The Obama redemption: will he or won’t he abstain on Palestine?
The United Nations General Assembly Hall (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Events in Arabia are racing to a head. That much is obvious with Palestine’s appointment with destiny on September 23rd approaching with hurricane force.
The diplomatic world is in a tizzy as to just how the United States can extricate itself from a situation where it is certain – or so it appears – that she will find itself on the wrong side of both fences in the Middle East.
Does the US have the nerve to face down the noisy kindergarten bully boy tactics of Messrs Netanyahu and Lieberman, and thus throw a wet towel at the powerful Zionist lobby?
Or, is she willing to accept that a veto (symbolic as that largely is) will enrage her closest Arab allies?
Effectively, the US has only one policy choice that makes sense in the circumstances: to abstain.
In my previous commentaries on the Middle East appearing on End the Lie, I have suggested that this option remains on the table and may be played in the end.
In the last few days, we have begun to see that US influence in the region is ebbing.
The New Ottomans have broken with Israel. They have seized the strategic initiative (and the famous moral high ground) over Gaza and the Palestinian issue in general.
Turkey’s lance is not solely aimed at Israel. She needs to deter rival powers from treading on her turf.
These are the Iranians, against whom she is taking an increasingly firm line, and the Saudis. Turkey is not worried about her ability to contain Iran. It may be more difficult for her to contain the Saudis. And that as we shall see, is increasingly a disturbing factor in Washington.
The Saudis normally prefer the safe shelter of temperate diplomatic language. For the last six months Prince Turki bin Faisal bin Abdul Aziz al Saud, an important member of the ruling royal family, has broken with that long tradition by brandishing the saber.
Last June, the former Saudi Arabian intelligence chief (and ex ambassador in Washington) began the warm-up act.
He started to warn that either the US backs the bid for Palestinian statehood or “risk losing what little credibility she has in the region.”
This is tough talk. The latter is a statement of deadly insight. It suggests that the Saudis have begun to view the United States as the modern day successors to the Crusaders. In short, under notice to quit.
This is Prince Turki in his best form in the New York Times, “If the US casts the veto at the UN, then Saudi Arabia would no longer co-operate with America in the same way it historically has. With most of the Arab world in upheaval, the special relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United States would increasingly be seen as toxic by the vast majority of Arabs and Muslims, who demand justice for the Palestinian people.”
Words of course come cheap. What is different here is that the Saudis have already put them into effect.
The obscure, backward and unstable country called Yemen is now thrust to the center of the stage with such a force it may influence one of the most historic issues to arise in the Arab world since the creation of the Zionist state.
On the 14th of September, the pro-Palestinian Al-Quds Al-Arabi, published in London, reported, “A motorcade of Saudi armored vehicles and military aid entered the Yemeni soil to help the forces of the regime of Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh.”
Saleh is fighting an increasingly bitter pro-democracy movement which is turning into full-scale civil war, or so the world is told.
There never was an “Arab Spring” in Sana’a. Yemen is breaking along the historic dotted line which separates the northern tribes from the ones in south, who until 1967 came under the sway of the British Empire. As a state she is breaking up, a process the United States intends to accelerate.
The US is posing Libyan-style as a friend of the rebels. However, we should not be fooled as to America’s real interest in Yemen, which as always in these matters is dedicated self-interest.
The US objective, begun by Leon Panetta as CIA boss and continued in the latest game of musical chairs in Washington which thrust him to the Pentagon, is to create the create circumstances for a full scale “humanitarian intervention” like in Libya.
This will allow the US to seize the deep water port of Aden which controls the vital strategic channels of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The Saudis cannot possibly allow this to happen.
As part of this enterprise the US has created the fiction of an Al Qaeda presence in Yemen. There are fewer Al Qaeda operatives in this poor benighted land than pork chops at a bar mitzvah.
Yemen is above all Saudi Arabia’s very own “near abroad.” Faced with the rival imperial ambitions of the Persian Empire redux and the New Ottomans, she is erecting “Keep Out” signs all along the Gulf.
Only a few weeks back a Saudi armed column put an end to the pro-democracy threat to the ruling royal family in Bahrain.
Palestine is the fulcrum in this new power game in the Middle East.
I am not sure that the young man in the White House understands very much of it. The Manchurian Candidate selected by the Bilderberg Group is, after all, nothing more than that.
So Obama will not be the man who takes the decision on the next step the on the Palestinian road to sovereignty. Nor, for that matter, will Hillary Clinton, the titular Secretary of State.
Look instead to Panetta, the new Prince of Pentagonia, and David Petraeus who left the seat warm when the pair switched jobs.
Petraeus may be a vastly over-glorified soldier, at least in terms of rather mediocre martial skills, but he is quite a smart politician. That is the story of his career so far.
Petraeus would like to be President of the United States, Ike Mark II. He could achieve his ambition better with most of that Middle Eastern clutter out of the way.
The CIA knows it would be better to put the shutters up on the Likud show in Israel. They have their own successor in waiting, the fragrant Tzipi Livni, daughter of an Irgun terrorist and now a born-again Two Stater, currently playing to rave CIA-fuelled pro-democracy shows all over the Zionist state.
It is obvious that the US will end up as the latter-day successors to the Crusader Kingdom unless she attends to the creature comforts of the Palestinians, urgently.
The present policy has resulted in the resurgence of Turkey, who is effectively calling the shots in Lebanon, Iran, Syria and Egypt. The Saudis are now staking out their claims.
In all of this the US views events from the sidelines. The waffle about “peace talks” is no more than that.
It is well past time that someone took the absurd Tony Blair’s Boy Scout uniform away and sent him packing. This is the time for serious politics.
That means a US abstention. I have been saying that from the moment I began to write about these momentous events.
The Saudi action in Yemen preceded by the plain language from Riyadh on the prospects America will face in the Middle East if she kowtows to the Zionist line, suggest that I may be working on something much stronger than a hunch.
Never mind the Palestinians, America is taking an important decision about her own future next week.
Richard Cottrell is a writer, journalist and former European MP (Conservative). His new book Gladio: NATO’s Dagger At The Heart Of Europe is coming shortly from Progressive Press.
Edited by Madison Ruppert
Richard Cottrell is a writer, journalist and former European MP (Conservative). His new book
Richard has a lot of great things to say and he says them well I really hope he continues to post here, I’m passing around these articles as much as possible.