JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: THE DANGEROUS DYNAMICS OF SAUDI ARABIA AND THE UNITED STATES AND ISRAEL WITH YEMEN AND IRAN - A POOR SET OF RELATIONSHIPS DELIBERATELY-SET BY THE UNITED STATES THREATENS TO EXPLODE INTO GOD KNOWS WHAT - WHY THE MURDEROUS SAUDI CROWN PRINCE IS SO CATERED TO BY TRUMP - THE COMPLETE INCOMPETENCE OF SAUDI ARABIA - THE SECRET ASSASSINATION OF THE OLD SAUDI KING'S LOYAL BODYGUARD - NEW STRENGTHS SHOWN BY YEMEN AND IRAN - AMERICA MAY INDEED GET "A NEW MIDDLE EAST" BUT NOT THE ONE IT HAS DONE SO MUCH KILLING TO TRY CREATING

John Chuckman


COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ROBERT FISK IN THE INDEPENDENT



“A year on from Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, and Saudi Arabia is lurching towards hysterical chaos

“This whole wretched saga is beginning to look less like ‘War in the Middle East’ and more like ‘Carry On Up the Gulf’”



https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/saudi-arabia-iran-jamal-khashoggi-donald-trump-middle-east-a9126601.html



A good piece, and deadly accurate.

The truth is, I'm sure, that America's government has no great affection for the Crown Prince or for Saudi Arabia.

He is a useful tool for Israeli and American imperial intentions.

A key new part of America’s great bloody effort to remake the face of the Middle East, “the birth of a new Middle East” as Condoleezza Rice charmingly put it when the bombs and screams started to be heard.

All the Neocon Wars - which have killed a couple of million people, created immense floods of refugees, and destroyed several well-functioning states - are part of that plan.

The effort resembles something like trying to pave over everything within hundreds of miles of Israel, America’s de facto colony in the region.

The new Crown Prince was a blessed discovery in the cause, someone suddenly appearing, unbelievably ambitious and willing to kill and kill, and someone who covertly gets along just fine with pals in Israel.

The Crown Prince knows very well that the key to excellent relations with Washington’s power establishment is demonstrating excellent relations with Israel, something Saudi Arabia never did, say, twenty years ago.

It's only because of the Crown Prince’s attitudes and inclinations that Israel permitted the United States to sell him tens of billions in new armaments, something that wouldn't have been tolerated not that many years ago.

So, the Prince gets to play powerful ruler of a kind of regional power, something, along with killing, he clearly enjoys.

Only trouble is, there’s that basic reality of traditional Saudi corruption and incompetence showing through, perhaps ultimately threatening the whole house of cards.

Saudi corruption and incompetence flow directly from the fact that the country’s rulers are a gang of immensely rich and spoiled people who want to soil their hands with nothing ordinary or menial. What could you expect in a fairly closed and authoritarian society where hundreds of billions of dollars change hands regularly and in secret? The Saudis try buying everything.

Well, the death the other day of the old King’s faithful bodyguard at Jeddah, Major General Abdul-Aziz Al-Faghm, someone who knew a lot of secrets and an event assigned a highly implausible explanation, accompanied by a huge fire at the new high-speed Jeddah rail station may well signal a new chapter in the Kingdom’s ongoing bloody melodrama.

Saudi Arabia’s disastrous recent failures involving Yemen and Iran’s heroic resistance to America’s undeclared and unwarranted war, “maximum pressure,” against it may indeed signal the coming of a new Middle East, one the United States may not like.