Tag: Saudi Arabia

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Khuzestan

khuzestan

The millisphere of Khuzestan appeared briefly in the news when, in September 2018, five Arab gunmen, disguised in Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard uniforms, opened fire on a Revolutionary Guard parade commemorating the day the Iran/Iraq war started.

The Shi’a Revolutionary Guard blamed Arab Sunni militants from Syria for the shooting in Ahvaz (pop 1.3 million) one of Iran’s most oil-rich cities. In 2015 the WHO (World Health Organisation) named Ahvaz “the most polluted city in the world”.

The Iran/Iraq war started in 1980 when, with US help, Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces invaded Iran’s southwest province of Khuzestan (population 4.7 million) and occupied Iran’s oil fields. During the war, despite an American arms embargo, Israel covertly supplied Iran with arms in exchange for oil.

Iran (population 82 million) has the world’s fourth largest oil reserves. In quality terms, Iranian crude is second only to Saudi Arabian, and Khuzestan produces 85 percent of all Iran’s oil.

Khuzestan has the Iranian portion of the once extensive Mesopotamian Marshes, the original ecosystem of the Euphrates and Tigris river deltas, and it is the home to Iran’s Arab minority. Khuzestan, sometimes referred to as Arabistan, was virtually autonomous from 1880 to 1920 and after the 1979 Iranian Revolution the Marsh Arabs unsuccessfully sought autonomy for their province again. The occupation of Iran’s London embassy in 1980 was by Arab separatists from Khuzestan.

American relations with Iran deteriorated after November 1979, when fundamentalist Iranian students occupied the United States embassy in Tehran, detaining the diplomatic staff there for 444 days.

The American CIA had failed to recognise the discontent that would sweep away the Shah in 1979, nor the deep distrust in Iran of the US and the UK. Iranians remembered when the 1953 “Operation Ajax” coup, organised by the CIA and MI5, deposed the Mossadeq government, which had offended Western oil companies in 1951 by nationalising their oil industry.

The geopolitics of oil and its attendant wars have embroiled Khuzestan regularly during the twentieth century. In 1941 the UK occupied Ahvaz to cut oil supplies to Nazi Germany and in 1988 the US shelled two Iranian oil platforms in the Persian Gulf. When Saddam Hussein’s forces pulled out in 1988 they left Iran’s largest refinery in flames, palm groves annihilated, cities destroyed and historic sites demolished. When Saddam Hussein’s amy torched the oil fields in Kuwait, the soot fell on Khuzestan.

In the marshes a combination of water, soil and heat once sustained a rich, diverse ecosystem. Wild wheat and pulses were easily domesticated and agricultural civilization blossomed here. In the Mesopotamian imagination this was The Garden of Eden. Iran refers to the city of Ahvaz as the “birthplace of the nation”, dated at about 3000 BC.

Ahvaz sits on the Karun River, which is navigable to the Persian Gulf.The Karun River flow has been reduced to less than a half of what it was in 1970 and dams divert water to neighbouring provinces. The marshes have also been drained for agribusiness – mainly sugar cane – which is water hungry. The palms that once produced the best dates in the Middle east are dying from ‘saline penetration’ and polluted rivers. Khuzestan has turned from a “wetland into a wasteland”, and now has drought, dust storms, unemployment and air pollution. “Khuzestan has dried up,” said one farmer.

In 2006-7 the US, the EU and finally the UN applied sanctions, demanding that Iran halt its development of nuclear arms, but the Chinese, during the Ahmadinejad years (2005-14), continued doing business with Iran, providing inferior, rough and dirty, oil refining technology.

Iran refers to the US and Israel (who both have nuclear weapons) as “big Satan and little Satan”, and in May 2018 Donald Trump, at the behest of Benjamin Netanyahu, imposed sanctions on Iran once again – before leaving office Barack Obama had lifted sanctions on Iran, seamingly assured that Iran had given up its nuclear ambitions.

Since Donald Trump’s Iran sanctions petrol prices have risen steeply at New Zealand service stations, Saudi Arabia’s economy is prospering again and Mohammed bin Salman can afford to pay for his American weaponry.

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Sana’a

Sana’a

Millisphere (abstract noun): a region where approximately one thousandth of world’s population live.

Based on tribal geographies going back to biblical times, Yemen (population 29 million) could be divided into three or four millispheres. It’s population is mostly Arabic and can be divided roughly 60 – 40 between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims.

Yemen is the third highest in the world, after Serbia, for civilian firearm ownership. America, naturally, comes first. The International Red Cross calls Yemen the worst humanitarian crisis that the world presently faces and estimates that seven million Yemenis are starving and about one million have cholera.

The latest civil war in Yemen started when fundamentalist Sunni Yemenis, returning from Saudi Arabia, established Wahhabi mosques in Sana’a and preached against Zaydism (the local form of Shi’a Islam). The inevitable backlash came from the Zaydi Houthi tribal areas in the mountainous north of Yemen, and in 2015 the Houthis overran Sana’a.

The Republic of Yemen government fled south to Aden on the Arabian Sea coast and Yemen – last united in 1990 – returned to being two countries. The Republic holds South Yemen (population eight million) which is larger in area than North Yemen (population twenty-one million) but much of it is desert.

Back during the Cold War, the Soviet Union supported South Yemen and the Americans backed North Yemen. Now the situation has reversed and there are US special forces in the south supporting the Republic of Yemen in exile and coordinating the war against the Houthis, who are supported by Iran.

Osama bin Laden was a Sunni Saudi of Yemeni descent, and a Wahhabi, and al Qaeda in the Yemen also supports the Republic of Yemen. The country’s late president Ali Abdullah Saleh once said: “Governing Yemen is like dancing on the heads of snakes.”

North Yemen, currently held by the Houthis, can be further divided along altitude lines – between the Red Sea coast where food is imported and the highlands where the capital Sana’a sits. Yemen does not grow enough food to feed itself and the Saudis have destroyed the Red Sea port infrastructure, blockading food imports. Yemen could possibly grow enough if they grew lentils instead of khat, the narcotic leaves of which are chewed as a stimulant.

Since the 1960s, US arms manufacturers have lobbied their government representatives about capitalising on the conflicts in the Middle East – it would be better for American businesses if these wars were fought with US arms, not those made by other members of the P5 (France, Britain, Russia and China) they reasoned.

In 2009 Saudi Arabia started fighting Yemen’s Houthis with arms supplied by the Obama administration. Saudi Arabia is reluctant to put soldiers into Yemen and has conducted a “smart war” from the air. Drones and jet fighters with “dumb bombs with graduate degree guidance systems” were deployed by Riyadh – with American technical assistance – and Yemen descended into an Islamic blood feud, half the casualties of which were civilian.

After selling the Saudis $100 billion worth of the latest in American weapons systems, and after the Saudis had killed the neutral mayor of Sana’a in 2016, with a guided missile at a funeral, the Obama administration started raising concerns about civilian casualties with the Saudis. Barack Obama’s signing of the “nuclear non-proliferation” treaty with Iran further angered the Saudis.

Incoming US president, Donald Trump, “decoupled humanitarian from security concerns,” in Yemen and last year he signed a deal for another $US 110 billion dollars of arms sales to Saudi Arabia. He said the deal represented “hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in the US and jobs, jobs, jobs.”

Trump’s simple policy in the Middle East is to set Sunni and Shi’a Muslims against one another and then sell arms to create US jobs and pay for US oil imports.

“Aspirant millisphere” South Yemen also has a secessionist movement but this is being put down by the Republic of Yemen and their US allies. Peace would be bad for the American economy.

In 2010 when The River City Press editor, Doug Davidson and his wife Marion visited Yemen the Houthis had yet to reach Sana’a. At night the stained glass windows of Sana’a’s UNESCO World Heritage old town looked “like something out of The Arabian Nights,” Marion said.

Sana’a is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world – going back some 2500 years and reputedly has the world’s oldest mosque. Since 2015 some of its distinctive inner city, rammed-earth, multi storey houses have been hit by American “smart” bombs – fired by the Saudis.

Between the Americans and the Wahhabis many important historic sites are being destroyed in the Middle East.

Fred’s millisphere columns can be accessed at millisphere.blogtown.co.nz

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Najd

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, population 33 million, can be divided into three or four millispheres. In the middle of the Arabian peninsula is the “Najd” (the upland) a region of nine million, including the Saudi capital Riyadh (six million).

The Najd is the heartland of both the Saud royal family and a branch of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism.

Muhammad Wahhab was born in the Najd in 1702 and aspired to restore Islam to “true monotheist worship”.

He preached that Muslims not following strict Wahhabi practices should first be given the chance to repent, otherwise they could be killed. He also preached that the veneration of Muslim saints and visiting shrines was idolatrous.

Anyone who was not a Wahhabi was not a Muslim, he said. The Wahhabi religious philosophy is a particularly strict form of commanding “right” behaviour and forbidding “wrong”.

Wahhab then made a pact with the local Saud tribe. If they followed the Wahhabi way and gave up taxing the local harvest, he promised that God would give them booty from conquest and the right to collect taxes.

This alliance has lasted two-and-a-half centuries and the two families have intermarried multiple times (not hard to do in a country where some wealthy men have more than 30 wives).

In 1802, the Sauds captured Karbala, slaughtering all the men (conveniently “non-Muslim”) and enslaved the women and children. Early in the 19th century they conquered all of Saudi Arabia including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, carrying out 40,000 executions of local leaders and amputations on 350,000 others in the process.

Under the Saudi/Wahhabi alliance, tobacco, alcohol, card playing and listening to recorded music was forbidden. In the petrol era, Saudi Arabia funded Wahhabi schools in such places as Pakistan and Indonesia with their new wealth.

After the USSR invaded Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia spent $US600 million per year there, sending 20,000 fighters.

After driving out the Russians (and destroying the Bamiyan Buddhas), these triumphant Wahhabi fighters (including one Osama bin Laden) returned home. Five hundred of these radicalised returnees seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979. Saudi policy has been to “rehabilitate rather than torture” its domestic fundamentalists.

After creating al Qaeda, Wahhabi Sunni then spawned Isis with its trademark executions, rape, pillage and destruction of “idolatrous” monuments.

To the east of the Najd is the millisphere bordering the Persian Gulf historically known as “Bahrain” (the seas). This includes most of the Saudi oilfields and the oil-producing states of Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE and Qatar, which is now being unjustly targeted by its neighbours for “supporting terrorism” – this has resulted in an “unlawful blockade”, says Amnesty International.

A member of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Qatar has historically been a moderniser, a mediator and an honest broker in the region. There are about 250,000 Qataris and they have invested their oil income in the West so the income from these investments now equals their oil revenue, some of which they use to fund the Al Jazeera (Mesopotamia) news channel.

Al Jazeera English now has coverage in the Middle East that is vastly superior to its rivals BBC and CNN but its offices in both Baghdad and Kabul have been targeted by US missiles.

The United States Defence Secretary, Jim Mattis, described the Qatar blockade as a “very complex situation”.

“Qatar has a history of supporting groups across a wide political spectrum, including those engaged in violence,” added Exxon oilman Rex Tillerson, now the US Secretary of State.

Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi praised Donald Trump’s participation in the counter-terrorism summit in Riyadh last month.

“We have come to fight terrorism in partnership with Middle East leaders,” said Trump after signing the $US110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia. Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudis and they were all Wahhabis.

The ink was barely dry on the arms contract before Saudi King Salman moved on Qatar. All Saudi hotels turned off their Al Jazeera satellite channel for “committing religious, political and moral violations”.

“We do journalism seriously,” say Al Jazeera English. It seems someone doesn’t like “serious journalism”.

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Israel

According to Wikipedia, Jewish geography is a popular “game” sometimes played when Jews meet each other for the first time and try to identify the people they know in common.

Depending on your definition, there are between 14 million and 20 million Jews worldwide. One-third in Israel, one-third in the United States and the remainder spread throughout the rest of the world. One third of the US Jewish population lives in New York.

David Friedman, the new US ambassador to Israel, is an orthodox Jew from New York, a bankruptcy lawyer and a business associate and personal friend of Donald Trump.

Friedman, who is a fluent Hebrew speaker, owns a home in Talbeyeh, a neighbourhood in Jerusalem from which Palestinians were expelled in 1948, and is known for his support of the more extreme elements of Israel’s settler movement.

Friedman was an active fundraiser for and donor to Ateret Cohanim, a far right Israeli group which settles Jews in key locations in East Jerusalem, and the president of the American Friends of Beit El, a settlement of religious extremists on unlawfully seized Palestinian land near Ramallah.

Friedman joined the Trump election campaign as an advisor on Israel. Fiercely opposed to a Palestinian state, he erased any mention of a two-state solution from the Republican platform.

Five former US ambassadors to Israel, two of whom were Jewish, wrote to the Senate committee urging them to block President Trump’s nomination of David Friedman because his “extreme views, divisive rhetoric and dangerous positions … would undermine our national security by further inflaming tensions in the region”.

Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, was born in Miami Beach where his father and brother were both mayors. Dermer, an orthodox Jew, moved to Israel in 1996 and gave up his American citizenship to become the Israeli economic envoy to the US before becoming Israel’s ambassador there in 2013.

Dermer is reputedly the closest senior advisor to Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and played a key role in having Netanyahu address the US Congress on Iran – famously without President Barack Obama’s prior knowledge.

Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, also an orthodox Jew, is a New York real-estate investor and developer. The designer of Trump’s online campaign, Kushner managed to assemble a presidential campaign on a shoestring budget which won the election for his father-in-law.

Kushner a long-time family friend of the Netanyahus, is reported to have negotiated directly with Lockheed-Martin (the world’s largest arms manufacturer) on behalf of the Saudis when they turned up at the White House this year (2017) with a shopping list for planes, ships and precision-guided bombs.

Speaking in Riyadh, President Trump described the common cause of the US and Saudi Arabia as fighting the “threat” posed by Iran. There was no mention by Trump of the economic reliance of the US and its “51st state” Israel on the arms trade.

In 2007, Israel handled 10 percent of the arms and security trade and 2014 was the world’s sixth largest arms exporter – not bad for a country with 0.1 percent of the world population.

After signing the biggest arms deal of all time in Saudi Arabia ($US110 billion) President Trump took the first direct flight between Saudi Arabia and Israel (the two countries do not have diplomatic relationships).

The Saudi arms deal was about providing work for the US military-industrial complex and would have had the blessing of Ron Dermer, David Friedman, Jared Kushner and Benjamin Netanyahu.

A few days earlier, 30 C-170 military aircraft arrived in Israel laden with vehicles and military equipment for Trump’s visit and 233 rooms in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel were occupied by Trump’s entourage. Trump’s suite was built to withstand virtually any threat, including building collapse.

The planes that took down the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11, 2001, were not hijacked by Iranians – they were flown into the Twin Towers by Saudi Arabians.

Iran being used here as a bogeyman by Trump and Netanyahu to justify the Saudi arms deal.