When you think of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Syria (all adversely impacted by US foreign policy) and then consider the region’s powers of Israel, Saudi Arabia and UAE that are pitted against Iran, it all becomes a bit more clear. Israel desires to be a permanent fixture in the Middle East in spite of its illegitimate birth at the expense of native Palestinians. To preserve their place in the Middle East, they have become more desperate in their quest to control the narrative as well as the lands outside their true borders (i.e. Golan Heights, West Bank as well as Gaza).
Paranoid to a fault, they have used the United Kingdom and the United States of America for seven decades since they were given partial ownership of land in this region after the Zionist movement gained UK support three decades prior to that.
From AntiWar comes a fair synopsis [ Titled: “Making Sense of US Moves in the Middle East” ] of the region’s neighbors who have been decimated by US foreign policy working towards protecting Israel at all costs.
Starting with the US’s longest undeclared war to date, Afghanistan, the article points out:
The report was devastating – or would have been, if anyone here had noticed it. “Between 2001 and 2017,” it concluded, “U.S. government efforts to stabilize insecure and contested areas in Afghanistan mostly failed.”
If you think this has nothing to do with Israel, you are sorely mistaken. Israel has seen Iran (used to be Iraq) as it’s biggest enemy in the region since it has Saudi Arabia and UAE as allies.
Of course the US would like the world to believe that Iran is threatening the US but in reality just its existence WITHOUT any nukes it threatens Israel which has 100 nukes. Iran is not really an offensive powerhouse with its 40 year old military equipment mainly from the US before the Shah of Iran (US puppet) was overthrown.
So $2T to date has been spent in Afghanistan with 2,000 US soldiers dying there as well as 100,000 Afghans to date. The fact that the poppy-market (Opium) market there is thriving makes the country fantastic in funding CIA black budget towards its black ops worldwide as well as being lucrative for the Military Industrial Complex.
The background on Afghanistan and how it became a target after 9/11 is an interesting one:
From Lew Rockwell
In 1998, the Afghan anti-Communist movement Taliban and a western oil consortium led by the US firm UNOCAL signed a major pipeline deal. UNOCAL lavished money and attention on Taliban, flew a senior delegation to Texas, and also hired an minor Afghan official, one Hamid Karzai.
Enter Osama bin Laden. He advised the unworldly Taliban leaders to reject the US deal and got them to accept a better offer from an Argentine consortium, Bridas. Washington was furious and, according to some accounts, threatened Taliban with war.
In early 2001, six or seven months before 9/11, Washington made the decision to invade Afghanistan, overthrow Taliban, and install a client regime that would build the energy pipelines. But Washington still kept up sending money to Taliban until four months before 9/11 in an effort to keep it “on side” for possible use in a war or strikes against Iran.
The 9/11 attacks, about which Taliban knew nothing, supplied the pretext to invade Afghanistan. The initial US operation had the legitimate objective of wiping out Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida. But after its 300 members fled to Pakistan, the US stayed on, built bases — which just happened to be adjacent to the planned pipeline route
So with that unpleasant fact out of the way (i.e. rationale for invading Afghanistan), let’s take a look at the West Bank before we turn our eyes to Syria.
Early on, Israel has made a point to solidify it’s grip on ALL the land promised the Hebrews and given to the Zionists (close enough for government work right?) by the UK and US after WWII:
From the AntiWar article mentioned above:
… the United States has often been Israel’s sole ally as, in direct contravention of international law, that country has used its own settlements to carve Palestinian territory into a jigsaw puzzle of disparate pieces, making a contiguous Palestinian state a near impossibility.
Then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon explained Israel’s plan for the Palestinian people in 1973 when he said, “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them.” Promising to insert “a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank,” he insisted that “in 25 years’ time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.”
Forty-five years later, his strategy has been fully implemented, as Barack Obama reportedly learned to his shock when, in 2015, he saw a State Department map of the shredded remains of the land on which Palestinians are allowed to exist on the West Bank.
The “pastrami sandwich” strategy has effectively killed any hope for a two-state solution.
How convenient for Israel, and now in its effort to solidify this even more (as they are in fact now the minority class in Israel in terms of shear population), they are doing this (again from the AntiWar article):
.. as the number of non-Jews begins to surpass that of Jews in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, that country once again confronts the inherent contradiction of a state that aims to be both democratic and, in some sense, Jewish. If everyone living in Israel/Palestine today had equal political and economic rights, majority rule would no longer be Jewish rule. In effect, as some Israelis argue, Israel can be Jewish or democratic, but not both.
A solution to this demographic dilemma – one supported by present Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – is to legislate permanent inequality through what’s called “the basic law on Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people,” which is now being debated in the country’s parliament, the Knesset. Among other provisions, that “basic” law (which, if passed, would have the equivalent of constitutional status) will allow citizens “to establish ‘pure’ communities on the basis of religion or ethnicity.” In other words, it will put in place an official framework of legalized segregation. [Editor’s note: The Jewish Nation-State bill described here was passed early Thursday morning. This article was written before passage.]
Apartheid .. segregation .. a last ditch effort to strong arm its way in a region that is hostile to its own paranoid agenda. Acting like the US Empire as a world’s bully, not even allowing UN inspectors in Israel while it demands Iran to have total transparency in the world’s court.
Blowback is a bitch, but the current Zionist leaders only care about themselves and not their kids when they use this method to coexist in this world.
So while the US has given the Israeli military almost every toy the US has in its inventory as well as $134.7B (current, or non-inflation-adjusted) dollars in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding and promising $39B more in the next ten years it appears that GOP, Democrats and Zionist Christians are falling all over themselves to aid in this intimate partnership for the long term. The world is NOT impressed.
Lastly, what is up with Syria?
Meanwhile, if it weren’t for Yemen (see below), it might be hard to imagine a more miserable place in 2018 than Syria. Since 2011, when a nonviolent movement to unseat Assad devolved into a vicious civil war, more than half the country’s pre-war population of 22 million has become internally displaced or refugees, according to numbers from the U.N. High Commission on Refugees. Actual casualty figures are impossible to pin down with any exactitude. In April 2018, however, the New York Times reported that the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the number of directly caused deaths at 511,000, including fighters and civilians.
Death and destruction have come from all sides: al-Qaeda-linked terror groups and the Islamic State killing civilians; the Syrian military, which is presently driving opposition forces out of the southern city of Dara’a, where the original uprising began (creating a quarter-million refugees with literally no place to go); and U.S. bombs and other munitions – 20,000 of them – reducing the city of Raqqa to rubble in a campaign to liberate it from ISIS militants. Add it all up and the war, still ongoing, has destroyed millions of homes and businesses, along with crucial infrastructure throughout an increasingly impoverished country.
So with Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria all smarting from Israel’s lover, the US, all to protect Israel (more than US citizens when you understand the $20T debt, $200T unfunded liabilities and the loss of freedoms across the spectrum the American people have suffered (out of ignorance they would not understand this sentence)) .. what else is there? Yemen!!!
Saudi Arabia with US weapons and assistance have decimated Yemen towards a genocidal disaster. It is almost as if the US is getting Saudi Arabia up to speed to be another useful puppet in the region to protect Israel .. yes, you heard that right .. in fact, the US/Israel/Saudi Arabia team were the proud parents of ISIS.
With U.S. logistical and financial support, Saudi Arabia has waged a cruel air war against the Houthis, a home-grown movement that in 2015 overthrew the government of president Ali Abdullah Saleh. What is the Saudi interest in Yemen? As in their support for a potential UAE-Israel-Russia-U.S. alliance in Syria, they’re intent on fighting a proxy war – and someday perhaps via the U.S. and Israel, a real war – with Iran.
In this case, however, it seems that the other side in that war hasn’t shown up. Although, like the Iranian government and most Iranians, the Houthi are Shi’a Muslims, there is little evidence of Iranian involvement in Yemen. That hasn’t stopped the Saudis (with American support) from turning that country into “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.” Their destruction of infrastructure in rebel-held areas has collapsed a once-functioning public health system, touching off a cholera epidemic, with the World Health Organization reporting a total of 1,105,371 suspected cases between April 2017 and June 2018. The infection rate now stands at 934 per 10,000 people.
Even worse than the largely unchecked spread of cholera, however, is Yemen’s man-made famine. Photographs from the country display the familiar iconography of widespread hunger: children with stick-like limbs and blank, sunken eyes. As it happens, though, this famine was not caused by drought or any other natural disaster. It’s a direct result of a brutal Saudi air campaign and a naval blockade aimed directly at the country’s economic life.
Before the war, Yemen imported 80% of its food and even today, despite a disastrous ongoing Saudi/UAE campaign to blockade and take the port of Hodeidah, Yemen’s main economic center, there is actually plenty of food in the country. It now simply costs more than most Yemenis can pay. Because the war has destroyed almost all economic activity in Houthi-controlled areas, people there have no money with which to buy food. In other words, the Saudi offensive against Hodeidah is starving people in two ways: directly by preventing the delivery of international food aid and indirectly by making the food in Yemen unaffordable for ordinary people.
Nice … am I right? American exceptionalism at its finest! A nation under God right?
The author summarizes with this statement of hope (she is young, so you will have that):
For more than 70 years, Americans have largely ignored the effects of U.S. foreign policy in the rest of the world. Rubble in Syria? Famine in Yemen? It’s terribly sad, yes, but what, we still wonder, does it have to do with us?
That Part of the World doesn’t wonder about how U.S. actions and policies affect them. That Part of the World knows – and what it knows is devastating. It’s time that real debate about future U.S. policy there becomes part of our world, too.
Fat chance on the US really having a debate on foreign policy as the only export this country really has anymore is weapons and a bully military.
Again, blowback will be a bitch someday. I just with my generation would have learned from Vietnam and thought more like Thomas Paine:
