How to fight terrorism while sponsoring terrorists

This Mohammad bin Salman dude who is now boss of Saudi Arabia has quite a track record for such a youthful world leader.

He's the architect of the collapse in world oil prices, a strategy that has been an epic fail. It has hurt Saudi Arabia more than any of the intended targets.

He's also the architect of the Yemen war, which is an unmitigated disaster and also an epic fail.

And as of this week, he's also the heir apparent to the leadership of the sclerotic state of Saudi Arabia.

Ya, Saudi Arabia is fucked.

Oddly enough, President Trump wasted no time offering congrats to this incorrigible youngster. He sees an eager vassal keen to do the bidding of Uncle Sam, and that's true to a point.

There are any number of policy initiatives taken by this imbecile that threaten catastrophic blow-back not only to Saudi Arabia but to the Middle East in general.

Sucking up to Israel will never fly in the Arab street. Perhaps it's a valid concept among the princelings in the Kingdom, but it will never find favour among the masses.

The Trump initiated quarantine of Qatar is another goose on its way to being cooked. If you've read this far you already know the hilarious demands that MBS and his Arab acolytes (all US vassal states, by the way) have made of Qatar.

Shut down Al Jazeera. Theoretically this should raise the hackles of freedom of speech advocates worldwide, but thus far the condemnation of this initiative has been muted.

Break commercial ties with Iran. After all, as Trump and the entire upper echelon of US power-brokers never tire of reminding us, Iran is the mother ship of terror networks world-wide.

Stop supporting terrorism. There's no question that Qatar has supported terrorism... in Syria. A far bigger sponsor of terrorism has been the very state that MBS is now the putative and temporary head of. The Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas and Hezbollah are only "terror" entities in countries where Israeli lobbying has succeeded in rendering them as such.

How many 9/11 terrorists hailed from Qatar?

How many from Saudi Arabia?

Kick Turkey out of their base in Qatar. This could get interesting. The US has a far larger base in Qatar. The US and Turkey are NATO allies. Turkey is essentially a Muslim Brotherhood hood. That won't change anytime soon. Read up on Erdogan's approval ratings. He's doing much better than Trump.

Interesting times indeed!

The wily Erdogan outflanks team Trump in Qatar

For the first couple of days after Saudi Arabia announced the excommunication of Qatar from the community of US vassal states in the Gulf, the punditocracy was unanimous that Qatar's goose was cooked. They'd have no choice but to deep-six their civil relationship with Iran. They'd have no choice but to drastically rein in their pain-in-the-ass Al Jazeera network. In fact, there was widespread talk that regime change wouldn't be long in coming.

What's coming instead is the Turkish military, and they're not coming to expedite the removal of the Emir. Quite to the contrary. Qatar and Turkey are two of the main sponsors of the Muslim Brotherhood. Thanks mainly to Israeli lobbying efforts, the MB have long been a listed terrorist outfit in much of the West, and also in Saudi Arabia. I would hazard a guess that if and when push comes to shove, an Erdogan-led Turkey would have more loyalty to the MB than to NATO.

Israel's main problem with the MB is that it's the backbone of the democratically elected government in Gaza. There was a time when Israel happily nurtured the fledgling Hamas to undercut the PLO. Those days are long gone. Today, the PLO/PA are generally seen as Israel's bum-boys, while Hamas are considered Palestinian patriots.

This unfolding shitstorm was unleashed by Trump's bombastic rhetoric on the occasion of his visit to Riyadh last week, when he demanded that his audience stand with America in the war to exterminate "terrorism" once and for all. Even in mainstream American media it's widely acknowledged that it's the Saudis who are the primary enablers of this thing we call terrorism.

Not that the Qatari's have clean hands, but after the putative leader of the free world put things so baldly, it was just a matter of time before the finger-pointing got serious.

So here we are. The Saudis are doing way more to keep the order books of Lockheed and Raytheon and Boeing plumped up than Qatar is, which is why they've got more cred in the West, at least for now. But with Erdogan throwing this spanner into the works and Washington in chaos, it's impossible to predict what's next.

Interesting times indeed!

Qatar climb-down signals imminent release of Jazeera journos

In the front office and on the front page, the Emirs of Qatar have officially turned their backs on the MB. That means those three Jazeera journalists who have been cooling their heels in a Cairo prison for the past year will be coming home soon.

Meanwhile, who knows what's going on in the back rooms? Just because Qatar has left the MB to hang, does that mean their support for the far more radical IS types in Iraq and Syria is over?

And would somebody, anybody, please make sure those three guys are released very soon, otherwise the ever-unctuous Canadian FM will take credit for their release!

We tried to warn Netanyahu, but would he listen?...

Surely our modest think-tank here at Falling Downs weren't the only ones who figured out there was way more than hashish and Mercedes sedans coming through the Gaza tunnels. Oddly enough, that story referenced in the link happened under Morsi's watch.

Which kinda makes you wonder... Morsi was a MB man, Hamas are an MB franchise; did Morsi order a few high-profile busts just to get happy headlines, while allowing unprecedented volumes of anti-tank weapons and Stinger missiles through the tunnels in those sedans?

Looks like Netanyahu and company are determined to find out.

When the wily Erdogan tells you to get out of Libya, Libya must REALLY be fucked!

Keep in mind that Mr. Erdogan is a MB insider. Not that I personally have a problem with that, but if you look at the arc of history, you could almost conclude that the MB is on its way out.

Morsi.

Hamas.

They don't exactly have momentum on their side, do they?

Erdogan?

Anyway, that's quite messed up, but what is even more messed up is that while Erdogan is almost the last man standing in Muslim Brotherhood ranks, he's also an insider in the NATO ranks.

Like, how the fuck does that work?

Washington consolidates control over global jihad

The Muslim Brotherhood is officially on the shit list.

We know that because Saudi Arabia has officially declared them a terrorist group. These notions don't spontaneously pop into King Abdullah's head out of nowhere.

The Brotherhood has in fact been nothing like a terror group. What the Saudi move means is that there is a bit of rebranding going on in the world 'o jihad. The al-Nusra Front and al-Qaeda have also been placed on Riyadh's Washington dictated verboten list.

This move is part and parcel of the news two days ago that most of the GCC were recalling their ambassadors from Qatar. Qatar has become the rogue state sponsoring not only the Brotherhood, but various other free-lance conglomerations of jihadis who operate outside of official US-Saudi oversight.

There was a time when Saudi money flowed freely to the many iterations of jihad terror around the Middle East and beyond. Saudi Arabia was the primariy financier of al-Qaeda for years. Bin Laden himself was financed out of Saudi Arabia.

Those days are now officially over. What brought about this U-turn?

The free-for-all in Syria. When Assad failed to follow the Washington script for regime change, random jihadi groups were given a green light to join the fray. Those myriad free-booters have proved to be well beyond the control of their financial backers, and as a result international jihad has a PR problem and their backers are pissed off.

Hence the current crack-down and consolidation.

Does the fact that Saudi Arabia has condemned al-Nusra and al-Qaeda mean we have won the war on terror?

Not at all. It means that terror groups have to buck up and do the bidding of their financial backers. No more of this random free-lance stuff where kids from Minneapolis and Winnipeg morph into "al Qaeda leaders" within six months of leaving Minneapolis and Winnipeg.

Where does that leave the Brotherhood?

The MB has been stomped on, persecuted, prosecuted, and driven underground for years. Its rise to legitimacy in Egypt and Turkey was never more than tenuous, as Morsi has found out and Erdogan will soon. It will continue as an underground organization.

Does this mean the end of al Qaeda and radical Islam? Hell no! This isn't about ending radical Islamist terror; it's about getting it under control.

Wahhabi zealots who once worked under the al-Qaeda or al-Nusra banners are simply being rebranded. Those who don't play ball and accept the US-Saudi directorship can count on a) being left out of the money & materiels supply chain, and b) finding themselves running zig-zag patterns in the desert as they try to avoid the drones with their names programmed into the guidance systems.

Once firmly under control, the jihadi hordes will be reliable allies. We'll finally be able to give them the kind of support we've been giving them all along, but now we'll be able to do it in the open.

They are an invaluable resource in the tool kit of Empire.

The Teflon Turk

Haaretz has this perspective on the wily Erdogan.

Haaretz generally has a liberal/secular take on ME issues. If the linked article is any indication, they too see Erdogan's main challenge coming from the Gulen loyalists in his country.

Turkey-Israel relations have been all over the map since Erdogan came to power. Turkey is a full-patch NATO member, and Israel is "the only democracy in the Middle East", so on an official level one might expect a substantial overlap in interests.

The Mavi Marmara incident was a turning point. Regardless of what one thinks of the illegal and immoral Gaza blockade, any realist will first need to acknowledge that there are plenty of others who view it as legal, moral, and necessary. Turkey's connivance with those who took direct action in attempting to breach the blockade was a classic case of over-reach.

In hindsight, that was the turning point in Erdogan's tenure, and also a turning point in the fortunes of the Muslim Brotherhood. The NATO bigs in Brussels and Washington realized that the NATO chapter in Ankara was no longer on the same page as the rest of the gang.

The Chinese missile deal was the last straw.

That's why you're hearing more these days about the influence of Fethullah Gulen, whose minions are poised to dispose of Erdogan. What then?

The appeal of the Muslim Brotherhood in Washington and Brussels was always that, all things considered, they were more moderate, more pliable, more US/Israel friendly than the alternatives.

The MB star is fading because there is a more moderate, more pliable alternative waiting in the wings.

Unfortunately, for a lot of conservative folks who held their noses and put up with the MB, any option that is even more moderate and pliable will simply be unacceptable.

The Teflon Turk may be on his way out. Whoever comes next will have a very serious problem with the fundamentalists who have taken root next door.

60 Minutes presents... Christian Towelheads!

OK, there's your Coptic Pope...





And here's your top toweller.

And what's the difference, other than one's got the white rig and the other got the black rig?

It was a remarkably telling episode of 60 Minutes. Seems like they are trying to re-establish their bona fides after some of their recent mishaps.

The first two thirds of tonight's show was dedicated to singing the praises of the NSA. Yup, that Snowden chap was one bad dude. Hurt America something terrible. You know; that America of secret prisons and torture etc. Snowden almost wrecked it for those folks.
And those Copts, god love 'em, just because their Pope manned up to support the Army after the coup they are suddenly the victims of all sorts of religious persecution.

We gotta put a stop to that!

Syria becoming "Afghanistan on the Mediterranean"

This bit of disingenuous twaddle is a prime example of history being fudged even as it is unfolding. After two and a half years fanning the flames of the Syria conflagration, the Turks are absolutely shocked to find there's a roaring inferno next door!

Turkey has from before the beginning connived in the training and arming of the Syrian "opposition," the harbouring of rebels, and the delivery of weapons to the various groups. But now that it has become plain that the support funnelled through Turkey and Jordan hasn't been enough to topple Assad, it's the weak moral fibre of the international community in not escalating the violence that is to blame.

Surely Erdogan and Gul knew what they were doing when they signed on for this regime-change exercise. We don't know yet what promises were dangled in front of them by the Big Dogs to entice them into what was always a dubious undertaking. The constant need to suck up to their NATO betters, as well as the endless scraping and bowing in front of the EU pack they are so desperate to join, no doubt helped to becloud their better judgement.

Alas, times have changed since those CIA promises were made three years ago, when they were assured that Assad would be gone in a matter of months, and the star of the Muslim Brotherhood would shine more brightly than ever before thanks to the noble efforts of Erdogan and Gul.

Assad is still there. The Big Dogs have turned their backs on the MB, in Turkey and across the region. The "revolution" has long since fallen into the hands of al Qaeda. Syria is at risk to become a failed terror state on the periphery of Europe...

All of this was readily predictable three years ago, Mr. Gul.

 

John Kerry's shit 'n shinola tour of Egypt

Here's what Professor of International Studies at Georgetown, John Esposito, has to say about the military dictatorship that over threw the democratically elected President Morsi a few months ago;

The interim government, an illegitimate product of a military-backed coup, is acting very much like the government of Gamal Abdel Nasser in the past, seeking to crush and destroy the Brotherhood. It has massacred large numbers of the Brotherhood and other opposition in the largest bloodbath in modern Egyptian history. The security forces have deliberately used violence and killing to provoke pro-Morsi non-violent demonstrators to take up arms and fire back, and it has declared its intention to outlaw the MB (as Nasser did, but neither Sadat nor Mubarak did).(AJE 3.11.13)

That's harsh condemnation indeed!

"illegitimate"...

"coup"...

"massacred"...

"largest bloodbath in modern Egyptian history"...

But John Kerry pops in for a meet 'n greet and sees democracy just waiting to blossom forth!

John is one helluva glass-half-full kinda guy. I guess you'd have to be, if you're the public face of America's convoluted, contradictory, and self-defeating foreign policy.

Kerry's next stop is Saudi Arabia, where he is expected to congratulate the rulers of the Kingdom on their great progress on human rights.

Desperate Erdogan wondering if he's next

Here's something worth reading.

Note the tinge of desperation as Erdogan wanly champions the imaginary obligations of the international community to intercede with the generals in Egypt and prevent the wholesale slaughter of the Morsi supporters who have been holding peaceful sit-ins in the streets.

Don't expect Hurriyet to spell out the irony of Erdogan's appeal to international law after being neck deep in fomenting the Syrian crisis for the past three years.

Truth is, the big boys have decided that the Muslim Brotherhood is expendable. That's evident by what has happened with the regime change in Qatar and the coup in Egypt. This anti-MB impetus also helps sideline Hamas while the US puts on the latest iteration of the Middle East Peace charade.

The supposed conversations that Erdogan has been having with his counterparts among the UN Security Council must have been awkward in the extreme.

It seems that Erdogan is the last to know that the world has turned a page, and that he is being hung out to dry.

True, he has clapped most of his US-trained high command into prison, but that may not be enough.

The US-sponsored "democracy activists" remain thick on the ground.

When billionaires speak, politicians listen

It follows that if you have a billionaire politician in a leadership position, he'll only listen to himself, which may account for Berlusconi's later career... but I digress.

Here's an uplifting story about one of the world's most influential politicians, EU Foreign Minister Catherine Ashton, travelling to Egypt to meet with a couple of young idealists from the anti-Morsi Tamarod movement.

So where is the billionaire, you ask?

Oddly enough, the billionaire in this story is deliberately left out of the story, so that we may naively continue on our way believing that these young Egyptian idealists have the ear of a powerful politician, and isn't that nice...

The billionaire for whom those young idealists are doing the talking is Naguib Sawiris, the man who bankrolls the Tamarod movement.

Sawiris comes from the Christian minority and that may explain some of the virulence in the anti-Muslim Brotherhood sentiments voiced by his little spokespersons.

The so-called Nations of Virtue have made a grave error in allowing this coup to pass unchallenged. The reason it has been unchallenged is of course the irrefutable fact that the US supported the coup all along. Unfortunately, the aspirations of the Egyptian people have been aroused, and it seems far from likely that the majority who voted for Morsi only a year ago are willing to give up those aspirations.

What's next for Egypt?

In the immediate future there's a big cloud of very toxic blow-back coming our way. It will decimate the Tamarod, sweep away the Christian minority, and perhaps prove even too much for the Army to contain.

After that, we'll see.

Egypt's US sponsored military about to roll back Arab Spring

We're watching history in the making.

The Muslim Brotherhood candidate was democratically elected a year ago. That was always seen as a bit iffy by the big dogs in Washington.

Sure, we're all about democracy, but what if the wrong guy wins?

You'll recall that quite by coincidence virtually the entire high command of the Egyptian Armed Forces happened to be in Washington for "consultations" at the time the anti-Mubarak demos broke out.

Morsi soon fired a goodly cross-section of that crew, but the fact remains that the new guys who stepped in to replace them are just as in thrall to America as the older generation.

So with the Egyptian military in their pocket and thousands of "democracy activists" on the ground, it should come as no surprise that the USA is pulling the plug on Morsi barely a year in.

The most important question at this moment is whether the majority who voted for the Muslim Brotherhood candidate will allow this to pass.

Social media and revolution

Much has been written, most of it laudatory, about the role of "social media" in the revolutions that comprise Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, Idle No More, etc.

The think tank here at Falling Downs has given this more than a bit of thought. In fact, we've gone deep in the tank on this question.

The problem with flash mob revolutions is that they're mostly sizzle and very little steak.

Real change takes years, often decades of dedicated activism. The overthrow of the Czars came after generations of anti-Czarist activism.

Occupy and Idle have mostly fizzled, precisely because after the thrill of that initial success in rallying a lot of voices wore off, there was no infrastructure of revolution there to carry things forward.

The Arab Spring has become the MB autumn simply because the Muslim Brotherhood was the only significant anti-government entity in Tunisia or Egypt that had the years-long back-story of forging grass-roots resistance networks. Both of those revolutions were fomented by young secular activists using social media as their primary tool.

Both of them are now in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood, who took the time to build those embedded real social networks in the fabric of their respective societies.

That's why they're in the driver's seat and the secularists are relegated to the margins.

PM Erdogan is the latest leader to fall afoul of the social media revolutionaries, and he has gone so far as mentioning Twitter in his denunciations of the Turkish uprising. The Twitter uprising in Turkey is something of a false alarm. There are well-established institutions embedded in Turkish society who will use this social-media inspired sizzle to assert their own agenda.

Whether that is also the agenda of the youthful protesters in the streets the past few nights remains to be seen.

Why is Muslim Brotherhood doing Israel's dirty work in Gaza?

There has to be a good deal more to this story than Bloomberg Businessweek is sharing with us.

Flooding the Gaza tunnels is the sort of gesture we would have expected from Mubarak. After all, he was an unapologetic US stooge and everybody knew it.

But Morsi is supposedly a different breed of cat. Hails from the Muslim Brotherhood, just like the Hamas leadership on the other side of the fence.

Is it possible that after mere months in power Morsi has capitulated to US pressure to distance himself from his Islamist brothers in Gaza?

Is it not curious that this story emerges just as Hamas and PA delegations are in Cairo negotiating a reconciliation?

Is this story true or have a few token tunnels been temporarily flooded to make photo-ops and float a propaganda story?

"Oh look, that Morsi is not such a bad chap after all! We can do business with him..."

US delivers tanks and F-16 fighters to Muslim Brotherhood

In the final act of a deal made with the Mubarak regime, the Obama administration intends to follow through on a deal to deliver 10 F-16s and 200 Abrams battle tanks to the now Islamic Republic of Egypt.

And why not? It's part of the regional quid pro quo. American tax-payers gift a couple of billion dollars worth of stuff to Israel, and the Egyptians get a couple hundred millions worth of stuff just so they'll cut out the pouting. Oh, and stand by that "peace agreement" they "voluntarily" entered into all those years ago.

Nevermind that Mubarak is long gone and the country is in the hands of what may or may not be Muslim fanatics. A deal is a deal! Free stuff is free stuff! Did the US renege on giving free stuff to Israel just because a bunch of Likud fanatics took over the country?

What could go wrong?

Why is the US handing the Middle East to al Qaeda?

This item from the Telegraph paints an intriguing picture of what's going on in Syria now. Not that one should reflexively believe all that appears on their website, but it looks like at this point the war is largely between the Assad military and a mostly-foreign army of radical Sunnis.

I am baffled at what the US strategy is here. It's been clear that official Washington has been supportive of the war from the beginning, but why?

Surely not to place Syria in the hands of al Qaeda, the people the Nations of Virtue have been waging the "War on Terror" on?

Do they even have a strategy?

Or are they just trying to figure out how to catch up with history?

Painting a smiley face on Netanyahu's Gaza debacle

Netanyahu's goals going into this latest Gaza adventure were clearly articulated and universally broadcast. He would eliminate the ability of the Hamas rocketeers to threaten Israelis, and he would eliminate Hamas as a political force.

It is thunderingly obvious that neither goal was achieved.

Far from it.

Yet Aluf Benn claims that the goals of this exercise in stupidity have been achieved.

To justify this claim the Haaretz editor-in-chief conjures up, post-facto, two new goals entirely out of thin air.

The goals, according to Benn, were to re-establish a truce with Hamas, and to "test" the Morsi government's commitment to the peace treaty.

Were Netanyahu interested in a truce with Hamas he could have respected the last one. As for testing the Morsi government, I think it's pretty clear that Egypt is no longer the Egypt of Mubarak, and that Egyptian interlocutions this past week were unambiguously weighted in favor of Hamas.

The ultimate goal of Netanyahu's great Gaza adventure was of course to portray himself as the man of steel just in time for the January elections.

To what extent that goal was achieved will be made known then.

NYT calls out the hypocrisy of the Egyptian Government on Gaza

David Kirkpatrick takes a swing at Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood president today. Apparently it's not kosher to play peacemaker while openly favoring one side over the other, and Morsi has made it plain who he holds responsible for the current crisis.

There is no hint in David's article that he is aware that this is exactly how America and "the quartet" have been seen by most of the world, and especially the Muslim world, for the past fifty years. It does indeed undermine the credibility of the peacemakers when they clearly hold one side blameless.

In America's case and in the Nations of Virtue generally we finance and arm one side and continuously blame the other, yet we hold ourselves out to be credible "honest brokers".

The main difference between our hypocrisy and that of Morsi is that he's only been at it for five days.

We've been at it for fifty years.

New York Times reveals new Egypt leader is Muslim!

Who knew! So that's why they call themselves the "Muslim" Brotherhood?

The Times article is just chock full 'o scoops.

He's keen to spring Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman from his US jail cell for one.

There's a surprise! Who would have imagined that the Muslim Brotherhood would be interested in freeing convicted Muslim terrorists?

Spring has sprung!