John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PATRICK COCKBURN IN THE INDEPENDENT
“The Iraqi elections and the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem will illuminate the damage Trump has really done to the Middle East
“As one commentator put it, there are more unpredictable ‘moving parts’ than ever before in the different crises, parts which may break loose at any moment”
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Response to a comment about Israel and Saudi Arabia:
Actually, they are somewhat like two peas in a pod.
They have secretly worked together for years, as in Syria.
Of course, all their mutual work is destructive to others, others who do not toe the American imperial line.
These two states have a very great deal in common, as might not be clear at first glance, including intense antipathy towards democracy in the region or towards independent-minded nationalistic leaders like Assad or Qaddafi. I know, I know that sounds odd to some who embrace that advertising slogan, "The Middle East's only democracy," but is true.
Israel loves dictators and absolute monarchs around it. It loves people like Mubarak or el-Sisi who keep their people in line. It loves the King of Jordan. The Saudi Crown, too, now that it no longer embraces its pre-9/11 attitudes. It cannot stand genuine democracies around it, which is why it hates Hamas and hated the first elected government of Egypt. Iraq is okay because it was half destroyed and is still heavily occupied by America.
You could credibly argue that Israel’s presence and influence are important explanations for the retarded development of democracy in the region.
Both states, Israel and Saudi Arabia, represent privilege, the privilege of birth and wealth in Saudi Arabia’s case, and the privilege of massive foreign subsidy plus a large population of people alien to the region in Israel.
They both have their extremist sects, but the Wahhabi, I do not believe, have driven Saudi policies quite the way settler/orthodox types have in Israel.
That's because in part Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. Its leaders only have to appear to be respecting the religious views of their extremists. They know how to fake it. And most of those princes are extremely corrupt too, religious devotion being a necessary pretense between fly-overs to Vegas’ sin pits.
Israel is an impossible mess of a kind of democracy (what kind of democracy has pretty much only one class of people who can vote and accepts only one category of people for in-migration? The kind we called the American Confederacy and the kind we called Nationalist South Africa) with an electorate so splintered that coalitions with the settler/orthodox types are always necessary. So, these unbalanced people drive much of Israeli policy. The lunatics really are running the asylum.
Saudi Arabia has been reaching out for American approval and acceptance since 9/11 when they very much feared American military action. That's why it has secretly cooperated with Israel in a list of things since that time. Syria, Yemen, etc. For America's establishment, that is the acid-test of having the right attitude.
The Saudis earned a place at the table, so to speak, and now have gone even further with the new usurper Crown Prince beginning to be open about what was secret. And look at how he has been rewarded, with the sale of hundreds of billions in American weapons, making Saudi Arabia a regional military heavyweight (something that Israel would never have allowed at an earlier time, but he is family now), and a grand American tour visiting many important national figures. In the corporate press of Britain and America, there have been the most transparent attempts to build his image as a reformer (possibly the world’s first usurper-killer-kidnapper-thief reformer). He even talks about developing nuclear weapons, predicated on Iran’s obtaining them, without a word of reprimand from Washington.
