Deciphering the Mideast
Chaos
Exclusive: The tangle of conflicts in the
Middle East is confusing to many Americans
who lack some key facts, such as the
transformational Israeli-Saudi alliance that
is dragging the American people into a
sectarian religious war dating back 1,300
years, as Robert Parry explains.
By Robert Parry
April 01, 2015 "ICH"
- "Consortium
News" - Few
Americans seem to comprehend what is
unfolding in the Middle East – with the
latest conflict involving Saudi airstrikes
against the Houthi rebels who now control
Yemen’s capital of Sanaa. In this swirl of
regional wars, it’s often not clear where
the U.S. government stands and how American
interests are affected.
The reason for the confusion
is simple: Many key pundits who get to
explain what’s going on from the op-ed pages
of the major U.S. newspapers and from the TV
talk shows prefer that the American people
don’t fully grasp what’s happening.
Otherwise, the people might realize the
dangers ahead and demand substantial changes
in U.S. government policies.
But a few basic points can
help decipher the confusion: Perhaps the
most important is that – although it’s
rarely acknowledged in the mainstream U.S.
media – Israel is now allied with Saudi
Arabia and other Sunni Persian Gulf states,
which are, in turn, supporting Sunni
militants in Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly,
this Israel-Saudi bloc sustains Al-Qaeda
and, to a somewhat lesser degree, the
Islamic State.
The U.S. news media is
loath to note these strange Israeli
bedfellows, but there’s a twisted logic to
the Israeli-Saudi connection. Both Israel
and the Saudi bloc have identified
Shiite-ruled Iran as their chief regional
adversary and thus are supporting proxy wars
against perceived Iranian allies in Syria
and now Yemen. The Syrian government and the
Houthi rebels in Yemen are led by adherents
to offshoots of Shiite Islam, so they are
the “enemy.”
The schism between Sunni
and Shiite Islam dates back to 632, to the
secession struggle after the death of the
Prophet Muhammad. The dispute led to the
Battle of Karbala where Hussein ibn Ali was
captured and beheaded in 680, an event that
gave rise to Shiite Islam as a rival to
Sunni Islam, which today has both moderate
and extremist forms with Saudi Arabia
sponsoring the ultra-fundamentalist
Wahhabism.
The extremist Wahhabism
has inspired some of the most radical Sunni
movements, including Al-Qaeda and now the
Islamic State, along with their practice of
suicide attacks as a form of martyrdom that
has become a staple of these groups’
anti-Western jihad.
In other words, what has
most outraged Americans has been the
behavior of these Sunni extremists, from
Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks to the Islamic
State’s beheading of helpless hostages and
religious minorities in Syria and elsewhere.
And, the principal backer of this Sunni
extremism has been Saudi Arabia
where wealthy prince-playboys buy leniency
for their licentious behavior from the
religious ulema (or leaders) by financing
the extreme Wahhabi teachings. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “The
Secret Saudi Ties to Terrorism.”]
Confusing the
American People
The West has had
grievances with elements of the Shiite
world, too, such as the seizure of U.S.
Embassy hostages in Iran in 1979 and
excessive violence by the Syrian military
against opposition forces in 2011. But the
most intense American anger has been
provoked by the actions of Sunni
fundamentalists involving mass murder of
innocents.
Yet, over the years, the
U.S. government has exploited the general
lack of knowledge among Americans about the
intricacies of Middle East religions and
politics by funneling the anger against one
group to rationalize actions against
another.
For instance, in 2003, as
revenge for the 9/11 slaughter of 3,000
Americans – carried out primarily by Saudi
extremists under the leadership of Saudi
Osama bin Laden – President George W. Bush
shielded the Saudis from blame and ordered
the invasion of Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein,
a secular Sunni dictator who was a fierce
opponent of Al-Qaeda and other religious
fanatics.
Ironically, that war put
Shiites in power in Baghdad, turned
Iraq’s Sunnis into a persecuted minority,
and created fertile ground for a
particularly virulent strain of Al-Qaeda to
take root under the leadership of Jordanian
terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. That group
became “Al-Qaeda in Iraq,” later morphing
into “the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria”
and finally into “the Islamic State,” with
its own twisted branches reaching out across
the Middle East and Africa to justify more
provocative slaughter of Westerners and
“non-believers.”
While on the surface,
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and
other Persian Gulf states repudiate this
violent extremism, some of their oil-rich
princes and intelligence services have
provided covert support to Al-Qaeda and the
Islamic State to advance the cause of
breaking the “Shiite crescent” – from Tehran
through Baghdad and Damascus to Beirut.
In seeking to smash this
“Shiite crescent,” these Sunni-ruled states
have been joined by Israel, which has taken
the position that Iran and its Shiite allies
are more dangerous than the Sunni
extremists, thus transforming Al-Qaeda and
the Islamic State into the “lesser evils.”
This was the subtext of
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s
address to Congress on March 3 – that the
U.S. government should shift its focus from
fighting Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to
fighting Iran.
One of the hit lines of
Netanyahu’s speech was when he told a
cheering Congress that the United States
should not collaborate with Iran just
because it was the most effective
counterforce to the bloodthirsty ISIS. Or as
he put it, “So when it comes to Iran and
ISIS, the enemy of your enemy is your
enemy.”
But Netanyahu
was soft-pedaling his real message, which
was that ISIS with its “butcher knives,
captured weapons and YouTube” was a minor
annoyance compared to Iran, which he accused
of “gobbling up the nations” of the Middle
East. To the applause of Congress, he
claimed “Iran now dominates four Arab
capitals, Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and
Sanaa. And if Iran’s aggression is left
unchecked, more will surely follow.”
His choice of capitals was
peculiar because Iran took none of those
capitals by force and, indeed, was simply
supporting the embattled government of Syria
and was allied with elements of the
government of Lebanon. As for Iraq, Iran’s
allies were installed not by Iran but by
President George W. Bush via the U.S.
invasion. And, in Yemen, a long-festering
sectarian conflict has led to the capture of
Sanaa by Houthi rebels who deny that they
are supported by Iran (although Iran may
have provided some limited help).
Amid the wild and inchoate
cheering by Republicans and many Democrats,
Netanyahu continued: “We must all stand
together to stop Iran’s march of conquest,
subjugation and terror.” But, in reality,
there has been no “march of conquest.” There
have been no images of Iranian armies on the
march or a single case of Iranian forces
crossing a border against the will of a
government.
Cheering the
Propaganda
Netanyahu’s oration was
just another example of his skillful (but
dishonest) propaganda – and the groveling
behavior of the U.S. Congress when in the
presence of an Israeli leader.
Among the many facts that
Netanyahu left out was Israel’s historically
close ties to Iran even during the reign of
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the 1980s
when the Israelis served as a key Iranian
arms supplier after the Saudi-backed Iraqi
invasion of Iran. Only after that
eight-year-long war ended – and Iran’s
treasury was depleted – did Israel shift
away from Iran and toward the oil-rich
Saudis.
Regarding the Syrian civil
war, senior Israelis have made clear they
would prefer Sunni extremists to prevail
over President Assad, who is an Alawite, a
branch of Shiite Islam. Assad’s relatively
secular government is seen as the protector
of Shiites, Christians and other minorities
who fear the vengeful brutality of the Sunni
jihadists who now dominate the anti-Assad
rebels.
In one of the most
explicit expressions of Israel’s views, its
Ambassador to the United States Michael
Oren, then a close adviser to Netanyahu,
told the Jerusalem Post in September 2013
that Israel favored the
Sunni extremists over Assad.
“The greatest danger to
Israel is by the strategic arc that extends
from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we
saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that
arc,” Oren told the Jerusalem Post in
an
interview. “We always wanted
Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the
bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the
bad guys who were backed by Iran.” He said
this was the case even if the “bad guys”
were affiliated with Al-Qaeda.
And, if you might have
thought that Oren had misspoken, he
reiterated his position in June 2014 at an
Aspen Institute conference. Then, speaking
as a former ambassador, Oren
said Israel would even prefer a
victory by the Islamic State, which was
massacring captured Iraqi soldiers and
beheading Westerners, than the continuation
of the Iranian-backed Assad in Syria.
“From Israel’s
perspective, if there’s got to be an evil
that’s got to prevail, let the Sunni evil
prevail,” Oren said.
Israel’s preference has
extended into a tacit alliance with
Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front in Syria, with which
the Israelis have essentially a
non-aggression pact, even caring for Nusra
fighters in Israeli hospitals and mounting
lethal air attacks against Lebanese and
Iranian advisers to the Syrian military.
A Powerful
Alliance
Over the past decade, the
Israelis and the Saudis have built a
powerful alliance, a relationship that has
operated mostly behind the curtains. They
combined their assets to create what
amounted to a new superpower in the Middle
East, one that could project its power
mostly via the manipulation of U.S.
policymakers and opinion leaders – and thus
deployment of the U.S. military.
Israel possesses
extraordinary political and media influence
inside the United States – and Saudi Arabia
wields its oil and financial resources to
keep American officialdom in line. Together,
the Israeli-Saudi bloc now controls
virtually the entire Republican Party, which
holds majorities in both chambers of
Congress, and dominates most mainstream
Democrats as well.
Reflecting the interests
of the Israeli-Saudi bloc, American neocons
have advocated U.S. bombing against both the
Syrian and Iranian governments in pursuit of
“regime change” in those two countries.
Prominent neocons, such as John Bolton and
Joshua Muravchik, have gone to the pages of
the New York Times and Washington Post to
openly advocate U.S. bombing campaigns
against Iran. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT
Publishes Call to Bomb Iran.”]
But the problem with this
Israeli-Saudi strategy for the American
people is that the only viable military
alternatives to the Assad government in
Syria are Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front and the
even more brutal Islamic State. So if
Israel, Saudi Arabia and the neocons succeed
in ousting Assad, the likely result would be
the black flags of Al-Qaeda or the Islamic
State flying over Damascus.
That would likely mean
major atrocities, including executions of
Christians and other religious minorities,
as well as terrorist plots mounted against
Europe and the United States. An Al-Qaeda or
Islamic State conquest of Damascus would
likely force any U.S. president to invade
Syria at enormous costs in blood and
treasure, albeit with little hope of
achieving any long-term success.
Such a U.S. intervention
might very well mean the end of the United
States as a viable democratic society – to
the extent that one exists today. A
full-scale transformation into a
militaristic state would be required to
sustain this open-ended conflict, channeling
national wealth into endless warfare and
requiring the repression of anti-war
sentiments at home.
So, what is at stake for
the American Republic is essentially
existential, whether the constitutional
structure that began in 1789 will continue
or will disappear. Politicians, who say they
love the Constitution but follow Netanyahu
into this dead-end for the Republic, are
speaking out of both sides of their mouths.
The only hope for the
Republic would come from recalling the
wisdom of America’s first presidents – to
avoid entangling foreign alliances when
they drag the United States toward
destruction.
[For more on Obama and
the
neocons, see
Consortiumnews.com’s “Neocons:
The Anti-Realists.”]
Investigative reporter Robert
Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories
for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the
1980s. You can buy his latest book,
America’s Stolen
Narrative, either in print
here or
as an e-book (from
Amazon
and
barnesandnoble.com).
You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on
the Bush Family and its connections to
various right-wing operatives for only $34.
The trilogy includes America’s
Stolen Narrative. For details on
this offer,
click here.