Foreign Policy: Mohammed bin Salman Is the Next Saddam Hussein

Saudi Arabia’s indignation at the United States would not be the first time an autocratic U.S. ally in the Middle East has assumed it could act with virtual impunity due to its alignment with Washington in countering Iran. Indeed, the Saudi prince’s meteoric rise to power bears striking similarities to that of a past U.S. ally-turned-nemesis whose brutality was initially overlooked by his Washington patrons: former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.[...]

Mohammed bin Salman’s gradual and brutal consolidation of power, marked by the detention and torture of his domestic rivals, evokes the “nation-changing assault on dissent within Iraq’s ruling party in 1979 by a young President Saddam Hussein,” Toby Dodge, a consulting senior fellow for the Middle East at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies, told Bloomberg last year. “The concentration of power in one youthful, ambitious and unpredictable pair of hands is worrying now as it was then.” Washington’s steadfast support of Saddam during the 1980s not only enabled his rampage against his own people and neighboring countries, but also eventually threatened U.S. security interests.[...]

However, U.S. ties with Saddam truly began to solidify in February 1982, when the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the State Department’s terrorism list, paving the way for providing military assistance to Iraq. This occurred roughly 17 months after Saddam’s invasion of Iran, while Iraqi forces were occupying the oil-rich southwestern Iranian province of Khuzestan that Iraq sought to annex. In December 1983, President Ronald Reagan dispatched Donald Rumsfeld as a presidential envoy to meet Saddam and set the stage for normalizing U.S.-Iraqi relations. U.S. support for Saddam during the war would grow to include, according to the Washington Post, “large-scale intelligence sharing, supply of cluster bombs through a Chilean front company, and facilitating Iraq’s acquisition of chemical and biological precursors.” [...]

According to declassified CIA documents, two-thirds of all Iraqi chemical weapons deployed during the war were used in the last 18 months of the conflict, when U.S.-Iraqi cooperation peaked. This included the March 1988 genocidal chemical weapons attack on the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja, which led to the deaths of as many as 5,000 civilians. Ironically, this attack would later be used by the George W. Bush administration in 2003 as part of its pretext for invading Iraq to eliminate the country’s by then nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. 

read the article

Jacobin Magazine: A Departure With Consequences

Anyone who imagines her a moderate Christian Democrat will soon discover otherwise: “AKK”, as she is called by her parliamentary colleagues, attracted attention this August by calling for the reestablishment of mandatory military conscription after its suspension in 2011. In a discussion with the German journalist Anne Will a day before Merkel’s announcement, AKK spoke about the need to “protect creation,” i.e., prevent abortions, and years before made stirred controversy by suggesting that legalizing gay marriage could open the door to group marriages or even marriages between relatives. Most recently she spoke in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, lumping together the “social populism” of the AfD, Die Linke, and even the Social Democrats, and is in favor of reforming the market economy by bolstering the role of individual responsibility. This includes, for example, regulating the housing crisis not through state intervention but even more private competition.[...]

Reflecting the general trend of the country, three of the likely candidates lean to the right, but in different ways. With Kramp-Karrenbauer, Spahn, or Merz, the CDU would take a more openly conservative line against left-wing policies on social questions. Spahn and Merz stand for policies similar to those of conservative Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who governs in coalition with the even more reactionary FPÖ: namely, a staunch economic liberalism that is quite open to the far right, though Merz’s radical neoliberal agenda and aspirations for EU reform resemble the model of Emmanuel Macron. Spahn, the youngest of the three, has avoided polemics recently and kept himself out of foreign policy issues entirely, though this ultimately may reduce his chances as he no longer stands out as an international and controversial figure. Merz, on the other hand, has already been stylized as Christian Democracy’s “savior” by the German press for representing a balance between liberal economic policies and traditional values. [...]

Kramp-Karrenbauer would certainly offer a counterbalance to this trend. She could deflect the AfD threatening to become the strongest force in the elections in the eastern German states next year with her record of conservative values and would therefore appear to be a promising candidate. But just a few weeks ago Ralph Brinkhaus, a figure close to Spahn, was elected the CDU’s new parliamentary group leader, in an offensive directed against a Merkel-loyalist. Either candidate can hope for victory.

read the article

Politico: How everything became the culture war

The Republicans clamoring for drilling that day in Pennsylvania weren’t reacting to the science of global warming or the economics of petroleum or the geopolitics of energy policy. They loved the idea of drilling now, and drilling everywhere, because their political enemies hated it. They were enjoying the primal experience of owning the libs, lashing out at the smug Democratic hippies who wanted to take away their SUVs and guns and Big Gulps. Oil exploration is a complex issue, but in the arena it was just another blunt-force weapon in a simple culture war.[...]

President Donald Trump has pioneered a new politics of perpetual culture war, relentlessly rallying his supporters against kneeling black athletes, undocumented Latino immigrants and soft-on-crime, weak-on-the-border Democrats. He reverses the traditional relationship between politics and governance, weaponizing policy to mobilize his base rather than mobilizing his base to change policy. And in the Trump era, just about every policy issue is a wedge issue, not only traditional us-against-them social litmus tests like abortion, guns, feminism and affirmative action, or even just the president’s pet issues of immigration and trade, which he has wielded as cultural cudgels to portray Americans as victims of foreign exploiters. These days, even climate change, infrastructure policy and other domestic issues normally associated with wonky panels at Washington think tanks have been repackaged into cultural-resentment fodder.[...]

Politics has always been adversarial. Traditionally, though, we’ve had a fairly robust national consensus about a fairly broad set of goals — a strong defense, a decent safety net, freedom from excessive government interference — even though we’ve squabbled over how to achieve them. What’s different about drill-baby-drill politics is the transformation of even nonpartisan issues into mad-as-hell battles of the bases, which makes it virtually impossible for politicians to solve problems in a two-party system. Cooperation and compromise start to look like capitulation, or even treasonous collusion with the enemy. [...]

It’s probably not a coincidence that this shift is happening at a time when college-educated voters are trending Democratic and noncollege whites have been Trump’s most reliable constituency. Policies that hurt colleges, like policies that hurt cities, are policies that hurt Democrats. To listen to pols talk about college these days is to watch a wedge issue in its embryonic stage, as substantive questions about the cost and relevance of higher ed, the burdens of student debt, the adequacy of worker training and the power of political correctness on campus start to morph into red-meat attacks on pointy-headed elitists who look down on ironworkers and brainwash America’s youth. Republicans are starting to fit the Democratic push for universal free college into their larger critique of the Democratic urge to hand out free stuff to Democratic voters. And they’re portraying a liberal arts education as a culturally liberal thing, like kale or Kwanzaa or reusable shopping bags.

read the article

The Atlantic: The Arab Winter Is Coming

To go back in time, as it were, the counter-revolutionary bloc—Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, and their allies in Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere—believes the future must be more authoritarian than ever. Based on extensive conversations with senior Arab officials, I’ve found that the dominant outlook could be summed up as follows: a heavy-handed domestic and regional approach may well carry risks, but the alternative is worse.

If the autocrats lost control over the masses in 2011, the thinking goes, that was because they did not go far enough in their repression. Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak gave some space to the Muslim Brotherhood, political activists, and critical media. Look what happened to him.[...]

Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, for example, declared in 2017: “We will not waste 30 years trying to deal with extremist ideas; we will eradicate them here and now.” In defense of moderation, he proposed simply stomping out religious radicals. (In American terms: Shock and awe rather than hearts and minds.) And MbS was probably using the term “extremist” conveniently; the Saudis have since designated as terrorist organizations certain religious groups, such as the International Union of Muslim Scholars, broadly perceived as mainstream.[...]

For counter-revolutionary regimes, the top priority is to prevent a repeat of the 2011 uprisings, and they believe the best way to do that is to stay the repressive course. Which is why recent talk that MbS was doomed, or that he could be replaced after the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, was out of touch with the broad reality of the region. MbS is seen as a key member of the pack of new leaders remaking the Middle East, and the pack will stand by him. This dynamic also informs the continuing blockade of Qatar as well as the war in Yemen; humanitarian concerns simply don’t matter next to the perceived efficacy of aggression.

read the article

ABC News: WWI centenary to be marked in London and Paris, not Berlin

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I on French soil, and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will be in London at a ceremony in Westminster Abby with Queen Elizabeth II.

But while the leaders visit the capitals of Germany's wartime enemies, at home there are no national commemorations planned for the centenary of the Nov. 11 armistice that brought an end to the four-year war that killed more than 2 million of its troops and left 4 million wounded.[...]

For Germany, the Nov. 11 armistice did not mean peace like it did in France and Britain. The war's end gave rise to revolution and street fighting between far-left and far-right factions. It also brought an end to the monarchy, years of hyperinflation, widespread poverty and hunger, and helped create the conditions that brought the Nazis to power in 1933.[...]

Although there aren't any national commemorations in Germany marking the war's end, individual events are planned, including an exhibition at the German Historical Museum in Berlin. A special World War I religious service is also being organized by the German Bishops Conference at the Berliner Dom cathedral.

read the article

Quartz: The Chinese and Soviets had a bigger role in supporting apartheid than we previously knew

This was supported (or at least connived at) by many western powers. That the US, Britain and France did this has been known, or at least suspected, for many years. Van Vuuren fills in the blanks and gives us plenty of new information on this. Although shocking this is less than astonishing.

What is really novel is that he uncovers a completely new set of actors: the Chinese and the Soviet Union. In the past it has been assumed that, for the most part, they were completely wedded to the liberation movements. The support from Moscow and Beijing for the African National Congress and—to a lesser extent—the Pan Africanist Congress, was so widely reported that few suspected there might be less than total solidarity between the communist powers and the liberation movements.[...]

The relationship that the book portrays between South Africa and the Chinese is just as complex. It involves purchases of Chinese military equipment – everything from machine guns to missiles and rocket launchers – using Congolese companies as a front. Sometimes the shipments were destined for South Africa’s Angolan allies, UNITA, sometimes not.

read the article

Politico: Italy’s League grows in popularity as 5Star support falls

Corriere della Sera, a daily, published an Ipsos poll showing that the League, which is headed by firebrand Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, is edging away from its coalition partner. In the poll, 34.7 percent of Italians said they would vote for the League — a huge rise from the 17.4 percent who actually voted for the party in March’s general election.

However, 28.7 percent said they would vote for the 5Stars, down from the 32.7 percent that voted for the party in March.[...]

The poll also shows that the League is increasingly luring voters directly from its coalition partner: 16 percent of those who said they would now back the far-right party had voted for the 5Stars.

There’s good news for the government in the poll: 57 percent of Italians now approve of the government, a higher level of support that the previous six Italian governments had enjoyed at a similar period of their mandate.

read the article

Quartz: More humane chicken breeding would cost consumers 1% extra

Animal-welfare advocates have long cast meat companies as the overseers of a cruel system in which chickens are bred to grow so heavy so quickly that their legs can’t support their weight. They’ve argued the industry should opt for more humane production practices. But little is known about how production costs would be impacted if the industry pivoted away from the ultra-heavy birds.[...]

The target weight for many broiler chickens that wind up in grocery stores is about 6 pounds. The slower-growing breeds take between 54 and 59 days to reach that weight. The faster-growing breeds hit that target in about 41 days.[...]

That 14% doesn’t directly cross over into retail, Lusk explains. After considering the costs of processing, packaging, shipping, and also consumer willingness to pay a premium for birds marketed as slower-growing, the economists settled on the idea that retail prices would have to increase by just 1.17%. Overall, they said, if the US switched to slower-growing breeds, the meat industry would sell about .91% less chicken than it does currently in a given year, amounting to about $3.5 billion in lost profits.

read the article