Bharat Rakshak

Chinmayanand wrote:The cartoon is disturbing. A peaceful man and moderate lover being harshly treated and devoid of his human rights by a lovely lowly woman .How can Europa forget human rights and Jesus's message of LOVE ?

Philip wrote:In fact,his cretinous actions have allowed the Russians to plant themselves inside Syria ,where they are putting down deep roots to protect their strategic interests.

Singha wrote:car, Iran, Iraqi shia, Hezbollah, Syrian militias and houthis are now Russian irregular capacity . not as big as Sunni kabila but better than nothing.

For decades, Saudi Arabia has ruled its people with an iron fist.

But that grip may have loosened just a little after the latest protests in its eastern provinces over the execution of Nimr al-Nimr, a prominent cleric who demanded rights for the kingdom’s Shia minority.
The country’s autocratic rulers deem protests as a form of sedition.
In this overwhelmingly Wahhabi Sunni nation -- where the state religion determines so many aspects of people’s lives, from what one says in public, to who can vote and build places of worship -- protests like these are almost unheard of.

They signal a deep-rooted mistrust of the Saudi establishment. Unrest may ultimately re-surface to create real schisms.
The Shiite cleric was beheaded along with a few dozen al-Qaida operatives.
A state cleric characterized the executions as a mercy to the deceased.
Al-Nimr would have preferred to live.
He would have preferred to see a far more equitable Saudi Arabia emerge, with the rights of minorities enshrined in the constitution, as they are in the charters of civilized nations.
But the Wahhabi kingdom is governed according to a medieval world view that holds the state to be synonymous with its long-standing, dictatorial monarchy.
This archaic system condemns any protests against its policies as treason.
Saudi Arabia has no legal political parties with platforms that can be promoted

Its constitution consists largely of the Qur’an and practices of the prophet Mohammad.

The current unrest is a sign Saudi Arabia has failed to produce modern political institutions that allow for political accountability.
The monarchy of the House of Saud, established in 1932, continues to oppress and persecute women, minorities and foreign workers.
Ironically it is in the Shia provinces that oil, the kingdom’s main source of revenue, is found in abundance.
Al-Nimr demanded equality for the Shia community and the democratic reform of Saudi general elections.
He also said if Shia rights were not going to be respected, the eastern province should secede.

These executions do not bode well for Saudi Arabia in the long run.
The restlessness of the Shia minority is only part of the problem.
Its oil revenues continue to decline and its meddling in Yemen is costly.
The executions violated human rights, but they also drew the world’s attention to what the stagnant Saudi regime values, and that may be the most damaging thing in the long term.
Saudi Arabia cannot ignore the disapproval of the outside world forever.

TSJones wrote:action continues around Ramadi as ISIL struggles to take Ramadi back but......it ain't happening because of some these guys......

...


http://www.defense.gov/News-Article-Vie ... syria-iraq

-- Near Ramadi, six strikes struck two separate ISIL tactical units and destroyed 16 ISIL fighting positions, 13 ISIL heavy machine guns, an ISIL obstacle, an ISIL bomb cluster, an ISIL house bomb, 11 ISIL vehicle bomb-making facilities, three ISIL staging areas, two ISIL sniper positions, two ISIL tunnel entrances and denied ISIL access to terrain.

In his address to the local administrators, Erdoğan also claimed that there was a “superior mind” behind all the sectarian conflicts in the Islamic world, without elaborating further. He claimed that this “superior mind” was trying to divide the Islamic world by fueling sectarian conflicts in countries such as Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon in an attempt to dominate the region.

abhik wrote: Can someone more well versed in murican milspeak throw some light on the bolded terms for the uninitiated amongst us. What do they mean by "ISIL obstacle", is it something like ditch? And did they destroy it by dropping a bomb in it?

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Just as there seemed to be some diplomatic progress in the Middle East, with the deal over Iran's nuclear program about to be implemented and talks for a political resolution to the civil war in Syria planned to start this month, those efforts are being jeopardized by a new conflict. That conflict has erupted between two rival nations in the region - Iran and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia executed a Shiite cleric on January 2. In response, an Iranian mob attacked the Saudi Embassy in Tehran. Then the Saudis severed diplomatic ties with Iran. My guest is journalist Robin Wright, who has been covering the region since 1973 and has reported on every war in the region since then. She's now a contributing writer for The New Yorker and is a joint fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center. Her books include "Rock The Casbah: Rage And Rebellion Across The Islamic World" and "Dreams And Shadows: The Future Of The Middle East." Robin Wright, welcome to FRESH AIR. Before we talk about the repercussions of this new rift between Iran and Saudi Arabia, let's talk about what caused it. The Saudis beheaded a Shiite cleric named Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr. Who was he and why did the Saudis say they beheaded him?

ROBIN WRIGHT: Sheikh Nimr was a prominent critic of the monarchy. He was a leading cleric of the Shiite sect inside Saudi Arabia. The Shiites make between 10 and 15 percent of Saudi Arabia's population, but they also live in the most important part of Saudi Arabia, which are the eastern oil fields. They live and work in the Eastern Provinces and have long felt that they don't reap the benefits or rewards of the resources on their own territory, whether it's the financial benefits, the social infrastructure, you know, health benefits, or whether it's a role in the political structure. And so for more than three decades, there have been bubbling movements that have risen and fallen over time to try to challenge the government over Shiite rights. The Saudi monarchy is Sunni. Saudi Arabia is the guardian of Islam's holy places. There is a long-standing tension between Sunni and Shiites over the interpretation of Islam - who should be the leaders, what is the proper doctrine, the proper interpretation of Islam. So the friction inside the kingdom comes in context of this long-standing division. Sheikh Nimr was a critic, but he had not been involved physically in violence. He had sympathized with the people, he had been - used pretty tough language when it came to criticizing the monarchy. He called it authoritarian and reactionary and said that - told American diplomats who interviewed him in 2008 that he would always side with the people against the government if it ever came to some kind of confrontation. He became controversial in 2012, in the aftermath of a new round of protests in the kingdom that were spawned in large part by the Arab Spring, as the protests began to spread across the entire Arab world. And he was arrested at that time. He was charged with a number of offenses, including the absence of loyalty to the ruler, fomenting dissent and inciting public violence. So this is - that's the core of the offenses that led to his execution on January 2.

GROSS: So he was beheaded. Is beheading a typical punishment in Saudi Arabia? Is that their form of capital punishment?

WRIGHT: The 47 men who were executed on January 2 were all either beheaded or put in front of firing squads. Beheading is a common practice in the kingdom. And, in fact, some of the various punishments - whether it's beheading or chopping off an arm or a leg for various other crimes, including robbery - are often done in public squares in the kingdom to drive home the point that these are costly offenses.

GROSS: So in response to the beheading of the sheikh, an Iranian mob burned down the Saudi Embassy in Iran. And again, the sheikh was Shiite; Iran is a Shiite country. The sheikh had studied in Iran. So after the Iranian mob burned down the Saudi Embassy in Iran, the Saudis broke off diplomatic relations with Iran. So what events - like, what ongoing diplomatic events and talks does this falling-out between Iran and Saudi Arabia - not that their relationship was good before this, but it's worse now - so what does this put in jeopardy in the region?

WRIGHT: Well, the timing of this confrontation is really dangerous because January was to be the month of developments, important developments, on four different peace initiatives that were really part of the international effort to prevent the Middle East from disintegrating completely. The first is the anticipated peace talks between the Syrian government and the Syrian opposition on January 25. This is the political complement to the military campaign against the Islamic State. This is the package of initiatives designed to hold Syria together to end what is the greatest humanitarian crisis and the bloodiest conflict in the world right now. The second one is the peace talks on the Yemen. Again, an enormous humanitarian crisis - 80 percent of the people in Yemen no longer have access to fresh water and are dependent on humanitarian aid to eat. And so the peace talks - a second round of peace talks - were supposed to happen this month. A cease-fire went into place last month. But on the same day that the Shiite cleric was executed, the Saudi-led coalition announced it was no longer going to comply with the cease-fire. And that, of course, jeopardizes the peace effort and any attempt to engage in another cease-fire. The third is the very important progress made last month by the Iraqi government in pushing back ISIS from the strategic town of Ramadi, and making some political gains as well. And this is a moment where the entire region, and particularly Saudi Arabia and Iran, have interest - and in some cases, rival interests. And the fourth very important - especially for the United States - is the Iran nuclear deal, which was expected to be formally implemented this month, which means Iran will have complied with dismantling some of its program, shipping out its low-enriched uranium, limiting the number of centrifuges used to enrich uranium, and then the lifting of sanctions. This was a moment that Iran was going to kind of begin to end its pariah status. And all these things suddenly are on the table because of the deepening rift between the two Islamic powers in the Middle East.

GROSS: Well, why does that rift jeopardize, for instance, the Iranian nuclear deal?

WRIGHT: Well, the Saudis have long been opposed to a nuclear deal with Iran, not just because of the nuclear deal or the terms of the deal. This - all this goes back to the long-standing rivalry between these two Gulf powers. And on a lot of different levels they are - it's the Shiite-Sunni rift that dates back 14 centuries but has taken on a kind of new face over the last few decades but particularly in the last couple of years. It's the long-standing rivalry between Persians in Iran and Arabs in Gulf countries. It plays out, you know, in terms of their relationship with the outside world. Remember, Iran was one of the two pillars of U.S. foreign policy along with Israel until the 1979 revolution. And after the 1979 revolution and the breaking of diplomatic relations with Washington, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to a certain extent, began to fill the vacuum. They became the real allies of Washington. And of course, with the nuclear deal and Iran's reentry into the international community, the Saudis have long feared that Iran would make a comeback and begin to rob it of its place in the region - a problem compounded by the fact that oil prices are down, the U.S. dependence on foreign oil or imported oil is diminishing, that Saudi Arabia is very nervous about its place in the region. You know, both countries have also been rivals in terms of what they want to see happen in the region. And so they're - it's not just the tensions between the two of them but the tensions between their surrogates, their allies in the region, that play out in many of these conflicts.

GROSS: So who are the major surrogates?

WRIGHT: Well, in Syria, for example, you have Iran backing the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and, of course, its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon who are now fighting in Syria. The Saudis have been supporting the opposition groups that are opposed to Bashar al-Assad. Now, it's not quite as clean as that because the Saudis have - and private Saudis have allegedly been providing funds to some of the Islamist groups, some of which defected to the Islamic State. It gets very messy when anything's involved in the Syrian War right now. But that's one country where their rivalries really play out. And, of course, one of the great achievements by the United States was getting a 17-nation coalition together to talk about peace in the fall that included, for the first time, both foreign ministers from Iran and from Saudi Arabia. And now, of course, they've broken off relations.

GROSS: Some experts are speculating that the Saudi's actually wanted other countries to unite against Iran and that they intentionally beheaded the Shiite cleric to provoke Iran and to get people to get other countries to unite against Iran. Is that a credible theory?

WRIGHT: It is - there's no question that Saudi Arabia wants to mobilize as many of its Arab allies and even some of its, you know, Western allies against Iran. It wants to check Iran's power in the region. Saudi Arabia is very jealous of Iran. It's a country that has a larger population, a larger military - even though Saudi Arabia has far better equipment - a much larger consumer market. And so it wants to check Iran's reentry into the international community. I don't know about the timing of Sheikh Nimr's execution, but it certainly did not work in favor of peace efforts in the region.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, guest is Robin Wright. She writes for The New Yorker, where she covers international affairs. She's written about the Middle East for 43 years. Let's take a short break. Then we'll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR, and if you're just joining us, my guest is Robin Wright. She's been covering the Middle East for about 43 years. She now writes about international affairs for The New Yorker. And we're talking about the broadening rift between Saudi Arabia and Iran ever since Saudi Arabia executed - beheaded - a Shiite cleric, which led to an Iranian mob to burn down the Saudi Embassy in Iran. And then the Saudis in response broke off relations with Iran.

So there's a lot of changes going on in the Saudi kingdom now. King Abdullah died about a year ago after two decades in power. He was succeeded by King Salman, who turns 80 this year and has been reported to have some form of dementia and memory loss. So the new king changed the internal line of power. What are biggest most important changes that the new king has made in Saudi Arabia that's likely to have the largest ripple effects on the region and on the U.S.?

WRIGHT: There's a whole new cast of political players inside Saudi Arabia. And the king did something quite startling in terms of the slow-moving Saudi politics. He fired the crown prince. He named a nephew as the crown prince and his own 30-year-old son as both deputy crown prince and minister of defense - a person who had very limited government experience, was a largely unknown commodity inside the kingdom and invested a huge amount of power particularly in his son. And many of the traditional players in the kingdom were pushed aside. What the king did really was carve out what amounts to a new royal family. The Saudis would deny that, but that's the truth.

The founder of Saudi Arabia had 43 sons and even more daughters. And among those 43 sons there were seven sons of one mother, and they're called the Sudairi Seven. The mother was a sudairi. And those seven now are the most powerful players, and one of them is king. And he is kind of carving out a new line of power through the sudairis and through his own family. And there are questions about his frailty on a lot of different levels. And there are questions about how much he's making a lot of the daily decisions. His son has been the one, as the new defense minister, who began engaging in the military campaign in Yemen, a very dangerous and costly proposition, particularly at a time there are real questions about the deficit in Saudi Arabia, that one - about one-third of the young in Saudi Arabia are unemployed. There are - two-thirds of the people who were on the labor force in Saudi Arabia work for the government - that this is a bloated bureaucracy and that the system itself has questions about, as structured now, how long it can endure.

Tribalism has never been stronger than it is today in modern Saudi Arabia. And of course that pulls at the fibers, the fabric, of the state. It was the current king's father who pulled together the tribes of Saudi Arabia in the 1920s and created the third version of Saudi Arabia. And there are a lot of questions about the cohesion of the state right now.

GROSS: So if the new king has created this new line of power, what is the politics of this new line of power?

WRIGHT: Well, look, the Saudi royal family has always been impenetrable when it comes to kind of understanding what the thinking is and what's likely to happen next. But it is clear that the king has bypassed dozens - even hundreds - of other princes who expected to be not only part of the power structure but possibly king and at least included in the perks and privileges of the royal family. There are today somewhere - some people say it's close to - well over 2,000 and some reports claim up to 6,000 princes. And many of them feel that they have been either marginalized or that their - the future generations of their lines of the royal family will not be included in the privileges of the royal family.

So you have, you know, an internal dynamic that's playing out in some very interesting ways inside the kingdom at this very vulnerable moment. The kingdom, you know, with the declining price of oil - less than half of what it was a year ago - with the internal disgruntlement over the line of power, with this very bold military campaign in Yemen, with the dangers of ISIS and al-Qaida growing - remember, these have strong Sunni ties, these are both Sunni movements that are a direct threat to the Sunni rule in Saudi Arabia - and now this new showdown with Iran - there's a lot of points of friction inside the kingdom.

GROSS: Would you describe the people in this new line of power as being any more or less moderate than their predecessors?

WRIGHT: Moderation is not a word I would ever use to describe Saudi Arabia.

GROSS: (Laughter) Fair enough.

WRIGHT: But I do think that the former king had a reputation - in a Saudi context - as trying to engage in reform - moderate, very small, small steps. He established a new university that is coed. And both boys and girls can go to this, you know, to the same university, which is unprecedented in the kingdom. But women still can't drive. Women are still considered minors all of their lives. To go out of the country, to go to school, to get jobs, they still have to have the written permission of the main man in their life - their father, their husband, even a divorced husband, or son. And so this is a country - and a country that still beheads people. So moderation is not something I'd use. I think that the Saudi regime at the moment is taking pretty hard lines on a lot of things.

GROSS: So the current king of Saudi Arabia is in frail health. He's 80. What's likely to happen when he dies - any idea?

WRIGHT: That's a big question. And of course there are - the kingdom is full of gossip and speculation. The conspiracy theories are everywhere in the Middle East, but they're particularly strong in Saudi Arabia. And there are those who will argue, look, the son of the king, who's only the deputy crown prince, really has ambitions to succeed his father, and he may not let his uncle take that role. And there are those who think - who will say, well, the uncle, who is the interior minister, a well-known figure in government, who was the one that pushed out al-Qaida - and he's actually kind of the very close ally of the United States - that he won't allow the very young defense minister, the son of the current king, to continue in his role and become his successor. So there's a lot of speculation about what happens next in the kingdom. This is a big moment of transition.

GROSS: My guess is Robin Wright, a contributing writer for The New Yorker. We'll talk about political changes in Iran, and the elections scheduled for February, after we take a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Robin Wright. We're talking about the rival powers Saudi Arabia and Iran and the new conflict that was set off this month when Saudi Arabia executed a Shiite cleric, and, in response, an Iranian mob attacked the Saudi Embassy in Tehran. Then the Saudis severed diplomatic relations with Iran. This conflict threatens diplomatic initiatives to end the civil war in Syria and to stop the nuclear weapons program in Iran. To understand what's going on, it's helpful to understand the political changes within Iran and Saudi Arabia, which Robin Wright is explaining for us. Wright has covered the Middle East since 1973 and is a contributing writer at The New Yorker magazine.

So we've talked a little bit about how Saudi Arabia is changing, how there's a new king who might be on the way out 'cause he's in ill health, how there's a new line of succession. Iran is undergoing a lot of political changes. There are elections coming up in February. Why are those elections going to be important?

WRIGHT: These elections are among the most important since the revolution because they will determine the future of the revolution at a very interesting juncture. For a decade, hardliners in Iran have controlled the basic levers of power. That began to change in 2013 with the election of a centrist president, Hassan Rouhani.

Iran's election in February is for two things - first, for parliament, a second branch of government, as well as the Assembly of Experts. This is a group of people very much like the College of Cardinals. There are 86 members. They are religious clerics and scholars, and they are the ones who will pick the next supreme leader.

The supreme leader in Iran is 76. He had prostate surgery 18 months ago. He's comparatively sturdy, but the actuarial charts would indicate that this Assembly of Experts, which sits for eight years, may well pick the next supreme leader. And it will probably pick the next supreme leader from among its ranks. So these two elections are really important.

If the centrists, reformers, moderates in Iran win parliament - or win more seats in parliament - playing off the gains of the nuclear deal, then you would see two of the three branches of government in the hands of centrists, moderates, reformers. That would be a huge power shift. The third branch of government, being the judiciary, would be the one held in the hands of conservatives and hardliners, and that's not likely to change anytime soon.

GROSS: So the demographics of Iran are going to affect, like, who is elected, and the demographics are really changing in Iran. The generation of the 1979 Iranian revolution is getting old. They're on their way out, and a new generation is moving in. And you've written about how when the revolutionaries took over, the government called on women to breed an Islamic generation. And the population grew by about 55 percent in a decade, but then you say the country couldn't feed, clothe, house, educate or find jobs for that many people. So the government reversed course and initiated a drastic family planning program. So you have what sounds like very uneven generational demographics now in Iran, which will certainly affect the voting. Can you talk about that a little bit?

WRIGHT: The baby boomers will determine the future of Iran. Today, the majority of the voter population is in that - from that decade when Iran promoted population growth - from the 1980s. And the young today don't talk about the ideal Islamic government. They're much more involved in new startups.

I've been in Iran three times in the last 18 months, and I went to see the young twins who started up the equivalent of Amazon in Iran. Today, it's worth a $150 million, and they sell everything from Steinway pianos and perfume to refrigerators and dishwashers, computers that - you know, this is a huge operation. I went to see the 26-year-old woman who had started the Iranian equivalent of Groupon.

And the young really have a different agenda. And that's why the revolutionaries, now in their 60s, 70s, even 80s, realize that something different is happening and that the numbers are against them. Now, the interesting thing is when they, after that baby boom spurt that's now between 25 and 35 years old - they then turned around and put in place a birth control program that brought the population down from more than six children per family to under two children per family. And as a result, you don't see the numbers any time soon that are going to challenge this young generation. They will be the determinators for the next 40 or 50 years of Iranian politics because they have the numbers. And so there is an awareness.

And one of the reasons the Iranians actually went to the negotiating table was not just because of international sanctions. It was because of their realization for the revolution to survive, they had to provide for the population the things that they wanted. And being a pariah nation, isolated from the world, cut off from trade, with a very savvy young population - you know, literacy is very high in Iran. Sixty-four percent of the university student body is female. You have a totally different dynamic than you did at the time of the revolution. The revolution began to understand they had to deliver to this young generation to survive.

GROSS: Well, you've written that Khomeini's grandchildren are all reformers. What does that mean?

WRIGHT: It's very interesting. The founder of the revolution has 15 grandchildren among his different children, and they are all reformers. And one of the interesting dynamics is that even his children are in trouble because they have spoken out. The most active grandchild is a woman who tried to run for parliament in 2004. She's a leading women's rights activist. She was disqualified for running as having credentials not Islamic enough, even though she was married to the deputy speaker of parliament at the time, whose brother was president of Iran at the time. And both she and her husband were disqualified. He is an incumbent from running.

Khomeini's grandson Hassan Khomeini (ph) is now running for the Assembly of Experts. And there's a lot of controversy about whether the system, which vets all candidates for their Islamic credentials, will actually allow the grandson of the founder of the revolution to run for the Assembly of Experts, who would pick his grandfather's successor.

GROSS: So if the baby boom dominates the election and votes more moderately, will Iran have a kind of divided government?

WRIGHT: Well, if you have the presidency and parliament agreeing on a national agenda, that makes things a lot easier for President Rouhani to engage in some of the reforms that he's long promised - opening up of the press, individual rights, women's rights. There are a lot of things that people have been waiting for since he was elected in 2013 as he worked on this nuclear deal. If you get the nuclear deal implemented, Iran's pariah status begins to be lifted, and you get a moderate parliament, things could begin to change.

The real issue in Iran, since the revolution, has always been the question - is the Islamic Republic of Iran - its full name - first and foremost, Islamic or, first and foremost, a Republic with the ideals of a republic state. Remember, Iran's constitution is based on French and Belgian law with an Islamic component - very strong Islamic component - added to that. And so the debate is always rage not just over international relations, but also in terms of the internal dynamics. What are its priorities? And so this important debate will be the subtext of the election. It's not just over the individuals or moderate versus conservative. It's really - what are our priorities?

And there are those hardliners who are probably 20 percent or so of the population who are clinging to that rigid implementation of Islam at the time of the revolution. And they are disproportionately powerful because they have their hands on some of the important instruments of power, some of the important newspapers in Iran. They've, in the past, had the blessing of the supreme leader. They want to cling to those ideals, versus those who say, hey, it's time to move on. It's time to normalize our revolution and be a republic that honors the goals, the democratic values originally promised at the time of the revolution.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Robin Wright. She writes for The New Yorker, where she covers international affairs. She's written about the Middle East for 43 years. Let's take a short break, then we'll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Robin Wright. She's a contributing writer for The New Yorker and frequently writes about international affairs. She's been covering the Middle East for many years. So, you can't rewrite the past, and it's really impossible to know if you were able to rewrite the past how it would have changed things. So I'm going to ask you this very speculative question in spite of that. Do you ever find yourself wondering what the Middle East - what the world would look like - if the U.S. had not invaded Iraq?

WRIGHT: Oh, I guess I've I wondered about that for a long time. I always thought it was a mistake, and I thought the repercussions would be enduring long after and would be far more significant, for example, than our very costly war in Vietnam. There's no question that it was the greatest mistake in U.S. foreign policy, arguably since we were founded as a nation. I think we're well-intentioned in trying to topple a dictator. Whether that was our role is, of course, debatable. The problem is - and this is true in Afghanistan today as well - we really don't know how to create peace, how to create nations. We were successful with the Europeans after World War II because we provided aid, and they had the skills, the development capabilities, to rebuild their societies - the political will, the unity of purpose. That's not something you find in these far more fragile states in the Middle East that are all - most of them are only a century old. They were carved up from the remains of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. And there are - one of the fundamental questions we all have to ask ourselves is should we, as a nation, use our military might, our economic resources and the human treasure of our military forces to try to preserve these artificial boundaries? I'm not arguing one way or the other, but it's a question we all should ask because the map of the Middle East is rapidly disintegrating. And it's not clear that some of the countries, anywany, are going to be viable long-term. So the repercussions of Iraq and the way it is played out - we never would've had al-Qaida in Iraq if it hadn't been for our invasion. We never would have had the creation of ISIS, a branch of al-Qaida that broke away and formed its own, even more lethal group, if it hadn't been for the invasion of Iraq. So I wonder all the time, and I weep all the time over what this will cost us as a nation. And I wonder sometimes if it will be that moment in history where historians say we began to lose our greatness.

GROSS: We as a nation - the U.S.?

WRIGHT: That we as a nation began to lose our way, our mission and - yeah.

GROSS: You know, I've heard a lot of people talking about dictators in the Middle East and was the Middle East actually better off with dictators than with the chaos and civil wars and ISIS and the other radical armed groups that are taking over parts of the region. So I'd love to hear you talk about that. I mean, the U.S. overthrew Saddam Hussein, and several years after that you have the Arab Spring, in which people rose up in Egypt and Tunisia and several other countries including Syria to overthrow or attempt to overthrow dictators. And, I mean, there's chaos through so much of the region now. It's a horrible choice, you know - chaos, civil war versus dictator. Who would choose either of those? But how do you wait the balance?

WRIGHT: You know, it would be arrogant of me to make the call about what serves the people of the region best. It's only fair to ask those who live there and who have suffered under both dictators and during warfare. We never learned how to deal with people in the region in a way that lets their priorities rule. We always want to create countries or systems that reflect what we do. And as a result, when we went into Iraq, the classic mistake was we disbanded the political party to which everybody had to belong - whether it was to get a job as a kindergarten teacher or a garbage collector - and we created a country from scratch. And we brought in people to make those decision who were exiles - who had abandoned their own country. We don't know how to help locals effectively build viable models. And we're impatient. We kind of want to switch on a light. It's just like with Gadhafi in Libya. We went in with a NATO coalition for eight months at enormous cost to pound the place to get rid of Gadhafi and push him out of power. And then we kind of walked away. And today, Libya is a terrible mess with, you know, dozens of militias. You have ISIS. And this is a country that has enormous oil wealth - was the one country that could have produced and rebuilt on its own because of its oil wealth - with a very small population, only 6 million. And yet we abandoned it. We just haven't figured out the balance of what's the right role. And frankly, the international community has really defaulted to the United States to take on that role, and then they want to blame us when we don't do it well.

GROSS: Do you ever feel like stability in the Middle East is just hopeless? Like, you've been covering that region for over 43 years and things seem to just keep getting worse in a way.

WRIGHT: I ultimately think that the Middle East is no different than the other regions of the world, and that part of the change that it's going through is part and parcel of what we've seen in the last 40 years with the collapse of minority rule, colonial rule and Apartheid in Africa, the collapse of military dictatorships in Latin America, the end of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union - that there is this wave of change as in the late 20th and early 21st century you see people understanding their rights - that they are entitled to have a say in their political life, in access to economic opportunity and to justice. And that's really the common thread that goes through this critical moment in history. You know, centuries from now, people will look at this period in terms of the commonalities. Now, the Middle East has been more volatile in part because of the religious components and also because the outside world - in part because of oil, we have to be honest about that - has backed autocratic rule. We wanted stability in a region where we needed their petroleum resources. And so we tolerated - whether it's the monarchy, an absolute authoritarian monarchy in Saudi Arabia, or the kind of autocratic rule we've seen in Egypt - you know, the dictators that prevailed until the Arab Spring. I think the Arab Spring is part and parcel, again, of this - whether it's the - just like the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa, the rising up of the unions in a place like Brazil against a military dictatorship - it's all part of the same phenomenon. The problem in all of these countries, of course, is that their people understand their rights, but the other half of empowerment is understanding the common good and the sense of responsibility. And in the kind of headiness of saying, hey, I deserve my rights, and getting out in the streets to demand it, people are not thinking about, well, what's the alternative? How do we come together to create a viable alternative that does represent the vast majority of the people? And so that's why we're seeing this fractious period across the world and most of all the Middle East. But I don't think the Middle East is an exceptional part of the region. I mean, ironically the Arab-Israeli conflict - or the Palestinian-Israeli conflict - is one of the smaller conflicts. And frankly, when you look at what's along Israel's borders, the Palestinian's is one of the comparatively more stable borders. So I ultimately think this will be resolved, but I also think it's going to be a long time before any of these transitions are going to play out and we're in a place where we feel more comfortable. This is the story of the 21st century.

GROSS: Let's end by talking about pizza and hamburgers. On a recent trip to Iran, you went to a knockoff of a Pizza Hut and a knockoff of a McDonald's. What are those franchises called in Iran?

WRIGHT: The pizza place is called Pizza Hot, which is a rip-off of Pizza Hut. And there are 14 franchises in Iran, and they have the same boxes, the same logo, the same uniforms. It's very funny. You go in and it's the same menu. And then there's also Mash Donald's. Mash is a shortened version of Mashhad, which is the holy city of - one of the holy cities. It's a site of pilgrimage in Iran. So Mash is somebody who's done the pilgrimage to Mashhad. So they've done it Mash Donald's. And they have big Ronald McDonalds and all the kind of, you know, the toys and stuff that go along with it. I will say I got food poisoning there, and I don't recommend it to anybody. But it is a reflection of the fact that they may still shout, death to America, in Iran but there is also this longing to be back in some kind of relationship with America again.

GROSS: Robin Wright, thank you so much for talking with us.

WRIGHT: Thank you, Terry.

GROSS: Robin Wright is a contributing writer at The New Yorker magazine and is a joint fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center. Our film critic, David Edelstein, will review the new Charlie Kaufman film, Anomalisa, after we take a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

Islamic radicalism, a consequence of Petro-imperialism:

In its July 2013 report [1] the European Parliament identified the Wahhabi-Salafi roots of global terrorism, but the report conveniently absolved the Western powers of their culpability and chose to overlook the role played by the Western powers in nurturing Islamic extremism and jihadism during the Cold War against the erstwhile Soviet Union. The pivotal role played by the Wahhabi-Salafi ideology in radicalizing Muslims all over the world is an established fact as mentioned in the EU report; this Wahhabi-Salafi ideology is generously sponsored by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf-based Arab petro-monarchies since the 1973 oil embargo when the price of oil quadrupled and the contribution of the Arab sheikhs towards the “spiritual well-being” of the Muslims all over the world magnified proportionally; however, the Arab despots are in turn propped up by the Western powers since the Cold War; thus syllogistically speaking, the root cause of Islamic radicalism is the neocolonial powers’ manipulation of the socio-political life of the Arabs specifically and the Muslims generally in order to appropriate their energy resources in the context of an energy-starved industrialized world. This is the principal thesis of this write-up which I will discuss in detail in the following paragraphs.

Prologue:

Peaceful or not, Islam is only a religion just like any other cosmopolitan religion whether it’s Christianity, Buddhism or Hinduism. Instead of taking an ‘essentialist’ approach, which lays emphasis on ‘essences,’ we need to look at the evolution of social phenomena in its proper historical context. For instance: to assert that human beings are evil by ‘nature’ is an essentialist approach; it overlooks the role played by ‘nurture’ in grooming human beings. Human beings are only ‘intelligent’ by nature, but they are neither good nor evil by nature; whatever they are, whether good or evil, is the outcome of their nurture or upbringing. Similarly, to pronounce that Islam is a retrogressive or violent religion is an ‘essentialist’ approach; it overlooks how Islam and the Quranic verses are interpreted by its followers depending on the subject's socio-cultural context. For example: the Western expat Muslims who are brought up in the West and who have imbibed the Western values would interpret a Quranic verse in a liberal fashion; an urban middle class Muslim of the Muslim-majority countries would interpret the same verse rather conservatively; and a rural-tribal Muslim who has been indoctrinated by the radical clerics would find meanings in it which could be extreme. It is all about culture rather than religion or scriptures per se.

Moreover, I said that Islam is only a religion just like any other religion. But certain reductive neo-liberals blame the religion, as an institution and ideology for all that is wrong with the world. I have not read much history since I am only a humble student of international politics; that’s why I don’t know what the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition were all about? Although, I have a gut feeling that those were also political conflicts which are presented to us in a religious garb. However, I am certain that all the conflicts of the 20th and 21st centuries were either nationalist (tribal) conflicts; or they had economics and power as their goals. Examples: First and Second World Wars; Korea and Vietnam wars; Afghanistan and Iraq wars; and Libya and Syria wars.

When the neo-liberals commit the fallacy of blaming religion as a root factor in the contemporary national and international politics, I am not sure which ancient global order they conjure up in their minds, the Holy Roman Empire perhaps? Religion may have been a paramount factor in the ancient times, if at all, but the contemporary politics is all about economics and power: the Western corporations rule the world and politics and diplomacy is all about protecting the trade and energy interests of the Corporate Empire. Thus, the root of all evil in the contemporary politics is capitalism, not religion, which has been reduced to a secondary role and at times to complete irrelevance especially in the liberal and secular Western societies.

More to the point, when the neo-liberals blame religion for all that is wrong with the world, they are actually engaging in a peculiar kind of juvenile thinking: a child mistakenly assumes that the world can only be seen from his eyes; and that all the people think exactly like he does. He does not understands that the outlooks and worldviews and the preferences and priorities of the people could be very different depending on their upbringing, circumstances and stations in life. You are not supposed to put yourself in another person’s shoes because sizes vary; you are supposed to put that other person in his own shoes, keeping in view his upbringing and mindset and then prescribe a viable future course of action for his individual and social well-being.

As we know that politics is a collective exercise for creating an ideal social matrix in which individuals and their families can live peacefully and happily, and in which they can maximally actualize their innate potentials. The first priority of the liberals, especially the privileged liberal elite of the developing countries, seems to be to create a liberal society in the developing countries in which they and their families can feel at home. I don’t have anything against a liberal society, especially if looked at from a feminist, inclusive and egalitarian angle, but the ground reality of the developing world is very different from the reality of the developed world. The first and foremost preference of the developing world isn’t social liberalization; it is reducing poverty, ensuring equitable distribution of wealth and economic growth. Liberal ethos and values, important as they are, can wait; our first preference ought to be to create a fair and egalitarian social and economic order on a national and international level, only then can our interests and priorities converge on a single and common goal.

If the liberals are willing to compromise on the foremost goal of equitable distribution of wealth, then the heavens won’t fall if they could show a little flexibility and maturity on the subject of the enforcement of liberal values too, which affects them on a personal level, more than anything. The socialist liberals of ‘60s and ‘70s at least made sense when they promoted liberalism along with the promise of radical redistribution of wealth. But the neo-liberals of 21st century are a breed apart who shrug off abject poverty and gross inequality of wealth in the developing nations as a secondary preference and espouse liberal values as their first and foremost priority.

The mainspring of Islamic extremism:

If we look at the evolution of Islamic religion and culture throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, it hasn’t been natural. Some deleterious mutations have occurred somewhere which have negatively impacted the Islamic societies all over the world. Social selection (or social conditioning) plays the same role in the social sciences which the natural selection plays in the biological sciences: it selects the traits, norms and values which are most beneficial to the host culture. Seen from this angle, social diversity is a desirable quality for social progress; because when diverse customs and value-systems compete with each other, the culture retains the beneficial customs and values and discards the deleterious traditions and habits. A decentralized and unorganized religion, like Sufi Islam, engenders diverse strains of beliefs and thoughts which compete with one another in gaining social acceptance and currency. A heavily centralized and tightly organized religion, on the other hand, depends more on authority and dogma than value and utility. A centralized religion is also more ossified and less adaptive to change compared to a decentralized religion.

The Shia Muslims have their Imams and Marjahs (religious authorities) but it is generally assumed about the Sunni Islam that it discourages the authority of the clergy. In this sense, Sunni Islam is closer to Protestantism theoretically, because it promotes an individual and personal interpretation of scriptures and religion. It might be true about the educated Sunni Muslims but on a popular level of the masses of the Third World Islamic countries, the House of Saud plays the same role in Islam that the Pope plays in Catholicism. By virtue of their physical possession of the holy places of Islam – Mecca and Medina – they are the de facto Caliphs of Islam. The title of the Saudi King, Khadim-ul-Haramain-al-Shareefain (Servant of the House of God), makes him the vice-regent of God on Earth. And the title of the Caliph of Islam is not limited to a nation-state, he wields enormous influence throughout the Commonwealth of Islam: that is, the Muslim Ummah.

Islam is regarded as the fastest growing religion of the 20th and 21st centuries. There are two factors responsible for this atavistic phenomena of Islamic resurgence: firstly, unlike Christianity which is more idealistic, Islam is a more practical religion, it does not demands from its followers to give up worldly pleasures but only to regulate them; and secondly, Islam as a religion and ideology has the world’s richest financiers. After the 1973 collective Arab oil embargo against the West, the price of oil quadrupled; the Arabs petro-sheikhs now have so much money that they don’t know where to spend it? This is the reason why we see an exponential growth in Islamic charities and madrassahs all over the world and especially in the Islamic world. Although the Arab sheikhs of the oil-rich Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and some emirates of UAE generally sponsor the Wahhabi-Salafi brand of Islam but the difference between the numerous sects of Sunni Islam is more nominal than substantive. The charities and madrassahs belonging to all the Sunni sects get generous funding from the Gulf states as well as the private Gulf-based donors.

After sufficiently bringing home the fact that Islam as a religion isn’t different from other cosmopolitan religions in regard to any intrinsic feature and that the only factor which differentiates Islam from other mainstream religions is the abundant energy resources in the Muslim-majority countries of the Persian Gulf and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region; and the effect of those resources and the global players’ manipulation of the socio-political life of the inhabitants of those regions to exploit their resources culminated in the emergence of the phenomena of Petro-Islamic extremism and violent Takfiri-Jihadism, our next task is to examine the symbiotic relationship between the illegitimate Gulf rulers and the neo-colonial powers.

The global neocolonial political and economic order:

Before we get to the crux of the matter, however, let us first cursorily discuss that why is it impossible to bring about a major fundamental change: political, social or economic, on a national level under the existing international political and economic dispensation? As we know that the Western so-called liberal-democracies could be liberal, however, they are anything but democracies; in fact, the right term for the Western system of government is plutocratic oligarchies. They are ruled by the super-rich corporations whose wealth is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars, far more than the total GDPs of many developing nations; and the status of those multinational corporations as dominant players in their national and international politics gets an official imprimatur when the Western governments endorse the Congressional lobbying practice of the so-called ‘special interest’ groups, which is a euphemism for ‘business interests.’

Moreover, since the Western governments are nothing but the mouthpieces of their business interests on the international political and economic forums, therefore, any national or international entity which hinders or opposes the agenda of the aforesaid business interests is either coerced into accepting their demands or gets sidelined. In 2013 the Manmohan Singh’s government of India had certain objections to further opening up to the Western businesses; the Business Roundtable which is an informal congregation of major US businesses and which together holds a net wealth of $6 trillion (6000 billion) held a meeting with the representatives of the Indian government and made them an offer which they couldn’t refuse. The developing economies, like India, are always hungry for the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) to grow further, and that investment comes mostly from the Western corporations.

When the Business Roundtables or the Paris-based International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) form pressure groups and engage in ‘collective bargaining’ activities, the nascent and fragile developing economies don’t have a choice but to toe their line. State ‘sovereignty’ that the sovereign nation-states are at liberty to pursue an independent policy, especially an economic and trade policy, is a myth. Just like the ruling elites of the developing countries who have a stranglehold and a monopoly over domestic politics; similarly the neo-colonial powers and their multinational corporations control the international politics and the global economic order. Any state who dares to transgress becomes an international pariah like Castro’s Cuba, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe or North Korea; and more recently Iran, which had been cut off from the global economic system, because of its supposed nuclear aspirations. Good for Iran that it has one of the largest oil and gas resources, otherwise it would have been insolvent by now; such is the power of global financial system especially the banking sector, and the significance of petro-dollar because the global oil transactions are pegged in the US dollars all over the world, and all the major oil bourses are also located in the Western world.

There is an essential precondition in the European Union’s charter of union according to which the under-developed countries of Europe who joined the EU allowed free movement of goods (free trade) only on the reciprocal precondition that the developed countries would allow the free movement of labor. What’s obvious in this condition is the fact that the free trade only benefits the countries which have a strong manufacturing base, and the free movement of workers only favors the under-developed countries where labor is cheap. Now when the international financial institutions, like the IMF and WTO, promote free trade by exhorting the developing countries all over the world to reduce tariffs and subsidies without the reciprocal free movement of labor, whose interests do such institutions try to protect? Obviously, such global financial institutions espouse the interests of their biggest donors by shares, i.e. the developed countries.

Some market fundamentalists who irrationally believe in the laissez-faire capitalism try to justify this unfair practice by positing Schumpeter’s theory of ‘creative destruction’ that the free trade between unequal trade partners leads to the destruction of the host country’s existing economic order and a subsequent reconfiguration gives birth to a better economic order. Whenever one comes up with gross absurdities such as these, they should always make it contingent on the principle of reciprocity: that is, if free trade is beneficial for the nascent industrial base of the underdeveloped countries, then the free movement of labor is equally beneficial for the labor force of the developed countries. The policy-makers of the developing countries must not fall prey to such deceptive reasoning, instead they must devise a policy which suits their national interest. But the trouble is that the governments of the Third world are dependent on the global loan sharks, such as IMF and World Bank, that’s why they cannot adopt an independent economic and trade policy.

From the end of the Second World War to the beginning of the 21st century the neo-colonial powers have brazenly exploited the Third world’s resources and labor, but after China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 things changed a little. Behind the “Iron Curtain” of international isolation, China successfully built its manufacturing base by imparting vocational and technical education to its disciplined workforce and by building an industrial and transport infrastructure. It didn’t allow any imports until 2001, but after entering the WTO it opened up its import-export policy on a reciprocal basis; and since the labor in China is much cheaper than its Western counterparts, therefore, it now has a comparative advantage over Western bloc which China has exploited in its national interest.

Asking the neo-colonial powers to act in the interests of the developing world is incredibly naïve. It’s like asking the factory-owners to act in the interest of their factory-workers on altruistic grounds. This is not the way forward, the factory-workers must strengthen their own labor unions and claim what’s rightfully theirs. The developing countries must form regional blocs and settle things among themselves. If a country takes interest in the affairs of its regional neighbor; like if India takes interest in the affairs of Pakistan, or if Pakistan is wary of the happenings in Afghanistan and Iran, their concerns are understandable. But what “vital strategic interests” does the US has in the Middle East where 35,000 of its troops are currently stationed, ten thousand kilometers away from its geographical borders? ‘Humanitarian imperialism’ is merely a charade, it’s the trade and energy-interests of the corporate empire which are ‘vitally’ important to the neo-colonial powers.

Cold War and the birth of Islamic Jihad:

The Western powers’ collusion and conflicted relationship with the Islamic jihadists (aka moderate rebels) in Syria isn’t the only instance of its kind. The Western powers always leave such pernicious relationships deliberately ambiguous in order to fill the gaps in their self-serving diplomacy and also for the sake of “plausible deniability.” Throughout the late ‘70s and ‘80s during the Cold War, they used the jihadists as proxies in their war against the Soviets. The Cold War was a war between the Global Capitalist bloc and the Global Communist bloc for global domination. The Communists used their proxies the Viet Congs to liberate Vietnam from the imperialist hegemony. The Global Capitalist bloc had no answer to the cleverly executed asymmetric warfare.

Moreover, the Communist bloc had a moral advantage over the Capitalist bloc: that is, the mass appeal of the egalitarian and revolutionary Marxist and Maoist ideologies. Using their: “Working men and women of all the countries, unite!” rhetoric, the Communists could have instigated an uprising anywhere in the world; but how could the Capitalists retaliate, through “the trickle-down economics” and “the American way of life” rhetoric? The Western policy-makers faced quite a dilemma, but then their Machiavellian strategists, capitalizing on the regional grassroots religious sentiment, came up with an equally robust antidote: that is, the Islamic Jihad.

During the Soviet-Afghan conflict from 1979 to 1988 between the Global Capitalist bloc and the Global Communist alliance, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arab petro-monarchies took the side of the former; because the USSR and the Central Asian states produce more energy and consume less of it; thus they are net exporters of energy; while the Global Capitalist bloc is a net importer of energy. It suits the economic interests of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries to maintain and strengthen a supplier-consumer relationship with the Capitalist bloc. Now the BRICS are equally hungry for the Middle Eastern energy but it’s a recent development; during the Cold War an alliance with the Western countries suited the economic interests of the Gulf Arab petro-monarchies. Hence, the Communists were pronounced as Kafirs (infidels) and the Western capitalist bloc as Ahl-e-Kitaab (People of the Book) by the Salafi preachers of the Gulf Arab states.

All the celebrity terrorists, whose names we now hear in the mainstream media every day, were the products of the Soviet-Afghan war: like Osama bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, the Haqqanis, the Taliban, the Hekmatyars etc. But that war wasn’t limited only to Afghanistan; the NATO-GCC alliance of the Cold War had funded, trained and armed the Islamic Jihadists all over the Middle East region; we hear the names of Jihadists operating in the regions as far afield as Uzbekistan and North Caucasus. In his 1998 interview [2], the National Security Adviser to President Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had confessed that the President signed the directive for secret aid to the Afghan Mujahideen in July 1979 while the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Here is a poignant excerpt from his interview:

Question: “And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic Jihadis, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?”

Brzezinski: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”

Despite the crass insensitivity, you got to give credit to Zbigniew Brzezinski that at least he had the guts to speak the unembellished truth. The hypocritical Western policy makers of today, on the other hand, say one thing in public and do the opposite on the ground. However, keep in mind that the aforementioned interview was recorded in 1998. After the WTC tragedy in 2001, no Western policy-maker can now dare to be as blunt and honest as Brzezinski.

The Anglo-Wahhabi alliance:

All the recent wars and conflicts aside, the unholy alliance between the Anglo-Americans and the Wahhabi-Salafis of the Gulf petro-monarchies, which I call “the Anglo-Wahhabi alliance,” is much older. The British stirred up uprising in Arabia by instigating the Sharifs of Mecca to rebel against the Ottoman rule during the First World War. After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the British Empire backed King Abdul Aziz (Ibn-e-Saud) in his struggle against the Sharifs of Mecca; because the latter were demanding too much of a price for their loyalty: that is, the unification of the whole of Arabia under their suzerainty. King Abdul Aziz defeated the Sharifs and united his dominions into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 with the support of the British. However, by then the tide of British Imperialism was subsiding and the Americans inherited the former possessions and the rights and liabilities of the British Empire. {this is very short summary of previous article posted on creation of saudi arabia}


At the end of the Second World War on 14 February 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt held a historic meeting with King Abdul Aziz at Great Bitter Lake in the Suez canal onboard USS Quincy, and laid the foundations of an enduring Anglo-Wahhabi friendship which persists to this day; despite many ebbs and flows and some testing times especially in the wake of 9/11 tragedy when 15 out of 19 hijackers of the 9/11 plot turned out to be Saudi citizens. During the course of that momentous Great Bitter Lake meeting, among other things, it was decided to set up the United States Military Training Mission (USMTM) to Saudi Arabia to “train, advise and assist” the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces.

Aside from USMTM, the US-based Vinnell Corporation, which is a private military company based in the US and a subsidiary of the Northrop Grumman, used over a thousand Vietnam war veterans to train and equip the 125,000 strong Saudi Arabian National Guards (SANG) which is not under the authority of the Saudi Ministry of Defense and which acts as the Praetorian Guards of the House of Saud. The relationship which existed between the Arab American Oil Company (ARAMCO) and the House of Saud is no secret. Moreover, the Critical Infrastructure Protection Force, whose strength is numbered in tens of thousands, is also being trained and equipped by the US to guard the critical Saudi oil infrastructure along its eastern Persian Gulf coast where 90% Saudi oil reserves are located. Furthermore, the US has numerous air bases and missile defense systems currently operating in the Persian Gulf states and also a naval base in Bahrain where the Fifth Fleet of the US Navy is based.

The point that I am trying to make is that left to their own resources, the Persian Gulf’s petro-monarchies lack the manpower, the military technology and the moral authority to rule over the forcefully suppressed and disenfranchised Arab masses, not only the Arab masses but also the South Asian and African immigrants of the Gulf Arab states. One-third of Saudi Arabian population is comprised of immigrants; similarly, more than 75% of UAE’s population is also comprised of immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka; and all the other Gulf monarchies also have a similar proportion of the immigrants from the developing countries; moreover, unlike the immigrants in the Western countries who hold the citizenship status, the Gulf’s immigrants have lived there for decades and sometimes for generations, and they are still regarded as unentitled foreigners.

Petroimperialism and the Western energy interests:

A legitimate question arises in the mind of a curious reader , however, that why do the Western powers support the Gulf’s petro-monarchies, knowing fully well that they are the ones responsible for nurturing the Takfiri-Jihadi ideology all over the Islamic world; does that not runs counter to their professed goal of eliminating Islamic extremism and terrorism? When you ask this question, you get two very different and contradictory responses depending on who you are talking to. If you ask this question from a Western policy-maker or a diplomat that why do you support the Gulf’s despots? He replies that it’s because we have vital strategic interests in the Middle East and North Africa region; by which he means abundant oil and natural gas reserves and also the fact that the Arab Sheikhs have made substantial investments in the Western economies at a time of global recession and the outsourcing of most of manufacturing to China. Thus, the Western policy-makers’ defense is predicated on self-interest, i.e. the Western national interests.

When you ask the same question, however, from the constituents of the Western liberalism that what is the Western policy in the Middle East region? The constituents’ response is quite the opposite, they don’t think that the Western powers control the Middle East, or the global politics and economics in general, for their trade and energy interests; they believe that the motives of the Western powers are more altruistic than selfish. The constituents of the Western liberalism mistakenly believe in the counterfactual concepts of humanitarian and liberal interventionism and the responsibility to protect.


Coming back to the question, why do the Western powers prop up the Middle Eastern dictators knowing fully well that they are the ones responsible for nurturing Islamic jihadism and is it possible that in some future point in time they will withdraw their support? It is highly unlikely at least in the foreseeable future. The Western powers have become so dependent on the Arab petro-dollars that they would rather fight the Arab tyrants’ wars for them against their regional rivals. Presently, there are two regional powers vying for dominance in the Middle East: Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Syrian civil war is basically a Sunni Jihad against the Shi’a Resistance axis. The Shi’a alliance is comprised of Iran and Syria, the latter is ruled by an Alawi (Shi’a) regime, even though the majority of Syria’s population is Sunni Muslims and the Alawites constitute only 12% of the population. Lebanon-based Hezbollah (which is also Shi’a) is an integral part of the Shi’a Resistance axis. And recently the Nouri al Maliki and Haider al Abadi administrations in Iraq, which also has a Shi’a majority, have formed a tenuous alliance with Iran.

Moreover, Saudi Arabia has long-standing grievances against Iran’s meddling in the Middle Eastern affairs, especially the latter’s support to the Palestinian cause, the Houthis in Yemen, the Bahraini Shi’as and more importantly the significant and restive Shi’a minority in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia where 90% of Saudi oil reserves are located along the Persian Gulf’s coast. On top of that Saudi Arabia also has grievances against the US for toppling the Sunni Saddam regime in Iraq in 2003 which had formed a bulwark against the Khomeini influence in the Middle East because of Saddam’s military prowess. Furthermore, in the wake of political movements for enfranchisement during the Arab Spring of 2011, Saudi Arabia took advantage of the opportunity and militarized the peaceful and democratic protests in Syria with the help of its Sunni allies: the Gulf monarchies of Qatar, UAE, Kuwait and Jordan and Turkey (all Sunnis) against the Shi’a regime of Bashar al Assad.

However, why did the Western powers preferred to join this Sunni alliance against the Shi’a Resistance axis? It’s because the Assad regime has a history of hostility towards the West; it had also formed a close working relationship with the erstwhile Soviet Union and it still hosts a Russian naval facility at Tartus; and its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, has emerged over the years as the single biggest threat to the Israel’s regional security. On the other hand, all the aforementioned Sunni states have always been the steadfast allies of the Western powers along with Israel; don’t get misled by the public posturing, all the aforementioned Sunni states along with the Western support are in the same boat in the Syrian civil war as Israel.

Hypothetically speaking, had the Western powers not joined the ignoble Syrian Jihad which has claimed 250,000 lives so far and made millions of Syrians refugees, what could have been an appropriate course of action to force the Gulf monarchies, Turkey and Jordan, not to engage in fomenting trouble in Syria? This is a question of will, if there is will there are always numerous ways to deal with the problem. However, after what has happened in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria only a naïve neoliberal will prescribe a Western military intervention anywhere in the world. But if military intervention is off the table, is there a viable alternative to enforce justice and to force the states to follow moral principles in international politics? Yes there is.

The crippling “third party” economic sanctions on Iran in the last few years may not have accomplished much, but those sanctions have brought to the fore the enormous power which the Western financial institutions and the petro-dollar as a global reserve currency wields over the global financial system. We must bear in mind that the Iranian nuclear negotiations were as much about Iran’s nuclear program as they were about its ballistic missile program, which is a much bigger “conventional threat” to the Gulf’s petro-monarchies just across the Persian Gulf. Despite the sanctions being unfair, Iran felt the heat so much that it remained engaged in the negotiations throughout the last few years, and finally the issue was amicably settled in the form of the Iran nuclear deal in April 2015. However, such was the crippling effect of those “third party” sanctions on the Iranian economy that had it not been for Iran’s enormous oil and gas reserves, and some Russian, Chinese and Turkish help in illicitly buying Iranian oil, it could have defaulted due to those sanctions.

All I am trying to suggest is, that there are ways to arm-twist the Gulf’s petro-monarchies to implement democratic reforms and to refrain from sponsoring the Takfiri-Jihadist terror groups all over the Islamic world, provided that we have just and upright international arbiters. However, there is a caveat: Iran is only a single oil-rich state which has 160 billion barrels of proven crude oil reserves and around 4 million barrels per day (mbpd) production. On the other hand, the Persian Gulf’s petro-monarchies are actually three oil-rich states: Saudi Arabia with its 265 billion barrels of proven reserves and 10 mbpd of daily crude oil production; and UAE and Kuwait with 200 billion barrels (100 billion barrels each) of proven reserves and 6 mbpd of daily crude oil production; together their share amounts to 465 billion barrels, almost one-third of the world’s 1477 billion barrels of total proven crude oil reserves; and if we add Qatar to the equation, which isn’t oil-rich, as such, but has substantial natural gas reserves, it must take a morally very very upright arbiter to sanction all of them.

Therefore, though sanctioning the Gulf petro-monarchies sounds like a good idea on paper, but bear in mind that the relationship between the Gulf’s petro-monarchies and the industrialized world is that of a consumer-supplier relationship: the Gulf Arab states are the suppliers of energy and the industrialized world is its consumer, therefore, the Western powers cannot sanction their energy-suppliers and largest investors, if anything, the Gulf’s petro-monarchies have in the past “sanctioned” the Western powers by imposing an oil embargo in 1973 after the Arab-Israel war. The 1973 Arab oil embargo against the West had lasted only for a short span of six months but it had such a profound effect on the psyche and the subsequent strategy of the Western powers that after the embargo the price of crude oil in the international market quadrupled; the US imposed a ban on the export of indigenously produced crude oil outside the US’ borders which is still in place; and the US started keeping a strategic oil reserve amounting to two months of fuel supply for its total energy needs for the military purposes that includes jet fuel for its aircrafts and petrol and diesel for the armored personnel carriers, battle tanks and naval vessels.

Recently, some very upbeat rumors about “the Shale Revolution” [3] have been circulating the mainstream media. However, the Shale revolution is primarily a natural gas revolution: it has increased the ‘probable-recoverable’ resources of natural gas by 30%. The ‘shale oil’ on the other hand, refers to two very different kinds of energy resource: one, the solid kerogen, though substantial resources of kerogen have been found in the US’ Green River formations, but the cost of extracting liquid crude from solid kerogen is so high that it is economically unviable for at least another 100 years; two, the tight oil which is blocked by the shale, it is a viable energy resource, but the reserves are so limited, around 4 billion barrels in Texas and North Dakota, that it will run out in a few years.

Although, the Canadian oil sands and the Venezuelan heavy crude are environmentally polluting energy resources but economically they are viable sources of crude oil. More than the size of the oil reserves, however, it is also about the per barrel extraction cost, which determines the profits for the multinational oil companies and in that regard the Persian Gulf’s crude oil is the most profitable. Moreover, regarding the US’ supposed energy independence after the so-called “Shale Revolution,” the US produced 11 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil in the first quarter of 2014; that is, more than Saudi Arabia and Russia’s output, each of which produces around 10 million bpd, but the US still imported 7.5 million bpd during the same period of time; that is, more than the oil imports of France and Britain put together. More than the total volume of oil production, the volume which an oil-producing country exports determines its place in the “hierarchy of petroleum” and the Gulf’s petro-monarchies constitute the top tier of that pyramid.

Conclusion:

It is generally believed that political Islam is the precursor of Islamic extremism and Jihadism, however, there are two distinct and separate types of political Islam: the despotic political Islam of the Gulf variety and the democratic political Islam of the Turkish and the Muslim Brotherhood variety. The latter Islamist organization never ruled over Egypt except for a brief year long stint, it would be unwise to draw any conclusions from such a brief period of time in history. The Turkish variety of political Islam, the oft-quoted ‘Turkish model,’ however, is worth emulating all over the Islamic world. I do understand that political Islam in all its forms and manifestations is an anathema to the liberals, but it is the ground reality of the Islamic world. The liberal dictatorships no matter how benevolent they may be, had never worked in the past, and they will meet the same fate in the future.

The mainspring of Islamic extremism and militancy isn’t the moderate and democratic political Islam, because why would people turn to violence when they can exercise their right to choose their rulers? The mainspring of Islamic militancy is the despotic and militant political Islam of the Gulf variety. The Western powers are fully aware of this fact, then why do they choose to support the same forces that have nurtured jihadism and terrorism when their ostensible and professed goal is to eliminate Islamic extremism and militancy? It is because it has been a firm policy-principle of the Western powers to promote ‘stability’ in the Middle East rather than representative democracy. They are fully cognizant of the ground reality that the mainstream Muslim sentiment is firmly against any Western military presence and interference in the Middle East region. Additionally, the Western policy-makers also prefer to deal with small groups of Middle Eastern ‘strongmen’ rather than cultivating a complex and uncertain relationship on a popular level, certainly a myopic approach which is the hallmark of the so-called ‘pragmatic’ politicians and strategists.

Erdoğan: Attack on Iraqi military base justifies Turkish deployment

"Our forces managed to detect the position of these rockets, so they conducted a preemptive strike," Atheel al-Nujaifi, former governor of the nearby ISIL-controlled city of Mosul, told Reuters.

Erdoğan said the problems over the deployment only started after Turkey's relations with Russia soured in the wake of Turkey shooting down a Russian fighter jet over Syria in November.

The founder of Saudi Arabia had 43 sons and even more daughters. And among those 43 sons there were seven sons of one mother, and they're called the Sudairi Seven. The mother was a sudairi. And those seven now are the most powerful players, and one of them is king. And he is kind of carving out a new line of power through the sudairis and through his own family. And there are questions about his frailty on a lot of different levels. And there are questions about how much he's making a lot of the daily decisions. His son has been the one, as the new defense minister, who began engaging in the military campaign in Yemen, a very dangerous and costly proposition, particularly at a time there are real questions about the deficit in Saudi Arabia, that one - about one-third of the young in Saudi Arabia are unemployed. There are - two-thirds of the people who were on the labor force in Saudi Arabia work for the government - that this is a bloated bureaucracy and that the system itself has questions about, as structured now, how long it can endure.

Tribalism has never been stronger than it is today in modern Saudi Arabia. And of course that pulls at the fibers, the fabric, of the state. It was the current king's father who pulled together the tribes of Saudi Arabia in the 1920s and created the third version of Saudi Arabia. And there are a lot of questions about the cohesion of the state right now.

GROSS: So if the new king has created this new line of power, what is the politics of this new line of power?

WRIGHT: Well, look, the Saudi royal family has always been impenetrable when it comes to kind of understanding what the thinking is and what's likely to happen next. But it is clear that the king has bypassed dozens - even hundreds - of other princes who expected to be not only part of the power structure but possibly king and at least included in the perks and privileges of the royal family. There are today somewhere - some people say it's close to - well over 2,000 and some reports claim up to 6,000 princes. And many of them feel that they have been either marginalized or that their - the future generations of their lines of the royal family will not be included in the privileges of the royal family.

MOSCOW, January 9. /TASS/. Russian military transport aircraft made more than 280 sorties in Syria last year, Defense Ministry’s spokesman for Aerospace Defense Forces Colonel Igor Klimov told TASS on Saturday. "Crews of Il-76 and An-124 ‘Ruslan’ aircraft made more than 280 sorties and transported 13,750 tons of cargoes in the framework of preparing infrastructure at the Hmeimim airbase on the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic," Klimov said adding that Military Transport Aviation (MTA) became the best command in Russia’s Aerospace Defense Forces last year. According to the spokesman, average flight hours of a military transport aviation’s crew commander stood at more than 170, while for young pilots the number exceeded 200 hours on average. Total flight hours of the Military Transport Aviation stood at more than 50,000 hours.

Mohammed bin Salman attends a summit of Arab and Latin American leaders in Riyadh AP

When Mohammed bin Salman was just 12 he began sitting in on meetings led by his father Salman, the then governor of Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh Province. Some 17 years later, at 29 and already the world’s youngest defence minister, he plunged his country into a brutal war in Yemen with no end in sight.

Now the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is jousting dangerously with its regional foe Iran, led by a man seemingly in a big hurry to become the Middle East’s most powerful leader.

Prince Mohammed was still in his early teens when he began trading in shares and property. And when he ran into a scrape or two, his father was able to take care of things. Unlike his older half-brothers, MbS, as he is known, did not go abroad to university, choosing to remain in Riyadh where he attended King Saud University, graduating in law. Associates considered him an earnest young man who neither smoked nor drank and had no interest in partying.

In 2011, his father became deputy Crown Prince and secured the prized Ministry of Defence, with its vast budget and lucrative weapons contracts. MbS, as a private adviser, ran the royal court with a decisive hand after his father was named Crown Prince in 2012.

Every step of the way, Prince Mohammed has been with his father , who took his favoured son with him as he rose in the hierarchy of the House of Saud. Within the Saudi religious and business elite it was well understood that if you wanted to see the father you had to go through the son.

Critics claim he has amassed a vast fortune, but it is power, not money, that drives the prince. When Salman ascended the Saudi throne in January 2015, he was already ailing and relying heavily on his son. Aged 79, the King is reported to be suffering from dementia and able to concentrate for only a few hours in a day. As his father’s gatekeeper, MbS is the real power in the kingdom.

That power was dramatically increased in the first few months of Salman’s rule. Prince Mohammed was appointed Defence Minister; put in charge of Aramco, the national energy company; made the head of a powerful new body, the Council for Economic and Development Affairs with oversight over every ministry; and put in charge of the kingdom’s public investment fund. He was named deputy Crown Prince but ensured ascendancy over his rival Mohammed bin Nayef, the Crown Prince and Interior Minister, by absorbing the latter’s royal court into that of the King’s.

Impatient with bureaucracy, MbS has been quick to make his mark by demanding that ministries define and deliver key performance indicators on a monthly basis, unheard of in a sclerotic economic system defined by patronage, crony capitalism and corruption. His sudden early morning visits to ministries demanding to see the books is rapidly becoming the stuff of legend, startling sleepy Riyadh into action and capturing the admiration of young Saudis. “He is very popular with the youth. He works hard, he has a plan for economic reform and he is open to them. He understands them,” enthused one businessman.

That counts, because 70 per cent of the Saudi population is under 30 and youth unemployment is running high, with some estimates putting it at between 20 and 25 per cent.

But the same zeal with which he is pursuing economic reforms has also led Saudi Arabia into a messy war in neighbouring Yemen. Last March, he launched an aerial campaign against rebel Houthi forces that had run the Saudi-installed President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi out of the country. Decades of Saudi caution were thrown to the wind as MbS presided over Operation Decisive Storm.

It must have seemed a very good idea at the time: the young, ambitious son of an aged king leading a war against a rebellion in a troubled southern neighbour. That the rebellion was supported by Iran made the adventure even more attractive. The Saudi military was bristling with new weapons – billions of dollars’ worth. MbS had a powerful older rival in the Interior Minister and wanted to prove his mettle both to his rival and his own supporters. The plan was to win a quick, decisive victory to confirm his stature as a military leader, placing him in the same league as his grandfather Ibn Saud, the great warrior king and founder of modern Saudi Arabia.

MbS ignored the fact that the Houthis were a useful buffer against the real threat to the House of Saud, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). He seemed, too, to have overlooked that the tenacious Houthis had embarrassed the Saudis in a border war just a few years previously. That was in 2009, when they seized the Saudi Red Sea port of Jizan and left only after a substantial payment of some $70m (£48m).

Thus far Operation Decisive Storm has proved anything but. The war has dragged on for close to a year, causing infinite misery to the people of Yemen. In intense aerial bombardments, much of the country’s infrastructure has been destroyed while the Houthis remain defiantly in control of the capital Sanaa and most of the north. In the south, AQAP has had an open field. Undeterred, MbS has vowed to carry on, determined to bomb the Houthis to the negotiating table.

“He is quite belligerent,” says Jason Tuvey, a Middle East economist at Capital Economics. But Tuvey, like many other analysts, has been impressed by Prince Mohammed’s grasp of the often maddeningly complex problems that bedevil the kingdom’s economy. “On the economic front he has done very well. He has shifted policy and he should be commended for that,” Tuvey says.

Where the good in his impetuous nature may come undone is over the growing struggle with Iran for regional hegemony. When MbS announced the formation of a council of 34 Muslim nations in mid-December to combat terrorism, he clearly had Iran in mind. The Iranians have strongly backed the beleaguered Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, both directly and through Hezbollah, a militia trained and armed over the years by Iran. The Saudis are determined to see Assad defeated before any Syrian peace talks commence.

Now, with the Saudis executing the senior Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a tit-for-tat battle is escalating. The Iranians allowed the sacking of the Saudi embassy in Tehran, and the Saudis together with other Gulf Co-operation council (GCC) states withdrew their ambassadors in retaliation. The apparent bombing of the Iranian embassy in Sanaa has further ratcheted up tensions.

In a widely circulated letter last summer, enemies within the ruling family decried the arrogance of the young prince, even going so far as to call for his ousting along with his father and Mohammed bin Nayef. But those calls have led nowhere and MbS continues to ride a crest of popular support in Saudi Arabia. The question remains, though, how far his impetuous nature will take him in the conflict with Iran.

It is not outside the realm of possibility that this brilliant, brash young man casting himself in his grandfather’s mould as a Sunni warrior may be weighing up the options, may be thinking of a military strike against Shia Iran – a frightening thought in a region already riven by sectarian war.

Bhurishrava wrote:

Hekmatyar and Erdogan

a lovely woman .

Armenians alongside Assyrians were massacred in Adana in 1909, the rest deported to Syria later. During WWI, 1.5 million Armenians were killed across the Ottoman Empire.

Ankara’s current operation against the Kurdish resistance is due to be finished by the end of January, Prime-Minister Ahmet Davutoglu announced, according to Hurriyet daily.

Some 200 people have been killed during the blockade and skirmishes between Turkish government forces and local youth resistance YDG-H. Over 100,000 people have reportedly been displaced in ongoing military actions in Turkey’s majority-Kurdish southeast.

UlanBatori wrote:shiv beat me 2 it as usual. But only because I was flying over ISIS-stan at the time.

a lovely woman .

A haraam apostate showing wearing a flimsly nightgown that would make a belly dancer blush, not 2 mention (because it is so ) that her ankles and bare arms are showing.
Shocking. This is what The Faithfool tried to discourage with the Cologne Station Apostate New Year festivities. But they just don't learn. Now another cartoonist must get fatwa'ed.

Assi Ali Nasser Al-Obeidi was killed in Iraqi airstrikes in Bervaneh region in Anbar province.

Assi Al-Obeidi was an Iraqi army colonel who was arrested after defecting the army. He escaped from Abu Ghraib in 2013, and later became ISIL Commander "Abu Omar Al-Obeidi".

Terrormonitor.org ‏@Terror_Monitor now2 minutes ago
#IRAQ
#ISIS Chief al-Baghdadi 2nd Deputy Aasi Ali Nasser al-Obeidi Killed In Air Strike In #Bruwana Of #Anbar: MoD.

Satya_anveshi wrote:wah..deejay ji...kya timing hai...on both posts?

Rights group says at least 162 civilians killed in SE in nearly 5 months

Abadi also said more than 60 percent of sorties against ISIL in Iraq are carried out by the Iraqi air forces and about 40 percent by the US-led coalition.

Iraq’s Abadi renews call for Turkish troop withdrawal from Mosul

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Friday said Turkish troops repelled an ISIL attack on the base, killing 18 militants, adding that this incident vindicated the presence of the protection force.
The Iraqi army, however, later denied that any clash happened recently between Turkish forces and the militants.

According to reports the resource «Al - Masdar news », which refers to the report of the International Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), poison gas, which was applied in Syria in 2013, had no relation to the Syrian government. The report actually confirms the statements of the Syrian government, according to which responsibility for the sputtering gas in Huta and in 11 of these episodes is the Syrian opposition.

The report also confirms the statements made in December 2015, a cousin of Mohammed Gaddafi Ahmed Gaddafi al-Kashi (Ahmed al-Gaddafi al-Qahsi), who said that used in Guta chemical weapons were stolen in Libya and then forwarded to Syria through Turkey.

Report of the OPCW was the result of a request of the government of Syria. According to the OPCW applied to Huta samples poison similar to sarin or a sarin-containing substances. And investigated samples composition different from sarin in existence on the territory of Syria.

In 2013, in East Huta was used poison gas sarin, killing 1,400 people. Then the United States, the European Union and the League of Arab States almost immediately blamed for what happened, and the government of Bashar Assad Syrian military. Ultimately, with the mediation of Russia and the USA the Syrian government agreed to transfer their chemical weapons disposal in Norway. In December 2015 it was reported that all Syrian chemical weapons have been destroyed.