World
War I was not inevitable, as many historians say. It could have been
avoided, and it was a diplomatically botched negotiation.
Richard
Holbrooke
While
the west gets on with the business of Christmas shopping, inflating
stock market bubbles, coping with President Trump’s ever more
erratic foreign policies, and watching Europe implode as voters there
increasingly punish establishment political parties, Saudi Arabia
seems to have lost its marbles, gone loopy, and be recklessly
hurtling towards triggering a new all against all war in the Middle
East.Despite the fact that this would produce another 1973 style oil shock, setting off havoc or worse across the west, no one in the west’s leadership seems to care. Stay long fully paid up physical gold and silver held outside the US financial system, remember M F Global. Whether the Saudis are pursuing some US deep state, or President Trump hidden foreign policy is an open question, but playing Russian roulette in the region is an incredibly reckless game with no good outcome.
Below, this weekend update, the west walking on eggshells.
“Despite not having the fleet we should have, we have conquered for ourselves a place in the sun. It is now my task to see to it that this place in the sun shall remain our undisputed possession.”
Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1901
The Reverse Midas Touch of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Is Turning the Middle East to Dust
Kudos to Germany’s spooks. Back in December 2015, the German foreign intelligence agency, BND, distributed a one-and-a-half-page memo to various media outlets titled: “Saudi Arabia — Sunni regional power torn between foreign policy paradigm change and domestic policy consolidation.” The document was pretty astonishing, both in its undiplomatic bluntness and remarkable prescience.“The current cautious diplomatic stance of senior members of the Saudi royal family will be replaced by an impulsive intervention policy,” the memo warned, focusing on the role of Mohammed bin Salman, who had been appointed as deputy crown prince and defense minister at the age of 30 earlier that year.
Both MBS, as he has come to be known, and his elderly father King Salman, the BND analysts wrote, want Saudi Arabia to be seen as “the leader of the Arab world” with a foreign policy built on “a strong military component.” Yet the memo also pointed out that the consolidation of so much power in a single young prince’s hands “harbors a latent risk that in seeking to establish himself in the line of succession in his father’s lifetime, he may overreach,” adding: “Relations with friendly and above all allied countries in the region could be overstretched.”
And so it has come to pass. In fact, despite being repudiated at the time by a German government more concerned about diplomatic and commercial relations with Riyadh, the BND warning turned out to be eerily prophetic.
Consider recent events in the Gulf. Can you get more “impulsive” than rounding up 11 fellow princes, including one of the world’s richest men and the commander of the national guard, and holding them at the Ritz Carlton on charges of corruption? Especially since MBS, who ordered the arrests only a few hours after his father set up an anti-corruption committee and put him in charge of it, isn’t exactly a paragon of probity and transparency himself. Where, for example, did the crown prince find more than $500 million to spend on a luxury yacht while vacationing in the south of France last year?
Is it anything other than “interventionist” to force the resignation of the prime minister of Lebanon on a visit to your country and then put him under a form of house arrest (though the hapless Saad Hariri, a long-standing client of Riyadh, publicly claims otherwise and says he is heading back to Beirut this week)? Or to also detain the president of Yemen? According to an investigation by the Associated Press, “Saudi Arabia has barred Yemen’s president, along with his sons, ministers and military officials, from returning home for months.”
That the crown prince of Saudi Arabia can, essentially, kidnap the elected leaders of not one but two Middle Eastern countries — and, incidentally, put the leading Saudi royal he replaced as crown prince under palace arrest — speaks volumes about not just his “impulsive intervention policy” but the shameless pass he gets from Western governments for such rogue behavior. Imagine the reaction from the international community if Iran had, say, detained the Iraqi prime minister on Iranian soil after forcing him to resign on Iranian television. Yet President Donald Trump has gone out of his way to tweet his support for the crown prince and his father: “I have great confidence in King Salman and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, they know exactly what they are doing.”
The more sober Europeans haven’t been much better. President Emmanuel Macron of France, on a surprise visit to Riyadh last week, saluted MBS “on the opening of his country and support for a moderate Islam.”
more
https://theintercept.com/2017/11/13/saudi-arabia-crown-prince-mohammed-bin-salman-mbs/
EXCLUSIVE: 'American mercenaries are torturing' Saudi elite rounded up by new crown prince - and billionaire Prince Alwaleed was hung upside down 'just to send a message'
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Source in Saudi Arabia says American private security contractors are carrying out'interrogations' on princes and billionaires arrested in crackdown
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Detained members of Saudi elite have been hung by their feet and beaten by interrogates, source says
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Among those hung upside down are Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, an investor worth at least $7 billion who is being held at Riyadh's Ritz Carlton
-
Arrests were ordered three weeks ago by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
-
Source claims mercenaries are from 'Blackwater', a claim also made by Lebanese president
-
But its successor firm denies it has any operations in Saudi Arabia whatsoever and says its staff abide by U.S. law
-
Americans who commit torture abroad can be jailed
for up to 20 years
Published: 21:24, 22 November 2017 | Updated: 13:11, 24 November 2017
Reining in the Rogue Royal of Arabia
Monday - November 13, 2017 at 10:16 pm
By Patrick J. Buchanan
If the crown prince of Saudi Arabia has in mind a war with Iran, President Trump should disabuse his royal highness of any notion that America would be doing his fighting for him.
Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, the 32-year-old son of the aging and ailing King Salman, is making too many enemies for his own good, or for ours.
Pledging to Westernize Saudi Arabia, he has antagonized the clerical establishment. Among the 200 Saudis he just had arrested for criminal corruption are 11 princes, the head of the National Guard, the governor of Riyadh, and the famed investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.
The Saudi tradition of consensus collective rule is being trashed.
MBS is said to be pushing for an abdication by his father and his early assumption of the throne. He has begun to exhibit the familiar traits of an ambitious 21st-century autocrat in the mold of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.
Yet his foreign adventures are all proving to be debacles.
The rebels the Saudis backed in Syria’s civil war were routed. The war on the Houthi rebels in Yemen, of which MBS is architect, has proven to be a Saudi Vietnam and a human rights catastrophe.
The crown prince persuaded Egypt, Bahrain and the UAE to expel Qatar from the Sunni Arab community for aiding terrorists, but he has failed to choke the tiny country into submission.
----Riyadh has now imposed
a virtual starvation blockade — land, sea and air — on Yemen,
that poorest of Arab nations that is heavily dependent on imports for
food and medicine. Hundreds of thousands of Yemeni are suffering from
cholera. Millions face malnutrition.
The U.S. interest here is clear: no new war in the Middle East, and a negotiated end to the wars in Yemen and Syria.
Hence, the United States needs to rein in the royal prince.
Yet, on his Asia trip, Trump said of the Saudi-generated crisis, “I have great confidence in King Salman and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, they know exactly what they are doing.”
Do they? In October, Jared Kushner made a trip to Riyadh, where he reportedly spent a long night of plotting Middle East strategy until 4 a.m. with MBS.
No one knows how a war between Saudi Arabia and Iran would end. The Saudis has been buying modern U.S. weapons for years, but Iran, with twice the population, has larger if less-well-equipped forces.
Yet the seeming desire of the leading Sunni nation in the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia, for a confrontation with the leading Shiite power, Iran, appears to carry the greater risks for Riyadh.
For, a dozen years ago, the balance of power in the Gulf shifted to Iran, when Bush II launched Operation Iraqi Freedom, ousted Saddam Hussein, disarmed and disbanded his Sunni-led army, and turned Iraq into a Shiite-dominated nation friendly to Iran.
----So far out on a limb
has MBS gotten himself, with his purge of cabinet ministers and royal
cousins, and his foreign adventures, it is hard to see how he climbs
back without some humiliation that could cost him the throne.
Yet we have our own interests here. And we should tell the crown prince that if he starts a war in Lebanon or in the Gulf, he is on his own. We cannot have this impulsive prince deciding whether or not the United States goes to war again in the Middle East.
We alone decide that.
“Anyone
who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the
battlefield will think hard before starting a war.”
Count Otto von Bismarck.
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