Tag Archives: McCain

The Foreign Oligarchs’ Demand for Senator McCain………

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There have been some reports that president Poroshenko of Ukraine has appointed Sen John McCain as an adviser. I commented on Twitter that maybe now the Nusra Front , the Al Qaeda franchise that leads the Syrian opposition, is trying to recruit him for Syria.

But wait, there may be more: new rumors that the Saudis are vying with the escaped general Hadi, former Yemeni president, to get the senator. They were all impressed with his travel prowess………

Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

 Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter [email protected]     

McCain’s Half-Empty Glass: Questionable Terms of Reference…….

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KuwaitCox2

Saw John McCain on MSNBC (Morning Joe). It was predictable: he did not add anything new to my knowledge. He never disappoints (me or his interviewer):

  • When asked about the Iran nuclear talks (P5+1) talks: he quoted Netanyahu (always of questionable veracity to the world on the other side of the Atlantic or the Pacific), Arab allies (Wahhabi powers Saudi Arabia, Qatari, UAE……… all true democracies).
  • When asked about Syria: insisted on his old mantra of no-fly zones, train more dubious current or future Wahhabi recommendations. Roll the dice again and see what comes up, maybe something better will happen than in the past (Al-Nusra, ISIS, Al-Sham, etc). He did not mention that the main US trained opposition group just joined Al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria today.
  • About Iraq. When asked about some towns freed from ISIS by Iraqi forces, he grumbled that there were also formerly-hostile Iraqi Shi’a militias who contributed. Always a half-empty glass.
  • He did praise Zbigniew Brzezinski, to his daughter, as a cold-warrior. He forgot to add that the Afghan campaign (against the Soviets and their Afghan allies) gave us modern Jihadism, then Al-Qaeda, then its ISIS offspring. That the Arab (and Turkish) intervention in Syria funded and enabled the growth of this new monstrous Caliphate.
  • Asked about Russia and Ukraine: send forces to Poland and the Baltic.
  • I didn’t hear anything about “liberated” Libya. Remember Libya that was liberated by McCain and Lieberman and Bernard-Henri Levy and Tony Blair (and NATO)? Or maybe I just subconsciously blocked it.

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter
[email protected]

No Turkish Delight in Syria: the Dilemma Beyond Kobani……..

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The Song of Istanbul, or——–> Turkish Delight

“Just a few kilometers away from the Turkish border, the war is raging. In the Kurdish city of Kobani, US jets bomb Islamic State positions while the town’s last defenders, equipped with more grit than guns, fight the jihadists on the ground. As the Turkish army impassively watches the deadly battle from its side of the boundary with Syria, it has opened its own mini-front on the outskirts of Suruç, a Turkish border city…………. The scene is prosaic and absurd…… Now that the city is being threatened with destruction by Islamic State Ankara is doing nothing to prevent it, and thus putting the future of Turkish-Kurdish reconciliation in danger — and domestic peace along with it……………”

In our native region we are obsessed with history, especially older history that spans the old Islamic Empire and goes beyond that to the Persian and Egyptian and other civilizations. Maybe it is so because the present is so dismal when compared to the distant past. Thus many Arabs have joked in recent years about a return of another not-too-distant era, a new Ottoman-less Empire with Caliph Erdogan as its leader.
Turkey probably did as much as anybody else to enable the ISIS and the Al-Nusra Front and other terrorist groups, to help them rise and thrive. Turkish help was essential for them to take hold of the Syrian uprising of 2011. It is true that the basic elements, the money, the weapons, and much of the volunteers came from among foreign Wahhabis, from the Persian Gulf to North Africa to Europe. But all these elements could not be of any use unless they reached Syria (and Iraq). Even Senator John McCain could not have snuck into Syria illegally without Turkish cooperation. Thus the role of Turkey in the past three years.

The Erdogan government believed some of the Gulf Arab and Western propaganda about an imminent early fall of the Al Assad regime in 2011. It gambled on that outcome and lost, and it has dug in deeper since. Now it seems that when the dust settles it may lose more than its expansionist Islamist face.

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

[email protected]