Middle East landscape rapidly changing

Started by give her dixie, January 25, 2011, 02:05:36 PM

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seafoid

Quote from: give her dixie on July 18, 2012, 01:47:36 PM
Quote from: seafoid on July 18, 2012, 01:43:14 PM
The Israelis will miss the Assads. They were very compliant enemies really.

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/israel-s-favorite-arab-dictator-of-all-is-assad-1.352468

As strange as it sounds, everyone in Israel loves Arab dictators. When I say everyone I mean both Jews and Arabs. The favorite dictator of all is president Assad. As Assad junior inherited the oppressive regime in Syria, so did both Jews and Arabs transfer their affection for the dictator from Damascus from Assad senior to his son.

Following the intifada in the Arab states, Bashar al-Assad maintained in an interview to the Wall Street Journal that the situation in Syria is different, adding that Syria is not like Egypt. He also emphasized that Syria was not susceptible to sliding into a similar situation, because it was in the "resistance" front and belongs to the anti-American, anti-Israeli axis.

Well, Assad is right. The situation in Syria is indeed different. The Syrian regime is more like Saddam's defunct regime. The Ba'ath Party that ruled Iraq and the one still ruling Syria both held aloft flags of pan-Arab national ideology. But slogans are one thing and reality is another. All the ideological sweet talk was only talk. For the Ba'ath Party, both in Iraq and in Syria, constituted a political platform to perpetuate tribal, ethnic oppression.

Indeed, the situation in Egypt is completely different. If we put aside the Coptic minority, then Egyptian society is homogenous religiously and not tribal at all. The demoted Egyptian president, Mubarak, never had a tribal-ethnic crutch to lean on. The Egyptian army is also different and not at all like the Syrian or Iraqi armies.

For example, when the United States invaded Iraq, the Iraqi army splintered into its tribal and ethnic fragments. The soldiers took off their uniforms and each joined his tribe and ethnic community. Saddam too adhered to those tribal codes. He did not flee Iraq but went to hide in the well-protected areas of his tribesmen. This is what happens in these societies. In the land of the cedars, as soon as the civil war broke out, the Lebanese army dissolved into its ethnic components and disappeared.

True, Syria is not Egypt. Syria is also different in terms of the price in blood inflicted by the tyrannical Syrian regime. The Syrian tribal government is based on the force exercised by the security branches ruled by the tribesmen and their interested allies.

Inherently, a tribal regime of this kind will always be seen as a foreign reign
. This kind of reign can be called tribal imperialism, which rules by operating brutal terror and oppression. This is underscored when a minority tribe rules, like in Syria. Thus every undermining of the government is seen as a challenge to the tribal hegemony and a danger to the ruling tribe's survival. Such a regime by its very nature is totally immersed in a bloodbath.

Both Assad senior and Assad junior advocated resistance against Israel. This slogan was hollow, serving the regime merely as an insurance policy against any demand for freedom and democracy. The Syrian "resistance" government has not uttered a peep on the Golan front since 1973. Instead, the "resistance" regime was and still is ready to fight Israel to the last Lebanese, and if that doesn't do the trick - then to the last Palestinian.

As voices in Israel have recently spoken out in favor of Hamas' continued rule in Gaza, so many Israelis are worried these days over the Syrian regime's welfare. Astonishingly, not only Jews are praying secretly for the Damascus regime's survival, but many in the Arab parties as well. These parties' leaders have been dumbstruck, their voices have been muted and no outcry has been raised against the Syrian regime's massacre of civilians.

All the hypocrites, Jews and Arabs alike, have united. It seems Assad has wall-to-wall support here, as though he were king of Israel

aithnionn ciarog ciarog eile
"f**k it, just score"- Donaghy   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbxG2WwVRjU

thejuice

Interesting post on Slugger

http://sluggerotoole.com/2012/07/20/can-iran-be-prevented-from-developing-the-bomb-should-it-be-prevented/

QuoteThe current edition of Foreign Affairs magazine contains a leading article by Professor Kenneth N Waltz provocatively entitled Why Iran Should Get The Bomb (it is worth taking a few minutes to read this short but cogent article).

The crux of Waltz' argument is that power begs to be balanced. Israel's regional nuclear monopoly especially coupled with American support, he argues, created a regional imbalance of power which is the primary driver of instability in the Middle East. A nuclear balance of terror in the region should, in his view, encourage actors in the region to behave more responsibly, as it has in the Subcontinent since India and Pakistan became formal nuclear powers. Since nuclear weapons came on the scene, no two nuclear powers have ever gone to war against one another.

Iran's theocratic leaders may be unpleasantly authoritarian and ideologically expansionist, but they are not mad. The consequences of an Iranian nuclear strike – massive retaliation by Israel and possibly the United States – are as clear to the Ayatollahs as they are to anyone else. Nor is passing on nuclear weapons to terrorist groups or other states likely to appeal to decision makers in Tehran, any more than it did to Mao's unpleasantly authoritarian and ideologically expansionist régime in the 1960s.

To me, however, the more pertinent question is not whether Iran should be stopped from developing The Bomb, but whether it can be. North Korea has managed to become a nuclear power despite its crushing poverty, isolation, primitive economy and clear technical failings in its nuclear weapons programme. Iran, which maintains friendly relations with Russia and China is, at present, awash with oil money and has an education system capable of training as many nuclear scientists as it needs.

Western conservatives seem to work from the standpoint that Iran's nuclear programme can be derailed at relatively little cost to Israel and still less cost to the West. Memories of Israel's successful surgical strike on Iraq's nuclear facilities in 1981, and more recent obliteration of what was almost certainly an undeclared Syrian reactor construction programme, fuel the idea that Iran can be forced to abandon its dream of becoming a nuclear power through air-strikes alone. However, Iran's nuclear programme has been developed with the risk of an Israeli or American strike, whether by planes or missiles, uppermost in the minds of its planners. Facilities are, as far as is possible, in hardened underground sites. Any air strike which failed would likely only encourage Tehran to increase the tempo towards weaponisation, while leaving the US to deal with diplomatic and probably military fallout, a subject I will return to below.

Israel has instead pursued a high-risk strategy of assassinating key Iranian nuclear scientists, four of whom have now been killed in attacks while travelling to work, using locally recruited agents. The Stuxnet computer virus, aimed at the enrichment plant at Natanz, represented a joint American-Israeli attempt to disrupt the Iranian nuclear programme by non-conventional means. However, its success in introducing significant delays to the programme simply underlines how difficult it would be to destroy it entirely.

Iran's nuclear programme has significant support outside the Islamic world. Moscow and Tehran have established a joint venture to complete and operate Iran's long delayed civil nuclear power plant at Bushehr. Russia seems to see little threat in, at the least, an Iranian civil nuclear programme. Russia has nuclear weapons, a lot of them, and is a Security Council veto power. Its consequent diplomatic clout has been on display for all to see in Syria. It tends to see its interests in the region in narrow economic terms – for example, support for Syria has not prevented some enormous sales of military technology between Israel and Russia, in both directions, in recent years. As a major energy exporter, Russia's economic interests in the Middle East are often far from being in consonance with Western ones.

Even without Russian support, Iran can take a number of steps to retaliate against any American-Israeli attack on its territory. It has already rattled sabres about closing the Straits of Hormuz, and while so far that has looked like an empty threat, it remains a go-to option in dire circumstances.

That could risk antagonising the Chinese, vastly more dependent on Middle East oil than the Americans and whose economy currently looks vulnerable. There are steps it can take which are more directly targeted at specifically American interests, however. Iran has long sponsored or encouraged terrorist attacks by proxies against its enemies, and as we saw in Bulgaria this week, it continues to do so. However, attacks on that small scale are likely to be seen in both Washington and Jerusalem as an acceptable price if they are the consequence of preventing a nuclear Iran. On its own doorstep, however, Iran has the capacity to undermine American interests in the region on a much bigger scale.

Iran's influence in Iraq is already enormous and, while it has avoided antagonising America too directly since the occupation, if it wanted to it could. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is close to Tehran and some of the parties in his governing coalition are intimately connected to Iran's most powerful politico-religious figures. Afghanistan, nestling on Iran's eastern border, plays host to around 90,000 US troops and relations between Tehran and the Taliban have warmed considerably in recent years. And on the other side of the Gulf, Saudi Arabia's predominantly Shi'a Eastern Province, home to the biggest chunk of its oil production, is perpetually unhappy with Riyadh, often for good reason. Bahrain also remains a powder keg, and of course nobody has the slightest clue how the situation in Syria will eventually pan out.

Stirring tensions in any of those countries represents a major escalation by Tehran, one that could provoke military conflict with Turkey or Saudi Arabia, a nightmare scenario for the entire region. However, hawks in Tehran may decide that as long as their nuclear programme is not derailed entirely, they can afford to wait. Once they have The Bomb, they will almost certainly be secure from any future attack, as North Korea has been.

That raises the prospects of a nuclear standoff between an American backed Israel and a Russian backed Iran. Is that necessarily a bad thing? It gives the world's two largest nuclear powers all the incentive they need to push for a final settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict, probably empowering America to seek more concessions from Israel in return for the maintenance of its nuclear umbrella and encouraging Russia to pour oil on troubled waters that might involve it in a situation well out of Moscow's comfort zone.

The Middle East is about as far from the United States as it is possible to be, and projecting American power in the region is expensive and depends on what are, even in today's globalised environment, fragile supply lines. Is it time for America to accept that its interests are now strategic rather than global? Asia's rise makes a mockery of American universal hegemony, as does America's own failure to project power into Iraq and Afghanistan.

Middle East oil mostly flows eastwards, fracking is driving US domestic gas production through the roof, and the oil sands in Alberta and Utah together with Brazil's massive new offshore oilfield probably means America can meet its energy needs entirely from the Western Hemisphere for decades to come. For the more brutal realists that inhabit every US administration, it is probably easier to engineer coups in Venezuela than it is to keep the Middle East from exploding. How does America's deep entanglement in the Middle East benefit it in concrete terms? Is it time to consider whether a policy of broad US disengagement from the Middle East best suits its interests?

In the short term, it would unleash howls of protest at home and it would take a brave politician indeed to raise the subject in an election year. In the medium term, it might prove popular with an American electorate weary of seemingly endless foreign wars.
It won't be the next manager but the one after that Meath will become competitive again - MO'D 2016

Denn Forever

Not changing quick enough (To be flippant, education is bad for your health).

All hail Malala.

Surgeons in Pakistan say they have removed a bullet from a 14-year-old girl who was shot in the head by Taliban gunmen in the Swat Valley.

Malala Yousafzai, a campaigner for girls' rights, is reported to be in a stable condition after the operation.

To read more http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19893309
I have more respect for a man
that says what he means and
means what he says...

southdown

Some very interesting points raised by Proff Waltz.  He raises some valid easons why the US should limit their involvement in the middle east.  The politics of this region are so complex, makes you wander if the region can ever become relatively stable.

seafoid

Quote from: southdown on October 10, 2012, 12:47:50 PM
Some very interesting points raised by Proff Waltz.  He raises some valid easons why the US should limit their involvement in the middle east.  The politics of this region are so complex, makes you wander if the region can ever become relatively stable.
not as long as it has cheap oil
"f**k it, just score"- Donaghy   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbxG2WwVRjU

southdown

Anyone hazard a guess as to if/when Isreal while strike Iran?

seafoid

Quote from: southdown on October 17, 2012, 03:27:32 PM
Anyone hazard a guess as to if/when Isreal while strike Iran?
If they are going to do it it will be next year but they would need the Yanks to back them up. I don't know if that will happen. The risks are massive.
"f**k it, just score"- Donaghy   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbxG2WwVRjU

southdown

I get the feeling they will strike Iran with or without the US, especially now there is a new right wing coalition in government. It wuld be a risky move but I think they are hell bent on stopping Iran.  Sudan have now threatened to report Israel to the UN over air strikes at munition factories.  Israel claim these factories are supplying weapons for Hamas and other groups. 

There would be chaos in the US election camps if Israel struck Iran before the election.

seafoid

Bradley Manning is now on trial



http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/28/bradley-manning-trial-plea-statement

Manning said: "We were obsessed with capturing and killing human targets on lists and ignoring goals and missions. I believed if the public, particularly the American public, could see this it could spark a debate on the military and our foreign policy in general [that] might cause society to reconsider the need to engage in counter-terrorism while ignoring the human situation of the people we engaged with every day."
In a highly unusual move for a defendant in such a serious criminal prosecution, Manning pleaded guilty to 10 lesser charges out of his own volition – not as part of a plea bargain with the prosecution. He admitted to having possessed and willfully communicated to an unauthorised person – probably Julian Assange – all the main elements of the WikiLeaks disclosure.



That covered the so-called "Collateral Murder" video of an Apache helicopter attack in Iraq;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbqmr5rtdOs

AIPAC, the Israeli lobby in DC, wants the US to attack Iran. WTF

http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/02/28/1650441/graham-menendez-backdoor-war-iran
"f**k it, just score"- Donaghy   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbxG2WwVRjU

give her dixie

The landscape certainly changed tonight as President Morsi in Egypt has been overthrown in what can only be described as a "Coup D'Etat"

Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood won a democratic election, and despite promising so much, they delivered very little in the eyes of most Egyptians.

The following days are going to be very interesting.....
next stop, September 10, for number 4......

Syferus

Kinda flies in the face of right wing worries about the Muslim Brotherhood becoming the new big bad. Turns out they're just another undesirable bunch of loons and politicians.

Egyptians deserve some good leadership at this point.

lawnseed

Quote from: Syferus on July 03, 2013, 09:57:44 PM
Kinda flies in the face of right wing worries about the Muslim Brotherhood becoming the new big bad. Turns out they're just another undesirable bunch of loons and politicians.

Egyptians deserve some good leadership at this point.

ireland deserves some decent leadership also.. maybe the gimp kenny would walk like an egyptian.. :P
A coward dies a thousand deaths a soldier only dies once

Syferus

Quote from: lawnseed on July 03, 2013, 11:28:22 PM
Quote from: Syferus on July 03, 2013, 09:57:44 PM
Kinda flies in the face of right wing worries about the Muslim Brotherhood becoming the new big bad. Turns out they're just another undesirable bunch of loons and politicians.

Egyptians deserve some good leadership at this point.

ireland deserves some decent leadership also.. maybe the gimp kenny would walk like an egyptian.. :P

Enda's our best leader since Queen Meabh.

johnneycool

Quote from: give her dixie on July 03, 2013, 09:36:50 PM
The landscape certainly changed tonight as President Morsi in Egypt has been overthrown in what can only be described as a "Coup D'Etat"

Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood won a democratic election, and despite promising so much, they delivered very little in the eyes of most Egyptians.

The following days are going to be very interesting.....

I wonder did Mohammed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood party enjoy the same amount of 'International Aid' as Mubarak did?

seafoid

Quote from: johnneycool on July 04, 2013, 09:25:14 AM
Quote from: give her dixie on July 03, 2013, 09:36:50 PM
The landscape certainly changed tonight as President Morsi in Egypt has been overthrown in what can only be described as a "Coup D'Etat"

Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood won a democratic election, and despite promising so much, they delivered very little in the eyes of most Egyptians.

The following days are going to be very interesting.....
I think the Yanks kept funding the army.

Egypt is a total mess. Very hard to triangulate between American geopolitical needs, the requirement for the economy to keep paying for stuff and the wishes of the people .

I wonder did Mohammed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood party enjoy the same amount of 'International Aid' as Mubarak did?
"f**k it, just score"- Donaghy   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbxG2WwVRjU