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No Blowback For Saudi Arabia?
The War Nerd thinks there will be no blowback for Saudi Arabia from sending Jihadis to kill Syrians.
The Middle East has been Saudi-ized while we looked on and laughed at those goofy Saudis who didn’t understand progress. No wonder they’re content to play dumb. If we took a serious look at them, they’d be terrifying.
And of all their many skills, the one the Saudis have mastered most thoroughly is disruption. Not the cute tech-geek kind of disruption, but the real, ugly thing-in-itself. They don’t just “turn a blind eye” to young Saudi men going off to do jihad—they cheer them on. It’s a brilliant strategy that kills two very dangerous birds with one plane ticket. By exporting their dangerous young men, the Saudis rid themselves of a potential troublemaker while creating a huge amount of pain for the people who live wherever those men end up.
This worked well, the War Nerd says, and Wahabized Afghanistan and Chechnya while the blowback, he says, has been zero in those cases:
[L]et’s total up the number of Saudi Sunni killed in this “blowback” from the Afghan jihad. I’m no math whiz myself, but I think I can give a pretty exact figure: Zero. None.
In short, there was no blowback for the Saudis. Blowback by Saudis, and by Saudi-funded groups, Hell yeah, but blowback within Saudi Arabia, against Saudis (real Saudis, which means Sunni), nope. Nary a bit.
It is a good argument but I am not convinced. There has been some blowback from other Saudi Jihad interventions that the War Nerd leaves out. There was, for example, a serious attempt to kill the Saudi deputy intelligence minister. The blowback also does not have to come from Jihadis. Syria is nearer to Saudi Arabia than Afghanistan or Chechnya and its allies are more potent forces.
Someone within the Syrian, Iranian or Hizbullah's inelligence services will surely be able to come up with some good ideas.
“The mechanism in play through the stolen 2000 Election, culminating in 9/11, is a coup d’etat;”
I think this is worth examining. And since I have believed, with some fervor, the same as you since the fiasco of 2000 (though much diminished having seen the way the Democrats have handled their opportunity to reject the Bush era) I’ll be playing devil’s advocate to some degree.
Lets not forget exactly who the alternative to Bush was. It was not Jesse Jackson or Ralph Nader. It was Gore and Lieberman. =Let’s not forget that Lieberman was about as outspoken a pro-Israel hawk as it was possible to be. Both him and Gore were Likud to the core (yuk, bad rhyme). I have heard characterizations of Gore since 1988, and from respectable Democratic sources – not people attempting to bait him – as being from the “Likud wing” of the Democratic party. What would a Gore presidency towards the eruption of the Second Intifada in Palestine have looked like? How would the tandem of Gore and Lieberman have responded to the 2006 Israeli attack on Lebanon?
And let’s not forget that Gore was such an exceptional Clintonista – NAFTA et al. If we want to start discussing transfers of wealth in the United States, you start with Clinton, not Bush. The “New Democrats” were well in bed with Wall Street by this point. It is hard to see how he would not have presided over the same housing bubble and financial shenanigans – even if he avoided the ridiculous tax cuts that Bush pushed through.
As for civil rights, It was Gore who rolled over without a whimper, his denying the motions of all the Black congresspeople standing up not for Gore, but against the disenfranchisement of their people – a crime better suited for the Jim Crow era than for the dawn of the 20th Century. His turning down of the Presidency – his refusal to fight – that wasn’t a selfless act of him, it was a selfish one that flew in the face of the memory of the Civil Rights movement.
Of course Bush was an idiot and a lunatic who was the vehicle that allowed the neo-cons to commit vast crimes. But likely 9/11 would have still have happened – assuming the deep state was responsible. So we have to ask – though it is entirely in the realm of speculation – how would Gore have responded? An invasion of Afghanistan, no doubt, with ZBig in the drivers seat of US strategy, followed by who knows what? Let’s not forget that Clinton was running the sanctions against Iraq, and lobbing cruise missiles at it on a regular basis. The problem, likely, was not George W. Bush. Instead, the problem is the United States. Let’s not forget that the Iranian Bomb was a key issue at that point. Would the Israel oriented Democratic party have focused on that as opposed to the Arabist GOP who wanted to vanquish Hussein? The possibilities for war following 9/11 – even under a Democratic presidency – were enormous.
I don’t think 2000 was a coup to the same degree of the Kennedy Assassination. The argument could be made (as could the counter-argument) that Kennedy was beginning to turn towards a more liberal outlook for the US (having been burnt by the CIA with their foolish Bay of Pigs Fiasco and the FBI with their insidious involvement spying on Americans at all levels) a sort of move away from the virulent anti-communism and coupism of the Eisenhower years. But by 2000, US policies were well set in place. 9/11 was bound to happen and the Neo-cons/Likudniks were in the wings no matter who was on stage for the duration of the performance.
Bevin is right to point out that the US has long been at the center of world crimes. Our government certainly needed no 9/11 to kill another half a million Iraqis – they had already done so by the end of the Clinton era.
And I infer another argument here, perhaps I’m seeing things. No one here, not JSore or POA or anyone else, have made this argument so please don’t think I’m putting words in your mouth – I’m just talking what I see in others who seem to argue for 9/11 as the ultimate crime. But there are people who seem to have the idea that 9/11 was a key moment without which the United States never would have dared commit the crimes in Iraq. That, in fact, the US is really a force for good as we were always taught in school, but it was those dastardly plotters (whoever they are) who fooled our brave if blundering nation into launching the heinous post 2000 wars.
Unfortunately, the millions of bodies the US has piled up form Indochina to Central America to Afghanistan seem to indicate otherwise. The US is, and has always been, a bully. And not just a bully, but, since World War 2 at least, the #1 bully. The exposure of 9/11 will expose the ultimate crime of a state against its own people, that’s for sure, but it will not vindicate the United States as a somebody’s victim. It will only prove that, after 55 years following its apex at the end of World War Two, the elite of the United States finally had to make victims of its own people in order to continue its victimization of the rest of the world.
9/11 was the day we lost our status as protected citizens, and joined the ranks of the Vietnamese and the Iraqis and Panamanians et al as just another group to be killed for the sole good of the elites of maintaining power. And in that sense, 9/11 was just another crime among many before and many to come until these cowardly, craven, anti-social regimes who serve in the favor of the elite (be they the chosen or the exceptional) over the people are toppled once and for all.
If the exposure of 9/11 can bring that goal one day closer, than it should be used for that goal. But for those looking for vindication for the murderous acts in Iraq and in other places – there will be none forthcoming.
Posted by: guest77 | Dec 24 2013 2:24 utc | 54
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