by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
The U.S. believes it can manipulate jihadi fighters in a holy war against the West’s enemies in the Muslim world. However, “Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza threatens to unravel the Salafist-Qatari-Saudi-NATO axis, for one simple and irreducible reason: there is no place for the racist settler state in this post-Arab Spring equation.”
Obama’s Mideast Policy Burns
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
“The Euro-American strategy to divert and control the Arab Spring through an armed alliance with Muslim fundamentalist fighters and their royal Arab financiers, has always contained a fatal flaw: Israel.”
As African Americans circle the wagons around Susan Rice, one of the most bellicose, bomb-at-the-drop-of-a-hat, Africa-bashing professional servants of power in Washington, America’s carefully crafted house of cards in the Middle East faces collapse.
The Euro-American strategy to divert and control the Arab Spring through an armed alliance with Muslim fundamentalist fighters and their royal Arab financiers, has always contained a fatal flaw: Israel. The Jewish State’s reflexive savagery towards Palestinians threatens to disrupt, if not destroy, the inherently unstable pact between the Great Satans of Washington, London and Paris, the Great Kleptocrats of Riyahd and Doha, and the martyrdom-seeking armies of Salafist Islam.
The unholy alliance is a retooling of the U.S.-Saudi Arabia-Pakistan axis that created the global jihadi network – including Al Qaida – at a cost of billions, in the 1980s. The immediate purpose was to humiliate the Soviets in Afghanistan. Inevitably, a “blowback” followed. Washington emerged with a new rational for the old business of imperialism: the war on terror.
To further circumvent international law and other hindrances to imperial reach, Washington devised the doctrine of “humanitarian” military intervention – where Susan Rice makes her mark as madwoman, demanding blockades and air strikes against Sudan, invasion of Somalia, embargoes on little Eritrea, and regime change in Libya.
The convulsions of the Arab Spring, leading to regime change of the most unwelcome kind for the West in Tunisia and Egypt at the beginning of 2011, set the stage for an even closer collaboration between NATO and the monarchies in Saudi Arabia and Qatar – and for a new and potentially cataclysmic blowback. The Euro-Americans, confronting the prospect of sudden eviction from an Arab world in flux, quickly regrouped to “get out in front” of the Arab Spring through a massive show of “humanitarian” force in Libya. However, NATO’s air armada needed foot soldiers to seize the ground in Libya, and to physically shove the knife into Muammar Gaddafi’s backside. Just as in Afghanistan three decades earlier, the Americans turned to the Salafists for fighters and to the thieving Arab royals of Saudi Arabia and Qatar for financing and political cover. Susan Rice, now U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was credited with convincing President Obama to join the French-initiated war to topple Gaddafi.
“It was only a matter of time before significant elements of the U.S.-empowered jihadis in Libya turned against their masters.”
It is silly to believe that Rice, or anyone other than Obama, was the pivotal person in this grand imperial maneuver. Rather, the sudden and savage assault on Libya was a collective imperial response to Europe and America’s greatest nightmare: mass revolutions in the Arab world, which would mean eviction of the West. However, Rice’s bellicosity and ambition, having thrust her into a key player position, conspired also to place her at the center of the blowback.
It was only a matter of time before significant elements of the U.S.-empowered jihadis in Libya turned against their masters. And there is no doubt that U.S. political and intelligence leaders saw it coming. When the U.S. ambassador and his entourage were under attack in Benghazi, two unarmed drones were diverted from surveillance duties over Derna, about 100 miles to the east. Derna is a center of jihadi activism, the town that accounted for the highest concentrations of Al Qaida fighters in the Iraq war. Apparently, the U.S. maintained constant surveillance of the city and its environs – and, presumably, other jihadi strongholds – all the while projecting the fiction that the U.S. had empowered the “good” (meaning, pro-American) Islamists in Libya.
Susan Rice was carrying out her official duty – to lie – when she read purported intelligence reports on CBS Face the Nation, September 16, suggesting the September 11 attacks “began spontaneously” as a protest against an anti-Muslim video produced in the U.S. The explanation was consistent with the official U.S. “line” covering the entirety of the West’s post-Arab Spring offensive in the Middle East, which has since engulfed Syria. Libya’s “good” jihadis have joined Salafists from throughout the Sunni Arab world, largely bankrolled by the terrified feudal regimes in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, in a holy war that Washington has no choice but to pretend it can, somehow, control to its geopolitical advantage.
The Republicans, who have no problem with Obama’s adventures in Libya and Syria – as Mitt Romney repeatedly affirmed in the third presidential debate – attempt to make partisan points from the obvious falsity of Rice’s remarks. Like Romney, Senator John McCain and other GOP warmongers are saying they could do a better job of projecting U.S. power in the region, through the application of more direct U.S. military force – an approach that would even more quickly unravel the unsustainable alliances in which the Obama administration is so deeply invested.
“The Americans and Europeans now scramble to constrain Israel, lest it enflame Arab nationalism and Islamist sensibilities beyond all manageability.”
As if the contradictions of U.S. Middle East policy were not already acute enough, the Israelis now force their putrid selves into the maelstrom. Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza threatens to unravel the Salafist-Qatari-Saudi-NATO axis, for one simple and irreducible reason: there is no place for the racist settler state in this post-Arab Spring equation. Which explains why Israel has chosen to make its presence so dramatically felt at this time – why it initiated the current crisis with its assassination of Hamas military leader Ahmed al-Jabari, last week, setting off the Palestinian rocket barrage.
The Israelis do not see themselves at the center of Washington’s evolving strategy for continued western hegemony in the Middle East, and are forcing the issue in the usual manner: by killing Palestinians. The Americans and Europeans now scramble to constrain Israel, lest it enflame Arab nationalism and Islamist sensibilities beyond all manageability, wrecking the fragile political configurations the West has constructed since the fall of Egypt’s Mubarak, the war on Libya and the torture of Syria.
Washington understands that it cannot successfully channel a holy war against Syria’s Alawite President Assad and Shiite Iran while its “unshakeable ally,” the Jewish State, wages war on Palestinian Sunnis. It is a fatal contradiction in a region that, only two years ago, seemed to be slipping from the West’s grasp. U.S. imperialism finds itself in deep crisis in the world’s most volatile, and energy-rich, region.
Meanwhile, South Carolina Black congressman James Clyburn is deeply worried about the racial implications of Republican claims that Susan Rice is not “competent” or “qualified” to succeed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. For Clyburn, this represents a grave problem for Black America. It is actually a perfect measure of how irrelevant the Black Misleadership Class has become to the burning issues facing mankind.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
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