Category Archives: U.S. Foreign Policy

Iran, Israel, U.S. Congress, U.S. Foreign Policy, U.S. Senate

Iranians Worry about Pro-Likud U.S. Senate, Seek a More Active Europe……….

Shuwaikh-school1 RattleSnakeRidge Sharqeya-Baneen-15

KuwaitCox2

“The European Union (EU) can play more active role in the negotiations between Iran and the world powers over Iran’s nuclear issue, Press TV reported on Tuesday quoting Iran’s foreign minister as saying. In a meeting with his Portugese counterpart Rui Machete in Tehran on Monday, Mohammad-Javad Zarif hailed what he termed as “positive” the European countries’ current approach to oppose the imposition of any new sanctions against Tehran and trying out diplomacy………….”

The Iranians are apparently just trying to get some help from Europe. They can see that the U.S. Knesset Congress/Senate is trying to create the conditions for failed negotiations. They see that the legislators are setting the U.S. up for being dragged into an Israeli war against another Muslim country. They know that the Europeans, like almost everybody else outside the USA,  are skeptic about Netanyahu and the Israeli stance. They are trying to get the Europeans to be a bit more forceful on this issue.

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter

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Arab Revolutions, Cuba, Human Right, Saudi Arabia, U.S. Foreign Policy

From Cuba to the Arab World: America and the Dissidents…….

Shuwaikh-school1 RattleSnakeRidge Sharqeya-Baneen-15

KuwaitCox2

Reports tell us that American diplomats in Cuba met with Cuban dissidents yesterday. They shared a meal together and talked. That is in Communist undemocratic repressive Cuba. The Cuba that restricts its people from coming to the USA even more than the USA restricts its people from going to Cuba.

Now to U.S. allies, non-communist anti-democratic allies:
A few months ago an American undersecretary of state was kicked out of Bahrain because he talked with some opposition leaders. Three years earlier another American diplomat was hounded out of Bahrain because he talked about human rights.
Can an American delegation meet and talk with local dissidents of whom there are many (in and out of prison) in Saudi Arabia? Or in the United Arab Emirates? Or even in Egypt? Would they dare?

Of course it is possible that because Cuba is in the Western Hemisphere, geographically and culturally, we should expect more of her. Which is like saying that Arabs (and Muslims) either do not deserve or don’t want democracy and freedom of expression. Which may not be as bigoted as it sounds. I know that, based on painful experience, most Arabs (outside Lebanon) are wary of the freedom of expression: mostly it gets you prison, torture, premature death, exile, or a combination of the above.

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter

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Al Aqeda, Arabian Peninsula, U.S. Foreign Policy, Yemen

American Friends, American Enemies: from Syrians to Al Qaeda to Houthis……….

Shuwaikh-school1 RattleSnakeRidge Sharqeya-Baneen-15

KuwaitCox2

Strange state of American foreign policy these days. There are cases and situations where allies and foes can be exchanged:

  • The current leader of America’s allegedly closest ally (Israel) and the U.S. president intensely dislike each other. It is obvious they have little respect for each other. Mr. Obama knows that Benyamin Netanyahu bears him ill will, besides being a habitual liar who can’t be trusted (imagine, a politician lying to another politician!). Most Western European leaders also believe the same. Mr. Netanyahu clearly believes that the U.S. president is a weakling who is not willing to launch an attack on Iran on Israel’s behalf. In fairness nor did George W Bush, but Netanyahu would never dare openly defy Bush.
  • Mr. Obama believes that a nuclear deal with Iran is better than yet another American war waged against yet another Muslim country. Especially given the doubtful outcome, the cost-benefit of that war. America’s closest allies outside Europe, the Israelis, and the ruling potentates and princes of some Persian Gulf states, strongly object to almost any feasible deal.
  • The Republican leader of the U.S. Congress has invited Mr. Netanyahu to deliver a speech to a joint session of Congress, just after President Obama’s State of the Union Speech. Basically they are inviting  a foreign leader to respond to the U.S. president. Inside the U.S Congress! Unheard of anywhere in the world.
  • Mr. Obama also now has problems with some of his Arab allies regarding Syria. He and his advisers and most the American foreign policy establishment have revised their position on the Syrian civil war. Most have realized in the past year or so the real danger in Syria now is not the survival of Bashar Al Assad, but what will come afterwards. They were hoodwinked by Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari potentates into betting on the Free Syrian Army, which also did a good job of selling itself to some gullible and jingoistic American senators like McCain and Graham and the not-so-dearly-departed Lieberman. The Free Syrian Army soon morphed, most of it, into Al Nusra Front and ISIS and other groups of kidnappers and cutthroats. 
  • The Americans and the Syrians and Hezbollah and the Iranians are now fighting the same enemy, the Jihadis. For now. Eventually, the Americans would like for Al Assad and Iran and Hezbollah to go away (I am not sure where they can go since they live in the region). Eventually the Syrians and Iranians and Hezbollah would like for the Americans to go away (also not feasible any time soon).
  • To complicate matters, there pops up Yemen, hardly felix now. In Yemen, the United States is trying hard to stem and roll back the regional Al Qaeda branch (AQAP) mainly by bombing its Saudi and Yemeni leadership. So are the new power wielders in Yemen, the Houthis who now control the capital. Yet the Gulf states, especially the Saudi princes and the UAE potentates, don’t approve of the Houthis. Besides their faith which is an offshoot of Shi’ism, they are also suspected of being too close to the Iranian regime. You can’t get any more heretical than that from a Wahhabi point of view. The Houthis do sport some silly Iranian-like anti-American slogans on posters in Sanaa, but it is not clear (to me) if their heart is in it. Nor where they stand ideologically regarding an Iran-style theocracy.
  • So the Houthis fight Al Qaeda. The Houthis are reported to be supplied by Iran, although they don’t seem to carry advanced weapons, unlike Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Americans fight Al Qaeda. Both Houthis and Al Qaeda fight the previous dominant tribal oligarchs of Yemen. Al Qaeda also as usual kidnaps and/or kills any Westerners (or Shi’as) they can get their hands on. Then there are the separatists of South Yemen who would like to regain the independence they lost in 1990. Complicated? Just hang on, it is going to get even more complicated in the coming weeks.
  • Then there is Lebanon, a place the Israeli military seem unable to stay away from. Once I likened it to the moth unable to resist the light and the fire, and cleverly if I may say so. We shall leave Lebanon, and Iraq, and North Africa for another day.

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter

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Israel, U.S. Congress, U.S. Foreign Policy

A Superpower with a Banana Republic Foreign Policy………

Shuwaikh-school1 RattleSnakeRidge Sharqeya-Baneen-15

KuwaitCox2

The Republican leader of the U.S. Congress, John Boehner, has invited Mr. Netanyahu to deliver a speech to a joint session of Congress, just after President Obama’s State of the Union Speech. Basically they are inviting  a foreign leader to respond to the U.S. president. Inside the U.S Congress! Unheard of anywhere in the world.
Two foreign policies in the same capital, in Washington. This is the ‘stuff’ of banana republics. Not all banana republics, some of them. It is something you see these day in Yemen. And it is happening in Washington, still capital of the only superpower. it hasn’t moved to Tel Aviv yet.

Here is how I responded yesterday: “Apparently the Republican Congress have invited him, again, to respond to Obama’s State of the Union speech. And his groupies in Washington are trying to help him in the March Israeli elections. Sheldon Adelson and his money be praised!…….”
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter

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AIPAC, Iran, nuclear Iran, U.S. Foreign Policy, U.S. Politics

An Iranian View of an Unsavory Las Vegas Tycoon………

Shuwaikh-school1 RattleSnakeRidge Sharqeya-Baneen-15

“Nearly one-third of anti-Iran pressure group United Against Nuclear Iran’s 2013 budget came from the country’s foremost Republican megadonor, a man who invested a reported $98 million to defeat Barack Obama in the 2012 election, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Adelson routed his $500,000 donation to UANI through his family foundation, according to tax documents. Over the past six months, a number of unanswered questions have swirled around UANI. The Justice Department continues to shield information about the group’s internal workings from coming to light; the group hasn’t accounted for a mysterious funder who stands to profit from a confrontation with Iran…………”

Apparently the Iranians also believe that Sheldon Adelson is at it again: that he is funding a mysterious new anti-Iranian group. A major Iranian news site writes about the American right-wing moneybag Sheldon Adelson.

The conservative Las Vegas gambling tycoon and part-owner of many Republican Party politicians once fully owned Newt Gingrich during his hopeless attempt to start running for the party nomination in 2012. The site reports that Adelson is the largest contributor to the GOP and spent 98 million of his own money to defeat Barack Obama in 2012 (it was probably pure politics, not related to race).
Mr. Adelson, who reportedly has very close connections to the Israeli right-wing parties had publicly proposed once in 2013 that Mr. Obama should launch a nuclear attack on Iran. The Iranians remember that he was kind enough to specify a nuclear attack on “sparsely populated” areas of Iran.
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter

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Israel, Palestine, U.S. Foreign Policy, West Bank

Israeli Settlers Greet New Year with Stones and Uprooted Olive Trees……

Shuwaikh-school1 RattleSnakeRidge Sharqeya-Baneen-15

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“On Friday, American security personnel accompanying staff from the United States Consulate in Jerusalem drew their weapons on violent Israeli settlers who attacked a two vehicle U.S. convoy outside the Palestinian town of Turmusaya in the West Bank. Consulate staff were investigating a incident which took place on private Palestinian land on the first night of 2015 when six thousand recently planted olive saplings were uprooted, and dozens of old olive trees were destroyed by violent Jewish settlers from an illegal outpost the Adei Ad near Turmusaya. Officials from Turmusaya notified the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem and requested an investigation because some of the owners of the land are Palestinian-Americans. When the U.S. delegation arrived in the area to investigate settlers started hurling stones at the convoy…………..”

The U.S. Congress, most of its Adelson-ized members, in a brave fit of loyal patriotism, would probably blame the incident on the American diplomats. Not on their foreign soul brothers from among the extreme right-wing Israeli colonists who resort to terrorist tactics and get away with it.

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter

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Cyber Security, cyber war, Cyber Wars, Internet, Iran, North Korea, U.S. Foreign Policy, Uncategorized, USA

From Stuxnet to Sony: CyberWar Chickens Coming Home to Roost?……….

Shuwaikh-school1 RattleSnakeRidge Sharqeya-Baneen-15

KuwaitCox2     ChristmasPeanuts

Have Yourself a Merry Little——-> Kenny G. Holiday 

There is a lot of media and official noise about the hacking of Sony documents. There are also threats of more damage to the company for producing a film spoof of Kim Jon Un of North Korea. There are claims that North Korea is responsible, being upset about the film. Maybe they didn’t get the famous haircut quite right in the film, or maybe it is the inevitable stupidity and silly thrust of the film.
Now there is much talk of the ‘terrible’ act of hacking and terrorism and how to respond. But wait: is hacking another country such a terrible act? A terrorist act? Weren’t the same media clinking glasses over the various cyber attacks on another country’s institutions only recently? Weren’t congressmen and women and senators going publicly orgasmic over the series of cyber attacks on official Iranian websites? Reportedly, strongly and deliberately and proudly disclosed by the usual unnamed sources to be the joint work of Israeli and American experts.

I commented several times in my postings on this cyber aggression, from Stuxnet to Duque to Flame and other malware, allegedly targeting the Iranian nuclear program and possibly other infrastructure. I even opined that “Live by Cyber war, Die by Cyber War“. I even wrote something about “cyber chickens coming home to roost“. And apparently they are starting now. This alleged North Korean attack and other allegedly Iranian cyber attacks in the past year. I have also written that cyber battles and cyber wars are equalizers: they are relatively cheap and any nation can excel in waging them.
Cyber counterattacks can be understandable, for they are done in retaliation for other cyber attacks. It happens. What irks me is the fact that American theatres have caved in to blackmail and fear and decided not to show the stupid film, The Interview. As has Sony now in deciding to “withdraw” the film, which makes one wonder what more information did the hackers get their hands on.

That reaction is an even more serious development: it means other hackers will be able to blackmail publishers, film-makers, and other cultural parties. Thus curtailing the right of free expression. Thus imposing a piece of the ‘political ambience’ of North Korea or wherever the hell they are located into the United States and other countries.

Cyber Wars as Great Equalizers: Tit for Tat?………

Cyber Jingoism: CyberSecurity, Cyber Wars, and the New Cyber Powers………

Cyber Wars: Malware, Mahdi, and Hail Mary in Iran and Israel……

Israel and the West: only Arab and Muslim Hacking is Terrorism, Ours is Kosher……
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter

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CIA, Culture, Gulag, Muslims, Torture, U.S. Foreign Policy

Comparative Torture in a Global Gulag: Islamic House of Glass, Western House of Glass……..

Shuwaikh-school1 RattleSnakeRidge Sharqeya-Baneen-15

KuwaitCox2     ChristmasPeanuts

Have Yourself a Merry Little——-> Kenny G. Holiday 

“The CIA paid torture teachers James Mitchell and Bruce Jesser more than $80 million. As they now live out their wildest dreams, their barbarity has cost the U.S. far more. Call them the houses that torture built: Two sprawling luxury homes purchased by the CIA-contracted psychologists at the center of the scathing Senate report. James Elmer Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen are not the first Americans to employ waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” against our enemies. But they are almost certainly the only ones to get rich doing it. They did so by employing what is widely dismissed as “voodoo science”…………..”

And I had almost come to think that we are among the last barbarians left. Some of us, a few actually, behead others, a few slit throats, some blow themselves up among others (mostly the victims are of us) and kill hundreds, some sentence dissidents to public flogging. All rather primitive methods of inflicting death and/or pain by both Jihadi terrorists and repressive regimes. But these are old tried and true methods dating back deep into history, to long before Rome, Persia, Egypt, Greece, and Islam. The cruel but unimaginative methods of execution and inflicting pain of the Muslim and Arab worlds.
Then we have the more imaginative, or more scientific methods of inflicting pain and causing death. That is the more civilized method. From the Nazis of Germany/Austria to the French in Algeria to Abu Ghraib and to the alleged CIA and the private contractor Gulag that spreads across the globe. From rectal (or anal) feeding to waterboarding to lengthy sleep deprivation to psychological torture to gas chambers to forced starvation, all the way back to the burning of people alive and to the fires and knives of the Inquisition. The more civilized methods of the non-Muslim West. I should not mention the odd questionable prison injections that cause convicts to die slowly and unusually painfully in some God-fearing states. But I just did.
Houses of glass are everywhere………..
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter

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CIA, Espionage, Torture, U.S. Congress, U.S. Foreign Policy

Hijacking America: from Liberators of Europe to Rectal Feeding by Hired Contractors………

Shuwaikh-school1 RattleSnakeRidge Sharqeya-Baneen-15

KuwaitCox2    ChristmasPeanuts

Have Yourself a Merry Little——-> Kenny G. Holiday ………..

“The CIA torture report lists ‘rectal feeding’ as a legitimate means of nourishing detainees. But the practice has no scientific backing, and is nothing but a torture method. There is enough contained in the newly-released Senate report on CIA torture practices to shock anyone’s conscience. News that CIA interrogators threatened violence against the children or parents of detainees, made them stand in stress positions on broken feet, and deprived them of sleep for up to a week at a time is appalling on its face. One needs no medical expertise to parse the horrors described. But what of “rectal feeding”? At first blush, this practice may have the appearance of legitimacy in cases where detainees refused to eat or drink. One man was put in a head-down position and Ensure was instilled into his rectum……………”

Does one hijacking deserves another? They say in the West that the Wahabbi Jihadis have hijacked Islam. So the solution is to have the torturers and their enablers hijack America and her traditions and values. To move her closer (and lower) to the level of the terrorists……….

How did it come down to this?
From the bright America of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and John Kennedy to this? To the recent American regimes of prevalent KGB-style domestic espionage and imaginative external torture? To the sorry lot of the past fourteen years of Bush, Cheney, and whoever calls the shots for Obama?

During the cold war, a favorite criticism of the Soviet Union was its all-powerful untouchable apparatus of internal espionage. The West allegedly won the Cold War, or did it? Can we say that after the disclosures of widespread spying on American citizens and their private correspondence and communications? The Allies won the war against the Nazis, but Western regimes are now using methods of torture for which they tried Nazis and others after the war. There is a difference in the extent of the torture. So it is a difference between “widespread torture” and “mass torture” as done by totalitarian regimes.

Could it be this new for-profit approach to national security of these past few years? The system that hires unaccountable “private contractors” and torturers and creates a chance of deniability? A deliberate alibi for officials at a cost of millions to the treasury paid to these private contractors? The modern legal equivalent of Mafia “hit men” pretending to be patriotic while inflicting unusual pain for a lot of money?
Would Messrs Bush, Cheney, their accommodating Counselors, and those in the Obama White House who condoned the practice accept to be “rectally fed”?
Can anyone imagine “rectal feeding” condoned under any American president that preceded Bush, Obama, and possibly one of the Clintons? Not even Reagan and Nixon, who were perceived as tough but had some honorable limits.
Normally you would consider the U.S. Senate as a sane place where grown-ups would impose some limits on such un-American behavior. But even that window will not be there anymore. It will be closed come January. The crazies look ready to control the asylum.

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                   Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter

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Caliphate, GCC, Jihadis, Middle East, U.S. Foreign Policy

Qatar and Her Sisters: Foundation for the Defense of More War……..

Shuwaikh-school1 RattleSnakeRidge Sharqeya-Baneen-15

KuwaitCox2    ChristmasPeanuts

“It has been dubbed the most two-faced nation in the world, backing the U.S.-led coalition against the militants of the Islamic State while providing a permissive environment, in the words of one top American official, for terrorist financiers to operate with impunity. And despite a growing furor on both sides of the Atlantic, Qatar, the tiny but super-wealthy Gulf emirate, shows scant willingness to clamp down on the jihad moneymen. Indeed, it may never unless Western powers start raising the political stakes. A new report identifies more than 20 funders designated as terrorist-linked by the U.S. or UN who have benefited from a mixture of benign neglect or support in Doha. “With every important case of suspected terror finance involving a Qatari national in past years, the government in Doha has refused effectively to crack down,” according to the study, “Qatar and Terror Finance,”……………Al-Nuaymi, who has also been fingered by the UN and the European Union as a funder of terrorism, has held major roles in official Qatari organizations, including serving as a board member on charities backed by the government and at the Qatar Islamic Bank…………….”

This Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) website claims it is “a non-profit, non-partisan 501(c)3 policy institute focusing on foreign policy and national security………” The most reasonable among its leaders is dead: one former NFL quarterback named Jack Kemp who went on to Congress and the Reagan cabinet. I usually take their analysis about the Middle East with a pound or two of salt, and I am being extremely polite here.
The Foundation For the Defense of Democracies has little to do with “democracy”. It is an extreme warlike group inhabited by frustrated American warhawks/chickenhawks and scurrilous Arabs and other exiles who seek more Western wars and destruction on their native region. The group is dedicated to two things: (a) absolute Israeli supremacy in the Middle East, and (b) waging more wars of choice on any remaining Middle East country that is not allied with the United States. Just a list of its board and its comments and its contributors will tell the story.

Having said that, this is not to deny that certain elements in the Persian Gulf states are heavily involved in financing Jihadi terrorists in Iraq and Syria. And not just Qatar, the Little Wahhabi gas power. I have written on this since before 2011, before the first Wahhabi suitcases of cash money from the Gulf entered Syria, through Turkey and Lebanon (the latter care of the pro-Saudi March 14 bloc). In Iraq the trail can lead all the way back to the elections of 2005 and the rise of Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, possibly earlier.

Ironically, there were no Qataris involved in the September 11 terrorist attacks, mainly Saudis, and Egyptians and Emiratis. Qatar has a tiny native population (some 90% are imported temporary foreign labor) but a lot of surplus money. Unlike some other Gulf states, they send more money and less Wahhabi volunteers to kill Shi’as and people of other faiths.

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Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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