Category Archives: Arabian Peninsula

Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, Arabian Peninsula, GCC, Saudi Arabia

A Rhetorical Arab Question: Where is the Oil Money………..

 

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“But the general trend is toward a hardening of rules. Prince Nayef, the crown prince and power behind the throne, believes this is no time to show weakness. Dissidents are detained or given travel bans, a favourite tactic of the regime in Syria until it started to use harsher methods in the past year. Media rules have also become tighter. No fly appears too small to warrant swatting. Hamza Kashgari, a young blogger, fled to Malaysia after posting provocative comments about the Prophet Muhammad. The government applied all available diplomatic pressure to have him returned. Emboldened senior clerics are asking for Mr Kashgari to be executed for blasphemy. Religion is at the heart of many conflicts. The volatile but oil-rich Eastern Province, home to many of the Sunni kingdom’s sizeable Shia minority, has witnessed frequent bouts of violent unrest in the past year. Two men were killed and several injured when police opened fire on a demonstration in February. In Qatif, the provincial capital, the walls of the main street are covered with graffiti insulting members of the royal family and asking, “Where is the oil money?”…………”


That graffiti question was rhetorical, no doubt. For whoever wrote it on that wall knows as well as I do where most of the oil money goes. The oil comes from the Eastern Province, Qatif and other areas, from the belly of the ancestral land of the same people who are treated like third or fourth class citizens in the Wahhabi ‘kingdom without magic’. But the money goes mostly to Riyadh, to a few thousand princes and their retainers and tribal sycophant. If in doubt as to who gets the oil money, this link here will clarify matter.
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, Arabian Peninsula, GCC, US Foreign Policy, Yemen

Electoral Democratic Joke: Yemen’s 99.8% Landslide, a F–king Big Deal………………

   

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The election results were typically Arab: the vice president of Ali Saleh, the man supported by the Saudis and the potentates of the GCC and the democratic Western powers won. He won with a modest 99.8% of the vote. He was the only candidate. Even Ahmadinejad won less than 60% in that disputed 2009 election in Iran (but Ahmadcinejad was not appointed by the Saudis and the West). It was like electing the King of Saudi Arabia or the ruler of Bahrain or Abu Dhabi. Now that is, to quote Joe Biden, a fucking big deal!

Here is what I posted about it before the vote results:
“Yemenis, including Tawakkol Karman, winner of the 2011 Nobel peace prize, go to the polls. Tuesday’s election is the fruit of a US-backed deal that eased President Ali Abdullah Saleh from power in exchange for immunity from prosecution over the alleged killing of hundreds of protesters. Saleh’s deputy, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, is the only candidate………..”

Tawakkol Karman: “This is a day of holy joy!”
This is a Nobel Laureate speaking.

Is the lady out of her blinking fundamentalist mind? Had she been chewing qat? A day of ”holy joy”? So they were forced by the neighboring potentates to vote for one man, maintaining the power of the old regime.

The GCC, with Western support, have saddled the Yemeni people with a continuation of the dictatorship. Of course the potentates of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf oligarchies would not want free choice for Yemen. So they have an election with one candidate! One candidate! Did anyone expect the Saudi princes to deliver democracy and freedom to the Yemeni people? When they refuse any mention of it to their own people? When you can vanish if you so much as mention freedom in Riyadh? And they call that travesty freedom? No wonder the Huthis and the Southerners are ready to resume their battle for whatever the hell it is they are seeking.
The Saudis, led by Field Marshal Khaled bin Sultan bin Technocrat bin Rommel were defeated militarily in Yemen. Their most expensively armed military was defeated by a ragtag tribal group armed with WWI and WWII weapons. Now they are trying to win their counter-revolution by diplomacy. It won’t work.
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, Arabian Peninsula, NATO, Syria

America Getting Ready to Liberate Syria from Itself: about Iraq and Libya and Maysaloon…….

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“As the violence in Syria spirals out of control, top officials in President Barack Obama’s administration are quietly preparing options for how to assist the Syrian opposition, including gaming out the unlikely option of setting up a no-fly zone in Syria and preparing for another major diplomatic initiative. Critics on Capitol Hill accuse the Obama administration of being slow to react to the quickening deterioration of the security situation in Syria, where more than 5,000 people have died, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. Many lawmakers say the White House is once again “leading from behind,” while the Turks, the French, and the Arab League — which sent an observer mission to Syria this week — pursue more aggressive strategies for pressuring the Assad regime. But U.S. officials insist that they are moving cautiously to avoid destabilizing Syria further…………..”


What is it about Arab opposition groups that they always beg for the West, their former colonial masters, to come back and rescue them from their own local dictators? This is becoming an unfortunate Arab phenomenon. Don’t they remember what happened with the Ottoman Turks and the British and the French? When the Hashemite rulers of Hijaz (original custodians of Mecca and Madinah and Jeddah) sought British help and got more than they bargained for? Do they remember the French and Faisal and Maysaloon?
First some Iraqi groups encouraged Western intervention against their repressive Ba’athist rulers. Then the Libyans did the same against Qaddafi. Now the Syrian ‘opposition’ groups want foreign intervention to liberate them.
Why do other peoples make their own revolution and these Arab “revolutionaries” insist on the easy way: Western forces and warplanes? Why can’t they do as the Tunisians and Egyptian did? Some of the same people who taunted the Iraqis for being “liberated” by Americans and British forces are now begging for American and British and French forces to kill their compatriots and liberate them. Even the Arab Saudi League is now seeking foreign intervention (in Syria but not in Bahrain).
Do you know why the peoples of Bahrain, Yemen, and Qatif don’t ask for foreign intervention against their repressive rulers? Do you know why the democracy-loving West is not offering or contemplating intervening in these countries (at least not on the side of the people)?
Cheers
mhg


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Arabian Peninsula, Britain, Saudi Arabia

Eternal Political Triangle: the Arab King, the Gipper, and Iron-Pants Maggie…..

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I read something recently that reminded me of an old story from the Gulf region. During the 1980s the late King Fahd was ruling Saudi Arabia, and Margaret Thatcher was “ruling” great Britain. The Saudi king had not yet given himself, usurped, the new title of “Servant of the Two Holy Shrines”. That title used to belong to the Hashemites until the al-Saud invaded Hijaz and evicted them north (sort of like the Jewish tribes of Khayber) in the 20th century. They probably did that with the connivance of the British, who were the supreme power in the Middle East. I recall there were stories around the Gulf that the king had a crush on the Iron Lady, that he went so far as to compose verses in admiration of her, comparing Thatcher’s red cheeks to apples (supposedly his words). Or maybe it was just lust since these princes are probably not raised like normal people. Maggie, of course had her heart filled with two: Ronald Reagan (she never called him Gipper or Gipp) and Dennis Thatcher (probably called him hey you), possibly not necessarily in that order.

I used to have my doubts about that story, although not many things surprise me about some of these potentates. I still doubt it, not that it matters. Now wtf kind of masochist, even an absolute king, would have wanted to be hand-bagged by old “iron-pants” Maggie?
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arabian Peninsula, Economics, Finance, GCC, Gulf states, Jordan, Persian-American Gulf, Saudi Arabia

Saudi Leadership of GCC: Three Major Failures, Three Strikes but not Out, not yet……..

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The GCC summit of the Gulf states this week again proved the failure of the shaky type of leadership the Saudis have tried to impose. This last summit marks three major “projects” that have failed.

  1. The GCC leaders gave the usual lip service to the ‘latest’ Saudi proposal that they should work toward some form of a political union. Gulf Salafis and Saudi media had been calling for a “confederation” since Bahrain joined the Arab revolutions in February. The leaders decided to start discussions and talks about that in the future, which is the usual way to kill any proposal.

  2. With this Saudi suggestion for a confederation dead on arrival (DOA), the leaders turned their attention briefly to killing another earlier strange Saudi proposal. They quickly killed the earlier Saudi proposal to allow Jordan and Morocco to join the GCC. They agreed to allow some form of limited “partnership” for Jordan and Morocco (I hate to say I told you so, but these people don’t listen to me anymore: that is what I predicted here, more than once). The potentates also voted US$ 5 billion in aid for the two countries to ease any disappointment after raising their hopes with the ill-advised Saudi membership proposal that was a product of fear. That will not exactly entertain the notoriously humorless Jordanians but it should keep the scowls moderate. Besides, Bahrain, and probably the UAE, will continue to import security agents and interrogators (know as torturers in less genteel parlance) from Jordan.

  3. Long before all that, before the Arab uprisings, the GCC quietly shelved the unified currency proposal, although they keep pretending they are still working on it.This is something they have been working on for almost three decades. I knew it would fail simply because they had not done the necessary preliminary work for it. And they do not need it: they tried it at the whim of some ignoramus potentate (you know who I mean).

  • That is three strikes for the Saudis, or three downs and short of a first down (three failures in American-ese).
  • Let’s see what other gems of proposals they will come up with next. Maybe the Saudis’ next proposal should be more modest, something within the capabilities of their bureaucrats. I shall post more on this sometime later.

  • I strongly suspect that any Saudi proposal about anything would not succeed unless they throw a lot of money at it.  Even then the money is no guarantee of success. They are trying feat, but I doubt it will succeed. Fear of Saudi domination, close up and right next door, may be stronger than fear of the Iranian mullahs who are far across the Persian-American Gulf and beyond the American navy.


Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, Arabian Peninsula, GCC, Saudi Arabia, Yemen

Funny Saudi Diplomacy: What Doesn’t Happen in Yemen Never Stays in Yemen……..

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Then there is Yemen: the GCC have succeeded and failed at the same time. They have succeeded in keeping the rotten old order in Yemen. Ali is not head of state, but he and his cronies call the shots. The “opposition” that got some of the power are not the same people that sacrificed in Sana’a and Ta’az and ‘Aden. But it is not what most people would call an “opposition”, it is a new GCC-type opposition. The GCC plan was rejected by the peoples of Yemen but accepted by the traditional powers in the country. It succeeded for the existing power structure, succeeded for the GCC oligarchs, but it failed the people of Yemen.
 
The Saudi record of reconciling Arabs and Muslims is pretty bad, although their media tries to make it sound like a resounding success. They failed to settle among the Lebanese more than once, they failed to settle the Kuwait-Iraq dispute before the invasion in 1990, they failed to settle among the Palestinians (Hamas-Fatah), they failed to settle among the warring Afghans several times. They even tried, with miserable results, to invite Iraqis to Riyadh to discuss their internal problems, and the Saudis do not even have an embassy in Iraq. They offer money to the warring factions and hope for the best. Or maybe they are foolish enough to believe that all these people flocking to Riyadh respect and/or love them.
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, Arabian Peninsula, Corruption, Culture, Saudi Arabia

Arab Monarchies and Illusory Legitimacy: Oil and Opium, Mars or Uranus………

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“In many of the region’s monarchies, while the king maintains ultimate control, power is more diffuse and thus the top leaders are able to deflect some criticism. Monarchies have so far proven to have greater legitimacy in the eyes of their countrymen than have the faux-republics. That doesn’t mean that they are immune to unrest, as we have seen in Jordan and Bahrain, the latter though is anomalous in that a Sunni minority rules over a Shiite majority. But they are better positioned to manage it. Saudi Arabia’s unique status as the “custodian of the two holy places,” Mecca and Medina, also confers legitimacy on the kingdom’s rulers. As the birthplace of Islam, and with an official religious establishment recognized well beyond the country’s borders, the Arabian kingdom ultimately exercises authority through religion and through the ruling family’s alliance with the Wahabi clerical establishment. But the Saudis are not taking any chances, and throughout the region’s uprisings, the royal family has employed a combination of sticks and carrots to help ensure domestic tranquility. Saudi troops have been deployed in force to deter any possible unrest. Thus far, any domestic turbulence has been contained to the Shia areas of Saudi Arabia, far from the majority Sunni population areas……….”

Actually being in control of the Mecca and Madinah in Hijaz does not necessarily bestow any ‘legitimacy’ on any ruling clan. It is an illusion and propaganda being perpetrated by Saudi media and their friends. They conquered the Hijaz during the 20th century from the Hashemites, the traditional custodians who roots are in Hijaz. More recently, they decided to give their kings the title of “Servant of the Two Holy Shrines” for propaganda purposes. They get the legitimacy from their tribal connections (bribes and intermarriages) as well as the ruthless repression of dissent.

Many leaders and politicians and ‘opinion-makers’ show respect and deference to the princes, but only because they control huge petroleum resources and huge amounts of money that belong to the peoples of the Arabian Peninsula. It is the money, stupid. They may respect the old king, but they know better with the rest of the princely brood. Let me put it this way: if Saudi Arabia had the resources of, say, Afghanistan, then the U.S. and French presidents would treat the king just as they treat Hamid Karzai. Unless they liked to smoke opium.

In general most Muslims and Arabs know how corrupt and avaricious and rapacious they are. Many of their subjects feel the same way, but are afraid to express it. I can be wrong: it is possible that they are almost as popular as the rulers of Bahrain are with a majority of their people. You know how much popularity that means, unless you’ve been living on Mars or the Jovian planet of Uranus throughout this year.
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, Arabian Peninsula, Salafi, US Foreign Policy, Yemen

Houthis of Yemen: Facing the Saudis, Facing the GCC Salafis, Queen of Sheba………

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“A fractured picture of a post-Saleh Yemen is starting to emerge as Houthis battle Salafists in the north of the country. If no solution to the strife is found soon, it may snowball into an uncontrollable situation, possibly leading to sectarian war. Tensions between the two groups have now reached fever pitch. This was made abundantly clear in a press conference held by a number of journalists at their syndicate’s headquarters in Sanaa after returning from a visit to Dammaj. It soon emerged that the journalists were conveying only one point of view, demonstrating a bias towards the Salafists. They maintained that the people of the Dammaj region had been suffering from a seven-week blockade by the Houthis, who were preventing food and medicine from entering. This prompted a pro-Houthi audience member to rebuke the journalists’ claims. He distributed a statement, signed by a member of the Houthi political bureau, Abu Malek al-Fichy, claiming that there is an attempt to distract the revolution youth with secondary issues. But the media escalation did not stop there. It intensified with the fighting on the ground, especially after Yemen’s Salafists vowed, during a conference held Wednesday under the slogan “Supporting the Oppressed in Dammaj,” to defend themselves by all legitimate means. They accused Houthis of “striving to establish a Shia state in the north of Yemen and south of Saudi Arabia.” The recent tensions in the north have raised questions about Houthi plans for the future, especially after they had announced their refusal to accept the Gulf initiative and its implementation mechanisms………….”

This rejection of the GCC plan for Yemen explains why some GCC potentates in their media have recently started blasting the Houthis again. They are renewing something they have not done since after the Houthis defeated the Saudi military incursion in their country in 2009. The lightly and pitifully armed tribesmen, having dispatched the Saudi military that is among the best armed in the world, are now in conflict with the Salafis, who are the Saudi proxies. That is not necessarily to say the Houthis are sweethearts, they are not. They tend to be fierce independent fighters, and they are almost as reactionary as any Saudi potentates, but not nearly as corrupt (but then who in the world is as corrupt as the Saudi potentates?). No group in Yemen are sweethearts, probably not since Bilqis the Queen of Sheba went sweet on King Solomon (or maybe she had to).
The GCC deal looks like a joke now, with (not yet former) president Saleh calling the shots in Yemen. He is playing Putin to his own Medvede (wtf that be).
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arabian Peninsula, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Weapons deals

Saudis to Intensify Arms Race and Commission Race within the GCC…….

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What does the promise of New Saudi defense minister Prince Salamn to “improve” the Saudi armed forces also means, besides fat commissions for the princes? It means bad news for the potentates of the UAE. Now the oligarchs of Abu Dhabi will have to spend more money, try harder, to catch to the Saudis in terms of being the biggest importers of weapons. And in terms of bribes and commissions paid to the potentates and their retainers. It is a race between our Gulf potentates to see who, which dynasty, can fleece the people faster and more effectively than the others.
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, Arabian Peninsula, Bahrain, Hezbollah, Iran, Qatar, Salafi, WTF

Bahrain (& maybe Qatar) Uncover another Stupid Terror Plot, about that Embassy Bombing……….

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“JEDDAH: A terror cell planning attacks against the Saudi Embassy, the King Fahd Causeway and other vital installations in Bahrain has been broken up, a Bahraini Interior Ministry spokesman said Saturday. Four members of the cell were detained in Qatar and turned over to Manama, while a fifth Bahraini was arrested inside the country, said Gen. Tareq Al-Hasan. The alleged targets also included the Bahraini Interior Ministry and other individuals. Al-Hasan said the four arrested in Qatar had been traveling by car from Saudi Arabia. Security officers at a checkpoint seized “documents and a computer containing information of a security nature (and) details on certain vital sites.” They were also carrying US dollars and Iranian rials………..”

If I were an Iranian official plotting terrorism in Bahrain or in Saudi Arabia, I would never hand the terrorists Iranian money, for two reasons: (1) American dollars, or Euro, or Gulf currencies are easier to use, and (2) Iranian money would look suspicious if these men get caught. A smart Iranian “control” would have them carry wads of Israeli NIS.
If I wanted to make sure everyone “knew” the Iranians were behind a plot, I’d give the terrorists some Iranian currency, a lot of it. So, somebody is very stupid: it can be the Iranians, or the Bahrainis, or the Saudis. Who do you think is that stupid? Could it be all of the above? I suspect any of the above have operatives who are stupid enough. The good news (or is it the bad news) is that we have not read anything (yet) linking this “plot” to an Iranian used car dealer in Texas named Arbabsiar. But it is early.

The Bahrain and Saudi media are running away with it. Saudi semi-official network Alarabiya headlines that members of the appointed Bahrain sectarian “parliament” have claimed Iran and Hezbollah were involved (they forgot to add North Korea). Qatari media have not reported on this, yet. Which is also odd, but maybe they are as suspicious of the timing of this as I am.
I think somebody somewhere ought to quit while they are ahead: the question is where is that somebody? Tehran or Manama or Riyadh?
Cheers
mhg


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