Updated 9 Dec 2018
KSA princes close to and part of royal rule have attended top-flight university and grad school in the US and Europe for generations.
Yet TheAdvancedWest persistently underestimates —racistly? religiously?— that talent-pool’s political. technologic and econ skill and sophistication on what resources to dominate for the longterm, what near-term dominances to focus on for those purposes, and what methods work. Perhaps including attire to seem ‘backward’ and tradition-bound...
h/t fishoutofwater 2015 — Yemen average rainfall data — probably worse in 2018. The highlands continue north of the border and drain into the
Case in point: the "intervention" in Yemen —in practical terms a war nonstop since the early 20th century, longer if counting Yemen’s prior regional domination, however complicated by Euro-colonialism toward the end— is almost as much about control of Yemen’s anciently historical water wealth from the highlands, unparalleled in the peninsula, annexed by KSA in 1934 and more of the highlands under contention ever since, with The New York Times prognosing in 2009 that
"Yemen could become first nation to run out of water."[307]
“Gulf of Suez”& line of canal zone, NASA orbit.
— as it is about controlling international land, sea and air shipping and transport regionally. E.g., July 2018 "Saudis halt oil shipments through key strait after Yemen rebel attack"
…A Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen has repeatedly raised alarm that Houthi rebels threaten vessels in the Red Sea — a key shipping route for world trade — through their control of the strategic Hodeida port....
With the right kind of government, economics and military are co-Operative. Overtly and covert. In and radiating outward from this sphere of influence the same as goes on among all the other spheres of influence on the planet.
(MER D’OMAN = ARABIAN SEA)
The sea-route: ArabianSea ⟶ GulfOfAden/Berbera (an ancient quarrel links the past ruling family of Yemen with Moroccan invaders) ⟶ Bab-el-Mandeb strait between Yemen and Djibouti (see also bridge project proposed by Tarek bin Laden) ⟶ RedSea ⟶ SuezCanal ⟶ MedSea shipping … that control equates to heavy econo-military as well as religo-political influence on nations of east Africa, with significant economic and political impact on everything adjacent.
(August 1, the Saudi Reconstruction Program in Yemen announced airport, seaport, and highway projects in Al Mahrah Governate bordering the KSA and Oman, and Nov 12 a massive rebuild of Sana'a Int'l Airport —in the historic city of Marib, east of the capital Sanaa —whose “runway is shared with a large military base with several fighter jets and transport aircraft of the Yemeni Air Force”...)
Indian Ocean to Mediterranean sea-lane shipping alone impacts Europe, the former Russian soviets, and Asia Minor/West Asia via the Bosphorus/Strait of Istanbul (TURKEY) & the Black Sea. (Socotra and the Guardafui Channel are Yemen’s, legally, for the moment.)
The 20 most populous nations as of 2017, comprising as well the largest producers of global-demand goods and the largest markets for global-demand goods.
Control of Arabian Sea routes, with the complaisance of —or dominance over— Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan, exerts control on Indian (Ocean shipping and again, on the economics and politics not only of Africa and the Indian subcontinent, but points/nations east and south —Myanmar … Indonesia (the world’s 4th most populous country and most populous Muslim-majority country) ... Australia…— thence upon all contiguous shipping and nations, among them China and Japan.
The KSA —arguably the richest nation on the globe (especially in terms of wealth vs responsible spending for internal population and their needs)— is positioning itself to become the next dominant world-class empire, roughly akin to that of its forebears, right under the oblivious, self-centered nose of The Advanced West.
Roughly in every sense of the term: historical mainstream Islam to the contrary not withstanding, intercultural tolerance is demonstrably not in their Wahhabist playbook, not even for co-religionist Palestinians, otherwise Palestinian well-being would have been a priority with them. Never has. KSA fueling of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as distractive cover for imperialist aims, is extraordinarily financially cheap in KSA terms, extraordinarily efficient, and brilliantly deceptive.
The more so with Iran competing to be favored patron of Palestine — Iran’s support actually lightens KSA’s smokescreen costs, and so far the KSA still comes out as patron (but that’s Iran’s problem.)
By “forebears”, it should be recalled that the medieval Islamic civilization was rivaled perhaps only by the Chinese in science, technology, literature, medicine, art, commerce, economy, international relations, and politics, meeting productively in India, while the rest of the contiguous old world virtually stewed itself in superstition and warlordism. It took centuries of commerce with the “non-advanced” southern and eastern civilizations and empires to spark Europe’s Renaissance (a development for which The Advanced West continues to give itself magical sole credit).
The Islamic expanse fostered a degree of intercultural and interfaith coexistence that the rest did not even approach for over half a millenium, and barely equaled by the time of the second world war. Little as Americans are attached to any glories predating our own, much of the rest of the world’s people DO know their histories of achievements across millenia. And their histories of subjugation, something the Us has no understanding or experience of … yet.
Qatar working with Israel and Gaza is quite possibly the only genuine challenge to KSA ambitions currently in play.
The below blockquote originally introducing this diary might be the most objective, clear-minded synopsis seen recently, as commented by Toro Blanco at Assaf's Nov 15 Gaza diary:
...I don’t think a solution is possible so long as both sides, and their supporters, are so willing to insist that they alone have the moral high ground. Neither side has the moral high ground here, regardless of the disparity of arms or acts.
but “supporters” ain’t what to call the emperors who keep gladiators trapped in combat for generations. When Jordanian lost possession of the WestBank and Egyptian lost possession of the Gaza Strip in the ‘67 War —that 20-year timespan having aborted the birth of Palestine 1948-67— the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia gained increased scope for funding and arming terrorism … as fuse for expanded igniting of grassroots Islamic rage across Africa and the middle east. Purpose: populist pressure on Islamic governments —especially of emerging nations, with barely-tapped natural resource wealth— to accept KSA’s religo-moral leadership (see also alliance with Wahhabism) and econo-political dominance.
Emerging African nations in particular were forced to cease receiving Israeli foreign aid and expertise in education, health and medical care, water conservation tech, adaptive agriculture, and infrastructure. The KSA filled none of those gaps, intentionally; those kinds of development are fundamental in building democratic economies, historically antithetical to the KSA/ArabLeague/GCC/etc monarchist-dicatorship superwealth agenda.
In this as in all else, the KSA knows precisely what it’s doing.
The willingness of Egypt to assist Qatar
despite Egypt technically supporting the KSA-led/directed blockade of Qatar, and the alliance of Qatar with Israel-hating Iran —itself allied with Russia, Turkey and Syria — ought to have clued The Advanced West that the term global climate change is as much an econopolitical metaphor as a material reality.
The fact that it didn’t is testament to the enduring power of centuries of antisemitic dogma and propaganda shaping the thinking and myopia even of the Left so effectively that we don’t recognize this global climate change as more radical than any since Christian Europe decided to conquer the world, attribute all ills to Jews and people of color, and set the precedent which the KSA now combines with its own cultural history to go The West one better.
Understand the gladiatorial distraction and attention-fatigue that I/P conflict is designed to feed us: as Toro Blanco commented in follow-up to a point of Assaf’s,
...the world ignores [the Israeli government’s] treatment of Gaza and Palestinians until it can’t anymore, then goes back to doing so. I don’t know how to solve this crisis or what the ideal solution is, but I damn sure know that pretending nothing is happening hasn’t worked and will continue to not work.
CalvinTheBold cited a lifetime of seeing the US and other nations persistently failing in their narrow-focused peace-brokerings. The root of that prolonged catastrophe is precisely because the brokering is always limited to the gladiators trapped in the arena — Israel and Palestine (itself now a decade fractured by internal wealth-and-patronage competition for control) — in utter disregard of the nations and empires adamantly fueling the conflict as means to their own ends.
Not in ignorant disregard, but intentional, cynical dismissal of tragedy: from the late 19th century, the self-styled brokers have coveted oil, shipping, and market-partnerships with the real forces sustaining conflict. Brokering peace is sheer window-dressing for public consumption. Peace, after all, is not possible without grassroots human needs being met. All the politicking in the world puts no food on the table, no roof overhead, no decent jobs in hand, no education or health.
Palestine and Israel simply DO NOT exist in the vacuum that popular, superficial argument is manipulated to portray, and Qatar is doing the only end-run around that argument.
If most of the rest of the world seems unable to recognize that, it’s largely because of the disingenuous practice of imposing Western religious and political ideologies upon all analysis of colonialist-created, imperialist-fueled conflicts spilling over the great powers’ doorsteps now more than ever. Conflicts the great powers find best to window-dress to their constituencies, portraying it all as backward sectarianism for which Western benevolence fails instead of as the survival scramble among peoples stripped of their resources and their cultural productivity by the avarice and greed of wealth and power.
Granted for reasons of its own, Qatar is one of the relatively quiet outsiders unconcerned to pretend that I/P conflict can be brokered out of existence in some doctrinaire, illusory vacuum. But others around the world also know, as does Qatar, from gleaning news beyond the superficial Western kind —and from working to originate investigatory news independently— that what Israel and Palestine DO exist in, is a gladiators’ arena surrounded by the stands full of cheering and booing crowds like us whose entry tickets are gratis, courtesy of the presiding emperors in whose interest it is to addict us to emotional, attentional distraction from emperors’ true objectives.
A mass of complex factors across time that liberals are too impatient to study, has equipped one of those gladiators far better than the other.
And Western liberals are anxiously, angrily skittish about facing the uncomfortable realities of their own role in sustaining that specific disparity.
ONLY IN FILMS AND BOOKS does anyone choose to be a gladiator. Recall the original eras of ‘bread and circuses’, and who [plural] capture, enslave, and meddle in equiping or under-equiping gladiators, in order to make certain of spilling BLOOD that spectators recognize as lethal but refuse to understand, for their own privilege, the crumbs that fall from the tables of the mighty.
Smokescreen is the implicit, blood-paid modern-era metaphor in photographs like these that earnest liberals make sure to miss, Another tightly-apt metaphor: whose is the gasoline constantly poured on, especially in the moments embers start to cool through positive engagement by outsiders with nothing to gain from the flames.
Outsiders like Qatar [bringing the first of multiple planned cash deliveries of] $15m CASH to Gaza Civil Workers & Humanitarian Needs w/ Israel's Cooperation on November 9 — cash delivery literally in suitcases.
(At that link are nearly 50 non-cherry-picked news links from around the world, including reports of super-heated strategies for derailing heretofore UNIMAGINED joint efforts of Egypt, the UN, Qatar, Israel, Hamas and the Gaza Strip. Reuters’ is blockquoted there, and a diary with yet dozens more news links chronicling that joint effort’s backstory, May 2018 thru’ Oct 21, 2018 … and the nations and entities taking taking positions against it.).
Of negotiations dating back at least to May, Al-Monitor reported on October 24 that
….Qatar [had] offered $60 million to buy the necessary fuel to operate Gaza's only power station, in cooperation with Israel and the [UN] special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, Nickolay Mladenov. … [And] 11 fuel trucks entered Gaza between Oct. 9 and 12….
Other articles discuss Qatari funding and staffing humanitarian projects for years in Palestine, (a form of soft power influence, perhaps) no matter how much how often the KSA fires the conflict up, and no matter what violence wrecks what’s built. Still they persist.
No surprise that the 2017–18 “Qatar diplomatic crisis” pits Qatar against more than a dozen nations under KSA “leadership” to blockade Qatar by land, sea and air nearly 18 months to date in this “ Second Arab Cold War”.
Consider which nations are Qatar’s friends and allies —e.g., Iran, Turkey, the Syrian opposition government in exile, Sudan (east Africa, whose largest trade partner is China), Somalia (ibid., also in bilateral relations with China)... etc— and what their stakes are in whether or not KSA can subsume and subjugate them into KSA home ground in the drive for empire. None of Qatar’s partners have bilateral relations with Israel, only Qatar itself, of sorts (no easy row for Qatar to hoe); and except for Iran competing with KSA to fund Palestinian violence for the same purposes, none visibly plays a role in alleviating need or supporting normal economics in Palestine.
Do we never wonder how top-rank Palestinian officials like Abbas become virtual billionaires —as Arafat before him, i.e., where does their wealth come from. And what had they better be willing to do to keep it coming. The more so to remain useful to their patron, rather than share Arafat’s rumored fate, or Jamal Khashoggi’s.
Consider also that slightly-to-very violent demonstrations are, in effect, a literal industry in Gaza, whether Gazans would choose it to be or not. The cost of maintaining and running buses for taking thousands of Gazans to the fence week after week —with Hamas loudspeaker trucks weekly reminding them to go— since the March began in March. Quite aside from who pays for provision and delivery of the matériel that Hamas's Izz ad-Din Al-Qassam military brigades arm themselves with and fire off at Israel, what an endless supply of tires and wherewithal to bring them to the fence and to set them on fire. What a supply of photogenic flags and garb and face-masks, incendiary balloons and kites in an economy popularly called concentration-camp conditions. Would Gazans take food from the mouths of their children to buy those things, however they entered Gaza? No bomb shelters for them, no body armor for them, altho’ some photos show the Brigades well-protected bodily. Who pays to assure such a literal wealth of riot and military supplies flowing into a concentration camp? Yet not for adequate healthcare and education supplies and workers salaries to plow back into the economy, or for road-build and repair, clean water supply however limited, public and household sanitation infrastructure. Food. The armament keeps getting rebuilt, but not homes and neighborhoods?
Recent news shows Jordan, Lebanon, Hezbollah, and the other usual athletes in the games coming off the bench to assure that Qatar fails, Palestine fails, and Israel fails…
While the same big winners go on winning. Some of them winning bigger than ever before...
See also "France and China [& the Us & the Russian Federation etc] in Africa" - October 10, 2018. See also Saudis & US nuclear industry Hundred$s of Thousand$s Lobbying Congress for Increased Sales - September 28, 2018
All things considered, and based on skim rather than study, it appears that Canada and Latin America tend to be hardheadedly practical in their international relations; if so, and if the KSA-centered sphere of influence coalesces further into some form of new Axis of powers in which Russia and its sphere will likely be part, the new “allies” probably stand to be China, Australia, the US, Japan, South Africa, Europe, etc. Not because the nations and groups approve or like one another, but because economic and perhaps military survival interests may align.
By then, Israel and Palestine together may have been plowed under, their utility as the cheapest, most brainwashingly efficient smokescreen and gladiatorial distraction ever deployed in world empire history —if piggybacking on 2,000 years of proven profitable Western antisemitism— finally at an end. Still pretty damned impressive, considering how sharp we of The Advanced West thought we were.
I hear the fictional magical program Game of Thrones models this type of three-dimensional chess to enthusiastic audience addiction. The irony is not lost on us, I hope.
N.B. It’s interesting that Xinhua news can be very speedy with reportage and details on middle-east events, sometimes faster than Western News. It’s as if China loooong ago recognized the world-scale econopolitical machinations of KSA et frères. Otherwise they’d have no well-emplaced contacts and data-relay so efficiently operating today. Those and other less popular online news outlets are rarely found on the first 3 or 4 pages of google searches into matters middle-eastern, though. We rely on Western sources most of the time, unclear why aside from the favorites that reliably paint all news in the colors we love best. That being so, do always continue past those favorite pages and sources, dear readers, if you’re seriously concerned (or even seriously interested) to learn more of what other people in the world think and know that we Americans are manifestly kept ignorant of. And persuaded by bread and circuses of every kind to like being that way.
Readers please click on tags of interest up at the left margin for more dk diaries on similar and related topics. In world view as in politics, diversity and stronger together.