the oil industry and the multinationals rich!
I don’t share Secular Talk’s religious views. I’m neither a secularist nor an atheist, but when host Kyle Kulinski talks about politics, I believe he’s correct. In this video from the 16th September 2019, he talks about the attacks on Saudi Arabia’s oil fields, and predicts the media’s and American government’s response.
He believes that, although the Houthi rebels in Yemen have claimed responsibility, Trump and the media, and even the Democrats, will claim that the strikes are solely the responsibility of Iran. And they will not supply any context for the attacks. Like actually telling them it’s in response to the Saudi war against them. Saudi Arabia attacked Yemen after the Houthis overthrew the Sunni Muslim government and installed a Shi’a regime. Saudi Arabia is Wahhabi, and militantly anti-Shi’a. They responded by invading and waging a genocidal war. They have deliberately targeted schools, hospitals and mosques. Thanks to them, the country is gripped by a famine and cholera epidemic. One has affected 85,000, the other perhaps a million. But despite the fact that the Houthis have claimed responsibility, all the lamestream news channels, Kulinski predicts, will claim that the strikes were unprovoked. And those lying news agencies include the Beeb.
He also notes that some in the Iranian regime have also claimed responsibility for the attacks and celebrated them. He doesn’t deny that it is entirely possible that the Iranians did give the Yemenis weapons and assistance. But the media, he claims, and Trump’s government will claim that the Iranians are solely responsible and a demand a war with Iran. Netanyahu wants a war with Iran. Saudi Arabia wants a war with Iran. Trump’s adviser, John Bolton, wants war with Iran. Even though he’s now gone, it looks like he’ll get his wish. The Democrats have said they’ll back a war with Iran. And Trump will want a war with Iran, because he doesn’t want to look weak. He’s said previously that Saudi Arabia should fight its own wars and that they were responsible for 9/11, but this won’t matter after these attacks. Kulinski concludes that we are the closest to war with Iran as we have ever been, but he doesn’t trust any of the actors to deescalate.
I don’t know if he’s right about the mainstream media not providing any context for this or not. I’ve been avoiding the mainstream news recently because I don’t trust them to report anything objectively. It could be that they have provided some context. But there are powerful forces at work demanding that we go in and attack Iran. Iran’s been on the Neocons’ list of countries, whose governments they want overthrown since 1995. I don’t know what’ll happen in Israel, because of the way the elections resulted in a tie between Netanyahu’s murderous coalition and their equally nationalistic rivals. But Netanyahu and the Israeli right have also pushed for war with Iran, because Iran backs the Palestinians and wants to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth. And America backs Israel, despite opposition from pro-Palestinian groups, including a sizable and growing number of Jewish Americans.
An Iranian gent, Reza Cage, left this comment pleading for peace on the YouTube page for this video. Here it is.
I am an Iranian living in Tehran, this terrifies me. For you guys it’a not big deal because your families and children will be safe not our.. most iranian just want peace we are not that different from you.. Edit: thank you my brothers and sisters for your support, I am overwhelmed by your (mostly) kind messages it gives me a tiny bit of hope in this time of chaos.I know our government in Iran is not good they are a minority with guns and weapons controlling a country mostly youth who are pro west and liberal to stay in power. That being said everything was peaceful under the nuclear agreement even American navy members were captured and immediately released this Trump has ruined this and our already right wing government has become aggressive. I want change in our country but it must happen from the inside not through war and killing this will only make majority of youth on your side despise you because no doubt their lives will be ruined.
His thanks to the other commenters for their replies is due to them having posted something like 355 replies when last I looked, mostly supporting him. And I don’t doubt that Agha Cage is right. There are right-wing hawks in the Iranian government, who’d love to push the country even further to the right by engaging in a war with America and the West. And of course, if we did invade, most of the Iranian young people would hate us. Because however much they hate their government, they, like everyone else, loves their country. The late Corinne Souza, whose father was an Iraqi dissident, said pretty much the same about our invasion of her father’s country. Before we invaded, there were Iraqis willing to work with us to bring down Saddam Hussein’s regime. But this stopped after we invaded, because we were the aggressors. And it’ll happen again if we invade Iran, along with all the other horrors we’ve seen in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.
I’ve made it very clear that I have little time or sympathy for the Iranian government. They are oppressive theocrats, impoverishing their people and plundering their country to enrich themselves. But the Islamic revolution which installed the current regime came about because we oppressed and exploited them. We overthrew the last of the Qajar shahs in the early 20th century and installed the Pahlavis as the Qajars couldn’t repay the loans we’d given them to modernise the country. When Mossadeq nationalised the Iranian oil industry in the 1950s, we arranged a coup to overthrow him as Prime Minister. This led to the Shah’s ‘White Revolution’ in which the monarchy seized absolute power, ruling through torture and fear. I’ve met Iranians over here, whose friends vanished, thanks to the Shah’s murderous secret police. Florence, one of the great commenters on this blog, was active in the British protests in the 1970s against Britain’s support for murderous Fascistic tyrants like the Shah. If we join the Americans in an invasion of Iran, it won’t be to liberate the Iranian people. It’ll just be like the Gulf War over again – done so that the Saudis can seize their oil reserves, the Neocons can remove another enemy of Israel, and western multinationals can loot the country and its state enterprises.
We got no business sending our courageous young women and men to lose life and limb in the Middle East again, murdering people who’ve never invaded us, simply to make the likes of Boris, Trump and the Bush family even more obscene amounts of money.
Yesterday and today I got the packages of multiple copies of the books I’ve published with Lulu, which I ordered last week. The first package, which I got yesterday, was of copies of my political books Privatisation: Killing the NHS, For A Worker’s Chamber and Crimes of Empire.
Privatisation: Killing the NHS is all about the Thatcherite plan to sell off this greatest of British institutions from Thatcher herself through Major, Blair, Cameron and now Tweezer.
For a Worker’s Chamber argues that as parliament is now dominated by millionaires, there should be a chamber solely reserved for working people, elected by working people.
And Crimes of Empire surveys current foreign policy and tries to show that instead of defending democracy in eastern Europe and bringing it to the Middle East through the War on terror, and so on, British and American foreign policy is and always has been about protecting western commercial interests. Which has always meant toppling foreign governments, installing brutal dictators and looting their countries of their resources and industries. Like the way the Americans overthrew the democratic socialist government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in the 1950s, because he nationalized the plantations of the United Fruit Company. Britain and America overthrew the premier of Iran, Mossadeq, at the same time because he dared to nationalize the Iranian oil industry, which was firmly in our hands. And the invasion of Iraq nearly two decades ago was all about seizing the country’s oil industry, privatizing their state industries so that they were sold to western multinationals, and then trying to turn the country in the low tax, free trade state the Neocons love. Which wrecked their economy. And more, ad nauseam.
The second package, which I got today, was of copies of my two volume book on slavery in the British Empire, The Global Campaign.
I’d like to get my books out to a wider audience, and so I’ve ordered multiple copies of them to send to various magazines and journals in the hope they’ll review them. I really don’t know if they will. I suspect that they may will be ignored in favour of books from known publishers and authors. But if you don’t try, you don’t know. I’ll let you know how I get on.
All the above books can be ordered from Lulu. Or from me, if you want a signed copy, though that will mean extra postage, as I’ll have to order from Lulu to go to me, then post it to you.
I’ve already put one piece up, commenting on how Boris ran from the chamber when Emily Thornberry rose to ask for the government’s comment about the Gaza massacre. Just as he also ran away from her in February, when she terrified him with a question about Northern Ireland. And in this short video from RT, she lays into Johnson again, over the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.
Mike reported last week that the Iranians had added yet another trumped up charge to Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s list of spurious crimes, and increased her sentence. This time she has been charged with spreading propaganda. It’s sheer nonsense, of course, but it shows the arbitrary, despotic nature of the regime.
However, this woman’s plight has been compounded by the sheer, hamfisted incompetence of the current Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson. The Iranian government claimed that she was really spying, and had been teaching journalism during her stay in the country. She hadn’t. She’d actually been taking her daughter, Gabrielle, to meet her Iranian family. Boris, however, decided to leap in with both feet, and claimed in a TV interview that she had indeed been teaching journalism, thus apparently confirming the Iranians’ charges.
There was naturally an outcry against Boris for so ignorantly making the situation worse. So Michael Gove decided to exercise his minuscule intellect, and appeared on television to defend BoJo. And he made matters worse, by stating in an interview that ‘we don’t know what she’s doing’. In fact, the government knew perfectly well what she was doing, and BoJo and Gove only had to look at the briefing papers. Neither of them appear to have bothered. This wouldn’t have surprised Ken Livingstone, who said that Boris often didn’t read them.
Mike in his article about the issue raised the obvious question of why Boris Johnson is still Foreign Secretary, considering all he’s done is make matters worse. He concluded that he is only there, because someone wants him there, not because he has any talent.
In the video, Thornberry turns her attention to Mrs. Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case, and asks how many times more times must Boris this happen? How many more times must he insult our international partners and damage our international relations, and imperil British nationals abroad, before Tweezer sacks him? And if she doesn’t, because she doesn’t have the strength or authority perhaps Boris himself should show a bit of personal authority that this job, where words have gravity and actions have consequences, is not for him.
BoJo then bounces up and starts blustering, stating that it is unfair to attack the Foreign Office, that have been working day and night so secure Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s release. To which Thornberry simply mouthes ‘Just you’, pointing to the fatuous buffoon. He then goes on to claim that her comments are a distraction from the people, who are really responsible for Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s situation.
This then provokes heated remarks from both sides, with the Deputy Speaker crying for order.
Boris is right that the people really responsible for Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s imprisonment are the Iranians. But they’ve been assisted in this by Boris’ massive incompetence. It’s also very clear to me that they’re holding her as a political bargaining chip. When they first imprisoned her, Boris ended flying out to Tehran, and Britain mysteriously unlocked about £250 million of Iranian funds, that had previously been frozen in banks over here. Both sides claimed that this was unrelated to Mrs. Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s imprisonment, but it looks far too much that it was very much connected for the excuse that it was all coincidence to be at all convincing. The problem is that the Iranians have learned that all they have to do is retain Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe and add a few more years to her sentence, and the government will automatically try anything to secure her release. Try and fail, because she’s too big an asset for them to throw away now.
And I think that the fresh charges they’ve drummed up against Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe are not unrelated to the current crisis in American-Iranian relations. America has imposed sanctions on Iran, and has blocked them from using the dollar as their currency of international trade. Even third party companies, who are not American, are prevented from trading with Iran in dollars, if they wish to do business in America. This is intended to make it difficult for the Iranians to trade oil, as the Americans have made the dollar the international trade currency for it. This has the benefit, for the Americans, of boosting their economy. If the world stopped using the petrodollar, and switched to another currency, the American economy would be devastated. Hence one possible motive for the Americans’ overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi was because the Libyan dictator was planning to ditch the dollar, and set up the dinar as an alternative trade currency. Venezuela was also planning to ditch the dollar. And the Russians and Chinese have also made similar plans.
And the Iranians have gone through with theirs, and replaced the dollar with the euro. This has resulted in Trump and his colleagues going berserk, and threatening all kinds of reprisals against Iran and Europe.
Also, while many Iranians are probably quietly in favour of better relations with the West, official Iranian ideology demonises both America and Britain. America is ‘the great Satan’, while Britain is ‘the little Satan’. And there is much popular suspicion and hatred of Britain as the country’s former colonial master. The country was never formally incorporated into the British Empire, but we owned their oil industry and interfered many times in their politics from the 19th century onwards. The Qajar shahs were overthrown and replaced with the Pahlavis because they took out loans with us for modernisation, which they could not repay. And we overthrew their last, democratically elected president, Mossadeq, because he nationalised the Iranian oil industry. The Iranians therefore have a saying, ‘If there’s a pebble in your path, it was put there by a Brit.’
The Iranian dissident, Shirin Ebadi, has said that so great is this popular hatred of Britain, America and the West, that it is actually harmful for them to support Iranian dissident movements. When that is done, the Iranian authorities try to undermine them by claiming that these are subversive movements working against Iran with the country’s colonial enemies.
It therefore seems clear to me that the Iranians are keeping Zaghari-Ratcliffe as a possible bargaining chip in case of further confrontations with America over their switch from the petrodollar to euro. As well as Trump withdrawing from the nuclear treaty Obama signed with the Iranians. And the Iranian authorities are probably also keen to exploit the propaganda value of continuing Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s imprisonment, while Britain impotently pleads for her release.
Boris is right that the real villains in this are the Iranians. But they’ve been assisted by his and Gove’s massive incompetence. Thornberry is right. It’s long past time Johnson was sacked. Not just because of Zaghari-Ratcliffe, but because of all the other stupid mistakes he’s made, which have threatened our international relations, business interests and the welfare of our citizens abroad.
But Mike’s right. May won’t sack him, because he’s too dangerous to her outside the cabinet. So he will continue in his post as foreign secretary for as long as she’s in power.
Which means that, if we want to do something to improve diplomatic relations and free Mrs. Zaghari-Ratcliffe, they’ll both have to go.
Here’s another very important clip from the Jimmy Dore Show. It’s one that should be viewed by everyone interested in what the various wars we’re fighting around the world are really about. Dore and his co-host, Ron Placone, discuss a review of Anand Gopal’s book No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War through Afghan Eyes by Ryan Grimm in The Intercept. And its more of what the mainstream media aren’t telling us about these wars.
Dore starts the show by making the point that mainstream media never reveals the truth about the reasons behind America’s various wars in the Middle East and the Maghreb. They don’t mention the petrodollar, Libya, or the reason why Iran’s now a theocratic state under the ayatollahs. It’s because America – and Britain – over threw its democratically elected prime minister, Mossadeq.
And this is just as devastating. Gopal’s book reveals that the Taliban surrendered several times to America and its allies, only to be rebuffed. It was traditional in Afghan civil wars for the losing side to surrender to the victors. They would, in turn, incorporate them into the new government. Dore makes the point that this is a sensible system for governing a country, where people still have to live together as neighbours after the fighting. The Taliban tried to do this with the Allies, and were rebuffed. Several times. He also points out that the Taliban itself withered away, as its members put down their guns, either going back and vanishing into the rest of the population, or heading over the border into Pakistan.
However, America and the Allies offered rewards for those informing on the Taliban. With the real Taliban having vanished, and al-Qaeda down to a mere handful of people, the venal and unscrupulous amongst the Afghan population used the system to settle personal feuds. They smeared their neighbours as Taliban, for them to be killed or arrested by the US forces, and get the reward money. This naturally has created massively hostility against Allied forces. When America and the Allies first defeated the Taliban, the Afghans were glad to see them go. Now, having had their peace overtures repulsed, and the country reduced to more chaos and warfare, the Taliban have returned with popular backing.
But Dore states, you are not going to hear it from the mainstream news, such as MSNBC and Rached Maddow, because the media automatically backs the American war machine. And that war machine must be kept fed. He notes that Congress, with the backing of the Democrats, has just voted another $100 billion for the defence budget, in addition to what had already been voted for it last year. America already spends more on defence than the next 13 countries on the list combined. And the country and her allies have been in Afghanistan for 16 years. In other four years, the war will get a gold watch and be able to retire.
That’s it. There are absolutely no good reasons anymore for us to be anywhere in the Middle East. I backed the invasion of Afghanistan because I believed that it was a justified response to an act of war by al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies. I heard a few years ago from a friend that the Taliban tried to stop the invasion by offering to surrender Osama bin Laden, claiming that they didn’t know that he had been planning the attack. I wasn’t sure whether to believe it or not. But after this, it looks much more credible.
We’re not helping anyone in Afghanistan by staying there, except perhaps an already corrupt government, propped up by us, western mercenaries, and the opium trade, which has flourished more than it ever did previously. Dore states that the only areas in Afghanistan, which weren’t troubled by fighting, were those where there wasn’t a western military presence.
Of course, there are other, corporate reasons why we’re still there. Trump announced that America would stay in the country to exploit its valuable mineral resources, in order to defray the costs of the invasion. As well as the gas pipeline that was supposed to be built, but wasn’t, as Dore also mentions.
But the humanitarian reasons touted as justification for the invasion have vanished. We’ve long outstayed our welcome. As Grimm’s review concludes, we’re losing to an enemy who’s already surrendered. A hard thing to do. We’re just killing and maiming people for the benefit of the military-industrial complex. And our boys and girls are also being killed and maimed.
They’re coming back traumatized and with terrible injuries, not for defending their country and its allies, as they and we have been told. They’re being mutilated and killed purely for the profit of the big arms manufacturers.
Disgusting.
Dore encourages everyone watching this to pass it on. I agree. We are not going to hear about this from mainstream media, which includes the Beeb.
General Smedley Butler was right. War is a racket. We need to get out, bring our troops back home, and close all the wars and interventions in which we’re currently involved down.
Until then, there will never be peace across the world.
This is another very interesting piece from The Jimmy Dore Show. In this video, Dore discusses the demand by Democrat politician Tulsi Gabbard, that the US stop providing arms and military support to the terrorists who oppose it. Dore reminds his audience that the terrorists responsible for 9/11 were all Saudis, and that the Saudis are funding Islamist terrorists, like ISIS, in Syria to overthrow President Assad. The Americans are also in Syria trying to overthrow Assad, and we are supporting the Saudis. ‘So,’ he asks rhetorically, ‘are fighting with ISIS now?’
The answer is obviously ‘Yes’. And Congresswoman Gabbard wants to stop it. She’s the representative for a constituency in Hawaii, and has proposed the ‘Stop Arming Terrorist Act’ to halt arms sales by America to its enemies. In her speech to Congress, Gabbard states that it is illegal for US citizens to aid their country’s enemies. But this is precisely what the American state itself is doing. The legislation she proposes to stop this would prevent the US government from using taxpayers’ money to provide funding, weapons, training and intelligence services to Islamist organisations such as the Levant Front, Fursan al-Ha, Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and countries that are providing support, whether direct or indirect, to these terrorists.
She states that this would prevent the US from funding terrorists in the same way that Congress passed the Boland Amendment in the 1980s to prevent America from funding the CIA-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Dore states that this was why Oliver North was sent to jail, because he was caught violating that amendment. The US government was also allowing the Contra rebels to export cocaine to the US as part of their war against the Sandinistas. Dore makes the point that Gabbard’s proposed legislation means the US cannot provide funds to Saudi Arabia, as that country funds Islamist terrorism. This, Dore states, is why it won’t pass.
The decision on which groups and individuals are to be considered terrorists would be made by the Director of National Intelligence, who would determine which people and organisations are linked or co-operating with al-Qaeda, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, or ISIS. He or she would also be responsible for deciding which countries were providing assistance to those terrorist groups. The list would have to be updated every six months in consultation with the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The Director of National Intelligence would also be required to brief congress on their decisions.
Dore also reminds his viewers that the reason why America is backing Saudi Arabia, an oppressive theocracy, rather than supporting democracy in the Middle East is because of the oil industry. Mossadeq, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, wanted to export democracy. But he nationalised the oil industry, and so was overthrown by the Americans. Because democracy in the Middle East was too close to Communism. Hence the preference for anti-democratic theocracies like Saudi Arabia. They also won’t tell you the truth about why America’s in Syria. They’re not there to spread democracy, but for the fossil fuel.
Dore thinks that the legislation will not get through, as Paul Ryan – presumably the Speaker of the House, will not bring it to a vote. As for spreading democracy, they don’t even have it in America. Dore’s team notes that Hillary Clinton got 2 1/2 million votes more than Donald Trump, but did not win the election. Dore follows this up with the statistic that in 40 per cent of American elections, the presidency went to the loser. He and his team end by joking that they wish somebody would invade them – like Canada – and spread democracy.
Dore and his team are absolutely right. Saudi Arabia is backed by the US and its allies following a pact made in the 1920s, in which Saudi Arabia would allow American and the rest to exploit their oil reserves, in return for which they would defend the country militarily. Which means that America is giving aid and succour to the country, whose government collaborated with the 9/11 terrorists, of whom 17 of the 19 involved in the plot were Saudis.
I think Dore’s right, and doubt very much that this bill will pass. But even if it’s many years too late, at least somebody in America in authority has woken up to the fact that America is funding its enemies, people responsible for appalling atrocities like the Contras in Nicaragua. There’s not even a remote chance of that happening in Britain. Since its foundation in the 1980s, Robin Ramsey’s Lobster has been arguing that British intelligence is far out of control. It smeared Harold Wilson as a Communist, and ran assassination squads in Northern Ireland. The Blair government were remarkably uninterested in the problem of reining it in, or even in reading the files the agencies compiled on them personally when they were student radicals. Indeed, they wanted to carry on Major’s expansion of the surveillance state, just as May is doing now.
In fact this legislation would be just as unwelcome over this side of the pond, as Cameron and May have been giving material aid to the same terrorist groups, for exactly the same reason, and our government and corrupt corporate media, including the BBC, has also been falsely claiming that they’re freedom fighters. And the Tories have been just as keen to sell the Saudis weapons, with David Cameron waxing lyrical the other year at all the ‘wonderful kit’ being produced at a weapons factory up North.
A few days ago the water protectors in North Dakota won a victory against big oil when Barack Obama finally did the right thing, and refused to award the oil company the final permit that would allow them to dig. Despite this victory for the First Nations, and the very many Americans of all races and creeds, who came together to support them, it seems big oil and their puppets in Congress still want to take Native Americans’ final natural resources.
In this short piece from The Young Turks, Ana Kasparian and her hosts discuss plans by Donald Trump’s advisors to privatise the oil deposits on the Indian reservations, so that they can be exploited by private industry. Although the reservations comprise only 5 per cent of America’s land, they hold 20 per cent of the country’s oil deposits. And so naturally the oil companies want to get their mitts on them. If this goes through, it would violate the reservations’ status as sovereign nations. Kasparian and The Turks believe that the advisors will try to sell this idea to Native Americans as an opportunity for them to become prosperous through the exploitation of their mineral wealth. However, in reality this is just another episode in the long history of Native Americans having their lands seized by the American government and private industry. They also make the point that the American government actively overthrows governments in the interests of big business, such as Arbenz’s government in Guatemala and the 1953 coup that toppled Mossadeq in Iran. Arbenz was a democratic Socialist -but not a Communist – who nationalised the banana plantations. Most of these were owned by the American company, United Fruit, who had the American government organise a right-wing coup. This set up a brutal military dictatorship, which kept the majority of Guatemalans as virtual slaves to the plantation masters. Mossadeq in Iran was also overthrown, because he nationalised the Iranian oil industry, which again was in foreign hands. As a result, America organised a coup, which overthrew him, thus initiating the brutal rule of the Shah as absolute monarch, a rule which only ended with the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Trump’s administration really is one of rapacious capitalism, absolutely determined to crush Americans’ civil liberties, and the rights of minorities for the benefit of big business. Not that Killary’s regime would have been any different. She was gearing up for more war in the Middle East, wars which would have been fought not free its peoples from dictators, but simply so that American multinationals could loot their oil and state industries.
Tribal sovereignty is, quite rightly, a very sensitive issue with Native Americans. Way back in the 1980s there was an armed stand-off between one of the Amerindian people in New York state. The FBI had pursued a Native American man, who was a member of the American Indian Movement, for a series of violent offences. The man drove into the reservation, and the way was blocked by angry indigenous Americans when the FBI tried to follow him. They claimed that the reservation was a sovereign country in its own right, and that any attempt by the authorities to infringe that sovereignty would be met with force. The tribe’s chief stated that if the police and the FBI tried to enter, the matter would then be up to the tribe’s young warriors.
I think the issue must have been legally clarified since then, as I can remember that at the same time there was considerable controversy over the decision by some Amerindian peoples to issue their own passports, as separate, independent nations.
Given how extremely sensitive the matter of sovereignty and land rights are to Native Americans, this latest scheme by Trump’s friends in the oil industry seems to me to have the potential to do immense harm, not just in the potential environmental damage, and the further dispossession and impoverishment of the First Nations, but also in overturning what must have been a series of very delicate negotiations between the Federal law enforcement agencies and the First Nations. This is quite apart from the various other programmes that have been launched over the years to bring Native and non-Native Americans together, and incorporate their point of view into the wider story of American history.
As for trying to convince Native Americans that private ownership of their oil would bring prosperity, that was the line the mining companies were trying to sell to the Aboriginal Australians back in the 1980s. I can remember a piece in the Torygraph of the time moaning that left-wingers were keeping Aboriginal Aussies poor by refusing them to mine the uranium on their lands.
Given the immense environmental damage oil pipelines like DAPL have done, and the rapacity of the oil companies and American government when it comes to exploiting other nations’ oil, Native Americans would likely be very well advised to keep well away from this. One of the instances of massive environmental damage done by the oil corporations show in one of the American left-wing news sites – I can’t remember whether it was The Turks, Majority Report or Secular Talk, was the destruction of hundreds of acres of waterways in Louisiana. The oil company had completely removed all the available oil, which had formed a supporting layer under the fertile rock and soil. As a result, the surface started sinking, with the marshland and waterways degenerating into a toxic, oil-sodden sludge.
The multinational companies in the Middle East also pay very little in royalties to the countries, whose oil deposits they exploit. Greg Palast in his book, Armed Madhouse, states that Aramco, the oil conglomerate formed to exploit the oil in Saudi Arabia, actually only gives one per cent of its profits to the Saudis as royalties. It’s a pittance, though enough to support the bloated and corrupt Saudi ruling caste in obscene luxury and absolute power. Similar trivial amounts of money are paid to the other Middle Eastern countries for exploitation rights, including Iraq.
If this goes ahead, the Amerindians can look forward to losing more of their territory, the devastation of the tribal lands, which is at the heart of the culture, and further poverty as the oil companies keep the profits for themselves.
Of course, the oil deposits do offer the possibility of enriching the tribes that posses them. But you can raise the question quite legitimately why a private company is needed, or should be allowed, to extract the oil. I understand that many tribes have set up their own, collectively owned companies to manage and exploit their natural resources for themselves, through tourism, woodland management and agriculture. One of the First Nations in California set up a company to catch, can and market the area’s salmon. If companies are to drill for oil on tribal land, a strong case could be made that the company should be at least part-owned by the tribe as the sovereign people, and very strict provisions put and rigorously enforced to protect the people and their homeland.
Unfortunately, the Neocons demanding war with Iran, along with just about every other opposing, or simply independent country, in the Middle East didn’t die with Killary’s campaign for the presidency.
In this piece from Secular Talk, host Kyle Kulinski talks about how John Bolton, one of the potential candidates for Trump’s secretary of state, has made a speech demanding ‘regime change in Tehran’. Bolton blames the Iranians for destabilising the Middle East. Kulinski points out how ludicrous and hypocritical Bolton’s views are. He begins with the point America and the West are now at war with seven countries in the Middle East, including boots on the ground. Bolton was one of the worst of the warmongers. Unlike many others, he still supports the Iraq invasion. Kulinski states ironically that Bolton never met a war he didn’t like. Kulinski goes on to explain how we, America and the West, have destabilised the Middle East. As for Iran, it’s a Shi’a theocracy, but Kulinski accurately states that it is far more liberal and progressive than Saudi Arabia. He doesn’t like the horrific Islamic theocracy in Iran, but also explains that the majority of the population is much younger, under thirty, and more secular than the dinosaurs that rule over them. Again, true.
Kulinski also explains how the Shi’a are a tiny minority in the Middle East, and are under attack everywhere. They have the Israelis on one side of them, and the Saudis on the other. And what about countering their destabilisation of the region? Israel, for example, invaded Lebanon in order to expand its influence, and continues to build illegal settlements to push out the Palestinians. The Saudis have invaded Yemen to attack the Shi’a there. And Qatar and the other Sunni states are funding al-Qaeda, so that they will overthrow Assad in Syria. But no, according to Bolton, it’s the Iranians, not these, who are primarily responsible for the chaos and carnage in the region.
Kulinski also describes how Bolton has blithely made this demand for war with Iran, without even thinking about whether the American people themselves want another war. Usually governments need to build up a propaganda campaign to prepare the public’s mood for war. But no, not this time. Bolton and his friends simply aren’t bothered about that. They’ll just steal Americans’ money through taxation to fund yet another war that no-one except them wants.
Kulinski concludes by stating that if Bolton is picked by Trump as his secretary of state, or even remains in Trump’s circle of advisors, it means that Trump wasn’t serious about keeping America out of further conflicts. Of course, there’s a chance that Trump may keep him as an advisor, but not listen to him. Similarly, if Trump doesn’t pick him, or anyone like him, to be secretary of state, then perhaps there is a chance for America to avoid going into another war.
This is another stupid, horrendous pronouncement by yet another Republican fossil. Again, it ultimately seems to go back to the Neocon plans under Bush, to overthrow a series of regimes in the Middle East, including Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya and Somalia. The result has been an unmitigated disaster. Iraq is now a warzone. As we saw this week, ISIS is determined to smash as much of the regimes precious heritage as it can. After destroying immeasurably valuable antiquities from the dawn of civilisation in Syria and Iraq, it carried out another assault on the Iraqi people’s ancient civilisation by levelling one of the country’s ziggurats. These barbarians have been funded by Saudi Arabia, in its campaign to spread its extremely repressive, intolerant brand of Islam across the world. The Iraqis weren’t responsible for 9/11: it was Saudi Arabia. But the Neocons and Likud wanted Iraq invaded. The Likudniks despised Saddam Hussein because he supplied the Palestinians with guns, while the Saudis and Neocons just wanted to the loot the country of its oil industry and other potentially valuable state assets.
Now, apparently, they want to do this to Iran. The mullahs are unpleasant. They’re extremely corrupt, intolerant and repressive. But they aren’t as corrupt and intolerant as the Saudis. Unlike Saudi Arabia, the Iranian theocracy does include a democratic element. Every so many years, the Iranian people vote for a president. I got the impression that in many respects, it’s pretty much Hobson’s choice, in that there’s little ideological difference permitted between the candidates. Nevertheless, the Iranian people enjoy a measure of popular sovereignty that is denied the peoples of the Sunni absolute monarchies in the Gulf.
I also need hardly say that Iran is also an ancient land with an immensely rich cultural and artistic heritage. This was demonstrated a few years ago when the British Museum lent the Cyrus cylinder for exhibition in Iran. The cylinder records the conquests of the great Persian emperor, Cyrus, over the Babylonians. It’s valuable because it documents how he freed the Israelites from their exile, and allowed them to return to Israel and Judea. This heritage would also be seriously threatened if the Americans decide to invade, just like the heritage of Iraq.
One of the causes for the present chaos in Iraq is the fact that the country is an artificial creation of the imperial powers, in this case, Britain during the Mandate in the 1920s. It does not have a uniform population, but is composed of different tribal groups and sects, including Kurds, Shi’a and Sunni Muslims, Christians and the Mandaeans, a small Gnostic sect that reveres John the Baptist as the true messiah. Iran similarly is composed of a multitude of different peoples. Just over half – 52 per cent – speak Farsi, the language derived from ancient Persia. There are also a number of other different tribes, speaking languages related to Turkish, Arabs in Khuzistan in the West, and Kurds, Lurs and Bakhtiars in their homelands. Three per cent of the population are Armenian Christians, and there are also Parsees, the followers of the ancient religion of the Persian Empire, Zoroastrianism, a monotheist faith centred around the teachings of the prophet Zoroaster. The Kurds have been fighting a war for their independence since the 1970s, just as they have in Iraq and Turkey. Iran was also the birthplace of the Baha’i faith, which claims that Baha’ullah, an Iranian religious of the 1920s, was a prophet. Baha’ullah and his followers were exiled to Haifa, in what is now Israel, when it was still part of the Turkish empire. Because of this, the Baha’i’s are under considerable pressure and suspicion as agents of Israel, intent on destroying Islam and Iran. It’s nonsense, but it has been strongly promoted by the authorities, with the result that there have been terrible pogroms and persecution against them.
There is also a massive underground Christian church in Iran. Although its comparable to the underground Christian churches in China, you’ve probably never heard of it. This is made up of Iranians, who have secretly converted from Islam. They too are under immense persecution as apostates. I’ve heard that the situation has go to the point, where the government is posting guards at the Armenian Christian churches to try and keep the Iranians away. If America invades, it will result in the same ethnic conflict and civil war that has turned neighbouring Iraq into a bloodbath. And just as the Christian populations of the Middle East are being massacred and cleansed from the regions by the Islamists, along with other, non-Muslim religions like the Yezidis and moderate Muslims, who want tolerance and peaceful coexistence, so my fear is that if the West attacks Iran, it will intensify the brutal persecution of Christians there.
Apart from this, Iran is a modern, relatively developed and sophisticated country. It was the most developed economy in the Middle East during the Shah’s reign. He tried to industrialise the country. One of his aims was for Iran to equal France as a producer of cars. The Iranians had their own car, the Payhan, and he very nearly pulled this off. Even now Iran is significantly involved in scientific research. I was surprised looking at some of the videos on YouTube on robotics to find that, alongside Britain, America, Japan and China, the Iranians have also developed a humanoid machine. Perhaps I shouldn’t be too surprised. The Middle East was the homeland of the Banu Musa brothers, who in the 11th century created a hundred or more automata and other ‘ingenious desires’. The country is also far more tolerant artistically than Saudi Arabia. More than a decade and a half ago, about the turn of the century, the Iranian government staged an exhibition of the works of the YBAs, including Damian Hirst and Tracey Emin.
Just as the invasion of Iraq wasn’t about liberating the Iraqi people and giving them democracy, this isn’t about bringing peace and freedom to the beleaguered people of Iran. This is just another, cynical excuse for us to grab their oil. We did it before. In the 1950s Mossadeq, the last democratically elected Iranian prime minister, nationalised the country’s oil industry, which had previously been in the hands of foreigners, principally us, the British. BP used to be Anglo-Persian Oil, and was set up to exploit the Iranian oil fields. And we did exploit them and the Iranian workers. They were paid less than British workers, and worked in appalling conditions. After Mossadeq nationalised the oil companies, America organised a coup, which we also backed, to overthrow him. I think Mossadeq was a Baha’i, and this was used to mobilise suspicion against him. His removal from power resulted in the Shah assuming total, autocratic control, complete with a secret police, SAVAK, who were brutal thugs. This in turn created rising discontent, which eventually culminated in the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The regime renationalise the oil industry, the date of which is now an official state holiday.
Bush and his fellow Neocons deluded themselves that they would be welcomed as liberators in Iraq. They weren’t. Corinne de Souza, one of Lobster’s contributors, whose father was Iraqi, made the point that one of the consequences of the invasion was that there were fewer Iraqis willing to cooperate with the British intelligence services. This was for a simple reason: they were like everyone else, and loved their country. They were prepared to help us, as they believed that we would liberate them from Saddam Hussein. But they did not want to collaborate with an occupying force. I’ve no doubt that the same will be true of the Iranians, if Trump goes ahead and appoints this idiot as head of state.
A few years ago, before Obama’s election, Bush and his circle of mass-murderers were indeed considering invading Iran. Shirin Ebadi’s book, Iran on the Brink, which describes rising discontent in Iran against the mullahs, strongly argued against her country’s invasion. Protest groups were also being formed. There was one organising meetings in Clifton in Bristol, as I recall. For a few years, that threat seemed to pass. Now it is come back.
There are now so many wars being fought by America and its allies in the Middle East, that one of the ghastly monsters from Bush’s cabinet actually lost count when he was asked that very question in an interview on American television. And the disgusting so-and-so even had the gall to laugh it off and chuckle about it, as if the murder of whole nations was some kind of joke.
And this comes just as NATO is moving more troops and missiles into Estonia, just in case Putin invades. Killary looked all set to start a war with Russia by stoking tensions there up to levels where some feared we were at the same point the great powers were just before the First World War. I think that threat receded slightly when Trump became president. Trump is a disgusting monster, but he does seem to be friends with Putin, and I’m sure that has helped defuse some of the tensions.
Now we have this despicable moron demanding more carnage. I do wonder where it will all end. How many countries have to be invaded, how many millions murdered, how many people forced out of their homes, to live in camps as refugees? How many of our brave young men and women have be sacrificed to the greed of the oil companies before this all stops? Is there really no end to these politicos’ lust for others’ blood?
This is a situation that will have to be watched very carefully. And I’ll keep an eye out also for any groups being formed to stop war with Iran.
A few days ago I put up a post about a piece from Sam Seder’s Majority Report, in which Seder commented on a piece in EcoWars and Politics magazines by John F. Kennedy, which gave the real reasons behind the calls for western intervention in Syria and attacks on Russia for human rights abuses in the killing of civilians in their own attacks on the militants fighting Assad.
As you might expect from our mendacious governments, it has nothing to do with any real concerns about human rights. It’s all about overthrowing Assad, isolating and weakening Russia, and securing a massive gas pipeline that the Qataris proposed nearly a decade and a half ago. This is planned to go through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey. The Saudis, Jordanians and Turks were all in favour of it. Syria refused, on the grounds that they didn’t want to hurt their Russian allies. The moment Assad refused, the Americans and their allies, including ourselves and the French, began to plot Assad’s overthrow. An international alliance was set up called The Friends of Syria Coalition, or some such, a name which Seder rightly described as ‘Orwellian’, in that it meant precisely the opposite of what it said, in the same way that in Orwell ‘war=peace, and freedom=slavery’. This alliance was to campaign internationally for Assad’s removal. The CIA paid £60 million to Barada, a TV station in this country, to run propaganda pieces imploring the Syrian people to overthrow Assad. At the same time, the Saudis and other hardline nations began funding, equipping and training the various jihadist splinter groups, ultimately descended from al-Qaeda, to start a civil war. And the Saudis and other nations also told the Americans that if they invaded Syria, like they had Iraq, they’d also pay for it.
Since I put the original piece up, I’ve got a few more pieces of very relevant information about it from Michelle, one of the great commenters here, passing on comments from David Croswell, who clearly knows much more about this than I do. Michelle writes
Hi Beastie,
I agree with you on the importance of this piece, I put this out on Google plus Friday and received an interesting comment from another googlepuser David Croswell on Dore’s comments he said:
“Mostly right.
The gas field involved is the `South Pars’, the largest in the world.
There are only two countries that have access to this, and they are Qatar and Iran.
Syria is Iran’s number one ally in the Middle East, which is why you see an Iranian military supportive presence in Syria.
So, Assad’s veto on the Qatari pipeline wasn’t simply `for our friend, Russia’.
However, Iran and Russia have a cosy relationship, also, and are working in coordination, with Iran handling the Islamic public relations aspect in the central Asian nations, and, with their gas programme, now extending pipelines to Pakistan and India in the opposite direction to Europe, developing their market there.
So, this shows another factor to the U.S. aspect: In their ongoing campaign to isolate Iran to place it in a more vulnerable position, it is necessary to kick out the prop of their number one Middle Eastern ally, Syria.
In their intent to regain what they once had for next to nothing in Iran, the fourth largest oil production on the planet (Iran was where BP got started, which is why we always find the UK riding along), they’ll also have possession of the South Pars gas field.
Of course, isolating Russia financially and geopolitically, along the way, is a major goal.
So, all and all, the west are not the forces of goodness and niceness … at all.”
Hi again Beastie, the conversation/comments have continued from David Crosswell on my post, he also said:
“The Syrian fields in the Golan Heights are already being exploited by Israel, with Murdoch and Cheney being two major beneficiaries roped in, in order to horse-shoe support from the U.S./UK support base.
Also, the gas fields off the Gaza are being siphoned off, with American help.
This is what it’s all about.
Wars are not fought on principle any more, but for corporate profit, so the contention that the U.S. is an oligarchy is not at all far-fetched….”
I replied: “Wars have always been fought for power and profit, empires and their trading companies have been carving up peoples and their nations for centuries, hence their armed forces were just as much corporate employees then as they are now.
In the UK there is also a military recruitment crisis so the UK government is using non-subtle techniques to recruit amongst children still at school:
This adds much more information on the geopolitical manoeuvring here. And none of this is to our credit. We and the Americans have always been desperate to get our mitts on the Iranian oil industry. It was the reason we and the Americans sponsored a CIA-funded coup in Iran in 1958, which toppled the democratically-elected Iranian prime minister Mossadeq, and led to the installation of the Shah as the country’s absolute monarch. The Shah and his secret police, SAVAK, were so brutal that the Shah’s rule ended in a popular uprising in the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which placed the mullahs and the Ayatollah Khomeini in control of the country. And one of annual holidays proclaimed by the new, theocratic regime celebrates the nationalisation of the oil industry.
The Neocons would love to invade Iran as well, and made plans to do so. The Iran regime is brutal and deplorable, but nevertheless it does contain a democratic element and is still freer and more liberal than the Saudis. It should be left to the Iranians to choose what form of government they wish to live under. And after the horrors created by the invasion of Iraq, no-one should have any illusion that any puppet regime created by the West after an invasion of Syria or Iran would be any better for the peoples of those nations. Assad’s Syria is a Fascistic state, but it’s secular nationalist, not theocratic, and definitely more liberal than Saudi Arabia. All that would result from another western invasion of these nations is yet another repeat of Iraq: the mass privatisation and looting of state industries to American and western multinationals, particularly the oil industry; more sectarian violence; killing, racketeering, prostitution and lawlessness by the ‘peace-keeping forces’, particularly the mercenaries; massive economic damage and sky-high unemployment due to the imposition of free-market capitalism; and a sharp decline in women’s status and opportunities. Women in Iraq before the invasion could have careers outside the home, and felt safe leaving work in the evening. That has all gone. As has the free education and health care that the regime also provided. If these also exist in Syria and Iran, you can expect them to disappear as well if the west invades.
The information about the Israelis’ exploitation of the oilfields in the Golan heights – taken from Syria – and Gaza also seems to me to be very relevant to the current attempts by the right, the Israel lobby and the Blairites to smear decent critics of Israel as anti-Semites or self-hating Jews. These slanders are risible, as so many of those libelled as such are anti-racists with a proud record of fighting against racism and anti-Semitism. The Jewish people smeared have included many, who are active members of their faith and community, and who had family murdered by the Nazis – real anti-Semites – in the Holocaust.
Much of this slander is because pro-Palestinian activists are having an effect in raising opposition to the Israeli colonisation of the West Bank and the dispossession of the Palestinians. This is notably true in the case of the BDS movement, which has many Jewish supporters. This movement urges people not to deal with or purchase goods from Israeli businesses located in the Occupied Territories. So far, a third of the Israeli businesses set up there have been forced out, thanks to this campaign. And the Israel lobby has gone ballistic. New York City council recently condemned it at a meeting as an anti-Semitic hate group, despite the fact that many of its supporters present at the meeting were Jews, including six rabbis.
Now it seems that oil is also a factor here as well, and the Israelis’ determination to exploit this in the territories they have seized from other nations.
This is disgusting and outrageous, but I doubt it will ever be reported by a mainstream TV or broadcasting channel. We need to do what we can to stop our governments destroying more lives – those of innocent Syrians, as well as our own brave young people – just to make the petrochemical companies even more rich and bloated than they are already.
The protesters against Gulf War I were right: ‘Gosh, no, we won’t go. We won’t die for Texaco!’ Or BP, Esso, Gulf or anyone else.
This is an extremely important piece from Jimmy Dore, the American comedian, who sometimes appears as a guest on the left-wing internet news show, The Young Turks. Dore is a consistent critic of American imperialism and its long history of overthrowing and destabilising the governments of poor nations around the globe, when they don’t bow down and surrender to American and Western political and corporate interests.
In this video, he comments on a piece published by John F. Kennedy jnr in EcoWatch and Politics magazines. This article provides damning, point for point proof that the reason for the civil war and calls in the West for military intervention in Syria has nothing to do with humanitarian concerns. John Kerry, one of the main movers in this, isn’t interested or concerned by how many children have been killed or hospitals bombed by Assad. The real reason is what you might expect it to be, given the similar circumstances that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
It’s all about the petrochemical industry. And in this case, it’s a natural gas pipeline, proposed in 2000 by Qatar. This would cost $10 billion and run for 1,500 km from Qatar, through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey. Another gas pipeline has also been proposed, which would run from Iran, through Iraq to Syria. These are both opposed by Russia. But they are most opposed to the Qatar to Turkey pipeline. Russia sells 70 per cent of its oil exports to Europe. Putin therefore regards this pipeline as an ‘existential threat’, a NATO plot to change the existing political and economic situation, deprive Russia of its only foothold in the Middle East, strangle the Russian economy and deny it leverage in the European energy market.
Syria also opposes the pipeline. In 2009 Assad refused to sign the agreement allowing the pipeline to pass through his country in order to protect the interests of the Russians, who are his allies. The moment he made this decision, military and intelligence planners formulated a plan to start a Sunni uprising in Syria.
Fore quotes another commenter, Cy Hersh, who states that before the war, Assad was actually beginning to liberalise the country. He gave thousands of files on jihadi radicals to the CIA after 9/11, as he viewed the jihadis as his and America’s mutual enemies.
On September 13th, 2013, the American Secretary of State, John Kerry, told congress that the Sunni kingdoms in the Middle East – that is, countries like Qata and Saudi Arabia – had offered to pay for an American invasion of Syria to overthrow Assad. He repeated this statement to Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican congresswoman for Florida.
Two years before this, the US had joined France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and England to form the ‘Friends of Syria Coalition’, which demanded the removal of Assad. The CIA also paid $6 million to Barada, a TV company in Britain, to run pieces demanding Assad’s overthrow. Files from Saudi Intelligence released by WikiLeaks also show that by 2012 Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia were training, arming and funding Sunni jihadists from Syria, Iraq and elsewhere.
Dore makes the point that the decision to use a civil war between Sunnis and Shi’as isn’t a new policy. In 2008 a report by the Rand Corporation, funded by the Pentagon, provided the blueprint for the strategy. This stated that the control of the petrochemical resources in the Persian Gulf was a strategic priority for America, and that this would ‘intersect strongly with that of prosecuting the long war.’
He also points out that this is the same policy America has adopted against nations the world over when they have refused to serve American interests. It’s particularly similar to the overthrow of the Iranian prime minister, Mossadeq, in the 1950s. Iran at that time was a secular democracy, just as Syria is a secular state. However, America was afraid of Arab nationalism, linking it with Communism. Mossadeq nationalised the Iran oil industry, which was previously in the hands of the West. So the CIA arranged a coup, which led to the Shah eventually ruling as the country’s absolute monarch. Until he was toppled in 1979 by the Islamic Revolution, which produced the Ayatollah Khomeini and the current Iranian regime that has been a bitter opponent of America ever since.
Dore also states that it was known long before this that American intervention in the Middle East and elsewhere was turning the world’s peoples against America. He cites a report by Bruce Lovett in the 1950s which condemned American military interventions around the world as ‘antithetical to American leadership’ and moral authority, and noting that this occurred without Americans knowledge. In other words, as Dore points out, they don’t hate the US because America enjoys freedoms that they don’t possess. They hate America because America bombs and kills them. The people in those countries are well aware of what is occurring, but this is carefully kept from America’s own people.
This is all too plausible. Dore’s own producers off-camera state that they’re not conspiracy theorists, but there’s nothing in this that is implausible given America’s foreign policy record.
This is the real reason we have people in our own parliament, like Bomber Benn, demanding military action against Assad in Syria. It also shows, on a more philosophical level, how right Jacob Bronowski, the scientist and member of the Fabian Society, when he decried war as ‘theft by other means’.
None of this makes Putin any less of a thug and a bully domestically. And Assad is also guilty of horrific human rights abuses. But those are not the reasons we’re being led into another war in the Middle East, and possibly with Russia.
I can remember back in 1990 when Gulf War 1 broke out. There were protesters chanting, ‘Gosh, no, we won’t go. We won’t die for Texaco’. The Green Party denounced it as a ‘resource war’. They were right then, and I’ve no doubt whatsoever they’re right now.
Our courageous young men and women should not be sent to die just to despoil another nation of its natural resources, and inflate the already bloated wealth of more petrochemical industry executives and oil sheikhs. And we definitely shouldn’t be doing anything to assist the Saudis, the very people who are giving lavish material aid to al-Qaeda and ISIS in order to export a viciously intolerant and brutal Islamism around the world through military force.
And a little while ago I mentioned how the veteran British comics writer, Pat Mills, had put in a few satirical comments about the Gulf War in the ABC Warriors strip in 2000 AD. In the stories about the Volgan War, the robot soldiers recount how they fought in a war against the Russians, the real cause of which was to steal the Russians’ oil reserves after the world had past the tipping point. This was called by the Volgans/Russians the ‘Fourth Oil War’.
Russia has indeed vast resources of oil and other minerals, which it exports around the world. And again, NATO forces are building up in eastern Europe, with NATO generals predicting that by May next year, we will be at war with Russia. It seems to me that Mills is right, probably more than he knew when he wrote the strip, and that the West really is pushing for a war to seize their oil.
This may lead us all into nuclear Armageddon. Quite apart from being grossly immoral.
We have to stop it.
As Hammerstein and his metal comrades say: ‘Increase the peace’.
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