At the time I’m beginning to write this post, a carrier battle group is headed for Yemen’s coast to enforce a blockade against Irani ships attempting to help Yemen’s rebels.  Why?  They’re supporting Saudi Arabia’s bombing of said rebels.  The Saudis announced they were going to stop but the bombing continues.  One problem?  Saudi Arabia is NOT our friend, and Iran is NOT our friend.  Second problem?  This is an internecine dust-up between Sunnis and Shi’ites, so what the hell do we think we’re doing taking sides in a religious war?  Third problem?  Al Qaeda in Yemen has been a severe thorn in our sides for a long time, so who cares if the Shi’ites wipe those particular Sunnis out?

The details: (1) Saudi Arabian royalty, in order to save their well-padded asses, have been walking a tightrope for decades, pretending to be our friends while supporting the Saudi religious schools that instill hatred and produced Sunni jihadists like bin Laden and the 9/11 terrorists.  Why do you think members of the royal family fled the U.S. after 9/11?  Washington knew and still knows, at least in intelligence circles, that Saudis are duplicitous scoundrels.  They don’t want Shi’ites nipping at their backsides in Yemen and probably are rooting for ISIS in their war against Iran-supported regimes like Hassad’s because the ISIS monsters are, after all, Sunnis.  They might be supporting ISIS too; they’ve certainly supported al Qaeda, that terrorist group that now seems tame in comparison to the crazy ISIS wild boars.  For the Saudis, the only good Shi’ite is a dead Shi’ite.

Point (2): How ironic is it that Iran wants to end economic sanctions while at the same time striking out against Sunnis in Yemen?  They and their brethren are the flip side of the Saudis: for them the only good Sunni is a dead Sunni.  Makes me wonder if this internecine battle between rival Muslim sects isn’t all about greed and power and exterminating anyone who disagrees with their warped versions of Islam.  No, not wonder.  Call it bringing out this Hatfields v. McCoy’s battle into the open.  The Palestinian problem, that justifiable desire for a Palestinian state, has receded to the point where it’s become irrelevant to everyone in the region except Israelis and Palestinians, notwithstanding Netanyahu’s stupid ploys to guarantee his survival by painting it as something else.  Instead of sending our sailors into harm’s way, we should just tell the Supreme Leader of Iran’s floundering theocracy to cease and desist, or all talks about lifting economic sanctions are off.

Of course, I would be putting trade embargoes and economic sanctions on Saudi Arabia too.  The royal family, like other despots in the Middle East, including Netanyahu, cannot exist without our foreign aid and military equipment.  That’s the biggest stick we can wield.  Do they want military aid?  Do they want cell phones and computers?  Do they want democracy?  Sadly, the answer to the first two questions is yes, while the answer to the last is no.  Despotism is rampant in the Middle East.  No country, and especially theocracies like Iran and Israel, can even pretend to be democratic.  They might mouth the word “democracy” and even have farcical elections, but tyrants and autocrats rule everywhere.  Maybe we should just bow out and let all the sons of Abraham kill each other?  I know a few McCoys (that Star Trek doc, for example), but I don’t know any Hatfields.  They probably learned their lesson.  The Jews, Shi’ites, and Sunnis never have.

Part of the problem is the tradition of ethnic cleansing rampant in the Old World, especially on both sides of the Mediterranean—in the old Yugoslavia, the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Turks (we remembered that last week), between different sects of Islam, Muslims against Christians and Jews (remember how ISIS sympathizers butchered on the beaches of Tunisia?)—many bloodbaths justified by religion but perpetrated by elements vying for power and swayed by greed.  Centuries of violence and the dogs of war are still not tamed.

I went to see Walt Disney’s Monkey Kingdom a few weeks ago.  We often enjoy watching apes and monkeys because we laugh at our own humanity.  Parts of this movie are not a laughing matter.  The Middle East and other parts of the world look very much like the warring tribes of monkeys in this movie—posturing, scheming, and murdering simians bent on destroying one another.  The main tribe, the home tribe of the protagonist monkey, even had a caste system reminiscent of India’s rigid ones and the implicit ones common in many old Semitic groups.  It almost seems that these trouble spots in the world are stuck in an evolutionary time warp.  We shouldn’t choose sides in these battles.  The aid we send should be humanitarian, nothing else.  If we must, protect the doctors, nurses, and social workers.  Choosing sides is a no-win situation, a lesson we never seem to learn.

And so it goes….

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2015 at 4:00 am and is filed under Fundamentalism, Government Waste & Inefficiency, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.