A Middle East War With No Middle Ground
| SEASONED NUTS: QUOTABLE |
|
“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” – T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph “You Americans, you treat the Third World in the way an Iraqi peasant treats his new bride. Three days of honeymoon, and then it’s off to the fields.” – Saddam Hussein |
| IN A NUTSHELL: MUST READ |
|
Incendiary Documents on Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions: President Trump has pulled no punches when conveying his opinion of the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal (JCPOA), negotiated on former president Obama’s watch. Trump has always wanted to “rip it up,” but had been dissuaded from doing so…until now. In less than a week (the deadline is May 12), all odds are that the US will exit the pact. British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson is giving it one more shot by travelling to Washington Sunday to discuss the matter with White House officials, most of whom are on record as wanting to scrap the deal. President Hassan Rouhani went on Iranian state television Sunday to warn: “If America leaves the nuclear deal, this will entail historic regret for it.” Last week Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed to have “new and conclusive proof” that Iran had been lying about discontinuing its nuclear program after the JCPOA was signed. Experts quickly showed that the “new” material was actually old information that had been released to the public years earlier. Netanyahu reiterated his claims on Sunday, saying: “We are determined to block Iran’s aggression against us even if this means a struggle. Better now than later.” In a startling revelation, British newspaper the Observer reported Sunday that days after Trump visited Tel Aviv a year ago on his first foreign trip as US president, his aides hired an Israeli private intelligence firm to conduct a “dirty ops” campaignagainst key individuals from the Obama administration who had helped negotiate the Iran deal. According to “incendiary documents” reviewed by the Observer, investigators hired by the intelligence firm were told to dig into personal lives and political careers in order to “discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it.” |
| NUTS AND BOLTS: SHOULD READ |
|
A Middle East Civil War in Yemen with No Middle Ground: Yemen’s latest civil war has been raging since late 2014, when Shiite Muslim rebels (Houthis) stormed the capital of Sana and ousted the government of Sunni President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, America’s main counterterrorism partner in fighting Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In 2015, a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia began bombing the Houthis. The coalition included the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Egypt, and the US, which was only supposed to help the Saudi’s secure their border, not to participate in offensive operations against the Houthis, who pose no direct threat to the US. The Pentagon has consistently stated that American military assistance to the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen is limited to aircraft refueling, logistics, and general intelligence sharing. However, under the Trump administration, the US/Saudi relationship has expanded, such that last December, a dozen Green Berets were deployed to the Saudi/Yemeni border. The Army commandos are helping locate and destroy caches of ballistic missiles and launch sites that Houthi rebels use to attack Riyadh and other Saudi cities. The deployment was done with no public discussion or debate, and is a marked escalation of Western assistance to target Houthi fighters deep inside Yemen. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) labeled the Green Berets mission a “purposeful blurring of lines between train and equip missions and combat,” and called for a new congressional vote on the authorization for the use of military force. In March, the State Department approved the sale to Saudi Arabia of an estimated $670 million in anti-tank missiles, and apparently has also agreed to sell them military aircraft worth $12.5 billion. Contrastingly, French president Emmanuel Macron is being challenged by two rights groups to stop weapons sales to the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates. The groups argue that France, the world’s third-biggest arms exporter, is violating national and international law by selling arms that are being used to target civilians in Yemen. Additional read: The Middle East is a cauldron of rivalries and uncertainties. Our favorite read this weekend was The Ascent: A Saudi Prince’s Quest To Remake the Middle East (The New Yorker, April 9, 2018). The longform article provides an excellent and fascinating backstory to the international intrigue and backstabbing associated with the rapid rise to power of Saudi Arabia’s deputy crown prince, Mohammed Bin Salman (MbS). The piece also chronicles the Trump’s administration influence and strategic alignments in the region. According to the article, the main divide in the Middle East is between Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and the Houthis (Yemen) on the one hand and Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt on the other. Qatar is sandwiched between these two polarized groups. |
| MIXED NUTS: QUICK TAKES ON WORLD NEWS |
|
-Think Mother Nature’s tough? Then you don’t know Competition-Watching Woman. Margrethe Vestager is Europe’s anti-trust enforcer, and she is One Tough Regulator. Known for aggressively pursuing big cases against Silicon Valley giants, her rulings against Apple, Facebook, Google, and Qualcomm have positioned the European Union, rather than Washington, as the world’s de facto Big Tech regulator. Which means, of course, she’s lined up a bunch of angry business people. (NYT) -While the US loves making big weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, it’s decided Turkey isn’t going to get any. The US House released details Friday of a $717 billion annual defense policy bill, including a measure to temporarily halt weapons sales to Turkey. Turkey was planning to buy more than 100 of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets and is also in talks to purchase Patriot missiles. But its agreement with Russia in December to buy S-400 surface-to-air missile batteries, which are incompatible with the NATO systems, prompted NATO officials to warn Turkey of unspecified consequences, and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to add the US wasn’t any too pleased either. (Reuters) –President Trump was in Dallas Friday, energizing the NRA crowd and making heads in France and Britain explode, with observations such as looser gun laws could have helped prevent the 2015 deadly attacks in Paris and linking knife crime in London to a handgun ban. (Reuters) More World News: |
| NUTS IN AMERICA |
|
| LOOSE NUTS: FASCINATING NEWS |
|
-Got (soy, almond, rice, yak, goat, cow, camel, etc.) milk? Cultures around the world consume milk from different animals and in different ways. From yak yogurt in Tibet to camel milk ice cream in Dubai, there’s a lot to milk that goes beyond the gallon of 2 percent we find in our grocery stores. (NPR) -Got chicken? “The Surprising Origin of Chicken as a Dietary Staple: Before 1948, chicken wasn’t a mainstay of the dinner table. A contest to breed a bigger, better bird changed that.” (National Geographic) –Add a third thing to the list of what’s certain in this world: Death, taxes, and robocalls. (NYT) -This past weekend about 1,000 people paid $5.40 to pay their respects to Karl Marxon the 200th anniversary of his birthday. No word on whether Marx is rolling over in his grave at the capitalist exploitation of his tomb. (NPR) -China is perhaps the embodiment of capitalism today – its economy has roared itself into global status and its workers have fueled China, Inc. Nonetheless, it continues to profess itself a Communist nation and the Communist Party aired a new show that “Marx Got it Right.” This despite the fact that “measures of wealth inequality in China have neared levels found in the United States, even as Mr. Xi courts global capitalists at Davos.” (NYT) -Capitalism over country and communism? Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater (a security defense contractor company), has been called the Prince of Darkness. He may not be the devil incarnate, but he is a capitalist at heart and an opportunist who has a nose for money and security. “The International Security Defense College in Beijing is a private security training school that is overseen by Frontier Services Group, which was founded by Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL who created Blackwater.” Some members of congress and the military are wondering if the “lucrative security-training deal with Chinese insiders” is “against U.S. interests?” (Washington Post) More Fascinating News:
|
