Having “liberated” the Arabs (only briefly) from the Ottoman Turks in 1918 with help from the Hashemites of Hijaz (the al-Saud were an unknown clan in their tribal corner of remote Nejd),
Having recently liberated Iraq and Libya from their dictators, with Arab cooperation,
Being already poised to liberate Syria from its dictator, with eager encouragement from some Syrian “opposition” leaders who forget their own country’s history with the Western ‘liberators’,
(WTF moment): even the fucking Salafis of the Persian-American Gulf, who hate the West probably more than they hate other creatures like Shi’as and Jews and Christians and secularists, are calling for Western liberation of Syria
Will the West (as in NATO) be ready to liberate Egypt and Yemen and Bahrain now?
The regime in Egypt has gone back to the mass killing business in earnest. Scores were killed at Maspiro, then tens this past weekend, and many in between, Then there are the arrests and the use of near-lethal crowd control. Egypt is going back to killings on the level of Syria. In Bahrain the rulers and their al-Saud masters have been killing people, arresting and sentencing others, even as they try to fool the international media with talk of reform and reconciliation. The same goes on in Yemen even with the funny GCC deal.
Will “Allenby” come back, marching into Cairo and other places like he did before?
“The unfreezing of £100bn in Libyan assets by the UN this weekend has fired the starting gun for a fierce battle for influence being waged by the country’s militias, in which the frontline is set to be Tripoli’s international airport. The glittering prize immediately in prospect is a consignment of several billion dinars, printed in Germany, which is due to be flown into Libya on board five cargo planes. Whoever controls the airport when the cash arrives will be able to levy a hefty security fee for delivering it to the country’s central bank. But the fight to control the airport is part of a far wider battle for political and economic dominance in the new Libya; one that pits the various factions who united to overthrow the Gaddafi regime against each other, as well as remnants of thedictator’s defeated military………….” Libyans have just been liberated by NATO warplanes and special forces: just as Iraqis were liberated by the West a few years ago, just as the Syrians might be soon. Instead of getting on with the job of rebuilding the country, the militias are fighting, essentially, over the carrion left by the dictator. There have been more of these violent rivalries in the past weeks, with casualties. It is possible that soon every Libyan militia will be identified by the Arab regime that supports and finances and arms it. There will be a Saudi militia, a Qatari militia, a UAE militia, and possibly even an Iranian militia. An Egyptian as well. It will be like Lebanon in the old days, like Lebanon these days. Except that the Lebanese militias kept within certain bounds and followed certain rules, especially when they were not massacring helpless Palestinian refugees (Sabra & Shatila) and other Lebanese. The Libyans have their own money, but some will have much more of it than others, hence the foreign financing. But then, the Libyan may surprise me and put their house in order. Cheers
mhg
In the new liberated Libya there is a struggle between rival factions of the new regime. The main struggle is between “moderate” Islamists and “radical ”Islamists. The former are represented by some regime figures, such as NTC leader Mustafa Abduljaleel who says that the new Libya will remove the Qaddafi restrictions on polygamy (I expect the US Congress to invite him to address a joint session just for that, and to honor him with rousing standing ovations). He also says that Libyan law will be Islamic Shari’a law, although he has not bothered to ask the Libyan people yet.
The less moderate Islamists are the Salafis who want an even stricter Islamic society like Saudi Arabia or the Taliban. They have been clamoring to imitate the Saudi Wahhabis in tearing down ancient mosques and monuments as “haram” or taboo. In Mecca, some of the most ancient Islamic monuments from the days of the Prophet have been erased and replaced with five star hotels and shopping malls. Homes of the Prophet and his early sahaba supporters lost to the greed of princes and potentates. I have written here in the past about the transformation of Mecca as the new Las Vegas without the legal “diversions” of the one in Nevada. An unforgivable and irreversible crime.
Arab media reports
tell us the Libyan Salafis are already eying some mosques and shrines that are centuries old, with plans to tear them down and erase all traces o them. In their place, they might want to erect murals of the king of Saudi Arabia and all the senior princes.
All sides of the new Libya are fully armed and ready. I expect the secular exiles who rushed home when the dictator seemed about to fall to be thinking of their plans B and C. Cheers
mhg
“Al-Asaad told us that despite being grossly under-resourced, he is getting more and more recruits every day. The latest reports put the size of the armed opposition force at anywhere between 1,000 and 25,000. In his interview, the colonel told us that he unequivocally is not seeking a coup and supports the Syrian National Council as the legitimate representative of the people. He also stressed that the force he is assembling is inclusive and non-sectarian. Finally, he makes a plea to U.S. President Barack Obama to offer quick and decisive support for the resistance and underscores that the establishment of a buffer zone, as proposed by Turkey and France, could accelerate defections and change the course of the conflict……….”
The Syrians who did not like American intervention in Iraq are now eager for American and French and British (and possibly Israeli) intervention in Syria. That is after the NATO intervention in Libya, which was aided and abetted by the Arabs. The hypocrisy some Arab leaders, and some opinion-makers of the Wahhabi faux-liberal stripe, especially in the Gulf GCC, is breath-taking (I like this last word more and more these days). These Arabs cheered and helped and participated in the invasion (or liberation) of Iraq, only to turn around and bitterly criticize it when things did not go their way. They even pushed for a second American liberation of Iraq, a retake, just to set things right from the Wahhabi point of view. They practically pushed (an eager) NATO to intervene and liberate Libya from its ruling dynasty even as they helped chain the people of Bahrain to their repressive and corrupt dynasty of thieves. Now they want to the USA and NATO to liberate Syria from its ‘current’ despotic rulers. Some claim they want the West to liberate Syria from the Assad regime, others that they want NATO to liberate Syria (politically) from Iran, some say they want it liberated from both. Some of them also want to liberate Syria fully by aligning it with the royal theocracy of the People’s Democratic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I wonder if they also want to liberate the Golan, and from whom. Cheers
mhg
“Un groupe de professeurs d’université chinois a décerné à Vladimir Poutine un «prix de la paix» copié sur le prestigieux Nobel, en saluant les «remarquables» talents pacifiques du premier ministre russe, notamment son opposition au «bombardement de la Libye par l’OTAN». Le nom du lauréat du «prix de la paix Confucius» a été annoncé mardi à l’AFP par l’un des organisateurs, Qiao Damo. M. Poutine était notamment en lice avec la chancelière allemande, Angela Merkel, ou Yuan Longping, le père du riz hybride chinois……………”
Interesting that the Chinese decided to give Russia’s Putin a peace prize. I suppose because his country has not been engaged in any foreign war for decades. The Russians have had no Iraq, no Afghanistan, no Yemen, no Pakistan, no possible Iran, no nothing: I wonder how the Russian budget deficit is faring. In our region of the Middle East the potentates give each other prizes all the time. Prince X bin Y awards Prince Z bin W the award for the most wedded. Prince S bin OB awards shaikh B bin S the award for humanitarian thinking (not doing). Prince Yin bin Yang awards Prince Yang bin Yin the Prince Yin bin Yang bin Ying award for just “showing up”. You can call them Woody Allen awards: remember what he said about “showing up is 80% of life”?. After the ceremony they all leave by driving up the Prince Yang bin Yin bin Yang Al Yong Avenue. In the new township named after Prince Polygamous bin Greed bin Bribe bin Nepotism. Mutual incestuous awarding of prizes. Now about that hybrid rice………… Cheers
mhg
BFF “This summer a senior Saudi official told John Hannah, Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, that from the outset of the upheaval in Syria, the king has believed that regime change would be highly beneficial to Saudi interests: “The king knows that other than the collapse of the Islamic Republic itself, nothing would weaken Iran more than losing Syria.” This is today’s “great game” – losing Syria. And this is how it is played: set up a hurried transitional council as sole representative of the Syrian people, irrespective of whether it has any real legs inside Syria; feed in armed insurgents from neighbouring states; impose sanctions that will hurt the middle classes; mount a media campaign to denigrate any Syrian efforts at reform; try to instigate divisions within the army and the elite; and ultimately President Assad will fall – so its initiators insist……….. The radical armed elements being used in Syria as auxiliaries to depose Assad run counter to the prospect of any outcome emerging within the western paradigm. These groups may well have a bloody and very undemocratic agenda of their own………The origins of the “lose Assad” operation preceded the Arab awakening: they reach back to Israel’s failure in its 2006 war to seriously damage Hezbollah, and the post-conflict US assessment that it was Syria that represented Hezbollah’s achilles heel – as the vulnerable conduit linking Hezbollah to Iran. US officials speculated as to what might be done to block this vital corridor, but it was Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia………….”
Bandar Bin Sultan, Saudi Prince of thieves, is advising the West on how to topple the Ba’athist dictatorship in Damascus and almost certainly install a worse regime of Salafis and other fundamentalists. That may be fine with the al-Saud rulers in Riyadh: the Salafis are their fifth columnists, bought and paid for, from the Persian-American Gulf states to Egypt and North Africa. The West will almost certainly miss the Assad dictatorship, once the Islamists rule in Damascus. Imagine the Taliban wedged between Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel. It is especially the latter border that should give the West second thoughts. (I trust there is no need for my regular readers to have me repeat the well-known story that BAE Systems had given bribes commissions of about GBP1 billion (US$ 2 billion) to Saudi Prince Bandar Bin Sultan for his role in a huge British-Saudi arms deal. Tony (Yo) Blair killed the British Serious Frauds Office (SFO) investigation of it because it threatened a new British deal to sell weapons systems and pay the princes yet more bribes commissions. That came to be known as the al-Yamama scandal, and it set Tony Blair on his path to multimillion contracts with Arab and other oil potentates after he left office).
Cheers
mhg
BFF “Huneish Nasr last saw the boss he served for 30 years standing in the ruins of Sirte looking confused as all hell broke loose around them. “Everything was exploding,” said Nasr, Muammar Gaddafi’s personal driver, recalling the moments before the deposed dictator was caught last week. “The revolutionaries were coming for us. He wasn’t scared, but he didn’t seem to know what to do. It was the only time I ever saw him like that.” Minutes later, euphoric rebels had ended Gaddafi’s last stand, over-running the ruined quarter of his birthplace that had served as his final, ignominious refuge. Nasr said he threw his hands up in surrender as gun-toting rebels approached. He was knocked to the ground with a rifle butt, which blackened his left eye. Gaddafi was being pulled from a drainpipe just before Nasr fell …………..”
Why only interview Qaddafi’s old driver? There are scores of Qaddafi’s former minions in power now in the new Libya, why not interview them? They certainly can tell more ‘juicy’ tales than this man. Maybe they don’t want to embarrass folks like Mustafa Abdul Jalil and others of the NTC by asking them about their years working with and for Qaddafi. Cheers
mhg
BFF Al-Quds al-Arabi from London quotes Iranian president Ahmadinejad that Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi was killed in order to keep many secrets he could have exposed, secret. He said among the secrets were the amounts of money Qaddafi paid to European leaders especially for their election campaigns. He also said the Western powers seek to appoint their own ‘friends’ in power inn Libya. Now, I am not usually a believer in conspiracies, and I am not sure I buy the idea that NATO somehow got the GCC and other Arabs to ask it for intervention. But when I saw Qaddafi wounded but quite alive and then I saw him dead, I suspected something. Qaddafi, like every leader, carries many secrets. Some of them are secrets about Western leaders. I would have loved to hear of the role of the British government, British businesses, and American banks and Tony Blair, in the release of al-Migrahi (Clinton now claims she wants him re-arrested). His take on the “non raunchy” photos of Condi Rice would have been interesting. I would also be interested in what he had to say about some leaders of the National Transitional Council (NTC). Many of them were his minions. Mustafa AbdulJalil was his minister of “justice”. Some of them are as responsible for the excesses of the regime as Qaddafi’s sons were.
It would have been a positive point for the “new” Libya if he had been tried, with lawyers, just as Saddam was tried for three years. Before being hanged. Then maybe some of these hypocritical Arab media would have slammed his executioners, just as they did the executioners of Saddam. Cheers
mhg
“An analysis of video obtained by GlobalPost from a rebel fighter who recorded the moment when Col. Muammar Gaddafi was first captured confirms that another rebel fighter, whose identity is unknown, sodomized the former leader as he was being dragged from the drainpipe where he had taken cover. A frame by frame analysis of this exclusive GlobalPost video clearly shows the rebel trying to insert some kind of stick or knife into Gaddafi’s rear end. GlobalPost correspondent Tracey Shelton said there is some question as to whether the instrument was a knife from the end of a gun, which Libyans call a Bicketti, or a utilitiy tool known as a Becker Knife and Tool, which is popularly known as a BKT. This latest video discovery comes as international and human rights groups call for a formal investigation into how the former Libyan leader was killed…………..”
Another unpromising sign of a new Libya. Cheers
mhg
“With NATO bombing of Libya set to end, U.S. Sen. John McCain on Sunday raised the possibility of some kind of military attack on Syria, where the government of Bashar Assad has been accused of brutally cracking down on protesters. “Now that military operations in Libya are ending, there will be renewed focus on what partial military operations might be considered to protect civilian lives in Syria,” McCain (R-Ariz.) said at a meeting of the World Economic Forum in Jordan. “The Assad regime should not consider that it can get away with mass murder. Kadafi made that mistake and it cost him everything.” There was no immediate response from the Assad government, which has blamed “armed groups” for the violence that has swept the nation since mid-March. ……….. Still, there is a school of thought that an impasse has been reached seven months into the protest movement and some kind of foreign intervention maybe the only way……….”
Foreign intervention? How about Chinese intervention? Or Iranian intervention? Are they as kosher as French intervention? Maybe McCain will join Sarkozy in leading a new Battle of Maysaloon to retake Syria.
The French reneged (along with the British) on their promise to the Arabs under the Hashemites of Hijaz after World War I. The Brits installed Faisal as King of Syria, only to see the French invade and kick him out to Iraq.Later on, the British allowed Ibn Saud and his Wahhabi forces to invade Hijaz and annex it to their Nejdi kingdom.Jordan and Iraq were the consolation prize. Cheers
mhg
Rattlesnake Ridge 
BFF 
