Category Archives: Persian-American Gulf

Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, Bahrain, Britain, GCC, Persian-American Gulf, Saudi Arabia, US Foreign Policy

A Gulf Love Affair: Mr. Cameron the Democratic Traveling Salesman……

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      BFF   
“The Foreign Office currently warns all Britons travelling to Saudi Arabia to exercise vigilance: “Any increase in regional tension might affect travel advice,” its website says. It is a warning that David Cameron could do well to heed when he flies to the kingdom today. Saudi Arabia might seem an ideal customer to a British prime minister keen to win contracts. If Barack Obama can sell the kingdom nearly $30bn of F-15 fighter jets, Britain can surely flog its armoured personnel carriers, sniper rifles, small arms ammunition and weapon sights………. However, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are fast learning to play another role in the region. The kingdom is branding itself as a bulwark not just against the Revolutionary Guards in Iran and despots in Syria, but against the Arab spring itself……… Internally, the most authoritarian regime in the Arab world has much to fear from demonstrations – which are illegal…………”

The Conservative (Tory) British prime minister likes to claim his coalition government’s love of democracy and spreading it around the world. His government participated in the NATO bombing and ground campaign for the liberation of Libya from Mu’ammar Qaddafi. Colonel Qaddafi was formerly a dear and near friend of Britain and the U.S. government in the last decade. They liberated Libya, just as they helped in the liberation of Iraq eight years ago. Just as they might help in the ‘liberation’ of Syria if the absolute ruling oligarchies on my Gulf, and their Salafis and the Wahhabi faux-liberals have their way.
The British government, like the United States government, like the Iranian government, like the French and Saudi governments, doesn’t give blanket support to all movements for freedom and dignity. If it truly believed in democracy before self-interest it would not do the following, and more:

  • The Crown Prince of Bahrain invited to visit the UK and was feted at No. 10 Downing St and other places.
  • The King of Bahrain to UK invite to visit the UK, where he was feted even as his mercenary forces were, are, busy gassing and killing and arresting protesters. Even as his local and imported Jordanian torturers are busy in the cells.
  • Prince Edward and the Countess of Wessex last week visited Bahrain where they reportedly received gifts of jewellery and watches. Gifts usurped by the ruling al-Khalifa clan from the poor people of Bahrain.
  • Now Mr. Cameron is visiting the most repressive regime in the Middle East, which also makes it the second most repressive regime in the whole world (thank God for North Korea). That would be the Democratic People’s Kingdom of (Saudi) Arabia, which is dangling the prospect of fat contracts in return for turning a blind eye, nay two blind eyes.
  • British governments since the days of Tony Blair have become good at the two-faced game. Pushing democracy while pushing weapons that repress democracy. Pushing transparency in other countries while suppressing investigations at home of massive bribery to Saudi princes like Bandar Bin Sultan (as in BAE Systems and Saudi al-Yamama and Tony Blair and British SFO).
  • Just before the Riyadh visit, Mr. Cameron loudly and noisily sent a new British warship to the Persian-American Gulf. The goal was likely to show the al-Saud princes who their true friends are; that it is not only the Obama administrations, and whoever follows it into the White House.

Cheers
mhg


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Arab Revolutions, France, Iran, NATO, Persian-American Gulf, Syria, US Foreign Policy

BHL d’Arabie: the Liberation of Syria and the Gulf………

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Speaking of the liberation of Syria, whatever happened to Bernard-Henri Lévy? The French pop-philosopher and liberator of Libya has not yet landed in Latakia to rally the opposition against the al-Assad regime. Actually Tartus would be a better spot for him than Latakia. He might be waiting for the opposition to establish their own ‘beachhead’, their own Tripoli (Libyan Tripoli not the Lebanese Salafi-Muslim-Brother Tripoli). Then he can sweep ashore, a la Douglas MacArthur. BHL d’Arabie, Lévy of Arabia!
Or maybe he has a more ambitious target in mind, maybe he is waiting or an opportunity to sweep the shores of the Persian-American (not yet French) Gulf. The liberation of Iran from the mullahs may be his next ambition: to bring down the theocracy and raise the flag or freedom, modernism, Wahhabism, and international oil companies. To drive the last Western nails, figuratively speaking, in the coffins of Mossadegh (nationalizer of oil) and Ayatollah Khomeini. For that goal, he can count on a small army of our Salafi and Muslim Brotherhood cheerleaders (only cheerleading, no fighting, not even puffy pompoms).
Cheers
mhg


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GCC, Gulf states, Iran, Middle East Nuclear, Persian-American Gulf, Saudi Arabia

Iran Tries to Reassure the Neighborhood…….

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“Head of Iran Atomic Energy Organization (IAEO) says the Islamic Republic is capable of exporting services related to nuclear energy to other countries……. The IAEO chief said that Iran can now produce heavy water (deuterium oxide), which is very useful for medical applications. Abbasi added that with the recently unveiled third-generation centrifuges, which perform much faster than the previous models and can considerably accelerate the enrichment process, the country can enrich uranium at level of20 percent……………” Press TV

“Iran’s Navy Commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari has expressed the country’s willingness to engage in joint military maneuvers with regional countries……. He noted that the 10-day Velayat 90 naval exercise was planned as a response to enemy threats and sanctions. Iran’s Navy launched the Velayat 90 on December 24, 2011, which covered an area stretching from east of the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Aden…..…”

I don’t think the Iranians will have many takers this year. In the past they had some limited Qatari and Omani participation during military exercises. Qatar, which hosts the CentCom Gulf HQ, has been wary of Saudi Arabia since the late 1990s, when it thwarted a Saudi plot to overthrow the current Emir. Omanis are wary of the Salafi Wahhabis who look down on their Islamic faith which is unorthodox.
These are days of heightened sectarian tensions. The Saudi Wahhabi campaign of sowing divisiveness in the Gulf region has succeeded. Admittedly the Iranians may have lent a hand with some of their heavy-handed approaches. But there is no doubt that the all-out Saudi campaign of sectarian baiting, after Iraq and the Arab Spring, has succeeded in dividing Shi’as and Sunnis more than at any other time in many centuries. That was the goal: to divide the Arabs by sect. When even ignoramus Tea Party politicians from Texas and Georgia start talking about Sunnis and Shia’s, you know that it has succeeded.
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Culture and Sports, GCC, Gulf states, Persian-American Gulf, Qatar, Saudi Arabia

Qataris and Saudis: is it a New Misyar Marriage? a Sober FIFA……..

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“Qatar, the wealthy Persian Gulf state that will host the 2022 World Cup and shot to prominence last year as a bankroller of the Arab Spring, is experiencing a small counterrevolution at home.
In recent weeks the government has suspended alcohol sales on the Pearl-Qatar, a man-made island close to the capital, Doha, that is popular with expatriates and boasts a string of international chain restaurants. An outdoor weekly party on the Pearl with loud music and free-flowing alcohol has also been closed down. The moves represent a small but significant challenge to one aspect of Qatar’s ambitions for the emirate, which also has drawn global attention by winning the staging rights to soccer’s World Cup and for funding and supporting the revolution in Libya. Some say the tiny Middle Eastern country must overcome huge cultural and social hurdles before it is able to successfully stage soccer’s marquee event in 10 years. Part of the vision is to turn Doha into a leading cultural, financial and sporting center to rival neighboring Dubai……………”

It is not
clear if this small move is part of this new return by the al-Thani to their
Wahhabi roots. Over the past few weeks the Qatari royals have
accelerated their new common-law marriage to the Saudi royals and their
Wahhabi clergy. This could be just a temporary part-time purely-for-sex “misyar”
marriage that many Saudis are so fond of. The Qataris have also named the
main state mosque in Doha after Mohammed Bin Abdulwahhab, the founder of
the Wahhabi faith and an early ally of the al-Saud. The Qatari
potentates have opined publicly and effusively on the “virtues” of Wahhabi
teachings and returning to them. Maybe it is just that the Qataris feel squeezed between the two regional theocracies: Iran and Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis are much closer and hence much more menacing.
But ruler of Qatar is probably not ready yet to unilaterally declare himself the “Servant of the Doha Wahhabi Mosque”.

Some European soccer (football) fans will complain that alcohol may not be available for the FIFA world cup games. In fact some Saudis and Kuwaitis will probably be even more disappointed about that than Europeans. On the bright side: the Qataris may be able to keep out the beer-sodden British hooligans who call themselves fans. Anything that can keep these fuckheads away from any sports tournament is a good and healthy move.

(For my new readers: Shaikh Mohammad Bin Abdulwahhab of Nejd must not be confused with the late Egyptian singer and musician and film star Mohammed Abdel Wahhab, who was not a Wahhabi nor a Salafi).


Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, GCC, Iran, Lebanon, NATO, Persian-American Gulf, Syria, US Foreign Policy

Turkey and Iran and the West: Containment from the Gulf to the Mediterranean…………..

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“Iran and Turkey said Thursday they planned to double their trade volume despite having political differences on Syria and a NATO radar shield on Turkish soil. “Our annual trade volume currently stands at 15 billion dollars but we hope to double it in the near future,” Iranian Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi said in a joint press conference with his Turkish counterpart Ahmet Davutoglu in Tehran. Despite the plan to increase trade, the two sides did not seem to have settled political differences, especially on the situation in Syria. ……….”
 
“Middle East powerhouse Turkey on Wednesday warned against a sectarian cold war in the region and said rising Sunni-Shiite tensions would be “suicide” for the whole region. “Let me openly say that there are some willing to start a regional Cold War,” Foreign Minster Ahmet Davutoglu told state-run Anatolian news agency before heading to Shiite Iran. “We are determined to prevent a regional Cold War. Sectarian regional tensions would be suicide for the whole region,” Davutoglu said, adding such effects would last for decades. “Turkey is against all polarisations, in the political sense of Iran-Arab tension or in the sense of forming an apparent axis. This will be one of the crucial messages that I will take to Tehran.”…….. Davutoglu is expected to hold talks in Tehran later on Wednesday on Iran’s nuclear programme and developments in neighbouring Iraq and Syria………..”

Davutoglu, with the talk of “Sunni-Shiite tensions”, seems to be jabbing the Saudis and their allies who have been stoking sectarian hatred for a few years now, especially along the Gulf. For a while there was talk, mostly in some Arab oligarchy media, of an Iranian-Turkish-Qatari-Syrian alliance. The Turkish role was exaggerated: after all Turkey is an old NATO member and a longtime friend of Israel. The Qatari role was also exaggerated: Qatar shares a huge offshore gas field with Iran and is also wary of Saudi attempts at hegemony over the GCC states. A Saudi-sponsored coup attempt against the Emir was thwarted in the late 1990s, with several high Saudi security officials arrested and jailed in Doha (they were released last year). Saudi media and the Wahhabi faux-liberal media on the Gulf were full of condemnation of a mythical Qatari-Iranian-Syrian-Iraqi-Hezbollah axis. It was supposed to be an “axis of evil” as opposed to the “axis of goodness and democracy” of Saudi Arabia-Bahrain-UAE-Taliban-Mubarak-Wahhabi shaikhs.
Now the Turks and Iranians are on opposite sides in Syria. Now the Saudis and the Turks and the Qataris are on the same side in Syria (almost on the same side: the Salafis and Wahhabiized Muslim Brothers of Syria are not exactly what the Turks like). The Turks are now seen by some Arabs as a counterweight to Iran, a NATO and a Muslim counterweight in Syria. There may be some complications: the Syrians and the Arabs have always claimed that the Turkish region of Iskandaruna (Alexandretta) is part of Syria and that it is occupied territory, just like the West Bank. That is another issue to ponder as the Turks and some Arabs get close enough to each other to start disliking each other again (all that stuff about familiarity breeding contempt). The West probably sees a two–pronged approach to contain Iran:

(1) The Persian-American Gulf to be “defended” by the Western forces, mainly the US Navy, that are clogging it now. Of course Iran has not attacked anyone in the Gulf yet, nor does it have any intention of attacking anyone “first”, Saudi and Salafi propaganda and fear-mongering by the Bahrain satraps notwithstanding.
(2) The Eastern Mediterranean to be “defended” by NATO, with the Turks as the main player. Lebanon is probably considered, wisely, very iffy: a majority of the people want no Western military forces, certainly no Israeli forces or outside Arab forces either. Lebanon was tackled with Western “intelligence” operations and Saudi money (a lot of Saudi money for such a small country). So far it has failed: Saudi princes are not exactly lovable, charismatic, or principled creatures. They can never buy love with money (not that kind of love), nobody can. This is not to say that the Iranian mullahs, or other Arab leaders, are very lovable either. Many are barely more lovable than Netanyahu or Lieberman (Avigdor not Joe).
 
Breaking Syria away from its Iranian alliance is the main prerequisite for success in the Eastern Mediterranean now. The pro-Saudi Syrian opposition (the Salafis, Muslim Brothers, some former military officers, even others, now seem to want Western (NATO) intervention against the regime. They want to be liberated by the West just as Iraq was liberated in 2003 and Libya was liberated in 2011.
After that, the Saudi camp hopes their Israeli allies will be able to soften Hezbollah and Lebanon.
More on this later……
Cheers
mhg


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Horn of Africa, Iran, Persian-American Gulf, US Foreign Policy

Iranian Faces and Egg: USS John Stennis, the Muslim Arab Pirates, about Hormuz……….

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“Iran on Saturday welcomed the rescue of 13 Iranian sailors by a U.S. Navy ship, calling it a “humanitarian act……….. The sailors were on a fishing boat that had been hijacked by pirates in the Arabian Sea, near the Strait of Hormuz. According to the Navy, a helicopter from the destroyer USS Kidd spotted a suspect pirate boat alongside the Iranian vessel on Thursday. The destroyer is part of the USS John Stennis Strike Group, which moved into the Arabian Sea from the Persian Gulf last week………..”

Somebody in Iran have egg on their faces today.
So the Iranian IRGC commanders and a couple of ayatollahs made a lot of the departure of the USS John Stennis from the Persian-American Gulf last week. Some of them warned the US navy ship not to return to the Gulf, or else.
Sure enough, the USS John Stennis Strike Group was not about to return anytime soon. Nobody knew it was on a divine mission for these same ayatollahs. It was destined to save a lot of Iranian sailors and fishermen from Somali pirates, from fellow Muslims (and full-fledged member of the Arab League although the Arab depots seem not to care about how many Somalis are killed or starve every year).
Apparently the Somali pirates have now expanded their theater of operations beyond the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden. They are now at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, threatening the petroleum waterway.
Cheers
mhg


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Iran, Persian-American Gulf, War on Iran

How Iran Closed the Strait of Hormuz…………

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“By a media trick, Tehran proved its claim that closing the Strait of Hormuz is as “easy as drinking water,” debkafile reports. First thing Saturday morning, Saturday, Dec. 31, Iran’s state agencies “reported” long-range and other missiles had been test-fired as part of its ongoing naval drill around the Strait of Hormuz. Ahead of the test, Tehran closed its territorial waters. For five hours Saturday, not a single warship, merchant vessel or oil tanker ventured into the 30-mile wide Hormuz strait, waiting to hear from Tehran’ that the test was over. Instead, around 0900 local time, a senior Iranian navy commander Mahmoud Moussavi informed Iran’s English language Press TV that no missiles had been fired after all. “The exercise of launching missiles will be carried out in the coming days,” he said. For five hours therefore, world shipping obeyed Tehran’s warning and gave the narrow waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s oil passes, a wide berth. They stayed out of range of a test which, debkafile’s military sources report, aimed to demonstrate for the first time that Shahab-3 ballistic missiles which have a range of 1,600 kilometers and other missiles, such as the Nasr1cruise marine missile, are capable of reaching Hormuz from central Iran……..….”

If true, this was done by stealth, sort of. It was actually done by consent. I wouldn’t advice doing it by force, for the reaction may be different, will surely be different. The USS John Stennis is somewhere in the Indian Ocean, serving the Afghanistan operations. It is not staying away because of the Iranian warnings. As long as the Iranians understand this fact, understand the firepower we are talking about, there is no need for concern.

Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, GCC, Gulf states, Persian-American Gulf, Religion, Salafi, Saudi Arabia

Saudi Urge to Merge the GCC: pan-Tribal pan-Dynastic Union, a Mufti to the Rescue ………..

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                               BFF                                                  Saudi mufti

There is something urgent about this new Saudi search for a GCC merger. This is something that does not fit with the al-Saud history. Throughout the period when pan-Arabism was ascendant during the 1950s through the early 1970s, the Saudi princes spent fortunes to oppose it. Their main nemesis was Gamal Abdel-Nasser of Egypt who actually came so close to toppling their dynasty. Unfortunately for the Arabs, Nasser and the movement he inspired failed, and the peoples of the Arabian Peninsula and our region have been paying the price since.
Of course, Nasser did not have the kind of money the al-Saud usually spend on buying people and on subversion: people followed Nasser mostly because he inspired them. The Saudi dynasty does not inspire anyone, anymore than the al-Nahayan or the al-Khalifa dynasties can inspire anyone, anyone with any wits. They buy politicians and journalists with their pocket change (especially many Lebanese ones for some odd reason, and a few on the Gulf). Just like they buy Western lobbyists and former officials.
This spring their king mumbled a proposal for GCC expansion to Jordan and Morocco, and they quickly backtracked on that one. Now they are pushing for a GCC confederation, to the excitement of their Salafi surrogates in the Gulf. There is nothing Nasser-like about this medieval Saudi urge to merge with the other Gulf states. It is not pan-Arab: it is pan-Tribal pan-Dynastic pan-Medieval. There is no pan-Arab motive behind it: it is a pure attempt at hegemony as well as at preserving their dynasty. It is more Qaddafi-like: the late Libyan dictator also sought to merge with various countries, from Egypt to Tunisia to Chad, among others.
All Saudi proposals for integration within the GCC have failed. They failed mainly because people saw them for what they are: raw attempts at asserting the hegemony of their tribal polygamous dynasty. I shall here propose one form of merger that may finally succeed:

It is a feasible proposal: a proposal to unify all the GCC fatwas. Urge their muftis to merge (and no this is not what it sounds like at first reading). Maybe they will propose their own mufti Shaikh Abdulaziz Al Al Al Shaikh (Triple-Al) as the common Wahhabi Mufti who will issue all fatwas on behalf of all GCC states. Somehow I feel that even that modest and useless proposal may also fail, but it is worth a try. It is something, no?

About the Mufti (for new readers): the Al Al  Al-Shaikh (call me Al) are descendants of Shaikh Mohammad Bin Abdulwahhab, after whom the Wahhabi sect is named. They all hold high positions at the Saudi court and bureaucracy. As I have repeated here, the shaikh is not to be confused with Mohammed Abdelwahab, the late great Egyptian musician, singer, and occasional actor from the golden (pre-Sadat-Mubarak) days of Egyptian art and culture who was no Salafi, Wahhabi, nor any kind of fundamentalist but a bon vivant in his own right).
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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Iran, Iraq, Middle East Nuclear, nuclear Iran, Persian-American Gulf, War on Iran, WMD

The Beatles and Iranian Intentions: Western Fools on the Hill of Nuclear Intelligence……….

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“But the fool on the hill,
Sees the sun going down,
And the eyes in his head,
See the world spinning ’round.
Well on the way,
Head in a cloud,
The man of a thousand voices talking perfectly loud
But nobody ever hears him,
or the sound he appears to make,
and he never seems to notice,……” Les Beatles

“It was the Little Interventionist Tony Blair who first began sanctions on Iran. And the build-up of hostilities has unnerving parallels with the case for war conjured by Blair and George Bush against Iraq. We have another dodgy dossier, in the shape of the report by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which claims Iran is developing nuclear weapons but says so largely on the basis of intelligence which ends in 2003. It relies on documents on a laptop, found in 2004 by the Israelis, whose reliability prompted deep scepticism among Western intelligence at the time. The foreign scientist said to have worked on a bomb with the Iranians turned out to be a nanotechnologist. And a former IAEA chief inspector has said the type of explosion chamber referred to in the report could not be used in a nuclear test. On that, is based hawkish noises and sabre-rattling sanctions. Intelligence chiefs publicly say such things as, the West must use covert operations to sabotage Iran’s nuclear programme. Politicians make thinly veiled threats of military attack using weasel words such as “all options are on the table”. Pardon me if it feels like Iraq all over again……… But Iran is a big, politically sophisticated country whose constitution of parliament, president, councils and assemblies of religious experts, creates a system of checks and balances in which change is possible. Reformers have held sway at times in this political pluralism. The Iranian establishment is fragmented into factions; a third of MPs did not vote for the measure to reduce the diplomatic status of Iran’s relations with Britain last Sunday. But it is precisely the wrong reactionary factions which are strengthened by the bellicosity of the West. And make no mistake, the war has begun. …………”

The West gets some of its ‘intelligence’ from certain Iranian exiles, and from the Israelis, not exactly an impartial source. The Israeli Likud would love for the Iran nuclear program to dominate the news so much that people would forget all about the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They would love for the world to focus on any other issue, HIV-AIDS, Global Warming, Tax Cuts, the War on Drugs, Dr Phil, anything but the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The Israelis get some of their ‘intelligence; from certain Iranian exiles.
Everybody else relies on Tony Blair and the Saudi royal family and Alarabiya (which belongs to the Saudi royal family) for intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program. Some are beginning to rely on the ruling al-Nahayan clan of Abu Dhabi for ‘intelligence’.
 
This does not mean that I have reliable intelligence that the Iranians are NOT working on a nuclear weapon. For all I know they could be in the last stage of making a Doomsday Bomb. I have no idea, but I would never believe what the IAEA or the UN or the US intelligence or British Intelligence or Israeli intelligence or Iranian intelligence or Ahmadinejad say about the Iranian program. That is what I learned from Iraq. And the writer is right, they are pushing the same arguments they used before the invasion of Iraq (which I supported at the time), and it is very likely based on faulty or downright fake information. The true goal is not nuclear weapons, it has to do with a balance of power in the Middle East.
Cheers
mhg


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