GARY BRECHER

“[Today we deal with fanatics and reactionaries throughout the Middle East]…because the modernizing Arabs were all killed by the US, Britain, Israel, and the Saudis.”

DILI, EAST TIMOR —
[dropcap]I[/dropcap] ought to be familiar with the Houthi, the Shia militia that’s now conquering most of what’s worth taking in Yemen. After all, the Houthis started in Saada Province, just a few miles due south of Najran, Saudi Arabia, where I was living a few years ago.

But the truth is Yemen was totally closed off to everyone in Najran, and no one except a few networks of smugglers and spies who, from what I heard, had a very high attrition rate, dared to cross that border. None of us expat goofs even knew the name of the Yemeni Province across from us. Yemen was that country from whose bournes no traveler returns, unless he’s hoping to get rich from an SUV full of weed—and what with the, you know, beheadings for drug dealing and all, we were pretty much a straight-edge crew in our time there, figuring to make up for lost time when we got home. We knew nothing about what was over the border except that every day there seemed to be a new convoy of car-carriers loaded with brand-new Land Cruisers with the logo of the Saudi Border Patrol rolling into town. The Saudi authorities were clearly nervous about that border, even back in 2011.

There was no road connecting Najran to Yemen. Instead there was a sheer, mile-high mountain wall that marked the Yemen border. The only Yemenis you met were beggars in the streets. One of them rolled up to me while I was waiting for the school van, said in English, as if we’d been chatting for ages, “My friend, eight years I Yemen…and so, you give ten riyals.” I gave him 20. In his spiel, “Yemen” summed it up, verb and noun, sufficient reason for his demand.

The only place I ever saw Yemenis who weren’t begging was the Najran Dam, the world’s most ridiculous tourist attraction. That Dam kind of sums up relations between Yemen and Saudi in a very cinematic way. You approach the dam up a canyon, through a checkpoint. They’re looking for Yemenis at the checkpoint; they wave you through, and after being stopped a few more times by nervous paramilitaries in Land Cruisers, who also check for Yemeni faces and wave, you reach the top of this huge, magnificent dam.

You walk across the little road over the top, expecting to look out on something like Lake Powell in Vegas, and see…nothing. Desert. Yemen. There’s no water except a tiny creek. There are boats marooned halfway up the rocky hillsides, but there’s no water, nobody can remember when there ever was water, and nobody expects there ever will be any water.

It’s still a tourist attraction, though, and one of the reasons is that you can see into Yemen. On one memorable occasion, we actually saw something much rarer: Yemenis, visiting Saudi with permission.

We didn’t notice them at first. We did our usual stroll across the top of the dam to the little picnic ground, where in theory you could sit, though you wouldn’t want to—and there was a huge family there. Not Saudis, but not South Asian or Western either. They didn’t look like anyone we’d seen. They were in a defensive circle, sitting on the grass. The men were on the outside of the circle, protecting the women. The women were in black, but not a Saudi-abaya black. They were thinner, shorter than Saudis, more alert—much more alert. And every single one of them was looking at us with an intensity you’d never see on a Saudi face.

We had no idea why they were staring at us like that, as if we were great white sharks instead of a gaggle of miserable TESOL mercenaries. Our van driver nodded towards them, said, “Yemen.”

There was never anything about Yemen in the Saudi press. Lots about “infiltrators” and “smugglers,” who were understood to be Yemeni, but nothing about what was actually going on on the other side of that mountain wall. Yemen equals trouble; that was the Saudi view, and all you ever got.

From this report in Al Akbar, it sounds like not much has changed since we left Najran. The Saudi authorities are still spreading hate against the Shia of the Southwest, and no one actually knows much about what’s going on south of the border:

“stories…tell of criminal activity by foreigners sneaking through the Yemeni borders, harassing and attacking homes along the Assir mountain range.

“The people of the south know very little about Yemeni politics and do not really understand the Saudi political approach toward Yemen. All they know is that a threat has emerged in Yemen.”

The Houthi are being bombed now by the Saudi AF, which is in a way the sincerest form of Saudi flattery. The Saudis are afraid of these Shia Yemeni. One of the reasons that “…people of the [Saudi] South know very little about Yemeni politics” is that the Saudi rulers make sure they don’t get any information. The last thing the Saudi authorities want is for the Shia of SW Saudi Arabia to remember that they were once part of a huge, powerful Shia kingdom that stretched south to the Indian Ocean. Najran was once part of that kingdom. It’s only been Saudi territory since 1934, when the Saud family leased the province from Yemen on a 20-year term. They kept it when the term expired, because by that time Saudi Arabia was rich and closely allied with the US and Britain, while Yemen was weak and poor.

The Saudis, with sleazy friends in Langley and unlimited cash to throw around, have incredible control over world media. They do such a good job of suppressing news about their long war with the Shia of Yemen that, until I lived there and got the story first hand, I didn’t even know that the Shia of Najran had actually risen up in armed rebellion in 2000. And it was an incredible story of a glorious, though doomed, rebellion.

In 2000, the Shia of Najran got sick of being told by their Saudi Provincial Governor (a Saudi princeling, naturally) that they were rafidii (“nay-sayers”) and takfiri (“apostates”). The Najrani grabbed their guns, scared off the Saudi national police and drove Prince Mishaal into hiding in the Najran Holiday Inn. You can still see the Holiday Inn; it’s as good as a Gettysburg monument to the locals, though the bullet holes have, unfortunately, been covered over.

That unknown rebellion ended with massive Saudi secret-police reprisals—more holes in the desert than a Joe Pesci golf tour. Once they’d killed off the ringleaders, the Saudi authorities went back to slower, less bloody methods. As I explained in 2012, they planned to neutralize the Shia threat in the southwest by buying the region a new demographic profile:

“Twelve years [After the Najran revolt of 2000], the Sauds are winning in a slower, smarter way. The locals have no friends, no money; their religion is slowly being Wahhabized, just like Islam in Indonesia and all the other places the Sauds are doing their best to make a little meaner and more rule-crazy in their own image. They’re doing it with demographics now, importing Sunni settlers from Yemen to tip the balance. There are rumors of a huge new city going up in the desert near the town I worked in, supposedly a ‘campus’ for the local university, but it’s twenty times bigger than that would ever need to be. It’ll be a Sunni city, a Wahhabi city.

“Meanwhile the local Ismaili Shi’ites try to stay alive and maybe even get a tiny piece of the tsunami of money that’s flowing over the rest of the country. They get very, very little of it, and most of what comes to the province goes for mosques—Wahhabi mosques, naturally. But they fought back when their beliefs were directly insulted, and to them, that still means a lot. In the meantime, they do what people in their position always do: they grovel when they have to, fight when there’s no choice, and have a lot of kids.”

Yeah, but that was in 2012, when the Saudis thought they had a lid on this thing. It’s all changed now, thanks to the Houthi victory in Yemen.

And it all began just a few miles south of that dam—in Saada Province, home of Hussein al Houthi, founder and martyr of the “eponymous” movement. (When did it become socially acceptable to use the word “eponymous”? I feel dirty.)

[dropcap]H[/dropcap]outhi was of the Fiver Shia sect called Zaydi, theologically moderate but fierce when committed to war. The Southwestern wedge of the Arabian Peninsula has always been largely Shia. The east, which spreads northeast toward Oman like a sun-baked brick, is almost uninhabited inland toward the Saudi border, but what population there is is Sunni, and chronically in conflict with the Shia wedge to the west.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is powerful there, helped and betrayed by turns by the Saudi security police, trying to hide from the American drones that occasionally drop a Hellfire missile on any AQAP pickup truck they can identify on the road.

The Shia have always been stronger and more numerous than the Sunni Yemenis in the east, but the last century wasn’t a good one for them. The Saudis, who were once “the ignorant Arabs,” got the oil, and Yemen got smaller and poorer.

Saudi Shia are barely tolerated, and consistently ignored by the Saudi media. The only way I found out that Najran was a Shia city was that none of my students showed up one day. Empty classrooms. I asked a colleague who looked around very carefully, then whispered, “Ashura.” Ashura is not mentioned in Saudi Arabia. They’re religious fascists and not shy about it.

And that’s what led to the forgotten rebellion in Najran, which was part of the long, slow struggle between the Shia of Yemen (Greater Yemen, which used to include Najran and everything up to Abha) and the other power in the Peninsula, the Wahhabi of the Najd.

The Saudis’ strength comes from three provinces , Al Qassim, Ha’il, and Riyadh—that make up the Najd, the uplands, the turtle-back of the Arabian Peninsula. What’s happening now, as Saudi planes bomb Houthi bases, is the latest of a long, chronic war between the Najd and Yemen.

Oil made the Najd strong in the 20^th century, but even before it was discovered, Yemen was weakened by invasions, first the Ottomans and then the British. The Sunni of the Najd were lucky enough to be ignored—what did they have that was worth taking, before the oil was found?—whereas the Yemeni had two very valuable, stealable assets: coffee, and ports along the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.

There was a time when Yemen was the world’s only coffee exporter (Mocha is a town in Yemen, on the Red Sea) and though coffee was banned as a dangerous drug by Murad IV, he couldn’t make that Prohibition work, because the Turks were addicts from their first sip. They needed that caffeine buzz to help them look over maps and think about new provinces to conquer. And when they looked at Yemen, they saw a 2,000 km long coastline that could be dotted with Ottoman naval outposts, and they drooled—probably drooled coffee grounds all over the map. They wanted the coast. That was them all over; show them a landscape painting and they were calculating how many Janissaries it’d take to conquer it, how many new taxes they could squeeze out of their kaffir subjects to raise a new army and seize whatever your hotel-room artwork showed.

And they didn’t mind casualties. You can rank armies by their aversion to KIA; the IDF clearly goes at the top (it’s their great, fatal har-har weakness), and the Soviets and Ottoman rank near the bottom for sensitivity to body bags coming home. The Pashas started ordering their unlucky Egyptian lieutenants to make grabs for Yemen in the early 1500s. They made the classic mistake in judging the odds of going into Yemen, thinking that because it was localized and anarchic that it must be weak. Early in the 16th century a half-smart Ottoman pasha made this “cakewalk” prediction:

“Yemen is a land with no lord, an empty province. It would be not only possible but easy to capture, and should it be captured, it would be master of the lands of India and send every year a great amount of gold and jewels to Constantinople.”

Wrong on all counts. In the first half of the 16^th century, the Empire sent 80,000 troops to Yemen. Only 7,000 of them ever came home.

The Ottomans had their own 16^th-century version of the US Army’s “lessons learned” ritual after a failure, and their review of this debacle was brutal:

“We have seen no foundry like Yemen for our soldiers. Each time we have sent an expeditionary force there, it has melted away like salt dissolved in water.”

Army prose was a little more literary back then.

The Ottomans kept trying, sending one doomed army out from Egypt after another. They always were a land-hungry, over-extended empire, jerking off to maps rather than consolidating what really mattered.

Yemen wasn’t nearly as easy to take as it must’ve looked to the Ottoman policy-pasha wonks looking over a map of the Peninsula in Constantinople.

By 1634, the last Ottoman forces were permitted—“permitted,” you’ll note—to leave Mocha, the Yemeni coffee-packing port they’d coveted for almost a century. The Shia of Yemen, who seemed so leaderless and weak, had defeated them completely, though the endless wars with the Turks had also weakened the Yemenis.

What the Turks never got was that the Shia highlands of Yemen weren’t a “land with no lord,” but a land with a hereditary Imamate, a theocratic military leader like Hassan Nasrullah of Hezbollah. Nasrullah is a perfect modern Imam, a sectarian icon, which may be why he looks like Gerry Adams after six months on an all-donut diet.  Moqtada al Sadr in Iraq has a similar role.

An Imam isn’t supposed to interfere too much in clan business in normal times. His most important job is to unite the sect when it’s under threat. The Imam is a mobilizer above all, which the US found out the hard way when they messed with Moqtada in Baghdad.

When the Shia of northern Yemen mobilize, like they have now, they always move outward from their stronghold in Saaba Province in the same directions: either North toward Najran and Abha, or West to the Red Sea (Jizan), or South to Aden.

As long as they stick together under a strong Imam, they’re hard to beat. But after the Turks left in the mid-17^th century, the Yemenis faced a much smarter empire: the British. Very few countries held off that Empire for long. Between the Americans’ victory in 1783 and Irish independence in 1922, not one country was able to eject the Empire. Tens of millions died trying — brave, brilliant empires like the Sikhs and the Zulus; no one succeeded. We forget that now, because . . . well, you know that amnesia flash device from Men in Black? It was actually the British Empire that invented that thing, and asked the world to smile and say cheese when it decided to dissolve itself around 1960. And like Tommy Lee Jones in that movie, their last act was to use the flash on themselves, so they could say in all truth, “Empire? What Empire?”

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ut in 1840, at their peak, the British were beautiful to watch. They were masters at handling a complicated, clannish country like Yemen. They never made the mistake of rolling in and claiming the whole place as the Turks had. That only united the locals. Instead, they did what they were good at: using proxies, fomenting divisions, creating distractions—the original force multipliers. And even when they lost battles or campaigns, they left their enemies weakened, often for good.

In 1840, they realized they could use Aden as a coaling port for the fleets that kept their Indian operation, the big money-maker, in business. And that was that; they needed Yemen, and they were going to get it. They landed at Mocha almost exactly two centuries after the Turks evacuated it.

The British used another Imperial strategy now forgotten: forced immigration by subject peoples. Aden, the focus of their ambitions in Yemen, became a “world town” in the 19^th century, with about a thousand Arabs swamped by South Asian, SE Asian, and African immigrants. Those were the perfect inhabitants, with no links to the locals and entirely dependent on the Empire’s protection to avoid being killed by the angry Yemenis.

Aden stayed fairly quiet, in Yemeni terms, until the 1960s, when Britain, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia fought a dirty, complicated Yemeni war. Aden blew up, with grenade attacks on British officials, who had a witty riposte in the form of torture centers that pioneered many of the techniques you’ll remember from Abu Ghraib, with emphasis on sexual degradation and nakedness.

The British got called on these torture centers—they were a little sloppy, not in form, during the 1960s—and left in 1967. The real action moved up north to Houthi territory, where Nasser, hope of the Arab world in the 1960s, decided that a modern, Arab-nationalist regime in Yemen would be a big move for him, Egypt, and the Arabs.

Arabs were getting very “modern” at that time. It’s important to remember that. You know why they stopped getting modern, and started getting interested in reactionary, Islamist repression?

Because the modernizing Arabs were all killed by the US, Britain, Israel, and the Saudis.

That was what happened in the North Yemen Civil War, from 1962-1967. After a coup, Nasser backed modernist Yemeni officers against the new Shia ruler. The Saudis might not have liked Shia, but they hated secularist, modernizing nationalists much more. At least the Northern Shia kings ruled by divine right and invoked Allah after their heretical fashion. That was much better, to the Saudi view, than a secular Yemen.

And the west agreed. To the Americans of that time, “secular” sounded a little bit commie. To the British, it sounded anti-colonial and unprofitable. To the Israelis, it raised the horrible specter of an Arab world ruled by effective 20^th-century executives. States like that might become dangerous enemies, while an Arab world stuck in religious wars, dynastic feuds, and poverty sounded wonderful.

Why do you think the IDF has not attacked Islamic State or Jabhat Al Nusra even once?  (Or said anything, let alone attack the Ukrainian Nazis?—Eds)

So all the factions we call “The West” jumped in to destroy these Yemeni officers: British commandos and pilots, Israeli military advisors, CIA bagmen, NSA geeks, and mercenaries from all over the world.

That was the all-star lineup fighting “for Allah and the Emir,” as the idiots at Time Magazine enthused in a 1963 article.

And of course that lineup won easily, against a clique of officers and a half-trained Egyptian expeditionary force. Egypt lost something like 25,000 soldiers in Yemen; you don’t fight a British/Saudi/American/Israeli/Islamist/Royalist coalition like the one they were facing without losing big. After the Six-Day War in 1967, when it lost the Sinai, Egypt had no interest in bothering about Yemen and called its surviving troops home.

If you look at a control map of Northern Yemen in 1967, when the war ended with Egypt’s total defeat, you see that the Egyptian forces and their Yemeni allies still controlled some of the southern areas around Taiz (which was just taken by the Houthi last week), while the Royalists, the conservatives, controlled all of Saada Province and the north, the areas across from Najran.

So the Houthi, whose core strength perfectly maps the Royalists’ areas of control in 1967, draw their strength from these same conservative areas. As for the modernist, secular Yemenis, they’re just gone. Emigrated, or died, or saw their children seduced by the madrassi.

Fidel with Egypt’s Nasser. A moment of ascendancy for anti-colonialist forces.

That scenario was repeated all over the Middle East during the Cold War, and it has a lot to do with how messed up the place is now. “For Allah and the Emir”; when Time ran that headline in 1963, that slogan sounded quaint and kind of touching. . . . It sounded like a nice alternative to Nasser, nationalism (and its much more dangerous corollary, nationalization) or, worse yet, Communism.

So the West put its weapons and its money in on the side of “Allah and the Emir” over and over again, against every single faction trying to make a modern, secular Arab world, whether on the Nasserite, Ba’athist, Socialist, Communist, or other model.

It worked very well . . . or badly, if you prefer. It left Yemen festering, like most of the Arab world, with a weak royalist regime in the north and an even weaker socialist state in Aden. In 1990, after the collapse of the USSR, that southern Yemen state dissolved, taking the last of its fading “socialist” posters and slogans with it. Yemen was reunited, in theory; a poor, sectarian, anti-modern nightmare state.

By that time, “For Allah and the Emir” was pretty much the only slogan anywhere in the Arab countries. It had gone from quaint and quirky to universal. The only option left was to choose which version of Allah, and which corresponding emir, you were going to back.

The Houthi are as conservative and devout as the Saudis who are using every plane they’ve got to bomb them at the moment.

In fact, their favorite poster is a devoutly blood-thirsty souvenir of Tehran in the Khomeini years:

God is great.

Death to America.

Death to Israel.

A curse upon the Jews.

Victory to Islam.

Of course, the Houthi, as Shia, worship the wrong version of Allah, from the Saudi perspective. But that didn’t bother the Saudis, or the Americans, or the British, or the Israelis, back in the 1960s when they all joined hands (in a very non-peace-and-love way) to wipe out the modernizing Yemeni.

Arabs are reduced to choosing which Allah and which Emir to support because a half-century alliance between the worst oligarchies in the West and the most reactionary elements in their countries wiped out the alternative. That’s why it’s so grotesque to hear right-wingers blaming the Arabs for the lack of commitment to democracy and even more ridiculous that Leftists demand respect for fascist thugs like Islamic State, as if they were the voice of the Muslim people.

These sectarian wars are what’s left when you’ve killed everybody else who was attempting to provide Arabs with an effective, secular, modern existence.

Gary Brecher is the War Nerd.  

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Andrew Korybko
Devious and corrupt to the core, the Saudis are betting that sectarianism is the ‘cure’ to combating the Houthis’ ‘democratic disease’ in Yemen.

 © AFP 2015/ FAYEZ NURELDINE

The Gulf NATO of the GCC has expanded into a wider Arab NATO through the inclusion of Egypt in the Saudi-led War on Yemen.

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]audi Arabia has used its attack on Yemen and the success of its anti-Iranian regional propaganda to create an Arab NATO, which is actually serving as one of the US’ most important Lead From Behind proxies. Combining the false myth of a secret Iranian ‘invasion’ of Yemen (which is non-coincidentally presented like the phantom Russian ‘invasion’ of Ukraine) with heightened sectarian rhetoric, Riyadh purposely scared its allies and indebted states into hurriedly rushing into a formal alliance under its leadership. While it still needs time to more fully integrate amongst its core Gulf and Egyptian components, the danger remains that if it’s ‘successful’ in Yemen (which Nasser’s disastrous war there in the 1960s proves will be extremely difficult to pull off), then the ‘Mideast Axis of Evil’ might set its sights on Syria next.

The Banker Pulls The Strings

Egypt’s incorporation into Saudi Arabia’s sphere of influence, despite it being much more populous and militarily stronger, is the result of the billions of dollars that the GCC has given al-Sisi since he came to power. Thus far, there has been over $20 billion in general aid and another $12 billion promised for ‘New Cairo’, Egypt’s plan for building a new capital, although there could be potentially much more that was covertly bequeathed in the past year and a half. All of this money has come with a price, however, since Egypt is now active in the War on Yemen, despite its catastrophic history of involvement in the country during the 1960s North Yemen Civil War, and has surprisingly even offered to send ground troops into the country if need be. The only reason that al-Sisi would smack the memory of the over 20,000 Egyptian soldiers that died in Yemen under Nasser and betray Egypt’s fundamental national interests by becoming the House of Saud’s ‘pit bull’ is simply because of the billions of dollars that he has received from them. Thus, the oft-mentioned phrase ‘beware of Greeks bearing gifts’ (in reference to the Trojan Horse of millennia prior) should be contemporarily modified to ‘beware of Gulf Sheikhs bearing gifts’.

[box] Speaking during the daily briefing session in Riyadh on the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen, Brig. Gen. Ahmed Asiri said that the coalition also targeted the air defense systems of the rebels.

(Al Arabiya)

Asiri also said the coalition has also intensified air strikes on roads leading to Aden. The spokesman spoke about the success of the military operations against the Houthis on all levels and said that the coalition would continue until it meets its objectives. [/box]

Manufacturing Sectarianism

The Saudi virus of sectarianism was already present in Yemen prior to recent events, but it was never the dominant engine of conflict in the war-torn country. The reason it’s become a key word in the current war has to do with the success of Saudi and Israeli propaganda in convincing the region and the world at large that Iran is utilizing Shia-affiliated militias to control the Mideast, even though that isn’t the case. This narrative is very convenient for the Western mainstream media and its political leaders’ designs for the region, and unfortunately, even certain non-Western media outlets have naively fallen for this ruse, which is especially evident when they emphasize that the Saudi-led Arab NATO is composed of Sunni-majority countries fighting against the Shia-affiliated Houthi movement. Taking the story even further, they broadly speculate that Iran is supporting the Houthis, using the same flimsy circumstantial/demographic arguments that have been deployed when imagining the massive non-existent Russian support for the Eastern Ukrainian Republics’ war against Kiev. To this day, not a single Russian tank has ever been found in Ukraine, and it’s likely that no proof of similar Iranian involvement will ever be found in Yemen either.

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ut there’s a strategic reason that the Saudis have clouded their actions in Yemen around sectarian rhetoric, aside from the political one, and it’s that they’re desperate to divide the Yemenis between themselves in order to stop the Houthis. The whole reason that this demographic minority has been able to achieve such astounding military success in Yemen is because they represent the majority of its citizens who have historically felt disenfranchised by the corrupt ruling authorities. They support the Houthis not because of their Shia identity (which contrasts with many Yemenis’ Sunni one), but because of their pro-democracy and poly-political/confessional/ethnic promises of governance. This is what explains why the citizens of Aden rose up in trying to expel Hadi and his supporters, and thus setting off the trigger for the Saudis’ rushed conventional intervention in propping up their puppet. Riyadh is betting that sectarianism is the ‘cure’ to combating the Houthis’ ‘democratic disease’ in Yemen, and it alternatively hopes to use the ‘Iranian-supported Shiite-destabilizer’ lie to justify its forthcoming crackdown on protests within the Kingdom that are bound to occur if the death sentence against jailed Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr is carried out.

Formalizing The Obvious

The Arab League just announced that it will be creating a unified military force, which confirms the abovementioned analysis that Saudi Arabia has achieved an Arab NATO through its War on Yemen. There’s a peculiar international division of labor within this military bloc that needs to be directly addressed:

Weapons:

These are overwhelmingly provided by the US to Egypt and the GCC.

Troops:

Egypt will provide the brawn and cannon fodder for when the going gets tough.

Financing:

Saudi Arabia is expected to bankroll most of the nascent organization (either overtly or covertly).

Recognition:

The Arab League’s rubber stamp on the organization gives the outside world the misleading façade of regional acceptance, although Syria was obviously excluded from this process and Iraq has voiced its serious reservations.

Strategy:

This regional behemoth is anticipated to satisfy the tripartite strategic goals of the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.

Concluding Thoughts

The Arab NATO is without a doubt centered on pushing back against perceived Iranian influence and destroying Resistant & Defiant states like Syria that contravene Washington’s preferred unipolar order in the region. The ultimate goal is to use the War on Yemen to deepen the military integration between the members of the ‘Mideast Axis of Evil’ prior to its eventual deployment against Syria in directly pursuing regime change.

The only thing that can realistically prevent this would be if al-Sisi ever attempts to free his country from Saudi control and reassert Egypt’s multipolar independence, but such a move would be extremely challenging to even initiate considering the overpowering influence that Saudi capital has over Cairo and the implicit militant threat that it wields in the Sinai. One should always keep in mind that ISIL and militant Islam’s ideology was birthed by the official Saudi state ideology of Wahhabism, which Riyadh strategically applies as a Sword of Damocles over the head of its international subordinates.

If al-Sisi ever gets out of line, he would have to contend with the realistic propability that the Saudis would pump loads of Wahhabist propaganda and (covert) preachers/activists into Egypt (and specifically the Sinai) with the intent of fomenting an extremist disturbance and terrorist activity. The irony about Egypt’s participation in the Arab NATO is that al-Sisi was extremely sensitive to the activities of the Qatari-supported Muslim Brotherhood, but he immediately jumped in bed with the Saudis who basically do the exact same thing but with different groups and different names. Still, judging by the development of current events, it doesn’t seem likely that he’ll rebel against his Saudi masters anytime in the near future.

CROSSPOSTED WITH SPUTNIK NEWS, A FRATERNAL SITE. 

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Ukrainian POWs being paraded through Donetsk’s main thoroughfares, bowed heads in humiliation. The US-supported and created Kiev regime has been trying to wage an ethnic-cleansing war against Eastern Ukrainians that reject its neofascist rule, but the campaigns have not fared too well due to lack of morale and superior fighting ability of the newly independent republics. (RIA/Novosti)

King Saud, the founder of the Saudi royal mafia. Why American leaders kiss the ass of these medieval brutes is anyone’s guess. They could be easily overthrown just like any other nation.

A little-noticed news story in Al-Monitor, on 27 January 2015, from Bruce Reidel, reported that, “Feb. 14 marks the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the US alliance with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. On Feb. 14, 1945, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with King Abdul-Aziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud in Egypt and the two forged a partnership that has endured despite occasional severe strains for the last 70 years.” Reidel went on:

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[dropcap]I[/dropcap] never expect much from the U.S. mainstream media, especially when it comes to the Middle East, but still I’ve been genuinely shocked by the sorry coverage of the conflict surrounding Iran’s nuclear program and Netanyahu’s recent speech to Congress.

As other critics have already pointed out, the biggest problem is not so much what the media have been reporting as what they leave out: not just critical perspectives, but also undisputed facts that are essential to understanding the situation. See, for example, “Somebody Needs to Tell The NY Times: Israel Has The Bomb,” by TimesWarp’s Barbara Erickson and “What Was Missing From Coverage of Netanyahu’s Speech” by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting’s Jim Naureckas.

But for me, beyond the New York Times website, my main exposure to the mainstream media is National Public Radio, and I haven’t seen any detailed analysis of its handling of the Iran nuclear issue. I’ve had the impression that its coverage has been at least as bad as the print media’s, but I don’t listen to all of its news broadcasts, so to be sure to be fair, I’ve spent the last few days burrowing through transcripts of past broadcasts at the NPR website. (The audio archives and transcripts there don’t include the network’s top-of-the-hour headlines, just the regular segments from Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and other NPR-produced shows, but there’s no reason to think the short headlines are much different from what’s archived.)

What I found was even more appalling than I’d anticipated. Not that there’s been a lack of attention – on the contrary, just in the last 30 days (through March 15) the network’s two daily newscasts – Morning Edition and All Things Considered – have a run a total of 23 segments containing both the words “Netanyahu” and “Iran.” But even with all that coverage, here are some of the things NPR hasn’t found time to tell its listeners:

Israel has nuclear weapons.

If NPR is where you get your information about the current debate, you’d have to be a longtime listener with a good memory to know that Israel, the chief proponent of aggressive efforts to block any nuclear programs in Iran, itself already has a bulging arsenal of nuclear weapons.

A decade or two back, following Mordechai Vanunu’s revelations, the network seemed to accept the existence of Israeli nuclear weapons as more or less established fact, even as it noted Israel’s policy of “strategic ambiguity.” Then in 2010 All Things Considered host Robert Siegel briefly interviewed Avner Cohen, author of two excellent books on the Israeli nuclear program, after President Obama referred obliquely to that program. Two years later, on the now-discontinued Talk of the Nation show, Yale professor Paul Bracken, author of “The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the New Power Politics,” commented on Israel’s nukes, among others.

In October 2013, Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep, in an interview with Netanyahu, raised and even pressed the issue of Israel’s nuclear weapons, its refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the double standard that condemns Iran’s nuclear program but ignores Israel’s. All that is to Inskeep’s credit, even if he posed these questions indirectly, as ones coming from the Middle East not from him, and ultimately let the Israeli leader wriggle away without actually answering them.

But in the 17 months since then, even as Israel and the Israeli lobby have driven the question of Iranian nuclear development to the very forefront of American and international politics, and Netanyahu has warned a cheering U.S. Congress of a Middle East “crisscrossed by nuclear tripwires. A region where small skirmishes can trigger big wars would turn into a nuclear tinderbox…. a Middle East littered with nuclear bombs and a countdown to a potential nuclear nightmare.”

NPR has not found the time to remind his listeners that the region has in fact faced all those threats for decades – from the very government that professes such anxiety about Iran’s non-existent weapons.

Granted, the very fact that Israel has had nukes for so long means that they’re not considered news, but surely they are an important part of the context listeners need when trying to assess the campaign Netanyahu and his minions are leading. Yet even in stories where it would be perfectly natural to note the double standard, such as 2013 piece by Emily Harris entitled “Israelis Disagree On How To Keep Iran From Nuclear Weapons,” this fundamental fact is left unspoken.

Neither U.S. nor Israeli intelligence agencies believe that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.

In 2007 – that is, under George W. Bush, not Obama – the U.S. government startled the world by releasing a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) – a type of document said to be “the U.S. intelligence community’s most authoritative and coordinated written assessment of a specific national-security issue,” reflecting a consensus of the 17 largest U.S. agencies in that community- called “Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities.” “Key Judgment A” began: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” Even though it went on to say “we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapon,” the document sent shockwaves through Washington and around the world, because it flatly contradicted the increasingly bellicose warnings that had been emanating from the Bush administration, as well as from Tel Aviv, for years. It was big news, and NPR, appropriately, ran a slew of stories about it. (Just where the pre-2003 Iranian nuclear program was headed is a topic of considerable debate, but here the point is that U.S. intelligence unanimously concluded that it ended in 2003.)

Since then, however, the network seems to have forgotten this momentous document, even though U.S. officials have reaffirmed its conclusions several times. The last reference to it, direct or indirect, that I could find in the transcripts came in May 2012. And on All Things Considered in January 2013, reporter Tom Gjelten blithely informed listeners that “U.S. intelligence agencies say it’s not clear whether Iran intends to develop a nuclear weapon,” without mentioning the those same agencies continued to believe that Iran at that point had had no weapons program for a decade.

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Gareth Porter on RT. Truthtellers need not apply. (Screengrab)

All the evidence indicates that the spooks still hold that no such program has existed has existed since 2003, and you’d think that assessment – and the fact that it was arrived at under the Bush, not the Obama, administration – would bear repeating regularly amidst the frenzy stirred up by Netanyahu, the lobby, and their GOP allies about Iran’s supposed nuclear ambitions. Unfortunately, it’s no longer mentioned on NPR.

As for Israel, Al Jazeera and the Guardian last month revealed that during the same month that Netanyahu warned the United Nations General Assembly that Iran could have a nuclear bomb within a year or less, Israeli intelligence judged that Iran “does not appear to be ready” to enrich uranium to the levels necessary for nuclear weapons. That report, based on official documents the Mossad, Israel’s equivalent of the CIA, sent to South Africa, was almost as surprising as the U.S. government’s 2007 turnaround. How did NPR handle the story? It didn’t: so far, the network has said not a word about the leak. Granted, no news outlet likes having to cover a competitor’s scoop, but when a story is important enough, most major publications swallow their pride and do so, as the New York Times, the BBC, CNN and many others did in this case. (Interestingly, the Washington Post apparently joined NPR in refusing to report the story at all.)

Iran signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its nuclear facilities are subject to regular international inspections, while Israel refuses to sign the treaty or allow any outside inspection of its nuclear installations.

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]lose listeners to NPR might be aware that Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the international agreement that’s supposed to regulate the spread of nuclear technology, because the network’s reporters have mentioned this fact on several occasions. (Sometimes, though, this information mysteriously disappears. The web version of an October 14, 2013 story by Geoff Brumfiel called “Are Iran’s Centrifuges Just Few Turns From A Nuclear Bomb?” included this statement: “Iran is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an international agreement that allows nations to develop nuclear technology as long as they don’t build a bomb.” That statement is missing, however, from the version broadcast on All Things Considered. An innocent trim to save a few seconds? Perhaps, but the broadcast version is nearly as long as the web one, and that sentence appears to be the only substantive information that was cut.)

Listeners might even know that as a signatory to the NPT, Iran is subject extensive inspection of its nuclear facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). While NPR has reported endlessly on claims that Iran has hidden some of its facilities from the inspectors (claims I’m not taking any position on), it has also reported that, for example, “the IAEA has cameras installed at most of Iran’s enrichment facilities” and even “the uncomfortable fact that of all the signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran is the most inspected country on earth.”

What listeners definitely won’t hear, however, is where Israel stands in comparison: aside from Inskeep’s vain effort, cited above, to get Netanyahu to address the question of double standards, I could find no report on NPR pointing out the supreme irony of the whole current crisis: a state that has repeatedly attacked neighboring countries, is known to be armed with advanced nuclear weapons, has never signed the non-proliferation treaty, and won’t allow even its ally the U.S. to inspect its nuclear facilities is attempting to convince the world that Iran, a country that has invaded no one for centuries, has no nuclear weapons and no nuclear weapons program, has signed the NPT, and is already subject to extensive international inspections, is the one that “poses a grave threat, not only to Israel, but also the peace of the entire world.”

One small indication of the problem: if you search the NPR archives for “Natanz,” “Fordow,” or Bushehr – the locations of Iranian nuclear facilities – you’ll get scores of hits. But search for “Dimona,” the site of Israel’s main nuclear facility, and you’ll get only a handful of references. Most are from the discontinued Talk of the Nation; in fact, the place in the entire NPR archive where the question of inspections at Dimona is raised is in a 2011 call to TotN from “John in Flagstaff.”

There are only two links to Dimona on the network’s flagship news broadcasts: a 2008 All Things Considered report about a suicide bomber blowing himself up in one of the city’s shopping areas and a 2010 Morning Edition story that’s actually about solar energy in the Mojave Desert in California, but is illustrated on the web with a photo of mirrors from a solar thermal plant outside Dimona!

Netanyahu has been issuing the same hysterical warnings about Iran for more than 20 years.

Netanyahu has been making essentially the same case he made to the U.S. Congress this month since the 1990s. The record is nicely summarized by reporter Murtaza Hussain in a post for The Intercept aptly titled “Benjamin Netanyahu’s Long History of Crying Wolf About Iran’s Nuclear Weapons: In 1992 the then-young politician told Knesset colleagues that Iran was “three to five years away” from nuclear weapons; three years later, when he wrote a book called “Fighting Terrorism”, it was still three to five years away; in 1996, when he first addressed a joint session of Congress, it was “extremely close;” and so on.

Being reminded of that history would help listeners evaluate how seriously to take the Israeli leader’s current warnings, but they haven’t heard much about it on NPR. The only suggestion that I could find in the archives that we’ve heard it all before came from the March 7 edition of the comedy show Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me, when host Peter Sagal described the scene in Congress before Netanyahu’s most recent performance there:

SAGAL: Bibi, as his friends call him, Netanyahu. It was nuts. Total frenzy in the Congress. Republicans were lined up for days outside the chamber. People were actually scalping tickets. Republicans – old-school Republicans – were showing off their worn, black tour T-shirts from the time Bibi spoke in Congress about how Iran was months away from getting a nuke back in 1996. Of course, back then, he was just opening for Hootie & the Blowfish.

The Israel lobby is the key force behind the Congressional opposition to a negotiated deal with Iran; Sen. Tom Cotton in particular is their man.

Bad as it is that NPR doesn’t tell us so much we need to know about Iran and Israel, what’s worst is what it’s not telling us about Washington: specifically, that from the start the whole uproar about Iran’s nuclear work has been ginned up and manipulated by Israel and the Israel lobby.

As always, NPR’s reporters focus all their attention, and thus their listeners’, on the party-political (Republicans vs. Dems) dimension of the controversy – John Boehner engineering the invitation to Netanyahu to snub Obama, Tom Cotton and his GOP colleagues sending their letter to Iran to undermine John Kerry’s diplomacy, and so on – and never looking behind the curtain to identify the forces pulling the puppet strings. The network hasn’t even mentioned that Boehner’s invitation to Netanyahu was arranged in collusion with Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer, a fact widely reported in other media. For the last week, since the release of 47 senators’ letter, it’s been all over Morning Edition and All Things Considered, and the other day reporter Ailsa Chang did a profile entitled “Tom Cotton: The Freshman Senator Behind The Iran Letter.” She even found a Harvard professor to interview about his memories of Cotton in his political philosophy class, but never mentioned the role of key lobby operatives William Kristol, Dan Senor, and Jennifer Rubin in launching his political career, nor the amply documented fact that his major sources of campaign funding have been billionaire Israel advocates Sheldon Adelson, Paul Singer, and their friends in the Republican Jewish Coalition, as well as Kristol, his family, and his Emergency Committee for Israel. (See note below.)

The problem is not that NPR never talks about these folks. Adelson, at least, has been mentioned on the air at least nine times in the last year – in relation to presidential campaign spending, his plans to open a casino in Japan, a hacker attack on one of his casinos, his heavy spending to defeat the legalization of marijuana in Florida and to stop Internet gambling – just not in relation to Israel, even though his friend Newt Gingrich had previously explained to NPR that that country is “the central value in [Adelson’s] life.” Nor does the network explain that Adelson is a personal friend of Netanyahu, his chief foreign funder, and the owner of Israel Hayom, the Bibi-boosting newspaper that’s now Israel’s most widely read – largely because Adelson pays for it to be given away free.

In that light, it’s hardly a surprise that the network made no mention of the presence of Adelson and his Israeli wife Miriam at Netanyahu’s recent speech – even though Bill Moyers, the most esteemed of public broadcasters, began his commentary on it this way: “Everything you need to know about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress Tuesday was the presence in the visitor’s gallery of one man – Sheldon Adelson. ”

The one NPR story I could find that even hints at Adelson’s real power in Washington was a Peter Kenyon piece headlined “Will Hard-Line Critics Scuttle Iranian Talks?,” which sounds as if it might have aired this week but was actually broadcast on Morning Edition in October, 2013. Citing the casino magnate as his example of “pro-Israel hardliners who make Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s dire warnings sound tame,” Kenyon played a soundbite – taken from Mondoweiss, which he identified by name – of Adelson suggesting that the U.S. drop an atomic bomb on an Iranian desert, then say “See? The next one is in the middle of Tehran.”

The very next sentence of Kenyon’s report, however, shows the superficiality of the analysis NPR apparently wants to project: “Analysts say it’s not the super-hawks who are the biggest worry, though, but the U.S. Congress.” In context, it’s pretty clear that by “super-hawks” he was referring to “pro-Israel hardliners” like Adelson, but by contrasting that group and the Congress, Kenyon obscures the plain and important truth: the politicians joining the effort to scuttle the negotiations were responding to guidance, pressure, and inducements coming from the “pro-Israel” crowd.

Kenyon didn’t use the phrase “Israel lobby,” but other NPR reporters do, with some frequency – just in a very particular sense. In years past, particularly in the wake of the release of Walt and Mearsheimer’s original paper on the lobby, then their book, the network showed at least occasional glimmers of openness to discussing the role of the lobby in all its glory – in 2006 Morning Edition dedicated a story to the their work and the debate it sparked; their original London Review of Books article was apparently even posted on the network website (no more, though a link to it on the LRB site remains); both authors were interviewed on Talk of the Nation in 2007, and Walt came back alone to the same show in 2009, after Osama Bin Laden recommended their book in a taped message.

In recent years, however, there’s been no reference to the lobby in the broad sense in which Walt and Mearsheimer wrote of it. Now, the phrase appears only in reference to AIPAC, which is regularly tagged as “the pro-Israel lobby.” Clearly, that organization is by now too prominent to ignore entirely. Sometimes it’s even called “the powerful pro-Israel lobby.” But what’s never communicated is that AIPAC is only the tip of the spear, just the most visible element in a vast network that also includes countless other Israel-first organizations, think tanks, wealthy donors, pols, PACs, pundits, academics, and government staffers – not to mention media outlets.

This network reaches into every corner of American life. As everyone knows, it has no formal structure, and there are significant political conflicts within it. But collectively it sets – and actively enforces – tight limits on the range of opinion and policy options about Israel that are considered “responsible” and acceptable in our public life. That’s a central feature of American politics, especially inside the Beltway, but you don’t hear about it on NPR.

Usually, that is. But last week, amazingly enough, Morning Edition listeners got a glimpse of the truth – not directly from an NPR reporter, nor from a professional political analyst, but from a Palestinian permaculture specialist named Murad al-Khuffash, who lives in the West Bank village of Marda, in the shadow of the Ariel settlement. In an interview with Steve Inskeep, he complained that the world is doing nothing to stop Israel from withholding the taxes revenues due to the Palestinians. Inskeep asked why.

AL-KHUFFASH: Why? Because they control the White House. The lobby controls the White House

INSKEEP: When you said the lobby, they control the White House, what did you mean?

AL-KHUFFASH: The Zionist lobby or the Jewish lobby in America. Who controls the White House? They control the White House.

How did that ever get on NPR’s air? I can only guess that Inskeep and his bosses assumed listeners would dismiss Al-Khuffash as a crazy Arab caught up in delusional conspiracy theory. Me, I think the network should hire him to cover Washington. I’m not holding my breath, though.

Critical experts don’t get interviewed.

When the network seeks out analysts to comment on the Iran-nukes controversy, it never, or almost never, turns to those who are most critical of the U.S. approach and the Israeli role in shaping it, even though the experts I’m thinking of are close at hand (they all live and work inside the Beltway) and are indisputably among those best qualified to discuss these issues.

Gareth Porter: Porter, an award-winning independent “investigative historian” and journalist – and an outspoken progressive since the Vietnam War – has zeroed in more closely than any other scholar on the questions at the heart of the current public debate about Iran: is it actually trying to develop nuclear weapons? In his searing book “Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare” and in frequent online posts – including in recent weeks “The long history of Israel gaming the ‘Iranian threat’” and “The real story behind the Republicans’ Iran letter“- presents a richly detailed analysis of the lies, deception, manipulation, and omissions U.S. and Israeli officials have used over several decades to create a false narrative, which was then purveyed to the public through uncritical news media.

How often has Porter been interviewed on NPR? Exactly once, in a 2008 segment on Shiite militias in Iraq (and to add insult to injury the network’s transcript of that one identifies his comments as coming from “BLOCK” – presumably a confusion with host Melissa Block, though she and Porter don’t sound much alike!)

Trita Parsi and Reza Marashi of the National Iranian American Council: The National Iranian American Council is a D.C.-based non-profit that advocates for human rights and democracy and Iran but also against war and broad sanctions against Iran.

Parsi, its founder and president, got his Ph.D. for a dissertation on Israeli-Iranian relations at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and has written two highly pertinent books: “Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States” (2007), which won several mainstream awards, and “A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran” (2012). Marashi, the council’s research director, previously worked at the Office of Iranian Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.

Both used to be quoted from time to time on NPR, but, as best I can determine, Marashi hasn’t been on the air in more than two years, while Parsi was interviewed only once in 2014 (about the political and economic situation inside Iran and not at all this year.

The Leveretts: Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, a husband-wife team, have impeccable establishment credentials: Flynt, before leaving government service in 2003, served as Senior Director for Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council, on the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff, and as a senior analyst at the CIA. Hillary Mann Leverett, now a lecturer at American University and CEO of a “political risk consultancy,” served, among other roles, as Director for Iran, Afghanistan and Persian Gulf Affairs at the National Security Council and as a negotiator with the Iranians over Afghanistan, al-Qa’ida and Iraq during the early years of the G.W. Bush administration; under Bill Clinton, she was, among other things, Associate Director for Near Eastern Affairs at the National Security Council.

Between 2005 and 2012 they were interviewed quite often on NPR. But in January 2013 they published Going to Tehran, a book arguing for a broad rapprochement with Iran. Since then, as best I can tell, they haven’t been on NPR at all. (Their frequent appearances on more honest media outlets, such as RT and Democracy Now, are archived at their website, goingtotehran.com).)

Given the analyses offered by Porter and NIAC’s Parsi and Marashi – in particular, their willingness to point to Israeli machinations as a central element in the whole picture – it’s hardly surprising that NPR won’t let them near its mics to talk about the Iran issue, though of course a network actually devoted to truth or even just genuine diversity of opinion would do so. But extending the blackout on critical opinion to the likes of the Leveretts, despite their “national security” credentials, suggests to me – at the risk of being accused of “conspiracy theory” – that someone in authority NPR decided a couple of years back, as the crisis sharpened, that the network would no longer allow any authoritative voices that might undermine the official story of an Iranian threat.

On the other hand, NPR routinely interviews analysts from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) about Iran, among many other issues, without ever noting that WINEP is a spin-off from AIPAC, according to a former AIPAC official who was in the room when “the powerful pro-Israel lobby” decided it would be useful to create “an AIPAC controlled think-tank that would disseminate the AIPAC line but in a way that would disguise its connections.” Even NPR’s own ombudsman has called out the network on precisely this point – to no avail.

So much for NPR’s About-page boast that “always we dig, question, examine and explore. We never settle for obvious answers and predictable stereotypes.”

* * *

NOTE: Chang and other NPR reporters wouldn’t even need to do their own primary research to learn about Cotton’s funders – all they would need to do is a little googling, because others have already explored the question in detail. Mondoweiss.net, for one, has posted a series of articles summarizing the evidence collected by journalists for LobeLog, Huffington Post, and other sites: See, for example, “Senator who spearheaded letter to Iran got $1 million from Kristol’s ‘Emergency C’tee for Israel’,” “Neocon meteor Sen. Cotton is funded by Abrams, Adelson and Kristol and loves war a little too much,” and “Cotton’s rise was fueled by pro-Israel money– but ‘NYT’ and Matthews won’t tell you so.”

On lobby operatives as Cotton’s mentors and promoters, see Jim Lobe’s “OMG! Cotton is Kristol’s Protege,” Lobe and Eli Clifton’s “GOP’s Man of the Moment Promoted by RJC’s Singer and Adelson,” Paul Blumenthal’s “Republicans And Iran Deal Opponents Are Funded By The Same Mega-Donors,” Rubin’s 2012 column “Tom Cotton: No ordinary freshman congressman,” and a 2013 David Weigel post that originally had the title “Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard has a crush on Tom Cotton” until Slate changed it to “Rep. Tom Cotton (R-Weekly Standard).”

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[box] Henry Norr is a retired journalist, a radio-news junkie, and an activist for Palestinian rights, among other causes. [/box]

This is a crosspost with COUNTERPUNCH, which ran the first iteration.

[printfriendly]

What is $1 a month to support one of the greatest publications on the Left?

FELICITY ARBUTHNOT

Neocon criminal Susan Rice with fellow imperialists McCain and Obama, as seen by artist DonkeyHotey, via flickr.

“It’s really 19th century behavior in the 21st century, you just don’t invade another country on phony pretexts in order to assert your interests.” (Secretary of State, John Kerry, “Meet the Press”, 2nd March 2014.)

[dropcap]V[/dropcap]arious professional psychology sites  state succinctly: “Projection is a defense mechanism which involves taking our own unacceptable qualities or feelings and ascribing them to other people.”

Further: “Projection tends to come to the fore in normal people at times of crisis, personal or political, but is more commonly found in the neurotic or psychotic – in personalities functioning at a primitive level as in narcissistic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder”, opines Wiki.

With that in mind it is worth returning to the assault on Libya and the allegation by Susan Rice, then US Ambassador to the UN, in April 2011, that the Libyan government was issuing Viagra to its troops, instructing them to use rape as a weapon of terror.

However, reported Antiwar.com (1) MSNBC was told: “by US military and intelligence officials that there is no basis for Rice’s claims. While rape has been reported as a ‘weapon’ in many conflicts, the US officials (said) they’ve seen no such reports out of Libya.”

Several diplomats also questioned Rice’s lack of evidence suspecting she was attempting:  “to persuade doubters the conflict in Libya was not just a standard civil war but a much nastier fight in which Gadhafi is not afraid to order his troops to commit heinous acts.”

The story was reminiscent of the pack of lies which arguably sealed the 1991 US led Iraq onslaught – of Iraqi troops leaving premature babies to die after stealing their incubators. The story of course, was dreamt up by global public relations company, Hill and Knowlton Strategies, Inc., then described as the word’s largest PR company which had been retained by the Kuwait government.

The late president of Libya, Muammar al Gaddafi R.I.P. (Via Thierry Ehrmann, flickr)

A tearful hospital “volunteer”, Nayirah gave “testimony” which reverberated around an appalled world. It transpired she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to Washington and was neither a “volunteer”, “witness”, nor in Kuwait. Amnesty International obligingly backed up the fictional nonsense suffering lasting credibility damage.  However, as Libya two decades later, Iraq’s fate was sealed.

Susan Rice: part of a crop of amoral Neocon careerists that have polluted US foreign policy for several decades. As a sociopathic reactionary, she’s a disgrace to her race, too.

The US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice and Foreign Affairs advisor, Samantha Power, are credited with helping persuade President Obama to intervene in Libya. By the end of April 2011, Rice was also pushing for intervention in Syria, claiming that President Assad was: “seeking Iranian assistance in repressing Syria’s citizens …” In the light of all, she vowed (in pure Orwellian lingo): “The United States will continue to stand up for democracy and respect for human rights, the universal rights that all human beings deserve in Syria and around the world.” (Guardian, 29^thApril 2011.)

Looking across the world at the apocalyptic ruins of lives and nations resultant from America’s continuance in uninvited “standing up” for “democracy”, “human rights” and “universal rights” there are surely few who could not only silently weep.

Amnesty, perhaps “once bitten” not only questioned the Libya Viagra nonsense but denied it in categorical terms. According to Donatella Rovera, their Senior Crisis Response Advisor, who spent three months in Libya from the start of the crisis: “We have not found any evidence or a single victim of rape or a doctor who knew about somebody being raped.”(2)

Liesel Gerntholtz, heading Womens Rights at Human Rights Watch which also investigated the mass rape allegations stated: “We have not been able to find evidence.”

The then Secretary of State, Hillary “We came, we saw, he died” Clinton, was “deeply concerned” stating that: “Rape, physical intimidation, sexual harassment and even so-called ‘virginity tests’ “ were taking place not only in Libya, but “throughout the region.” Presumably leaving the way open for further plundering throughout Africa in the guise of bestowing “democracy”, “human rights” etc.

The world is buffeted and martyred by the arrogant criminality of a superpower wrapped in the thickest mantle of industrial-grade hypocrisy ever seen in modern history.  

Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court obediently weighed in telling a Press Conference of:  “ … information that there was a policy to rape in Libya those that were against the government. Apparently (Colonel Gaddafi) used it to punish people.” A bit of a blow for the impartiality and meticulous evidence of the ICC it might be thought.

A week after the bombing of Libya started in March 2011, Eman al-Obeidy burst in to a Tripoli hotel telling the international journalists there she had been raped. She was removed by Libyan security. Government spokespeople claimed she had mental health problems, was drunk, a thief, a prostitute, and would be charged with slander. The world sneered.

By June 2011 Ms al-Obeidy had ended up in Boulder, Colorado, US, granted asylum with remarkable speed, with the help of Hillary Clinton, according to US news outlets.

In November 2014 al-Obeidy, now known as Eman Ali, was arrested  “violating conditions of her bail bond and probation.” It was her third arrest. Prosecutors allege that she tested positive for opiates and alcohol. The probation and bail bond relate to an alleged assault case in a Boulder bar with Ms al-Obeidy-Ali accused of pouring drink over a customer and then lobbing a glass at her. (3,4) The trial is scheduled for 17^th February with the possibility of her asylum status being rescinded.

However, back to projection. It transpires that the Pentagon has been supplying Viagra to US troops since 1998. That year it spent $50 million, to keep troops, well, stiffened up: “The cost, roughly, of two Marine Corps Harrier jets or forty five Tomahawk cruise missiles …”(5)

By 2014 the cost of extra-curricular military forces frolics had risen to an astonishing $504,816 of taxpayers moneys. An additional $17,000-plus was spent on two further erectile enhancing magic potions.

The Washington Free Beacon helpfully estimated: “that the amount of Viagra bought by the Pentagon last year could have supplied 80,770 hours, 33 minutes, and 36 seconds of sexual enhancement, assuming that erections don’t last longer than the 4 hour maximum advised by doctors.”(6)

Surely coincidentally, on 14^th February, St Valentine’s Day, Joachim Hagopian released an article: “Sexual Assault in the US Military – More Rapists Attend the Air Force Academy Than Any Other College in America.” (7)

In a survey taken in 2012 “an unprecedented number” of over “26,000 incidents of unwanted sexual contact was reported by service men and women.” Further, weekly: “another high profile officer often in charge of reducing assaults was being investigated and charged himself.”

The US Air Force at Colorado Springs, writes Hagopian: “has more rapists on Campus than any other college in the country.”

But then the US military planners would seem to be sex and bodily function obsessed. In 1994 they contemplated releasing pheromones (a hormonal stimulus) against enemy troops: “to turn enemy soldiers into flaming love puppets whose objects of affection would be each other.” (8)

“While enemy troops were preoccupied with making love instead of war …” America’s finest could blow them to bits. This bit of military dementia was dubbed the “gay bomb.”

Also dreamed up have been halitosis, flatulence and vomit inducing chemicals to unleash on foes. Body function obsession clearly rules in  the armed forces, officially and unofficially.

Projection: “ … is more commonly found … in personalities functioning at a primitive level.” Indeed. And to think both Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi were labeled mad by such as these.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

[box]Felicity Arbuthnot is a freelance journalist who has visited Iraq 26 times since the 1991 Gulf War. She worked as senior researcher on the film Paying the Price—Killing the Children of Iraq, which investigated the devastating effect of United Nations sanctions on people of Iraq.

The film’s title refers to a statement by then US Secretary of State Madeline Albright in 1996 that the deaths of over half a million Iraqis as a result of embargo related causes was, “a hard price but the price is worth it.”[/box]

 NOTES

1.     http://antiwar.com/blog/2011/04/30/susan-rices-viagra-hoax-the-new-incubator-babies/

2.     http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/amnesty-questions-claim-that-gaddafi-ordered-rape-as-weapon-of-war-2302037.html

3.     http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news/libyan-political-refugee-living-in-boulder-charged-with-assault-arrested-again

4.     http://www.newsgb.com/local/libyan-refugee-iman-al-obeidi-sentenced-to-work-release-for-violating-probation-h60508.html

5.     http://articles.latimes.com/1998/oct/03/news/mn-28958

6.     http://the-raw-story.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/us-military-moral-bit-flaccid-pentagon.html

7.     http://www.globalresearch.ca/sexual-assault-in-the-u-s-military/5431157

8.     http://www.topsecretwriters.com/2014/12/7-strangest-non-lethal-technologies-explored-dod/

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