Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Middle East Page 20 of 22

Will the military join the people in Egypt?

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On January 28, 2011

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The people of Egypt know the military is what matters, and it looks like they may win on this:

Unconfirmed reports of fights between military and police according to Al Jazeera now. Military are moving toward Ministry of Defense and Radio and Television Building – no word yet of their plans as those locations are site of massive protests. Egyptians flags seen being waved by soldiers.

12:48CNN reporting from the Information Ministry building that there are chants of “the Military and the People are one” and the military officers speaking calmly with them’

There are also reports that protests have spread to every major city in Egypt.

If the army turns, and I think it’s going to, Mubarak is toast.  Siun at FDL is doing excellent liveblogging on this and Sean-Paul at the Agonist has an excellent roundup he’s keeping updated as events change.

Update: Corrente is also doing a good job.

Egypt, Revolutions and Food

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On January 26, 2011

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Zero Hedge notes something interesting about food prices post-Tunisia:

Dow Jones reports that wheat futures just hit a 29-month highs on “strong global demand.” Per the newswire, Algeria bought 800,000 tons of milling wheat, with traders estimating the nation’s purchases for January at about 1.8M. Turkey and Jordan bought wheat last week after rising food prices helped fuel unrest in Tunisia.

This is something Stirling Newberry predicted 10 years ago: that the end of the “great moderation”, 30 years of declining commodity prices, would lead to political instability.

Meanwhile Siun is reporting on the clashes in Egypt, in particular in Suez.  One part, from Egyptian blogger Zeinobia struck me in particular:

Again the people of Suez are suffering from terrible economic conditions as the factories owners there started to use cheap Asian labor instead of them creating a huge unemployment problem in the city.

That, as I have been discussing in the past is something very simple: betrayal of the ordinary citizens of a state (Egypt), by that state’s elites, for their own crash enrichment.  (I am for immigration, I am not for guest workers.  I am not for bringing in cheap labor to undercut one’s own labor.)

The future is as follows: decreased agricultural land, decreased water, decreased cheap oil (which is what our agricultural system rests on.)  The inflation figures say “there is no inflation”, but that’s a lie, pure and simple.  Food prices are up, energy is killing people and commodities are up.  So-called “core inflation” is mostly inflation in things people can do without (toasters, etc…) while fuel and food inflation is in what people MUST buy.  The same is true, btw, of health care inflation.  When you’re dying or in pain or crippled, you have to pay.

Virtually every oligopoly in the world is trying to grab as much money as it can by raising prices in collusion while not improving service or goods quality unless they absolutely much.  And if you can even buy the good stuff, it’ll cost your through the nose.  As one of my friends quips, “I buy organic meat and eggs and milk because when I was a kid, that’s just what we called meat and milk and eggs”.  Make the regular quality shit, charge for the stuff that isn’t crap.

Food and fuel are flashpoints, as will be water, but things like access to the credit economy (including the ability to pay by credit or debit card for things that can only be bought electronically, not with cash), reliable fast access to the internet, and so on, will also be crimped in any nation where the powers that be allow it.

War on Iran?

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On July 16, 2010

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Pat Lang seems to think so. This may be a case of cry wolf.  No one believes it anymore, because it hasn’t happened despite warnings yet.

But remember, when the boy cried wolf the second time there was a wolf.

We’ll see.

Another journalist down for saying something “inappropriate”

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On July 7, 2010

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Latest victim is Octavia Nasr, who tweeted:

“Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah… One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.”

Hezbollah, of course, are designated terrorists by the US state department, for the 1983 bombing of marine barracks in Lebanon.

Two things about that attack:

  1. Marine barracks are, by any definition, legitimate targets of war.
  2. Do you know why they attacked a military target?  Because the US shelled Shia villages in Lebanon.

Let me emphasize, Hezbollah attacked a military target, killing soldiers, in retaliation for US attacks on defenseless civilians.

Now that doesn’t mean I agree with everything Hezbollah does, they’ve done some real terrorist attacks.  But they have a policy against terrorist attacks against Americans and have for a long time.  Certainly they have killed far fewer civilians than either the US or Israel.

As for Fadlallah and Nasr, her own words say it best:

I used the words “respect” and “sad” because to me as a Middle Eastern woman, Fadlallah took a contrarian and pioneering stand among Shia clerics on woman’s rights. He called for the abolition of the tribal system of “honor killing.” He called the practice primitive and non-productive. He warned Muslim men that abuse of women was against Islam…

It is no secret that Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah hated with a vengeance the United States government and Israel. He regularly praised the terror attacks that killed Israeli citizens. And as recently as 2008, he said the numbers of Jews killed in the Holocaust were wildly inflated.

But it was his commitment to Hezbollah’s original mission – resisting Israel’s occupation of Lebanon – that made him popular and respected among many Lebanese, not just people of his own sect.

She further notes that as he got older, he actually spoke out against Hezbollah and hardline Iranian clerics:

In later years, Hezbollah’s leadership apparently did not like Fadlallah’s vocal criticism of Hezbollah’s allegiance to Iran. Nor did they like his assertions that Hezbollah’s leaders had been distracted from resistance to Israeli occupation of portions of Lebanon and had turned weapons against their own people.

At first, he was simply pushed to the side, but later wasn’t even referred to as a Hezbollah member. Rather, he was referred to as the scholar – the expert on Islam – but nothing more. During the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, his honorary title “Sayyed” – indicating that he’s a descendant of the prophet – was dropped any time he was mentioned on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV and other Hezbollah media outlets.

None of this is to say he was a “good guy”, but he was certainly no more evil than a man who launched a pre-emptive war based on lies against a country which was no threat to his own country, killing hundreds of thousands and making millions homeless.

It’s not that journalists can’t have opinions, it’s that they can only have approved opinions, or at least they can only admit to approved opinions.

UNIFIL presence in Lebanon will increase civilian casualties

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On July 7, 2010

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Intentional, or a side effect?

In the last war, much of the fighting took place on open scrubland, Merli said. But the deployment of United Nations forces in southern Lebanon had forced Hezbollah into built up areas where troops from the international UNIFIL force have no authority.

Not good.  Note that Hezbollah fought outside built up areas for military reasons: they felt they were more effective there, because outside of population centers they were also away from informants.  UNIFIL’s mission means the next war will be fought in population centers.

Somehow that does not seem to be something a UN peacekeeping operation should be ensuring.

Enough with the Sanctimony over Israel, Jews, Palestine and the Holocaust

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On June 13, 2010

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Look, enough. Let me lay it out really simply for the dense.

The Palestinians did not deserve to be colonized, displaced and turned into 2nd class citizens in their own land because Europeans tried to kill off the Jewish people.

The morality here is the same as the morality of Iraq and 9/11.  “Well, some folks attacked us, so we’re going to use it as an excuse to beat the shit out of someone who was completely uninvolved.”

So, enough with the sanctimony about Helen Thomas’s statement about Israeli Jews from the usual suspects on the left.

Telling the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors to “go back to Poland” is outrageous. I received a “defense” of Thomas’s remark from a leftwing blogger who suggested that if HE were a refugee in World War II he would not have wanted to live in Israel. Not helpful. Going back to 1948 — let alone suggesting the repatriation of the descendants of European Jews to the countries that annihilated them — is as absurd as it is hideous.

Oh really, is Germany or Poland as bad a place to be a Jew as Gaza or the West Bank are to be a Palestinian?  Why, exactly, did Western nations pay for their sins by giving Jews a nation in the Middle East instead of, say, a chunk of Germany and Poland?  Why take from, why punish, those who had nothing to do with the Holocaust.

Is it really as bad to be told to go back to a first world nation where you would have full citizenship, as it is to be forced to live in a slum where you have no rights, can be starved at will, can’t travel as you choose, can have your house bulldozed and your farm destroyed?  Is it really so “hideous”?

Of course it isn’t.

The fundamental truth of Israel’s existence is that it is a settler nation in the modern world.  Yes, there have been plenty of them, including Canada, the US and virtually every nation in the Americas, but is that an excuse to do it again?  To not learn from the past?  To turn our heads and say “well, too bad for the Palestinians, because we Western nations need to expiate our sins, and we intend to make them pay for what we did wrong?  And hey, whatever, it’s not as bad as what we did to the American Indians, so the Palestinians should just suck it up?”

Obama wanted Helen Thomas gone because she had a habit of asking questions he hated.  She was a fool to walk right into it, but hey, someone who was the soul of discretion wouldn’t have asked the questions over the years Helen asked.

You want eunuchs in the White House press corp?  This is how you get them.

A Gaffe: saying the truth in the worst way possible

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On June 7, 2010

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As with Helen Thomas when asked what she thought about Israel.  “I think they should get the hell out of Palestine.”

Israel is a colonial power occupying a land whose population was, prior to their getting rid of many of them, majority non-Jewish.  This is why “right of return” is a non-starter, because if all the people pushed out of Israel were allowed to return…

What would Turkey’s NATO allies do in the case of a Turkish/Israeli throwdown?

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On June 1, 2010

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The general assumption has been that if push comes to shove between Israel and Turkey, that NATO allies will not support Turkey, and that the US will supply Israel, but not supply Turkey.

I wonder if those two things are both true.

It’s interesting to note that Britain, normally a staunch Israeli ally, in response to the attack on the aid flotilla in international waters called for an end to the Gaza blockade.  As with both Turkey and Israel’s actions, one imagines this may be driven by domestic political concerns.  To put it simply, Britain has a lot more Muslim citizens than Jewish ones, and England’s Jewish residents tend to be liberal and unlikely to become radicalized and blow things up.  Electorally, helping Palestinians may be a winner.

In the US, AIPAC and the Jewish lobby are generally considered amongst America’s strongest lobbies.  But it’s worth putting in perspective—when George Bush senior tackled AIPAC, he crushed them.  The vast majority of likely Democratic voters aren’t that sympathetic to Israel.  And to mess with Israel, all Obama has to do is stop protecting it at the UN, which is completely under his control, and not preferentially ship supplies to Israel in the case of a crisis, something which is also 100% inside the executive’s purview.

Obama has been snippy with the Israelis in the past, as when new settlements were announced during vice-President Biden’s visit.  While it’s hard to read Obama, I think it’s clear that he hasn’t appreciated the way Israel has taken the US’s support for granted.

And hey, changing the conversation from the BP oil spill can only be good.

I also don’t think it’s clear that Israel can use its nukes on Turkey without any other nuclear power threatening retaliation.  Glassing a major metropolis is not something likely to make Britain, the US or France happy.  In the US the idea of using nukes seems to occasion something of a yawn, but in the rest of the world it is the ultimate taboo.

Likewise, I’m not entirely sure that if Israel attacks Turkey’s military vessels in support of what may soon be considered an illegal blockade of Gaza, that other NATO nations won’t back Turkey up if it responds with a naval blockade of its own.  In particular, I’m not sure that the new British government comes in on Israel’s side, nor am I sure France does.  And either of those nations is more than capable of slapping Israel around if Israel gets too big for its britches.

Israel’s been pissing off its friends for a long time now.  This particular attack seems to have been done for domestic political reasons, and was a deliberate flouting of international law, a slap in the face “you won’t do anything about this, we can do whatever we want.”

Works, until it doesn’t.  I don’t know if Israel has crossed the line, but I think it may have.  For Britain, in particular, to come out with a statement calling for the end of the Gaza blockade is not a small thing.

All of which is a long way of saying, I’m not so sure the US, and particularly Britain, will automatically support Israel in any confrontation with Turkey.

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