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Presenting The Syria Deception: Al Qaeda Goes to Hollywood (VIDEO) – Grayzone Project

Posted by M. C. on December 8, 2019

https://grayzoneproject.com/2018/09/15/presenting-the-syria-deception-al-qaeda-goes-to-hollywood-video/

An exclusive Grayzone investigative documentary rips the cover off of the most sophisticated and expensive campaign of humanitarian interventionist propaganda in modern history.

By Dan Cohen

For decades, Western governments, corporate media, and Hollywood have engaged in a project of mass deception to manufacture consent for military interventions. Waged in the name of lofty ideals like freedom, human rights, and democracy, US-led wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya wound up bringing death, destruction and even the return of slavery to the African continent.

As the wounds from those catastrophes festered, Washington embarked on its most ambitious project yet, marketing another war of regime change, this time in Syria.

The following investigative mini-documentary exposes the cynical deceptions and faux humanitarianism behind the campaign to sell the dirty war on Syria.

It also demonstrates the lengths that the US and its allies have gone to develop new ploys to tug at Western heartstrings and convince even liberal minded skeptics of war that a US intervention was necessary — even if it meant empowering Al Qaeda’s largest franchise since 9/11 and its theocratic allies among the insurgency.

Big lies and little children have formed the heart of what is perhaps the most expensive, sophisticated, and shameless propaganda blitz ever conducted. Welcome to The Syria Deception.

Hollywood’s role in promoting war is nothing new. The American film industry has collaborated over the years with the State Department, the Pentagon, and the intelligence services to produce an array of films burnishing the military’s image, revising controversial US actions, and propagating official accounts of critical events through action blockbusters.

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The Saudi/U.S. Partnership: Evil Begets Evil

Posted by M. C. on December 7, 2019

In the process it has become the biggest humanitarian disaster in the world, all due to U.S aggressive intervention, with no compassion whatsoever shown toward the innocent people of Yemen.

The Saudi government kills many of its own citizens as well, and is continuing to murder record numbers by public beheadings every year. Mass beheadings are not uncommon after being charged with non-existent crimes, mostly by corrupt state courts. These charges are against anyone speaking out against the government…

Saudi Arabia. Our friend and perpetrator of 9/11.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/12/gary-d-barnett/the-saudi-us-partnership-evil-begets-evil/

By

Those who knowingly conspire with evil are evil themselves, and because this truth is irrefutable, hiding behind the false mask of exceptionalism only deepens that evil. Conspiracy to commit evil abounds, but some partnerships seem to have sprung out of the bowels of the nether world. One such union is that of the United States and Saudi Arabia, an alliance based only on greed, murder, and power.

Attempting to understand the American psyche concerning its obvious lust for war, and especially its worship of those who prosecute those wars, is difficult beyond reason. But the masses blind indifference toward this heinous and immoral marriage between Saudi Arabia and the United States belies all aspects of common sanity. On the surface, this is an absurd paradox, but considering the “leadership,” is it really? It would be difficult to compare the Saudi citizens to American citizens given the stark differences at many levels, but the leadership of these two countries is much more closely aligned, at least considering known agendas in common. Slime does mix well with slime.

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy, and is run by the House of Saud, which is the ruling family of Saudi Arabia. The King and Prime Minister is Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, but he is incapacitated by dementia and is senile, and not in good health. He appointed his son, Muhammad bin Salman, Crown Prince in 2017, who is now heir-designate to the throne. He rules the country with an iron hand, and holds the positions of deputy prime minister, chairman of the Council of Political and Security Affairs, and the minister of defense. In other words, he controls politics, all security, vast sums of money, and the military. This is the essence of a powerful monarchy.

The situation in Saudi Arabia is very complicated, and many others are involved with what happened before and after the 2017 Saudi Purge that solidified the rise of Muhammad bin Salman. The partnership and love affair between Trump and the U.S. and Saudi Arabia is disturbing in every way, and that relationship includes Zionist Israel as well. This collusion has to do with oil, proxy wars, energy price manipulation, Middle East politics, technocracy planning, vast amounts of money, and future political and geopolitical conspiracy planning and probable war against Iran.

I am mainly concentrating here on the strange bedfellows that are Saudi Arabia and the United States. The Royal Family’s net worth is estimated to be 1.7 trillion dollars, and my guess is it is much higher. The U.S. buys oil from the Saudis and the Saudis are buying over $110 billion worth of arms from U.S. companies. The U.S., UK, and the rest of Europe supply 99% of Saudi’s weapons, weapons used for murder. 61% of those weapons come from America. These weapons are used against innocent countries, but concentrated in Yemen, where the Saudi’s have been murdering civilians in that country for the U.S. since 2015. This proxy war has been a genocide that was purposely orchestrated by the U.S. as an attack against Iranian interests, and is simply meant to stop any Iranian presence in Yemen. In the process it has become the biggest humanitarian disaster in the world, all due to U.S aggressive intervention, with no compassion whatsoever shown toward the innocent people of Yemen.

The Saudi government kills many of its own citizens as well, and is continuing to murder record numbers by public beheadings every year. Mass beheadings are not uncommon after being charged with non-existent crimes, mostly by corrupt state courts. These charges are against anyone speaking out against the government, against non-violent offenders who commit victimless crimes, including drug charges, and a multitude of others. Some of the other non-violent capital crimes include “Apostasy, treason, homosexuality, blasphemy, adultery, sorcery, witchcraft, and waging war on God.”

Saudi’s human rights record is beyond atrocious, including no free speech, incarceration without due process, limited or no basic freedoms for women and girls, no peaceful demonstrations, or practicing the “wrong” religious rites. Other punishment “includes amputations of hand and feet for robbery, and flogging for lesser crimes such as “sexual deviance” and drunkenness. In the 2000s, it was reported that women were sentenced to lashes for adultery; the women were actually victims of rape, but because they could not prove who the perpetrators were, they were deemed guilty of committing adultery.”

This is a major ally of the U.S. It is a murdering arm of American aggression against civilians. It is a recipient of U.S taxpayer aid, and is supplied its weapons by the U.S. and Europe. This is the same country that produced the alleged terrorists that supposedly committed the September 11 attacks, although the true story has never been told.

Saudi Arabia is the worst example of government abuse, of horrendous human rights violations, of misogyny and the brutal treatment of women, of total disrespect for life at every level of man and animal, of insatiable greed, of segregation, of racism, sexism, torture, and murder.

Saudi Arabia is the exact opposite of all that was good about the United States at its founding. Its policies defy morality and the sanctity of life, but the ignorant and indifferent American populace in their total hypocritical blindness says nothing and does nothing to stop the nefarious union of these countries via there beloved elected rulers. The U.S. has become its own enemy, and is now joined with evil. Evil begets evil, and so long as Americans allow this partnership to continue in their name, they are at fault, and responsible for these crimes against humanity. This relationship is not just based on oil, but is based on power and control. It is the essence of depravity, and should be ended without delay.

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Saudi Arabian Lobbyists Have Many Friends in DC | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on November 24, 2019

According to a recently released Center for International Policy (CIP) report — one based entirely on publicly available information — the Saudi government spent approximately $27 million on US lobbying firms in 2017. So there is no doubt that there’s plenty of good money in pestering politicians on behalf of the Saudis. Not only the lobbyists but for the politicians as well. CIP found that Saudi lobbying firms donated nearly $400,000 to the campaigns of members of Congress they “had contacted on behalf of Saudi interests.” And if this weren’t blatant enough, CIP identified “twelve instances in which that contact and contribution occurred on the exact same day.”

The US congress – a cheap date and easy.

https://mises.org/wire/saudi-arabian-lobbyists-have-many-friends-dc

Most libertarians are familiar with Dwight Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex and its nefarious influence on US foreign policy. Many have read Major General Smedley Butler’s short book War is a Racket, in which he lays out the ways in which war is in the economic interests of certain groups, while other groups pay the cost. Some may even have read Robert Nisbet’s warning about the way in which the military-industrial complex has expanded to universities, as researchers seek out government funding from the vast military-industrial blob. While all of these warnings are indeed correct, they neglect another equally nefarious influence on American foreign policy; foreign governments.

Every year foreign governments spend hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying the US government for everything from foreign aid and trade deals, to trying to influence US military policy. This lobbying is generally ignored, but after the recent gruesome murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi Arabian government, there has been increased scrutiny on the cozy relationship between the Saudi regime and US politicians — a relationship maintained through the Saudi’s vast entourage of over two dozen DC-area lobbying firms.

According to a recently released Center for International Policy (CIP) report — one based entirely on publicly available information — the Saudi government spent approximately $27 million on US lobbying firms in 2017. So there is no doubt that there’s plenty of good money in pestering politicians on behalf of the Saudis. Not only the lobbyists but for the politicians as well. CIP found that Saudi lobbying firms donated nearly $400,000 to the campaigns of members of Congress they “had contacted on behalf of Saudi interests.” And if this weren’t blatant enough, CIP identified “twelve instances in which that contact and contribution occurred on the exact same day.”

What has Saudi Arabia gotten in return? The CIP report notes that “the timing of many of these political contributions coincides closely with key Congressional events, involving the Justice Against State Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) votes and votes to block arms sales to Saudi Arabia.” Let’s also not forget the US support, in the form of mid-air refueling and intelligence, for the Saudi-led coalition into Yemen that has led to a humanitarian disaster — complete with the threat of mass starvation and a widespread cholera outbreak .

This mid-air refueling has been stopped for now as a result of the Khashoggi affair, but, according to CNN ’s Sam Kiley, “it’s an opportunity to appear a little bit cross over the alleged murder of Jamal Khashoggi while making sure that the Kingdom’s strategic trajectory stays on course.”

It is even possible that all of this lobbying might manage to save Saudi Arabia from the ongoing Khashoggi murder fiasco. NBC reports that the Trump administration has weighed expelling Fethullah Gulen, an exiled Turkish cleric and enemy of the Erdogan regime, “in order to placate Turkey over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.” The Trump administration denies this, but the fact that such action is even in the realm of possibility speaks to the success of Saudi lobbying efforts.

The outrageous abuses by the Saudi regime — both domestically and abroad — are nearly endless. But, unfortunately, they are not the only foreign power pouring lobbying money into DC to influence US military policy. In 2017, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), the UAE spent over $21 million on US lobbying. The UAE has a large ground presence in Yemen as part of the Saudi-led coalition and has been accused of running secret prisons where Yemenis are tortured. Former US Army Colonel Stephen Toumajan is currently the head of the UAE Joint Aviation Command, where, by his own admission to BuzzFeed News, Toumajan claimed that he was “instrumental in the modernization of the UAE fleet with investing over $10 billion in American aircraft and services.”

But US entanglement with the UAE’s sordid business in Yemen doesn’t even stop there. An in-depth investigative report from BuzzFeed News found that former US special forces had been serving as an assassination hit-squad in Yemen for the UAE. In a stunning report, a former Navy Seal recounted to BuzzFeed News how he, along with a former French Foreign Legionnaire, ran a hit squad made up of former US special forces in Yemen — whose targets included not only armed terrorists but politicians as well.

As of 2008, it took over $350,000 to train a Navy SEAL, and then an additional $1 million to deploy him overseas. As Ryan McMaken points out, this means that the US taxpayer is effectively subsidizing the training of “what are essentially death squads designed to eliminate the regimes’ enemies” for the UAE.

The Saudis and the UAE obviously feel it is necessary to grease US palms with tens of millions of dollars in order to ensure that arms sales get approved, US assistance in the Yemeni war continues, and the Pentagon continues to turn a blind eye to misconduct from former US service members. This leads to the question, what would US policy toward these two onerous regimes be without millions of dollars in lobbying money?

With such blatant bribery of US officials, it seems impossible to trust US foreign policymakers to judge American national interests in an unbiased and levelheaded way. Factor in the even larger amount of influence wielded domestically by the military-industrial complex and it seems hopeless to expect American foreign policymakers to actually be acting in the American national interest. It is little wonder that American foreign policy has been a complete disaster for decades.

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Saudi Bases and the Bin Ladens: A Love Story – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on October 28, 2019

Nothing would please the “three Bs” – Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, and former National Security Adviser John Bolton – more than a US military strike on the Islamic Republic, cost and consequences be damned.

https://original.antiwar.com/Danny_Sjursen/2019/10/27/saudi-bases-and-the-bin-ladens-a-love-story/

by

What is Trump really up to? It’s almost unknowable. At the same time that the president was pulling (some) troops out of Northeast Syria, giving an antiwar speech, and then sending other troops back into Syria to “secure the oil,” he also quietly sent another 1800 service members into Saudi Arabia. What little Trump did say about it consisted of a peculiar defense of his actions. Faced with the obvious question from a reporter: “Mr. President, why are you sending more troops to Saudi Arabia when you just said it’s a mistake to be in the Middle East?” Trump argued that there was no contradiction in his policy because, well, the Saudis “buy hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of merchandise from us,” and have “agreed to pay us for everything we’re doing to help them.” It seems the U.S. military is going full mercenary in the Gulf.

While I’ve noted that Trump’s recent antiwar remarks were profound – though largely unfulfilled – these words will amount to nothing if followed by a military buildup in Saudi Arabia that leads to a new, far more bloody and destabilizing, war with Iran. Nothing would please the “three Bs” – Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, and former National Security Adviser John Bolton – more than a US military strike on the Islamic Republic, cost and consequences be damned.

It’s just that an Iran war isn’t the only risk associated with basing majority-Christian, foreign American troops in the land of Islam’s two holiest cities. And a brief historical review of US presence in Saudi Arabia demonstrates quite clearly the potential transnational terrorist “blowback” of Washington’s basing decisions. In fact, Trump’s latest deployment constitutes at least the third time the US military has been stationed on the Arabian peninsula. It’s rarely ended well, and, in a paradox stranger than fiction, often linked Washington and Riyadh’s dollars with the Bin Laden family. It’s almost enough to make one understand the propensity of some Americans to buy into some degree of 9/11 “truth.”

The strange saga began in the 1930s when a US oil conglomerate, Aramco, built a settlement at Dhahran in the desert near the little town of Khobar. Local workers did the construction, including a rather talented Yemeni bricklayer named Mohamed Bin Laden. Though illiterate and with only one eye, he and his brother then started their own construction company: Mohamed and Abdullah, Sons of Awadh bin Laden.” When, in 1945, the US military decided to lease a sizable air base at Dhahran, the Bin Laden brothers got the contract. The firm made a fortune on the American taxpayers’ dime. After that, the Bin Laden’s became the builders of choice for the spendthrift Saudi royal family, by then flush with oil profits.

Nonetheless, the devoutly Muslim Saudi people were horrified by the Western presence and the king ended the first US military lease in 1962. Still, the Bin Laden company continued to do business with the American government and corporate entities, so much so, in fact, that it retained an agent in New York City. After the elder Bin Laden died in 1967, his sons took over the family business. One, Osama, had a particular knack for construction.

He was also devoutly religious, and, despite his family business’ close connections with the Americans, virulently opposed to foreign intervention in the Greater Middle East. So, with tons of his firm’s heavy construction equipment in tow, he headed off to Afghanistan to fight with the mujahideen against the Soviet Army occupation of that country. Though he and his fellow Arab volunteers played only a small role in the Soviet’s eventual defeat, Osama Bin Laden dug tunnels, built roads, and crafted a genuine mountain base for his fighters in Afghanistan. He even named his new organization to direct the jihad Al Qaeda, or “the base,” and learned a life-altering lesson from the Soviet war. As he reflected, “The myth of the superpower was destroyed not only in my mind but also in the minds of all Muslims.”

Thus, when Saddam Hussein’s massive Iraqi Army swallowed up Kuwait and threatened the Saudi Kingdom in 1990, Bin Laden thought he could recruit a new mujahideen army and single-handedly defeat the invaders. He offered his services to the king, but was rebuked, in favor of an invitation to the US military to instead defend Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden never forgave the king or the American “occupiers” of his holy homeland. The American troopers flooded into a reopened base at Dhahran, the Iraqis were swiftly defeated by the US military coalition, Bin Laden later declared war on the United States, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Terror attacks on the Khobar Towers Air Force barracks, two US African embassies, and the Navy’s USS Cole followed, and then New York and Washington were struck in the worst terrorist incident in American History. Bin Laden got the war he sought, lured the US military into countless quagmires in the Mideast and, despite his eventual death at the hands of American Navy SEALs, succeeded beyond probably even his wildest imagination.

All that brief history ought to remind American policymakers and people alike of the inherent dangers of military basing in Saudi Arabia in this, the third, such instance. Washington, as has been proven time and again since the end of the Second World War, reaps what it sows across the world. So, when Trump’s latest addition to the tragic US history of building bases and stationing troops on the Arabian Peninsula backfires, when a new Bin Laden of sorts takes the war to a major American city, I’ll be one of the few voices saying I told you so…

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The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity : Will More US Troops in Saudi Arabia Make America Great?

Posted by M. C. on September 24, 2019

Why should the military be sent to “defend” one of the wealthiest and most repressive countries on earth? It is hard to see how putting US servicemembers into harm’s way – into a war zone – to defend Saudi Arabia can in any way make America great again.

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2019/september/23/will-more-us-troops-in-saudi-arabia-make-america-great/

Written by Ron Paul

President Trump deserves credit for resisting the war cries from neocons like Sen. Lindsey Graham and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo after last week’s attack on two Saudi oil facilities. Pompeo was eager to blame Iran because he wants war with Iran and anything that can trigger such a war is fine with him. So he put the president in a difficult spot by declaring Iran the culprit: suddenly the president’s options in the media and in Washington were limited to “how to punish Iran.”

A week has now passed since the attack and Pompeo’s rush to judgement has been shown for what it was: war propaganda. That is because there has still been no determination of who launched the attack. Yemen’s Houthis took responsibility right away and Iran denied any involvement. We have seen nothing to this point that contradicts this.

President Trump likely understands that a US war on Iran will be his undoing as president. Who knows, maybe that’s what his closest advisors want. But according to a Gallup poll just last month, only 18 percent of Americans were in favor of military action against Iran. Seventy-eight percent of Americans – including 72 percent of Republicans – want the president to pursue diplomatic efforts over war. Iran has made clear that any attack on its territory will trigger a total war. The Middle East would be engulfed in flames and the US economy would be in the tank. Suddenly we’d see Democrat challengers pretending to be antiwar!

The message to Trump is pretty clear – war with Iran would be deeply unpopular – and it seems clear he understands the message. Just hours after his Secretary of State put the US on war footing with Iran, President Trump was forced to walk back Pompeo’s aggression. When asked about going to war with Iran, President Trump said, “Do I want war? I don’t want war with anybody.”

Unfortunately, with pressure on President Trump to “do something” even as Iran has not been found to have been behind the attack, the president has settled on two measures – one pointless and the other dangerous. On Friday Trump announced yet even more sanctions on Iran, leaving many of us to wonder what is possibly left to sanction. He also announced a deployment of US military forces to Saudi Arabia of a “defensive nature.” Why should the military be sent to “defend” one of the wealthiest and most repressive countries on earth? It is hard to see how putting US servicemembers into harm’s way – into a war zone – to defend Saudi Arabia can in any way make America great again. I believe most Americans would agree.

President Trump should immediately cancel the order to send US troops to Saudi Arabia and should immediately remove what troops are already on Saudi soil. Then the Saudis would understand that they must end their aggression against Yemen.

Attempting to placate the neocons is a fool’s errand, because they are never satisfied even up to and including war. The tide is turning in America – and even in Washington – against Saudi Arabia. After the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and a catastrophic four-year Saudi war on Yemen, no American politician is any longer in the mood to stick his or her neck out to defend Saudi Arabia. President Trump would be wise to use caution: it’s always dangerous sticking one’s neck out when the Saudi government is around.

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Watch “Defending Saudi Arabia…Hardly Our Moral Responsibility!” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on September 23, 2019

Becoming Irrelevant.

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Saudi Arabia won’t attack Iran. But it may pay someone else to | Nesrine Malik | Opinion | The Guardian

Posted by M. C. on September 23, 2019

It is baffling, in the light of last week’s attacks on two Saudi oil facilities, that there is so much speculation about Saudi and Iran going to war. Saudi does not “go to war”: it hires proxies, and depends on US gullibility to continue the lie that it is the regional peacekeeper…

Meanwhile, Saudi looks on – as ever, the indulged and unpunished provocateur of the Middle East.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/22/saudi-arabia-iran-us-middle-east-saudis

The US is being fooled that it needs to rescue its ally in the Middle East. The Saudis always get others to fight for them

There is a longstanding joke told in the Middle East about Saudi Arabia’s reluctance to fight its own wars. “Saudi Arabia will fight until the last Pakistani,” the punchline goes, in reference to the fact that Pakistani troops have long supported Saudi’s military endeavours.

The punchline has expanded lately to include the Sudanese, a recent addition to the Saudi army’s ground troops. Saudi Arabia is accustomed to buying labour that it deems too menial for its citizens, and it extends that philosophy to its army.

There is always a poorer country ready to send cannon fodder for the right price. The military assault in Yemen is sometimes referred to as “the Arab coalition”, a respectable term for a Saudi-led group of combatants that, in addition to allies in the Gulf, includes forces from Egypt, Jordan and Morocco, as well as Sudanese child soldiers, whose deaths are handsomely compensated for with cash paid to their families back home. When asked what fighting in Yemen under the command of the Saudis had been like, some returning Sudanese troops said that Saudi military leaders, feeling themselves too precious to advance too close to the frontline, had given clumsy instructions by satellite phones to their hired troops, nudging them in the general direction of hostilities. Where things were too treacherous, Saudi and coalition airforces simply dropped bombs from high-flying planes, inflating civilian casualties. This is how Saudi fights: as remotely as possible, and paying others to die.

It is baffling, in the light of last week’s attacks on two Saudi oil facilities, that there is so much speculation about Saudi and Iran going to war. Saudi does not “go to war”: it hires proxies, and depends on US gullibility to continue the lie that it is the regional peacekeeper, and that any threat to the country destabilises the region. The US and Saudi Arabia have repeatedly accused Iran of being behind the attacks, which were claimed by Yemen’s Houthi movement, a group aligned with Iran and fighting the Saudi-led alliance in Yemen’s civil war. The Pentagon has announced that it will be sending hundreds of US troops, in addition to air and missile defence equipment, to Saudi Arabia as a “defensive” move.

Why does a country that was the world’s largest arms importer from 2014 to 2018, according to a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, need so much help?

In 2018, the US provided 88% of all weaponry sold to the country. By the end of 2018, Saudi was responsible for 12% of global arms purchases. It is clearly not in need of more military kit from the US to defend it against drone attacks.

What, then, does a country that is involved in one military campaign, in Yemen, and which appears so vulnerable to attack and in need of constant protection, do with so many weapons? Buying the weapons, rather than deploying them, is the point. These multimillion-dollar purchases maintain commercial relations with western allies from whom it imports arms, and who in return turn a blind eye to Saudi’s human rights abuses, assassinations and kidnappings, because there is too much money at stake. Saudi Arabia’s entire foreign policy model is based on using its wealth to buy friends and silence….

Saudi is currently locked in escalating conflicts with Iran, Qatar and Yemen, propping up military regimes in Sudan and Egypt, messily meddling in Lebanon, and continuing to fund random Sunni hardline endeavours all over the world – and generally getting away with it. Saudi will not go to war with Iran, but the US may do so on its behalf. Meanwhile, Saudi looks on – as ever, the indulged and unpunished provocateur of the Middle East.

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The Saudis Get a Taste of Their Own Medicine – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on September 21, 2019

The Saudis would have been better off buying air defenses from the Russians, at a quarter of the US selling price.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/09/eric-margolis/the-saudis-get-a-taste-of-their-own-medicine/

By

Special for LewRockwell.com

The Mideast has its own variety of crazy humor.  The Saudis have been blasting and bombing wretched Yemen, one of this world’s poorest nations, since 2015.

These US-supported attacks and a naval blockade of Yemen imposed by Saudi Arabia and its sidekick ally, the United Arab Emirates, have caused mass starvation.  No one knows how many Yemenis have died or are currently starving.  Estimates run from 250,000 to one million.

The black humor?  The Saudis just claimed they were victims of Iranian `aggression’ this past week after the kingdom’s leading oil treatment facility at Abqaiq was hit by a flight of armed drones or cruise missiles.  The usual American militarists, now led by State Secretary Mike Pompeo after the demented warmonger, John Bolton, was finally fired, are calling for military retaliation against Iran even though the attack was claimed by Yemen’s Shia Houthi movement.

This drama came at roughly the same time that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a close ally of US president Donald Trump, vowed to annex Palestine’s entire Jordan Valley if elected. Not a peep of protest came from the US, which recently blessed Netanyahu’s annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights while scourging Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, for annexing Crimea – a Russian possession for over 300 years.

I studied US photos of the damaged Saudi oil installations. Its oil tanks appear to be precisely hit at the same place. After the attack, the Saudis claimed half of their oil production was knocked out; but a day later, they vowed production would be resumed within a week. Parts of so-called drones were shown that appeared way beyond the technological capabilities of Yemen or even Iran. The missiles may have been supplied by Ukraine.

The Saudis, like their patron in Washington, have a poor record for truthfulness. Remember the Saudi denials about the murder of journalist and Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi? More important, we have been waiting for more false flag attacks in the Gulf designed to justify a US attack on Iran.

The pattern of so-called drone attacks against the Saudi oil installations is just too neat and symmetrical. The Israelis have a strong interest in promoting a US-Saudi War. The attacks in Saudi came ironically right after the anniversary of 9/11 that plunged the US into war against large parts of the Muslim world.

As a long-time military observer, I find it very hard to believe that drones could be guided over such long distances and so accurately without aircraft or satellites to guide them.  In Yemen, which is just creeping into the 12th century, changing a flat tire is a major technological achievement.  To date, Iran’s missile arsenal has poor reliability and major guidance problems.

Adding to the questions, the Saudis have spent billions on US-made air defense systems.  They failed to protect the oil installations.  The Saudis would have been better off buying air defenses from the Russians, at a quarter of the US selling price.

Trump at least showed some wisdom by so far rejecting demands from the neocons that surround him to launch major attacks on Iran.  Blasting Iran would not serve much purpose and would expose US forces in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Somalia, and Syria to Iranian guerilla attacks.  Saudi oil installations – after what we saw last week – are vulnerable.

Attacking Iran, even if just from the air, risks a much wider Mideast war just as the Trump administration – which originally campaigned against ‘stupid’ Mideast wars – faces next year’s elections.  But the administration is under intense pressure from its pro-Israel base to go after Iran.

Bombing Iran’s oil infrastructure would be relatively easy and has been intensively planned since early 2002.  But what next?  So-called ‘regime change’ (Washington’s favorite euphemism for overthrowing disobedient foreign governments) rarely works as planned and can get the US into horribly messy situations.  The CIA overthrew Iran’s democratic government in 1953 and look where we are today.

Perhaps the attacks on Abqaiq may cause the reckless Saudi leaders to stop devastating Yemen and throttle back on their proxy war against Iran which has gone on since 1979.  But don’t count on it.

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MoA – The Crisis Over The Attack On Saudi Oil Infrastructure Is Over – We Now Wait For the Next One

Posted by M. C. on September 20, 2019

There is also the oddity that the Patriot unit’s radar system was shut off.

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/09/the-crisis-over-the-attack-on-saudi-oil-infrastructure-is-over-we-now-wait-for-the-next-one.html#more

Moon of Alabama

The crisis about the Yemeni drone and cruise missile attack on two Saudi oil installations is for now over.

The Saudis and the U.S. accuse Iran of being behind the “act of war” as Secretary of State Pompeo called it. The Saudis have bombed Yemen with U.S. made bombs since 2015. One wonders how Pompeo is calling that.

The Yemeni forces aligned with the Houthi Ansarallah do not deny that their drones and cruise missiles are copies of Iranian designs. But they insist that they are built in Yemen and fired from there.

President Trump will not launch a military attack against Iran. Neither will the Saudis or anyone else. Iran has deterred them by explaining that any attack on Iran will be responded to by waging all out war against the U.S. and its ‘allies’ around the Persian Gulf.

Trump sent Pompeo to Saudi Arabia to hold hands with the Saudi gangster family who call themselves royals. Pompeo of course tried to sell them more weapons. On his flight back he had an uncharacteristically dovish Q & A with reporters. Pompeo said:

I was here in an act of diplomacy. While the foreign minister of Iran is threatening all-out war and to fight to the last American, we’re here to build out a coalition aimed at achieving peace and a peaceful resolution to this. That’s my mission set, what President Trump certainly wants me to work to achieve, and I hope that the Islamic Republic of Iran sees it the same way. There’s no evidence of that from his statement, but I hope that that’s the case.

The crisis is over and we are back to waiting for the next round. A few days or weeks from now we will see another round of attacks on oil assets on the western side of the Persian Gulf. Iran, with the help of its friends, can play this game again and again and it will do so until the U.S. gives up and lifts the sanctions against that country.

The Houthi will continue to attack the Saudis until they end their war on Yemen and pay reparations.

As long as no U.S. forces get killed the U.S. will not hit back because Trump wants to be reelected. An all out war around the Persian Gulf would drive energy prices into the stratosphere and slump the global economy. His voters would not like that.

In our earlier pieces on the Abqaiq attack we said that the attacked crude oil stabilization plant in Abquaq had no air defense. Some diligent researchers have since found that there was a previously unknown Patriot air-defense unit in the area which was itself protected by several short range air-defense cannons:

Michael Duitsman @DuitsyWasHere – 7:02 UTC · Sep 18, 2019
On paper, the point air defenses at the Abqaiq oil processing facility are rather formidable… by 1995 standards, at least.
A battery of Shahine SAMs (French system from the early 1980’s)
3 or 4 anti-aircraft gun sections, each with 2 twin 35mm cannons and a fire control unit


biggerBut one Patriot system covers only 120° of the horizon. The attacking drones came from a western directions while Saudi Arabia’s enemies are to its east and south. The older Patriot 2 version the Saudis have is also not of much use against low flying drones and cruise missiles.

There is also the oddity that the Patriot unit’s radar system was shut off.

Putin is a Virus @PutinIsAVirus – 4:53 UTC · Sep 19, 2019No patriot radars have been active in recent months (at least not consistently) in the vicinity of the plant, not in the short range required to detect low flying cruise missiles or drones. Closest installation is in Barhain.
(using Sentinel 1 CSAR sat for detection)


biggerSatellites with synthetic-aperture radar can ‘see’ the radar of Patriot and other air-defense system. None was detected around Abqaiq.

The explanation for that is likely rather trivial. Colonel Pat Lang was stationed in Saudi Arabia as a military liaison officer. As he recently remarked:

Never underestimate the feckless laziness of the Saudis. In my experience they turn off all ATC and air defense systems that require manning or watch keeping when they find them inconvenient as on the weekend. IMO if Ansarallah did this they will do something similar soon to prove they are responsible.

Abqaiq was attacked on the night of Friday to Saturday. That is the weekend in Saudi Arabia.

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Were the Nice Attacks A False Flag Or A Lone Nut?

 

 

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‘Locked and Loaded’ for War on Iran? – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on September 18, 2019

If a dozen drones or missiles can do the kind of damage to the world economy as did those fired on Saturday – shutting down about 6% of world oil production – imagine what a U.S.-Iran-Saudi war would do to the world economy.

Did our weapons sales carry a guarantee that we will also come and fight alongside the kingdom if it gets into a war with its neighbors?

All the hundreds of U$ billions in military aid and SA pipelines are completely unprotected and vulnerable.  Now SA is going broke getting it’s ass kicked in Yemen even with U$ help.

That will give you a clue as to how US war will go against Iran.

We can’t win against countries barely out of the stone age, some of the poorest and most backward on the planet.

Russia backed Iran is a horse of a different color.

SA (Israel) is thinking “better US soldiers die in an unwinnable war than Saudi (Israeli) citizens”.

https://original.antiwar.com/buchanan/2019/09/16/locked-and-loaded-for-war-on-iran/

by

“Iran has launched an unprecedented attack on the world’s energy supply,” declared Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Putting America’s credibility on the line, Pompeo accused Iran of carrying out the devastating attack on Saudi oil facilities that halted half of the kingdom’s oil production, 5.7 million barrels a day.

On Sunday, President Donald Trump did not identify Iran as the attacking nation, but did appear, in a tweet, to back up the secretary of state:

“There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom (of Saudi Arabia) as to who they believe was the cause of this attack and under what terms we would proceed!”

Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who have been fighting Saudi Arabia for four years and have used drones to strike Saudi airport and oil facilities, claim they fired 10 drones from 500 kilometers away to carry out the strikes in retaliation for Saudi air and missile attacks.

Pompeo dismissed their claim, “There is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen.”

But while the Houthis claim credit, Iran denies all responsibility.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif says of Pompeo’s charge, that the U.S. has simply replaced a policy of “maximum pressure” with a policy of “maximum deceit.” Tehran is calling us liars…

Before Trump orders any strike on Iran, would he go to Congress for authorization for his act of war?

Sen. Lindsey Graham is already urging an attack on Iran’s oil refineries to “break the regime’s back,” while Sen. Rand Paul contends that “there’s no reason the superpower of the United States needs to be getting into bombing mainland Iran.”

Divided again: The War Party is giddy with excitement over the prospect of war with Iran, while the nation does not want another war.

How we avoid it, however, is becoming difficult to see.

John Bolton may be gone from the West Wing, but his soul is marching on.

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Ponzi World (Over 3 Billion NOT Served): The Business of ...

 

 

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