Tag Archives: Saudi Arabia

Political Rants

Same old same old (and I loathe it)

Remember when, during the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden said that he would return us to the Iran deal (or JCPOA)? Yeah, that was awesome. Except that they haven’t done that, which is not so awesome. In fact, it’s infuriating. But it’s also exactly what we should have expected out of him, frankly – namely, that instead of reversing Trump’s most heinous foreign policy initiatives, Biden would adopt and even extend them into his own term.

Some readers may remember my posts from during the Biden/Trump race regarding Biden’s lack of focus on foreign policy issues. I wrote at the time about how his campaign site issues section didn’t have a single item on global affairs, other than some dreck about immigration from the southern cone nations. My contention at the time was that he had little good to say about it, and that he assumed his voters didn’t care about those issues. Perhaps he was right, but I have to think a section of Democratic party voters are a bit taken aback by some of his policies.

The toxic alliance

The JCPOA is the most glaring example of this. Biden could have reinstated this agreement with the stroke of a pen in the first days of his presidency. Instead, he chose to consult with then Israeli PM Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia – both openly hostile to Iran – before proceeding. Our State Department is balking on sanctions relief, and there’s little sign of progress over the past year. This agreement, very favorable to the U.S., is essentially dead in the water. Why?

Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute, who appeared on Majority Report last week, talked about Biden’s apparent support for strengthening the alliance of nations that are signatories to the Abraham Accords, a Trump initiative to defuse support for the Palestinians and isolate Iran. Parsi suggests that the JCPOA is a casualty of the administration’s desire to build a common front against the Iranians, pulling Israel together with some of the more pugnacious gulf states – an alliance built on common enmity. What a good idea.

Continuity: not our friend

Okay, so … why is our government – the government of normie Joe Biden, not crazy-ass Donald Trump – encouraging conflict in the Middle East instead of working toward peaceful outcomes of the sort the JCPOA was designed to produce? Well, this is nothing new in American foreign policy. Yes, they are extending one of Trump’s worst decisions. But they are also doing the same sort of thing the U.S. always does in various parts of the world.

Other examples aren’t hard to find. The first that comes to mind is another Trump reversal of a late Obama administration policy, the opening to Cuba. Trump shut that down entirely, and Biden has failed to even act as though he’s willing to reinstate it. The domestic political motivations are obvious, but again – why perpetuate conflict when normalization would bring greater stability and, of course, more benefits to Cubans living in the U.S.?

The other obvious example is Korea. Here is one instance when Trump’s instincts were, at a certain point, better than Biden’s. Why have we failed to settle the Korean conflict when the solution is almost entirely in our hands? Same reason with all of the other endless conflicts: we want to remain a force to be reckoned with in all of these regions. We want to keep potential economic rivals – like an integrated Asia – from emerging. Same old, same old.

The way forward

There are a handful of members of Congress who understand these issues. We need more like them. I know elections are not the only thing, but they’re worth the modicum of effort we all need to put into them. Look at the candidates vying for your district’s House seat, find the most progressive, and vote. We need allies in government before we’ll see some movement on backing off of the bipartisan neoimperialist agenda.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

While you were looking over there

As Russia continues to do what Russia always does, this time in Ukraine, other atrocities try to keep pace. The Saudis put 81 people to death this past week in one of their execution sprees. Ali AlAhmed shared some photos of the victims on Twitter, and it’s worth scrolling through the list just to afford these people a small portion of the humanity being accorded, quite rightly, to Ukrainians.

Then, of course, there’s Yemen – still Yemen. Over the weekend, UNICEF reported that almost 50 children were killed or maimed in January alone, adding to the more than 10,000 child casualties recorded since the war began, with our nod and crucial material support, in 2015. Yemen remains among the worst humanitarian crises in the world, and yet it has fallen from the front page, particularly in America.

Proximity, proximity is everything

It’s not surprising or outrageous that the mainstream corporate media, and much of the independent media, spends most of their time on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It’s a huge story, and it should be reported on. But some crises fail to command the attention that Ukraine has garnered over the past three weeks. Yemen is chief among them, but certainly not the only instance.

The reason? Impossible to be precise, but it’s not hard to discern a pattern. If an atrocity is being committed by an official enemy, it is all over the media. If, on the other hand, the atrocity is being committed by us or by a close ally, it gets much, much less coverage, by and large. Count the number of stories about the war in Yemen that have run in U.S. major media. You will have fingers left over. Now compare that with this wall-to-wall Ukraine coverage.

Conclusion: Ukraine is being attacked by someone we don’t like; Yemen is being attacked by an ally who’s dependent on our help to conduct the war. The less likely it is that we can stop a war, the more likely it is that our media will focus on it.

Sticking to what you know

Russia’s military, at Putin’s behest, is doing what they know how to do: blowing things up. That’s how they get people to bend to their will. It’s the sharpest imperial tool in their toolbox by far. They destroy whole cities and drive people into the wilderness. That’s all they know.

Bombs, missiles, shells, and bullets are what’s available to Putin. But he doesn’t have a corner on imperialism. The United States, on the other hand, has more than one way to skin a country. When we put a nation under sanction, it hurts very badly. We can shut off access to international financial institutions. We can starve whole populations and ruin their public health infrastructure. This is what we did to Iraq in the 1990s and early 2000s, between two spates of bombing. That’s how we bent them to our will.

Russia doesn’t have that. If they sanction someone, it doesn’t mean much. They don’t have anywhere near the leverage of the U.S. in international finance. All they have is the bombs.

Finding the exit

Maddeningly, this attack on Ukraine, all in the space of a few weeks, is doing what was done in Yemen, in Syria, in Iraq at the height of those conflicts – destroying societal infrastructure on a massive scale. Much as you have to admire the Ukrainians’ courage and stubbornness, I hope the sides aren’t getting so entrenched that some settlement can’t be reached.

This war will end. The question is, how much of Ukraine will survive that long? If Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and others are any indication, it’s better to find a way to settlement sooner rather than later. I think that’s one channel by which the international community can help.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Enter The Blob.

As anyone who listens to my podcast, Strange Sound, knows, I’ve had serious differences with the Biden team on foreign policy from early on in their campaign. What first gave me pause was the fact that the “issues” section of their campaign web site included no foreign policy items whatsoever, except one or two bank-shot mentions of other countries in the context of discussions about domestic policy issues, like immigration and energy policy. Of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as Donald Rumsfeld once told us, and in this context the cliche is true – while Biden’s outward-facing platform was a blank slate on foreign policy, there was definitely a there there, even if we couldn’t see it. And, no great surprise, the Biden foreign policy is basically built around the return of the blob (a.k.a. the imperial foreign policy establishment that has dominated administrations of both major parties since the American empire began).

We saw evidence of this in stark relief this past week with the bombing of “Iranian-backed” elements in Syria. Immediately we saw mainstream commentators like Richard Haas on television describing this as a measured and appropriate response to what they described as Iranian provocations, parroting the administration line that the U.S. needed to do this to show the Iranians that they can’t do whatever they want in the region without consequences. (That privilege we reserve to ourselves, of course – hence the raid.) The Biden administration is taking the path of least resistance, returning to the settled imperial order of confronting Iran at every opportunity, imposing conditions on them unilaterally, and not taking responsibility for our own disastrous policy decisions over the past four years (which, themselves, compounded the disastrous policy decisions of the preceding 75 years).

The fact is, the Biden administration is building on that bad policy. While Anthony Blinken has not openly endorsed Trump’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, he is leading the State Department in returning to something that still looks a lot like that recognition, while keeping the American embassy in Jerusalem – a decision that cements in place this open defiance of the very concept of a two-state solution. The Biden State Department is still calling Juan Guaido the “interim president” of Venezuela when he is, in fact, no such thing and has no standing as the leader of that country – a delusional policy originated by the Trump crew. Biden is unlikely to withdraw U.S. recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, a criminal quid-pro-quo over recognition of Israel, brokered by the Trump administration. Don’t even get me started on Saudi Arabia. In fact, as far as I can see, the only policy Biden appears poised to reverse is Trump’s opening to North Korea – literally the only good thing the man ever did (albeit by accident).

With respect to foreign affairs, war and peace, we appear to be locked into place, regardless of which major party runs the White House. Bad news for anyone who might have hoped this presidential transition would bring a saner approach to the world. Doesn’t seem likely.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.