Washington's Middle East friends want more weapons

These misogynists, long time friends of the US Congress and the folks in the Pentagon, are coming to the US for more guns

By Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired
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The Gulf Cooperation Council is a US proxy group aimed at preserving and maintaining the dictatorial Arab regimes of the Middle East that support US capitalism’s plunder of the region’s resources. This is the gang the US media is referring to when it announces to the US populace that the US is leading a “coalition” in the region.

The group met last Thursday to discuss the situation in Yemen and included the folks in the picture, the Saudi foreign minister, Abdulaziz bin Abdullah bin Abdulaziz and the foreign ministers of Bahrain and the UAE. All of these family run states are despotic regimes but they allow the US to plant bases on their soil, or sand if you will.  The Bahrain ruling family slaughtered protesters demanding democratic rights and an end to religious discrimination during an uprising in 2011.  Even doctors that were found treating injured protesters were imprisoned. The Bahraini monarchy committed these atrocities as 15,000 US troops sat and watched. Bahrain is home to the US Fifth Fleet that protects the global energy industry’s oil profits in the region.  The Bahraini ruling family has been in power for around 200 years with the support of British and US capitalism.

The Saudi’s acting on the behalf of their friends in Washington and the Pentagon, have been one of the staunchest supporters of Sunni religious extremists and many people believe sections of the Saudi royal family were involved in the terrorist attacks on 9/11.  After all, many of the attackers on the planes were Saudi’s and if my memory serves me right, none were Iraqi’s.

The Saudi’s and the GCC with the support of the US have been bombing Yemen including using cluster bombs which are banned by most countries but not the US.  The US supplied the Saudi’s, (beheading people and publicly flogging women is on of their favorite pastimes) with $28 billion in weapons of mass destruction in the past period in the form of fighter jets so they were desperate for a place to test them out. However, the invasion backfired to the point that the UN called on the sorties to cease as more and more civilians were being killed.

This coalition of thieves is demanding more weapons from the US that they claim they need to deal with Iranian aggression; “Iranian’ aggression” is a term the mass media is fond of these days as it covers for the Wall Street aggression that is responsible for the assault on US workers and the middle class at home. And a bigger threat than Iran to the misogynistic bunch that run the states that make up this phony coalition is the potential of revolts from below, particularly in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain which have considerable Shia populations (a majority in Bahrain) that suffer religious discrimination.  Many of the smaller Gulf states also import foreign workers from Nepal, Bangladesh and other poverty stricken regions to do the work. There have been numerous cases of young women from the Philippines laboring as servants under near slave like conditions working for rich Saudi’s and facing terrible physical abuse.

The US defense industry is very pleased with the turn of events as the US supplies most of the worlds’ weapons of mass destruction. In the Middle East it supplies weapons to all sides ensuring of course that its Zionist proxies “maintain a military advantage”.

So the men in the image above are coming to Washington to beg the Obama administration for more weapons and are tying it to their support for the Iran/US nuclear deal. “These countries are in the most vulnerable geographical areas, and I think they have a legitimate concern about Iran” says Eliot Engel, a Democrat from New York on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, adding that if the US sells more weapons of mass destruction to these Sheiks with a 7^th Century mindset, “….we must make sure that Israel’s qualitative military edge is kept.”

The Zionist regime uses US bulldozers made by Caterpillar in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and US planes and weaponry to drive them in to submission in Gaza and to control them as prisoners in their own homes in the occupied territories. What a great deal the arms business is for some. Iran of course has invaded no one in recent memory and is surrounded by US military installations and Washington’s flunkies in the region. The average Iranian has not forgotten that the US, at the behest of the British that controlled Iranian oil production, overthrew the Democratically elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 and installed the murderous Shah in his place.

One should not be surprised at the hatred many Arabs, Muslims and others feel for the US regime and its proxies worldwide.  The US has an agreement with Israel, on of the worst human rights abuser in the region, to defend it no matter what, “Current (US) law mandates that the US uphold Israel’s military edge over its neighbors” the Wall Street Journal reports.  What could be better for any investor in weapons manufacture than supplying both sides of a conflict?

US support for the Zionists mind you has little to do with the US ruling class fondness for Jews. Israel is the most reliable and stable ally that US capitalism can depend on to help maintain its plunder of the region’s resources. As the Arab spring showed, the revolutionary potential of the Arab working class is too great a threat and the Arab regimes too unstable.

This disastrous foreign policy, disastrous for the millions it maims and kills but also for US workers at home as we have to pay for it through declining living standards, lack of social services and a miserable future for our youth, is the root of the growth of religious fanaticism and the rise of extremely unstable and maniacal groups like ISIS. Both ISIS and the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia arose out of US intervention in these societies.

It is hard to imagine the affect of 20 years of war has had on the consciousness and mental health of the mostly Arab and Muslim population of the Middle East.  I recall my mother telling me about the Blitz when London was bombed and how terrifying it was as the doodlebugs were sent over, small flying bombs that could be heard before their engines cut out and everyone waited terrified not knowing where they would actually land.  That war lasted 5 years or so, most Iraqi’s have grown up knowing nothing else as have Palestinians.

US intervention and presence in the Middle East has been a disaster. Iraq is worse off than ever despite over one million deaths and a US taxpayer bill of trillions. The people that discuss and determine the political and social direction society travels in; the fate of the lives of millions of people and the health of the planet’s ecosystem, are representatives of that parasitic and historically bankrupt class that has its hands on the levers of society, the bankers and financiers, the feudal monarchists and compliant dictators whose myopic short term view, the rapacious quest for profits and the accumulation of capital is the sole determinant of their actions.

There is no guarantee that humans have a future on this planet.  We certainly do not if capitalism is not overthrown and that task falls to a united international movement of workers across borders.  The working class and our organizations have been set back in the Middle East and other former colonies of western powers due to the intervention of the imperialist countries, especially US imperialism. But we have had set backs here in the US as well. 

The US capitalist class is a powerful and a skillful manipulator.  It is a crass and vulgar class, a decaying class with nuclear weapons.  Engels pointed out that the US capitalist class differed from its British colleagues for example in one major way.  The British and European bourgeois fought a centuries old intellectual struggle, a war of ideas against the decaying feudal aristocracy; they had to defend their ideas against an organized ruling class.  For the US colonial bourgeois it was simply a matter of wiping out a few million native people and building some infrastructure, there was no ruling class here as such.

They are a violent bunch and will, if they feel the need, use nuclear weapons against their own people.  The US bourgeois and it’s Democratic Party are the only nation and political party to use nuclear weapons on civilian populations.

The only solution in the Middle East is for the working class to enter the scene in a major way, take control of the production of its major resources and for the formation of a federation of democratic socialist states.  And despite the US losing much of its manufacturing base capitalists seek cheaper labor power and more lucrative environments for profit taking which has undermined the industrial working class in the US, sending the so-called free market and capitalism in to the history books will not be successful without the US working class settling accounts with US capitalism.

There is no other way out that I can see other than society needing new managers.