Comparing Cool Apple and a Genocidal Petroleum Oligarchy………

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Reports say that Apple Corporation (AAPL) has about $207 billions in cash (that was before the latest good results came out on Tuesday). All these beautiful useful gadgets, some necessary and some not so necessary, and some American technical ingenuity/creativity have made a lot of money for Apple during the past decade. They may use it to buy back shares, pay more dividends, expand into new products, or acquire subsidiaries.

Reports also claim that Saudi Arabia used to have over $700 billion in foreign exchange (Forex) reserves (its Sovereign Fund managed by its monetary agency SAMA).  All of it from oil revenues. These have probably been depleted by somewhere over $100 billion over the past two years, since the new regime of His Majesty King Salman Bin Abdulaziz and His Royal Highness the Crown Prince to the Crown Prince (and Minister of Defense) Mohammed Bin Salman came to power. The latter is the putative conqueror of Yemen: he has been pouring Saudi money and American (and British) bombs (cluster bombs and otherwise) all over the poor country of Yemen for seven months. With the goal of establishing a government to his liking in Sana’a.

Too much power and money can make even the most impotent of potentates blind to past history. All it takes is a tablespoon of foolish vanity, and the rich young Arab princes have plenty of that. Hence this new quagmire in Yemen, which promises to go on long after former president Hadi (Bin Zombie) evacuates his Riyadh hotel suite for wherever the hell he’ll end up. Long after Al Qaeda (the Saudi-led AQAP) expand their newly acquired territory in the South beyond Al Mukalla. Long after the Caliphate of ISIS expand their current use of the porous border to attack civilian Ismailite (quasi-Shi’a) inhabitants of Najran and Jazan.

Hence the new barely-veiled threats by Saudi officials of sending newly hired Arab and African (and Western?) mercenaries into Syria.

The IMF has noted that Saudi reserves could vanish within five years. That is possible if the funds are used at current rates and crude oil prices remain near current low levels. Especially if the need arises to buy public approval with new royal handouts. Especially if the princes continue their costly genocidal war on Yemen and expand their intrusion in Syria into an official military confrontation with their Iranian and Lebanese rivals, even if the “boots on the ground” are rented foreign mercenaries.

Hopefully their reckless policies do not doom the economies of the other Gulf states.

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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Sad Economic Dances: From Tango Argentino to Saudi Arabian Ardha………

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“من حفر حفرة لأخيه وقع فيها :Whoever digs a hole for his brother, he himself shall fall into itAn Arabic saying against treachery, based on a Hadith quote from the Prophet.

” Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer, needs to sell oil at around $106 to balance its budget, according to IMF estimates. The kingdom barely has enough fiscal buffers to survive five years of $50 oil, the IMF said. That’s why Saudi Arabia is moving fast to preserve cash. The kingdom not only raised $4 billion by selling bonds earlier this year, but its central bank has yanked up to $70 billion from asset management firms like BlackRock (BLK) over the past six months. After years of huge surpluses, Saudi Arabia’s current account deficit is projected to soar to 20% of gross domestic product this year, Capital Economics estimates. Saudi Arabia’s war chest of cash is still humungous at nearly $700 billion, but it’s shrinking fast…………”

Argentina evokes images of tango, soccer, gauchos…and an awful economy — one of the world’s worst. Its economy is projected to show little or negative growth this year. Argentina is still indebted to American hedge funds, affectionately known as “vultures” in the country. And it remains the poster child of nations that default on their loans. But there’s new optimism in Argentina, mainly driven by presidential elections coming later this year…………….”

In Argentina, the ruling party could win another term in run-off elections. But the Tango Argentino goes on.

Now to Saudi Arabia, where the princes like to force their Western visitors to mimic the native all-male Ardha dance for the cameras. From George W Bush to Prince Chuck of England they have all pretended t enjoy this dance. Only the Frenchmen, Sarkozy and Hollande, could not bring themselves to pretend that they want anything to do with it.

There is a great Arabic saying from the Hadith that ” من حفر حفرة لأخيه وقع فيها   whoever digs a hole for his brother, he himself shall fall into it“.

As I have opined recently, the Saudi princes had bought the fantasy that they can “control” crude oil markets. They thought they could engineer limited lower prices for political strategic goals. To punish the mullahs in Iran, Putin in Russia, and the North American shale industry. It worked well beyond their expectations, to the extent that Saudi Arabia faces economic disaster in a few years.  They probably never dreamed that prices will collapse to less than $50 (apparently the Saudis need oil prices to hover around $100/barrel).  Other Gulf GCC states can live with much lower oil prices than $100, but not the Saudis.

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If you look at the IMF chart, you’ll notice that the most corrupt most repressive of the Persian Gulf states require a higher price for crude oil to break even. These are the two countries to the right. Of course that could be just a coincidence, some may say “there is no correlation”.

However, the princes are fine. They take their cut first, from oil production and from huge military and civilian contracts. They keep on sucking the resources of the country and its people. Whatever reduction in their loot results from reduced oil prices they make up with commissions and kickbacks on even larger weapons contracts with the West.

Hopefully their reckless policies do not doom the economies of the other Gulf states.
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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War on Yemen: Assault by Rich Arab Princes and Poor African Rapists……

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Yemen has been under severe assault for almost eight months now. From the air, warplanes of Arab princes, the best machinery of war that the West can sell, are raining death and destruction on the poorest of Arabs. Now the princes have also bought or rented thousands of African/Arab mercenaries to do the ground fighting for them. Apparently too many casualties among the Gulf coalition soldiers (Saudi, UAE) in Aden have raised ‘concern’ among the peoples of these two countries.

The Saudis have already handed parts of Aden in Southern Yemen to mercenary Sudanese soldiers. These soldiers have been rented from the wanted international criminal Omar Al-Bashir, military dictator of Sudan for almost 27 years. Al-Bashir was convicted by the International Criminal Court years ago, but he keeps traveling at will across the Arab world. He met the Saudi king in recent days. His army excels in and is famous for rape and murder of unarmed civilians. Now he is being paid by the Saudi princes so that his army of rapists and killers can help control the city of Aden. These Sudanese soldiers are now technically allies of American and British forces that are involved over Yemen.
Arab media report that more Sudanese soldiers, a third wave, are heading to Aden. Saudi daily al-Hayat (owned by Prince Khalid Bin Sultan) quotes a senior adviser to the deposed Yemeni president General Hadi that mercenary Egyptian soldiers hired out from Al Sisi are also on their way.

I have some doubts about the veracity claim of this Egyptian role. Unless the price was raised to an offer that the ruling military could not refuse.

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter
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Syrian War: the Advantage of Gospodin Putin, Poisonous Straws for the West………

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Almost everybody who is anybody is involved in Syria now. Plus a few nobodies. The Western powers have been ‘in’ Syria since long before they started their tepid bombing of the terrorists of ISIS (DAESH, ISIL). Some Republican senators have also crossed the Turkish border into Syria for photo-ops, Western trained fighters have crossed from Turkey and Jordan, before handing their weapons to ISIS or Jabhat Al Nusra (I called them Jabhat Al Qaeda three years ago) and defecting to one or another Wahhabi Jihadist groups. Now we also have Jaish Al-Fath, whose name translates correctly into Army of Islamic Conquest, which some Westerners seem to pin their dwindling Syrian hopes on. A poisonous straw to cling to.

The Arab oil potentates of course entered Syria from the beginning in 2011, with money, weapons, and Wahhabi jihadists from the Persian Gulf states and now from across the globe. That is how the early Syrian protests were quickly taken over by the Islamist jihadists. The West commenced its own bombing campaign after the fall of Mosul and other towns in Iraq and the consequent piling up of mass sectarian and religious atrocities in Iraq and Syria.
But the Western bombing campaign has been “measured”, a polite way of saying it was half-assed (which is how I would describe it if I were rude and crude, which I’m not). It is seemingly aimed only at preventing the expansion of ISIS (DAESH), perhaps rolling it back in Iraq. But the goal in Syria seems to be to keep the status quo: for if ISIS is pushed back in Syria, only Assad and his foreign allies would gain. Or, worse, the Al Qaeda allies and offshoots among the various Jaish Al or Jabhat Al or Ansar Al. Keeping the status quo in a civil war and in a multi-faceted international proxy war is nearly impossible. Hence the tepid air campaign that failed to alter the situation on the ground in Syria. Until a few days ago, when Russia decided to upend this strategy which Mr. Putin probably sees as either wimpy or sly.
Now Gospodin Tovarish Putin has decided to join everybody else and also interfere into the Syrian War, but in his case more decisively and with some authority. He has the luxury of knowing who he supports and who he opposes. He wants to defeat the Syrian opposition, most of whom are genocidal Jihadists with many Russian Chechens among them. He wants a victory for the Assad regime and its allies, if he can get one.


Unlike the Western powers, his campaign is straightforward and focused because it does not seek to mollify rich Arab allies, oligarchs whom he needs to mollify with an indecisive and week air campaign. And unlike Mr. Obama, Mr. Putin has a tame Doma (house or parliament) that does not pounce on every move he makes.

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum
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Fibonacci and a Series of a Gaggle of Crown Princes all F(King)………

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“The Fibonacci Sequence: is a series of numbers. The next number is found by adding up the two numbers before it……….” Math is Fun

Saw headline by Saudi News Agency that the “Crown Prince to the Crown Prince” ولي ولي العهد has met with some Lebanese Druze warlord, and discussed regional whatever…..

This is probably a first in the world: an official titled crown prince to another titled crown prince. Just to keep the currently powerful branches of the family dynasty mollified if not satisfied. I tried to figure it out, or rather formalize it as an equation. Mathematically it could be:
Crown Prince= Crown Prince to the King= f(King)
Crown Prince to the Crown Prince= Crown Prince (Crown Prince to the King)= f(Crown Prince to the King))= f(f(King)). Some Math purists might prefer it as: g(f(king)).

Now suppose the family feud in Riyadh and Taif and Jeddah gets more complicated and more entangled among generations and various branches of the princes. There might be a Crown Prince to the Crown Prince of the Crown Prince ولي ولي ولي العهد . That would end up being: y(g(f(King))).

Meanwhile the bloody quagmire of the assault on Yemen continues and the self-inflicted budget deficit grows. There might be a serious split within the tribal ruling classes, one that is hard to cover up. So, it could also get worse, worse-r than the Fibonacci Sequence, but maybe not as long…………

P.S.: f stands for ‘function of'(…….). Nothing nefarious and no pun intended here. Honestly, cross my heart and hope to die.


Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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New Folly of Charlie Wilson and his Mistress: from the Stinger to the TOW………..

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In the 1980s the Reagan Administration decided to supply the Afghan Mujahideen with ground-to-air Stinger missiles with which to shoot down Soviet (Russian) helicopters/aircraft. Years later Hollywood gave “credit” for that policy, and presumably for the fall of Afghanistan to the Jihadists, to a Texas Congressman named Charlie Wilson and his influential Texan mistress (and to Tom Hanks).

The film Charlie Wilson’s War was made just a few years after the terrorist attacks of September 2001, but Hollywood has its own tunnel vision and did not see the irony lurking somewhere in the background of that story. Or, most likely, it was seen as inconvenient to paying suburban movie-goers to bring out the connection that was screaming out of the large screen. After all, that Stinger policy may have contributed to the eventual Soviet withdrawal and handing Afghanistan to a bunch of Islamist terrorists.
The civil war that ensued between the Mujahideen factions and Islamist tribal warlords destroyed more of Afghanistan than the Russian incursion/occupation. It culminated in the takeover of the Taliban and their Arab Wahhabi (Al Qaeda) paymasters. We all know the rest: the switching off the lights all over Afghanistan, terrorist attacks in Africa, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, other places, then in the USA, Europe, and Asia.


That was the Stinger. Now the Russians and Iranians are in Syria, in the air and on the ground. Just as the Saudis and their partners are in Yemen, in the air and on the ground. Now the TOW is being supplied to what are called “moderate” Syrian rebels. And I had thought all moderate Syrian rebels resided in Europe and North America by now. The American TOW is being supplied to counter a possible Russian-Syrian (and possibly Iranian) assault on the strongholds of the Jihadis in northern Syria. If this new weapon works, the likely beneficiaries will be the Jihadis of ISIS and Al-Nusra allies. It is almost certainly too late to revive the old moderate Syrian opposition in-country: the Wahhabi princes and petroleum potentates saw to that three years ago. With crucial Turkish cooperation by Caliph Erdogan, of course.
No doubt the Saudi, Qatari, and Emirati potentates are footing the massive bill.

But does history repeat itself? Can it be repeated? I know that mistakes can and are repeated, and too often.

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum
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Crude Oil Prices and Legitimacy in a Tribal Oligarchy………

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Several years ago, after one of Iraq’s convoluted elections, more foreign Arab Jihadis were flowing into that country, killing and maiming civilians, especially those of the Shi’a denomination. So did Wahhabi and Salafi money and weapons flow into Iraq, which was seen by the Wahhabis and their royal tribal potentates to have been “usurped” by the wrong people.

Some Saudi spokesmen, one of them worked at the time for the ambassador/prince/kleptocrat in Washington (he later moved on to Harvard), issued dire warnings, nay threats, via the Washington Post. They warned that they can roll back the growing Iranian influence in Iraq by destroying the Iranian (and presumably the Iraqi) economy. The method suggested was by flooding the world market with crude oil. At that time oil prices were high and Persian Gulf producers’ treasuries were flush with surplus cash. I wrote at the time on this site pointing out that the Saudi economy could not afford a sustained increase in crude production and lower prices.

They did not listen to me. In the past couple of years the princes took up the wrong advice: they started a deliberate policy of lowering crude oil prices, aimed at crushing the besieged Iranian economy and weakening the Russian economy (both allies of the Syrian regime, both supporters of Iraq). Like everybody else, they used oil as a political weapon. They probably also had the additional aim of weakening the shale industry in North America. Saudi production of crude oil increased and prices plummeted to much lower levels than they had expected (much lower than most observers expected).

They all waited with baited breath for the low price and the long Western economic blockade to bring the Iranian economy to its knees, for the Iranian Ayatollah to call the Saudi king and cry “uncle”. For Brig. Qassem Suleimani to be sent packing home and maybe for Iraq to be handed back to the former Baathists. Neither happened, but there is now an economic backlash, and possibly a political backlash brewing in the kingdom of no legal breweries.
The Saudi foreign exchange reserves are being depleted and they have now been forced to cut domestic spending (the princes still keep their cut of the oil revenues). Most Saudi citizens work for the state, in effect they are employed by the princes. There are no elections that would legitimize anyone in Saudi Arabia: so, money and patronage are the price of continued absolute one-family tribal rule. With revenues plummeting and foreign reserves being depleted, the main tool of legitimizing the avaricious ruling family has weakened for the second time since the 1990s.
Of course the security services are as strong as ever, in fact they are stronger than ever. That is how the princes have stimulated the economy: by hiring  tens of thousands of tribal members for the security services. The tame Wahhabi clerical establishment also toes the line and tries to do its part.

Now the Saudis face their second inevitable defeat in their adventure in Yemen (sooner or later). As the new quagmire in Yemen continues, with Saudi warplanes daily bombing civilian and other targets, the Western powers turn a blind eye to human rights violations as they compete to sell more weapons. The cost of the war also goes up: using and servicing and replacing state-of-the-art Western weapons is very costly. But it is one way of recycling the dwindling oil revenues and jiggling the balance of trade with the large industrial countries.

Tightening the belt may be wise economic policy, but it reduces the “legitimacy” of the ruling princes in the eyes of the tribes and many other citizens.

Expect more domestic trouble in the Arabian landmass that stretches north of Yemen and extends to humorless Jordan and western Iraq.

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter

The Fourth Rail of the West: Saudi Regime as the World’s Third Superpower………

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“Saudi Arabia enjoys a spectacular level of impunity from international accountability. This is not only because it has the world’s richest and largest royal family with influence spread far and wide. And it is not even just about oil, although having a quarter of the world’s pre-fracking energy reserves still engenders utmost deference from those many modern economies that will depend on Gulf oil and gas for as long as the precious black stuff lasts. However, the recent election of Saudi Arabia to the UN Human Rights Council, partly due to a secret vote swap with the UK, seems to have crossed a line. Mainstream eyebrows that have usually looked the other way when it came to the Saudi record on human rights have now been raised. And if that was not enough of an affront, the Saudi UN ambassador has just been selected to chair the influential Human Rights Council “consultative panel” that recommends to the president of the council a short-list of whom shall be appointed as Special Rapporteurs, including on such issues as rights of women, freedom of expression and religious freedom…………..”

When we were kids on the Gulf, a joke was making the rounds back home and in some foreign media. It quoted the late humorless Saudi King Faisal Al Saud that the world was not bi-polar, that there were in fact three superpowers: USA, USSR, and Kuwait. The king was quoted as making an uncharacteristic joke here, perhaps with a tinge of jealousy. At that time Saudi Arabia was not ‘rich’ yet, and Kuwait was the major oil producer and most advanced state on the Arab side of the Persian Gulf.

Now it almost seems that the new uni-polar world has several superpowers. That the Al Saud are often being treated by Western salesmen-leaders as one of them. If not, then they are at least considered untouchable by Western governments. In America they would be one addition to the untouchable issues of politics in Washington: perhaps a ‘fourth rail’ added to the ‘three rails’ of politics. Just look at the record:

  • They behead and crucify people in public, including common criminals, hapless foreign laborers, witches, warlocks, magicians, as well as members of the political opposition who are not of the Wahhabi faith. The only regime that does so with impunity. ISIS (DAESH) cutthroats are correctly criticized by official Western hypocrites when they do that. The Iranian regime is also rightly criticized by official Western hypocrites when it hangs people in groups, including drug dealers and others. But no official criticism is heard anymore, especially from the US, British, and French governments, of the more barbaric Saudi practices.
  • They ban all other religions and religious practices except Wahhabism. The Muslim Shi’a minority are third-class citizens at best, but they are barely tolerated and only because they were in the Eastern Province long before the Wahhabis conquered it during the last century. Only ISIS (DAESH) is more intolerant.
  • For months they have been bombing the poorest Arab country, Yemen, with the latest lethal weapons the Western governments can sell, including cluster bombs. They and their fellow tribal potentates and hired Afro-Arab mercenary regimes. No complaint or criticism is heard from Washington, London, or Paris. In fact I suspect that the targets (the victims) are often picked and located for them by Western intelligence and satellite technology.
  • This least democratic, most repressive and backward tribal regime is allowed the chutzpah of claiming to be working to bring democracy and free speech to other countries, especially Syria and Yemen.

Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter

Jizya: ISIS Tax Plan, Republican Tax Plan, Royal Tax Plan………

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A new twist on the current, and perennial, political (not economic) tax debate in the USA:
Reports tell us that the Wahhabi Islamic States (ISIS or DAESH)  has demanded the United States, as the leading Western power, should be ready to pay a special Jizya tax to their Caliph Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi. This Caliph was born  Ibrahim Al Samarrai, so I assume Al Baghdadi is his married name, as they do in the West.

So he wants Mr. Obama to pay the old Islamic Jizya tax that used to be imposed on non-Muslim subjects partly in order to exempt them from military service. That tax used to have some logic to it: you can’t expect a Christian citizen, for example, to join an army that fought to convert other Christians to Islam. So maybe the U.S. Congress, under a new old leadership, will take up this new ISIS tax plan. Nothing like the promised miraculous “tax cuts and a strong defense and protecting social security and reduced deficit” plan they have been pushing. Should be fun watching C-Span. Should also be fun watching the Republican (and maybe the Democrat) presidential candidates take up the issue in their endless sound-bite “debates”.

The Saudi princes and other regional potentates, unlike ISIS, do not directly tax their people and businesses. They apply what I would call a princely (royal) tax on the whole country. The numerous Saudi royal princes get first cut of the oil revenues, for just being who they are, for the accident of birth. They also get to expropriate public land at will. In recent years they have been destroying ancient Islamic monuments and converting them into parking lots, half-empty shopping malls, and luxury hotels and apartments for local potentates and others from neighboring oligarchies.
Not a bad racket……….

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter

New Umayyad Dilemma: From Russia to Syria with Love and Bombs?……….

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We have been ranting for almost four years here that the foreign Arabs have subverted the early Syrian uprising and contributed to turning it into a religious and sectarian bloodbath. That especially includes some Arab governments: Wahhabi regimes like Saudi Arabia and Qatar and other non-Wahhabi Persian Gulf governments that bowed to Salafi and Muslim Brotherhood pressure.
So Western powers and Persian Gulf potentates kept picking successive new leaders of Syrian “rebels”. These leaders kept failing, as expected here on these posts. Their early followers usually ended up joining the Wahhabi Jihadist cutthroats with their Western weapons.

The Turkish government was happy to help the growth of the Jihad in Syria (and Iraq) by expediting the flow of foreign weapons, money, volunteers, and accommodating women (harems). Now we have ISIS (DAESH) and Al-Nusra Front (Al Qaeda franchise) and Army of Islamic Conquest (Jaish Al Fath), among others as the only credible opposition in Syria.


So, the choice now is: serious negotiations with the Al Assad regime or the continued Jihad. Make no mistake about it: the Syrian struggle is now completely a “Jihad” to establish an Islamist Caliphate in Damascus. Except it will not be like the Umayyads who joined Islam out of political necessity after Mohammed (the original one) conquered Mecca. They will be true blue puritans: more doctrinaire, more corrupt, and less open than the early Islamic state.
Many foreign powers and regimes and forces are involved in Syria, from Americans to Europeans to small Arab states to Iran and Lebanon. So, why not Russians? Especially if they are sanctioned by Damascus? After all, the Russian Chechen Jihadis are among the leaders of the Jihadist side in Syria and Moscow does not look forward to their possible return home.
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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