Tag: United States

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Rojava

Rojava

Millisphere: a discrete region inhabited by roughly one thousandth of the world population.

I first noticed Rojava (northeast Syria) a decade ago – while running my millisphere model through a philosophy of the science of geography paper. At the time Syria was in the grip of the 2006-2010 drought (probably caused by climate change). Large areas of Syria’s crop lands were turning into desert and by 2009 their cattle herds had been reduced in number by 80%. Desperate farmers were migrating to the cities.

The Arab spring of 2011 was the spark that started Syria’s civil war but there were pre existing factors. Drought, ethnic factions, economic divides, religious differences and rapid population growth all contributed. Before 2011 Syria’s population had been doubling every twenty years – since 2011 the population has dropped from 21 million to 17 million today.

Roughly 40 million Kurds live in the mountainous region where the states of Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran meet. In 2005 Abdullah Ocalan, the founder of the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party), proposed a “border-free confederation” of North Kurdistan (S.E. Turkey), West Kurdistan (N.E. Syria aka Rojava), South Kurdistan (N. Iraq) and East Kurdistan (N.W. Iran) – neatly equating to four millispheres.

Originally from Turkey, Abdullah Ocalan lived in Syria from 1979-98 before he was captured by the Turks – with the help of the CIA. Ocalan has been banned from holding public office for life and has been held on the Turkish prison island of Imrali since 1999.

While in prison Ocalan discovered the writings of the American anarchist philosopher Murray Bookchin (The Ecology of Freedom, 1982). Abandoning his Marxist/Leninist beliefs, Ocalan embraced Boochin’s Libertarian Socialism which amongst other things doesn’t believe in capitalism, the nation state or the United Nations.

The Syrian branch of the PKK embraced Ocalan’s ideas and in 2011 the Kurds formed the YPG (People’s Defence Units) and the YPJ (Women’s Protection Units) and entered the Syrian civil war. In 2012 Bashar Assad’s forces withdrew from Rojava leaving the Kurds in control of half of Syria’s oil fields – and the United States put the PKK on its list of foreign terrorist organisations.

The Kurds have administered N.E. Syria since 2014 “working voluntarily at all levels to make Ocalan’s experiment successful.” Based on a bottom-up direct democracy with no hierarchy or party line they set up self-governing sub-regions. Ocalan was critical of nationalism and the Kurds instead proposed a democratic confederation within Syria obeying all Syrian civil laws. So as not to inflame Assad’s government they called their autonomous region NES (North East Syria) instead of Rojava.

In jail Ocalan wrote a book on feminism – his sister had been in a forced marriage – and he was for gender equality. The Kurds in Rojava have banned child marriages and polygamy and a 40% gender quota is required on all councils for a vote to take place. All men entering the Kurdish army take a compulsory class on feminism – highly unusual in the Middle East.

Rojava’s PEP (People’s Economic Plan) proposes “moving beyond capitalism”. Private property and entrepreneurship are protected “by the ownership of use” – but there was to be no absentee ownership. In Rojave there are no direct or indirect taxes and government services are funded through the sale of oil.

From 2014 to 2017 ISIL (the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) controlled large areas of Iraq and Syria. The Kurds (both in Syria and Iraq) played a major role in the defeat of ISIL. Women YPJ snipers with antique Kalashnikovs were deployed to the front line where they proved to be very accurate. In October 2019 the Kurds led the American Special Forces to a tunnel NW of Idlib where Abu Bakr al-Baghadadi detonated his own suicide vest and that was the end of the first caliph of ISIL.

Turkey meanwhile vehemently opposes Kurdish autonomy in Syria and has moved its forces across the border into Rojava. Trump’s sudden pullout of US forces shortly before the Turkish invasion was seen as a “serious betrayal” of the Kurds who have “no friends but the mountains.”

Nanaia Mahuta should ask president Erdogan of Turkey to free Abdullah Ocalan. Twenty years is a long time for starting a political party.

 

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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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Tasmania

The millisphere of Tasmania covers the watershed east and south from the Australian Alps, and includes Melbourne (4.9 million) and the island of Tasmania (half-a-million).

When we visited Tasmania again in October 2001 air travel had changed dramatically. Osama bin Laden had just leveled the “twin towers” in New York  and the New Zealand army manned the Auckland airport and the Australian army was there to meet the plane in Melbourne. Australia, New Zealand and the United States are technically in the Cold War ANZUS defense alliance, although in the 1980s New Zealand was “partially suspended” because of its “nuclear free” position.

“No worries mate, this building is owned by the Kuwait royal family,” joked the Lebanese lift operator as I ascend the Melbourne’s Rialto Tower – the tallest building in the southern hemisphere – so I could draw a picture from the top.

We explored Victoria, including  a pilgrimage stop at the Holden Museum in Echuca. At Ballarat we found the site of the Eureka Stockade, now a carpark waiting development, where in 1854, gold miners rebelled against the colonial authority of the United Kingdom and swore allegiance to the Southern Cross.

Victorian “bush larrikin” and son of a transported convict, Ned Kelly, appropriately born also in 1854, took on the system, denouncing the police, state government, and the British Empire. Ned was still in his twenties when he was captured in Glenrowan and hung in Melbourne in 1880.

We checked out Ned Kelly’s old stamping ground before pointing the Holden east into the Australian alps. In 1890, a decade after Ned’s hanging, Banjo Paterson set his narrative poem, The Man from Snowy River in the Australian Alps. “But the man from Snowy River let the pony have his head … and he raced him down the mountain like a torrent down its bed” celebrates the bush larrikin.

In New Zealand we drive around mountains, in Australia they drive over them. It is a country of “low relief” and we dropped south into Gippsland and back to Melbourne and checked out their art scene. At a contemporary art gallery an installation featured a Holden hearse painted in Aboriginal colours, commenting, I think, on genocide. Modernist painter, Sidney Nolan, portrayed another view of the Ned Kelly mythology and a Melbourne larrikin, Barry Humphries, gave the world “Dame Edna Everage”.

Commenting on the #metoo movement that had drifted across the millisphere of Te Moananui, from Los Angeles, feminist writer, public intellectual and good Catholic girl from Melbourne, Germaine Greer, said “if you spread your legs because he said ‘be nice to me and I’ll get you a job in a movie’ then I’m afraid that it is tantamount to consent, and it’s too late now to start whingeing about it”.  You don’t necessarily need to be man to be a larrikin!

Internet larrikin, Julian Assange, studied programming, maths and physics at Melbourne University before helping set up WikiLeaks in 2006. Like a modern-day Ned Kelly Assange attacked the “Nation of Darkness” (the United States), publishing sensitive classified information, but as young Ned discovered there are consequences. “The internet, our greatest tool for emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism.” said Assange.

The last time we passed through Melbourne we were flying home from Bali.  We had just a spent a month in Java which coincided with the month of Ramadan and Indonesia was even more alcohol-free than usual.

“Jeez we had fun, got peesed evree noight” said an Aussie tourist with a beer gut in a singlet at the Denpasar terminal. Transiting through Melbourne, we were met by a young woman with a tray of glasses marketing free shots of a new RTD (ready to drink alcohol), but cigarette smoking had been banned in the entire terminal. In Indonesia they did it the other way around, no one drank in public and everyone smoked wherever they liked.

Anglos united against the rest: New Zealand, Australia, The United States, The United Kingdom and Canada are in “The Five Eyes,” strategic information sharing alliance. Going back to the Second World War, the Five Eyes countries also standardise their military equipment and generally fight together.

American NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden described the Five Eyes as a “supra-national intelligence organisation that doesn’t answer to the known laws of its own countries.”

 

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Uruguay

Uruguay

Millisphere (noun): a discrete region inhabited by roughly 1000th of the world population. Around seven million people but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million will do. A lens through which to observe human geography.

The tiny millisphere of Uruguay (2018 population just under 3.5 million) has a population growth rate that is tending towards zero. Because of emigration and a falling birth rate its population is remaining about the same.

Contested between Spain and Portugal, Spanish-speaking Uruguay became independent in 1828, after a gaucho uprising lead by Jose Artigas. During the military dictatorship of 1973-85 many Uruguayans moved to neighbouring Argentina, Brazil, and the United States and Spain.

At the height of the Cold War the US was involved with local military terror squads in many Central and South American countries. Democratic governments were replaced with military dictatorships and community activists, school teachers, journalists and union organisers were imprisoned or suddenly disappeared. The American ideology, at the time, portrayed it as a battle for world domination between the West, capitalism and religion on one side and the East, communism and atheism on the other.

During 1962-63 American journalist Hunter S Thompson travelled through South America and his pieces sent back to the National Observer provide some of the few criticisms of the cold-blooded American geo-political arrogance to be published in the US at the time. In retrospect Thompson was right.

In the 1960s the Tupamaros were actively opposing the military and police in Uruguay, and their actions included the assassination of an American FBI agent whom they accused of advising the Uruguayan police on torture.

One of the Tupamaro leadership, Jose “Pepe” Mujica, was imprisoned for 13 years in squalid conditions during the 1970s and 80s before being elected Uruguay’s 40th president from 2010 to 2015.

Known as “the Switzerland of the Americas,” Uruguay now rates first in South America for democracy and peace. Uruguay provides more troops per head of population to United Nations peacekeeping operations than any other country and it is rated first in South America for press freedom and the absence of terrorism.

Uruguay is a prosperous country by South American standards and has a sizeable middle class. Ninety-five percent of Uruguay’s electricity is generated from renewables (hydro and wind) and, like NZ, they have a lot of dairy cows – and dirty streams. Uruguay has a well developed education system with free access to university and liike New Zealand some graduates find their country too small to achieve their goals and emigrate.

Uruguay is noted for its historic separation of church and state and is roughly 60 percent Christian with 40 percent having “no religion” – Christmas is officially known as “family day” and Easter “tourism week.”

The Economist in 2013 named Uruguay its “country of the year” because of its liberal attitude towards same-sex marriage, abortion and cannabis legalisation.

Under the Mujica government it became legal to grow six plants and produce up to 17 ounces of cannabis per year, and they made it legal for pharmacies to sell up 1.4 oz of cannabis per month to any citizen over 18 registered as a cannabis user. Out of Uruguay’s 1,100 pharmacies only twelve have registered to sell cannabis and initially there were complaints about the low THC content of the state supplied weed. Traditionally being a cohort that doesn’t trust the state, Uruguay’s pot smokers have proved reluctant to register as cannabis users and the underground market continues, as do the illegal sales to foreign drug tourists.

One unexpected outcome of Uruguay’s cannabis law reform was that their banks started getting letters from American banks, including the Bank of America, demanding that they close down the account of anyone involved in the sale of marijuana. It transpired that the US “Patriot Act”, passed shortly after September 11th, 2001, made it illegal for any American financial institution to have anything to do with any other institution dealing in controlled substances, including marijuana.

It is estimated that more than one hundred billion US dollars of illegal drugs are consumed in America every year and yet American banks can  dictate to Uruguay about their enlightened drug policy – a policy Uruguay has ostensibly designed to get drug traffickers out of the market!

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New York (part two)

Millisphere, noun: A discrete region inhabited by roughly 1000th of the total world population.

This summer I ran into “Squirrel”, an “art-mover” who had once gone to New York to install tuku-tuku panels as part of the $US two billion plus upgrade of the United Nations building.

Originally built in the 1940s, with a $65 million interest-free loan from the United States government, the United Nations HQ has been a steady earner for the City of New York ever since. “The further you go away from the UN the cheaper the hotel rooms are,” Squirrel observed.

Depending on point of view the United Nations is either a global humanitarian organisation or a bloated New York based bureaucracy controlled by the world’s arms manufacturers. Ever since the American Civil War, New York arms dealers have prospered from just about any conflict going. New York physicist, Robert Oppenheimer, led the “Manhattan Project” which built the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the nearby “Trump World Tower” is the “World Bar” where UN diplomats socialise and the Saudis own an entire floor there for their UN delegation. Newsman Walter Cronkite, at the time, led a protest against the building of the Trump Tower; claiming it would dwarf the UN building, block views and was aesthetically unappealing. Following advice from his mentor, Mafia lawyer Roy Cohn, Trump counter-sued and built his “slab of banality.”

After the US decided to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem the UN Security Council took the unprecedented step of censuring the US. “We will be taking names,” the US threatened, cut UN funding and closed the Palestinian’s office in Washington.

New York is 60% Christian, one in three New Yorkers are Catholic and one in five are Jewish, over half of whom live in Brooklyn. One third of all US Jews live in New York. During the 1970s Brezhnev/Nixon negotiated detente another wave of Russian Jewish immigrants arrived in Brooklyn, including mobsters released from Soviet prisons.

Since the days of Al Capone doing business with the Mob has been almost inescapable in New York. Lately the Cosa Nostra have been displaced by the Russian Mafia who have moved up from drugs and extortion into high level finance. New York’s Russian Mafia now import most of the Afghan heroin consumed in the United States.

New York is the world’s preeminent banking and finance city. Two of the previous three chairmen of the Federal Reserve have been from New York. The 2008 global financial crisis was caused by trillions of dollars of toxic derivatives going down a plughole somewhere in New York – where they were originally invented. The largest ponzi scam off all time netted New York investment adviser Bernard Madoff $US 65 billion.

New York is the most important source of funding for US presidential campaigns. The last US Democrat primary was between New York native Bernie Sanders and former New York senator Hillary Clinton, who was ultimately defeated by New York reality television star and property developer Donald Trump.

The art of “public relations” was invented in New York (to bring the US into WWI) and its broadcast networks, ABC, NBC, CBS & Fox, shape public opinion worldwide through both traditional and “new” media, promoting an ideology of vulgar conspicuous consumption and ultra-superficial patriotism. Facebook boss, Mark Zuckerberg, is from New York and Madison Ave taught the world how to drive the that consumption.

New York markets itself as “the most energy efficient efficient city in the US,” but generates 14 million tonnes of trash per year (more than any city in the world). Once dumped at sea now the Mob moves the trash to landfill in the surrounding states.

The millisphere of New York dominates the politics of the United States which in turn casts its shadow over rest of the world. New York intellectual property lawyers initiated the raid on Kim Dotcom’s mansion in Auckland. Billy the Kid, Timothy McVeigh and Harvey Weinstein were all from The Big Apple.

New York’s legendary “creativity and entrepreneurship” has its dark side. Rather than calling other countries “shit-holes” Donald Trump should look at his own backyard.

 

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Houston

Millisphere: a region containing one thousandth of the total world population, around seven million people.

Natural disasters have a way of revealing aspects of the geography of the region affected.

The Greater Houston metropolitan area (pop 6.5 million and the fourth largest in the USA) was last week flooded by Hurricane Harvey, which broke all previous records for rainfall.

This “natural” disaster was actually a perfect storm of economics, population and land use.

In 1900 the deadliest hurricane in US history devastated Galveston, when a 4.6-metre storm surge swept over the 2.4-metre high island on which it was built. Not surprisingly many of the survivors moved inland to nearby Houston.

Built on a swamp, Houston has 4000 kilometres of managed waterways – the first of them dug by hand by black slaves and Mexicans. Today it is estimated that one in ten of Houston’s residents is an illegal “alien” from south of the Mexican border.

Parts of Houston have been sinking because of the extraction of groundwater. Some areas have subsided by 3m since 1920, others by 300mm in a decade, creating cracked foundations, uneven footpaths and areas where floodwaters collect.

Houston has very few planning restrictions. Developer-friendly bylaws and no formal zoning code mean that housing was cheap and Houston largely escaped the 2008 economic crisis when American house prices plummeted.

Described by some as “America’s worst designed city,” Houston has doubled in population since 1980, with the resulting urbanization exacerbating the flooding. To cope with the extra run-off many of the waterways needed widening but that would require the city coming up with billions to buy out the properties lining the “bayous.”

A graph of the rainiest days in Houston (1890 – 2016) reveals a trend to intensified rainfall with extreme weather events more frequent. Climate modeling depends on a complex confluence of factors but the world’s temperature is about 0.7℃higher than 1980 and for each degree celsius increase air holds 7% more water.

Houston is the “oil and gas capital of the world” and has the headquarters of over 500 global energy firms. The Shell Oil Company (the US branch of Royal Dutch Shell) has a head office there with 22,000 employees.

The Shell Oil Company’s “futurists” came up with “three hard truths” that the company faced. They were: 1. that global energy demand is rising; 2. that the supply of conventional energy will not be able to keep up, and; 3. that climate change is both real and dangerous.

Red Adair the famous oil well firefighter was from Houston. As well as providing jobs in the downstream oil and gas industry Houston is known for its terrible traffic and bad public transport. The climate is very hot and humid and there are fire ants, snakes, alligators, “mosquitoes the size of sparrows” and residents are forced to spray once a month for the cockroaches. It also has the distinction of being America’s “fattest city.”

Both the Bush presidents, Ted Cruz, Indianapolis 500 race car driver A J Foyt, Howard Hughes, Kenny Rogers, Rodney Crowell and some of ZZ Top are all from Houston and it has the highest number of Fortune 500 companies after New York.

The Port of Houston is the second largest US port in total tonnage (2015) and the first US port in foreign tonnage (2016), exporting oil field equipment, plastic, resins, synthetic rubber, insecticide and chemical fertilizers.

As well as “natural” disasters art has a way of revealing aspects of the geography of a region. Houston’s phenomenally wealthy oil industry has a collective a reputation for patronising “high” art such a Mark Rothko’s multi denominational chapel built to display his blue/black modernist abstract paintings dedicated to “truth and freedom.”

The paintings are so much part of the architecture that visitors have been known to ask: “where are the paintings?”

The Latino barrios are decorated with folk art such as “bathtub Madonnas” – an old decorated bath, sometimes with lights, standing upright with a madonna inside.

President Trump declared the Sunday after the deluge a national day of prayer for the victims of Hurricane Harvey. Planning might be more useful than prayer to avoid future “natural” disasters.

 

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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.

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Korea (ten millispheres)

Readers of this blog will know that I occasionally use the lens of the “millisphere” to examine the context of an international news story, a millisphere being a region with roughly 1000th of the world population.

An invaluable resource when writing a millisphere column is Wikipedia. The internet encyclopedia is the result of millions of contributions, subject to continuing editing by its online readers.

Up until now, spin and deliberate disinformation has been quickly edited out and corrected. As Wikipedia says: “With enough eyes all swamps are shallow”.

In recognition of the democratising power of reliable sources of information, I make an annual contribution to Wikipedia and I am watching with interest their recently signalled move into journalism with their venture, Wikitribune.

A small percentage of what passes for news these days actually includes primary research, whether it be an eyewitness account, an interview or digging up facts and figures that illustrate a news story.

The majority of news stories appear to be passed from one agency to another unaltered. This was highlighted for me when I did an internet search about the MOAB (mother of all bombs) that the United States dropped in Afghanistan on April 13, 2017.

Almost every international news agency carried the story word for word, based on an initial press release from the US Defense Department.

It was refreshing then to come across some left-field primary research by Murray Horton from Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) on the “militarisation” of Christchurch Airport.

Murray had asked the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade about the movements of US military aircraft passing through Christchurch NZ in the 2015-16 year.

Of the 26 flights – nearly all C-130s – five didn’t fly to and from Antartica. Their destinations included American Samoa, Hawaii and  the Richmond RAAF base near Sydney – en route to the American spy base in Pine Gap, Alice Springs.

Horton’s point was that because a MOAB was too heavy for a conventional bomber, and is transported by C-130s, there is no way the New Zealand government would know whether or not the MOAB passed through Christchurch on some circuitous route to attack Afghanistan. Personally I think the MOAD is most likely to have gone through Guam.

This week the American war machine is steaming towards the Korean peninsula.

The underlying philosophy of the millisphere is the notion that wars are primarily caused by competing empires.

The history of the conflict between North and South Korea goes back to World War II; at the end of the war, Japan, which had occupied the entire Korean peninsula since 1910, surrendered the north to the Soviet Union and the south to the Americans.

When North Korea attempted to occupy South Korea by force in 1950, the Soviets and the People’s republic of China supported the North and America and her allies supported the South, and we had the world’s first Cold War conflict.

After three years and over one million casualties, the two sides fought themselves to a standstill and a truce was called – although technically the two sides are still at war.

In recent times, the South Koreans have taken more responsibility for their own defense from their ally, America, and have initiated a peaceful dialogue with North Korea, but the North continues its warlike posturing towards South Korea and America, initiating the occasional skirmish.

One such “skirmish” was the reputed hacking of Sony’s Hollywood computers in retaliation for the movie The Interview – something the North Koreans have consistently denied.

Some say that the North Koreans didn’t have the technical ability and that it could have equally been the Russians or even a disgruntled former Sony employee.

Either way Sony got lots of publicity for what was a pretty ho-hum movie, which subsequently did better at the box office when it was finally released.

In this age of “false news”, the declining number of investigative journalists employed by the traditional print media, social-media echo-chambers and the endless propaganda from warring empires, it is hard to know what is real news and what is manufactured.

What the world doesn’t need though, is a unified Korean empire. Instead what the Korean peninsula needs is ten separate millispheres.

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Pashtunistan

Millisphere, abstract noun. A discrete region inhabited by roughly 1000th of the world population – around seven million people, but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million people will do.

Afghanistan, with a population of 33 million, is made up of four or five millispheres. The city of Kabul, now over 3.5 million, qualifies as an urban millisphere; its economy dependent on cash flow from the US. To the northeast of Kabul is the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance millisphere of Mazar-e-Sharif, to the southeast, the millisphere I will call “Pashtunistan”; its capital Kandahar.

There are nearly 14 million Pashtuns in Afghanistan, the majority in Pashtunistan, and another 40 million Pashtuns live across the border in Pakistan.

When my friends John and Miranda passed through on the “hippie trail” in 1971, Kabul had a population of less than one million. Travelling by bus down the Kabul river, through Jalalabad to Pakistan, they said the Khyber Pass (through the White Mountains) was a bit like the Manawatu Gorge, in New Zealand, only drier. John, who remembers seeing a lot of forts, thought the Pashtuns were a proud people.

On April 13, 2017, the United States dropped a GBU-43/B MOAB (aka the mother of all bombs) on caves in the Achin district of Pashtunistan; not far from the Tora Bora caves, where the US had briefly cornered Osama bin Laden in December 2001.

Costing $US16 million, the MOAB is equivalent to 10 tons of TNT. Reputedly dropped in retaliation for the killing of a Green Beret sergeant in the area the previous Sunday, it was part of an increased effort by US special forces in the east of Afghanistan against Sunni/Pashtun tribes targeting the Shi’a minority in Kabul.

The Achin district is almost 100 percent Shinwari, a sub-tribe of the Pashtun Kasi tribe. One such Kasi was Mir Qasi. Born in Quetta, Balochistan, Pakistan in 1964, Qasi picked up forged papers in Karachi and bought a fake green card in Miami before investing in a courier firm in Langley, Virginia where he worked as a courier driver – familiarising himself with the entrances to the CIA HQ.

In 1993 Qasi bought himself a Chinese-made AK-47 at a Langley gun shop, pulled into  the CIA entrance and killed two and wounded three CIA operatives.

Qasi fled to Pakistan but was traced to Pashtunistan. With a sizable reward on his head, he was lured by informants into Pakistan, where he was captured by the FBI. Found guilty in the USA and executed by lethal injection, his body was repatriated to Pakistan. Qasi’s funeral was attended by the entire civil hierarchy of Balochistan.

The military history of Pashtunistan is a story of asymmetrical warfare. The British Empire in the 19th century and the Soviet Union in the 20th century had both come out of Pashtunistan badly bloodied, now it is the American Empire’s turn to “dominate” the Pashtuns.

In October 2013, Hakimullah Mehsud, the Pashtun chief of the Pakistan Taliban, was killed outside a mosque by a US drone in Waziristan, another Pashtun millisphere. Before his death Mehsud and his fighters had forced the closure of the Khyber Pass six times. Mesud was targeted because he appeared in a photo with the Camp Chapman suicide-bomber, Humam al-Balawi.

Named after the first American casualty in Afghanistan, “Forward Operating Base Chapman” contained a CIA facility tasked with providing intelligence supporting drone strikes inside Pakistan.

A Jordanian doctor the US thought had turned informer against the Taliban, al-Balawi had used this trust to gain access to the Camp Chapman CIA compound unsearched. Disregarding the maxim “don’t bunch up”, the CIA gathered to “debrief” al-Balawi, who then detonated the suicide vest sewn into his tunic. Casualties included the CIA base chief, Jennifer Mathews, one of the US government’s then top experts on al-Qaeda.

Pakistan took the Mehsud case to the UN Security Council reiterating that “US drone strikes constituted a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty, were a violation of humanitarian laws and a dangerous precedent in inter-state relations”.

After the April 13 MOAB bombing, Afghan president Ghani’s representative in Pakistan called the attack “reprehensible and counterproductive” and the previous president, and Pashtun, Hamid Karzai, said: “This not a war on terror but the inhuman and most brutal misuse of our country as a testing ground for new and dangerous weapons”.

The “shock and awe” of the “mother of all bombs” was designed to intimidate the enemy. History has shown that Pashtuns aren’t easily intimidated.