China, Saudia Arabia and the Fate of the Uyghurs

BY LOUIS PROYECT

Beginning with the 9/11 attacks, much of the left decided that Saudi Arabia was the chief engineer of a Wahhabi plot to impose its reactionary, feudal, and patriarchal values on the rest of the world. Supposedly, the USA was being punished for its licentious and ungodly ways even if it was one of Saudi Arabia’s chief supporters in the Middle East, alongside Israel. While 9/11 Trutherism is hardly worth taking seriously, another line of investigation has implicated the Saudi state as providing the logistical support that made the attack possible while the USA looked the other way. The truthers claim that the FBI and CIA ignored the threat because they were in cahoots with al-Qaeda. What could American imperialism have possibly gained by such an attack? The answer is an excuse to invade Iraq, a ridiculous idea. But is it any more ridiculous to believe that Wahhabism, the official religion of Saudi Arabia, explains the attack or Saudi foreign policy in general?

If you are looking for grounds for this, the 9/11 Commission Report  is a good place to start. It does not blame the Saudi state but its evil spawn al-Qaeda. The report stated:

In the 1980s, awash in sudden oil wealth, Saudi Arabia competed with Shia Iran to promote its Sunni fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, Wahhabism. The Saudi government, always conscious of its duties as the custodian of Islam’s holiest places, joined with wealthy Arabs from the Kingdom and other states bordering the Persian Gulf in donating money to build mosques and religious schools that could preach and teach their interpretation of Islamic doctrine.

For those who viewed Saudi Arabia as so devoted to ascetic values that it would be willing to mount a devastating attack on the WTC, a symbol of the financial system it was closely tied to, and the Pentagon, its chief military benefactor, there were some counter-indicators best left under the rug. For someone like Prince Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud, the former Saudi ambassador in Washington, who was supposedly the quartermaster supplying the jihadi hijackers, those values were not to be taken too seriously as Christopher Dickey reported in The Daily Beast: “When the prince was the ambassador he was the toast of Washington, and plenty of toasts there were. Bandar bin Sultan smoked fine cigars and drank finer Cognac.”

If you believe that Wahhabism explains Saudi foreign policy, you are either unaware of or simply ignore the long-standing relationship between the ruling class of the USA and the Saudi royal family. Saudi Arabia has been staunchly opposed to radical movements in the Middle East and supportive of stability in the West, where much of its oil wealth was invested. It supported the first Gulf War and has provided an open door to the construction of American military bases. In 2010 the USA signed a 60 billion dollar arms deal with Saudi Arabia, not exactly consistent with reports that they might be used to destroy American assets both economic and personal. Further investigation would reveal that Al Qaeda was as hostile to the Saudi royal family as it was to the White House and that most of the hijackers were from Yemen originally, just like Osama bin-Laden. As detailed in Akbar Ahmed’s “The Thistle and the Drone”, the tribesmen of Yemen viewed the Saudis as virtual colonizers as I indicated in my review:

For example, despite the fact that the Quran has strict rules against suicide and the murder of noncombatants, tribal peoples fighting under the banner of Islam have often resorted to such measures, especially on the key date of September 11, 2001. In an eye-opening examination of those events, Ahmed proves that a Yemeni tribe acting on the imperative to extract revenge was much more relevant than Wahhabi beliefs. While most of the hijackers were identified as Saudi, their origins were in a Yemeni tribe that traced its bloodlines back to the prophet Mohammad. And more to the point, they were determined to wreak vengeance against the superpower that had been complicit in the murderous attack on their tribesmen in Yemen, an element of the 9/11 attacks that has finally been given the attention it deserves.

Fast-forward to the revolt in Syria and you get the same arguments rehashed except in this instance put forward to explain it as a holy war against the “axis of resistance” rather than against American imperialism. This time, the Saudis were bent on regime change in Syria, a supposedly religiously tolerant state even if the Baathists prioritized Alawite interests. Once that would succeed, the next domino to fall would be Shiite Iran. All of this would be a prelude to isolating and conceivably getting rid of Vladimir Putin, who was a committed adversary of jihadists. Indeed, Russia had a long record of punishing Islamic fundamentalists, starting with the intervention in Afghanistan that was designed to protect the government in Kabul against feudal-minded villagers. Later on, Russia—this go-round capitalist rather than Communist—invaded Chechnya twice in order to save the people from fanatical jihadists.

While Wahhabism certainly influenced the Chechen guerrillas, there were aspects to their ideology that defied facile and reductionist formulas. In a provocatively titled article “Che Guevaras in Turban” in the September-October 1999 New Left Review, Georgi M. Derluguian wrote about the admixture of Islam and Marxism that was at the heart of the independence movement:

During his brief period as a student in Moscow, aside from the fateful Professor Borovoy, [Shamil] Basayev met Cubans and learned from them about Ernesto Che Guevara. The young Chechen commander carried a picture of Che in his breast pocket through the Abkhazia war of 1992–93, where he was rescuing the fellow Abkhazian mountaineers from the marauding Georgian warlords—and where he was apparently trained, supplied, and supported by the Russian military who saw their interests as lying in the subversion of Georgia’s independence. Basayev had that picture on him during the raid on Budionnovsk and, who knows, may still cherish it today…One might cite as another example the brilliant and wonderfully opportunistic journalist Movladi Udugov, the autodidact master of Chechen war propaganda, who blends quotations from Gramsci, Samuel Huntington and the Koran into his anti-American diatribes and the caustic philippics directed against the ‘so-called Russian democrats’. If one puts aside the exoticism attributed in the Western cultural tradition to the world of Islam, such examples look scarcely more eccentric than Latin American liberation theology.

Turning now to the war in Syria, which by all accounts has virtually come to an end, there is an odd disjunction between a Saudi Arabia that was capable of organizing hijackers to demolish the top symbols of American finance and military power on 9/11. Capable of such bold initiatives, why would it be so stingy about supplying rebels with the weaponry they needed to neutralize the Syria air force. It was not even a question of denying them Manpads but actively intervening in partnership with the CIA to keep them out of rebel hands as the Wall Street Journal reported on October 17, 2012:

U.S. officials say they are most worried about Russian-designed Manpads provided to Libya making their way to Syria. The U.S. intensified efforts to track and collect man-portable missiles after the 2011 fall of the country’s longtime strongman leader, Moammar Gadhafi.

To keep control of the flow of weapons to the Syrian rebels, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar formed a joint operations room early this year in a covert project U.S. officials watched from afar.

The U.S. has limited its support of the rebels to communications equipment, logistics and intelligence. But U.S. officials have coordinated with the trio of countries sending arms and munitions to the rebels. The Pentagon and CIA ramped up their presence on Turkey’s southern border as the weapons began to flow to the rebels in two to three shipments every week.

Some analysts attribute this blockade to a fear of civilian airplanes being shot down by jihadis but why would Saudi Arabia be worried about this if it had already been the lynchpin of the 9/11 attacks? Does any of this make sense? Only if you are addicted to binary oppositions ideologically.

In reality, Saudi Arabia supplied Syrian rebels with mostly light arms that were useless against aircraft. In the 1960s, Trotskyists used to refer to Soviet support to the Vietnamese as doled out with an eyedropper. The same thing can be said about Saudi support for Syrian rebels. It was sufficient to establish a modicum of credibility in the Sunni world but insufficient to change the battlefield outcome.

Furthermore, keep in mind that until March 2011 relations between Saudi Arabia and Syria were not marked by Wahhabi/Alawite sectarian strife. On October 8, 2009, the UAE-based Gulf News reported:

The Riyadh-Damascus rapprochement comes at the same time as a cautious warming takes place between Damascus and Saudi ally Washington under President Barack Obama.

“It’s not surprising that this meeting is taking place during the Obama administration,” said Amr. “The US wants to bring Syria more into the fold.”

Al Assad and Abdullah have met several times in regional forums since Abdullah became king, although there have been no official visits until now.

Analysts say ties began to improve at an Arab summit in Kuwait in January and a second in March when outrage over Israel’s turn of the year invasion of Gaza became the basis for greater unity among Arab leaders on regional issues.

You’ll note that Obama wanted to bring Syria more into the fold. That jibes with what Hillary Clinton, his Secretary of State, said about Assad in March 2011: “Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.”

Now that those inconvenient rebels that Obama dismissed as former farmers, teachers or pharmacists are out of the picture, it is back to business in the Middle East. Turkey, another supposed Islamist state bent on removing Assad, now works closely with Russia. For that matter, there are signs that Saudi Arabia is becoming part of the progressive, anti-imperialist left in light of a growing affinity with Russia. At the G20 Summit meeting in Argentina in November 2018, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) grinned at Putin while high-fiving an equally grinning Putin before they sat down next to each other. Widespread anger at the Prince’s role in murdering Jamal Khashoggi was evidently not shared by Russia whose deputy foreign minister Mikhail Bogdanov defended MBSs pending assumption of the throne in Saudi Arabia against those who would deny him this right by saying “Of course we are against interference. The Saudi people and leadership must decide such questions themselves. The King made a decision and I can’t even imagine on what grounds someone in America will interfere in such an issue and think about who should rule Saudi Arabia, now or in the future. This is a Saudi matter.”

With Saudi Arabia and Russia mending fences in November 2018, it hardly comes as a surprise that the fiercely fundamentalist regimes are also turning back the clock to pre-2011 days when all the Arab states were united in their fear and hatred of angry former farmers, teachers or pharmacists. The United Arab Emirates announced that month it was negotiating the reopening of its embassy in Damascus and restoring full ties with Syria. It certainly would have not taken this measure unless encouraged by Saudi Arabia that will inevitably follow suit before long.

As the latest sign of how far Saudi Arabia will go in cementing ties to its new friends in the “anti-imperialist” camp, it has now endorsed the right of the Chinese to impose its rule over the Uyghurs. This week Chinese state media cited MBS as saying that China has the right to undertake “anti-terrorism” and “de-extremism” measures. This will probably impress the bloggers at Grayzone who have been ardent supporters of the crackdown in Xinjiang and who regard reports of concentration camps as fake news.

Perhaps this might lead to them reevaluating their stance on Saudi Arabia as a reactionary Wahhabist state even though this would not be the first time they have made the fight against “terrorism” sacrosanct. In 2017, Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton co-wrote an article  for Alternet (a magazine that booted them before long) about a citizen journalist named Abdul Kareem they fingered as an al-Qaeda agent. As I pointed out days after their article appeared, their proof of his ties relied on Saudi media, which was anxious to demonize Kareem since he was a supporter of the Qatari government. For those who follow internecine Islamist feuds in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have opened an offensive against Qatar for its ties to Iran. As they say, “You Can’t Tell the Players Without a Scorecard!”

What motivation would Saudi Arabia have for developing ties to China, a state that represses Muslims? It has everything to do with the Silk Road that is at the heart of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It will revive a trade route between China and the Arabian peninsula that opened about 3000 years ago with the export of silk from China to trading centers in the Middle East. There have already been trade agreements between China and Saudi Arabia that will be the first in a series culminating in a new version of the BRICS that includes Saudi Arabia, a state supposedly joined at the hip with Washington (when it wasn’t intent on leveling the Pentagon, of course.)

In 2017, King Salman made a six-week tour of Asia that included a mid-March visit to China, where he signed a $65 billion Sino–Saudi trade and investment package that included more than 20 agreements on oil investment and energy. Among them was a memorandum of understanding between Saudi Aramco and China North Industries Group Corporation to build refineries in China and an agreement between Saudi Basic Industries Corporation and Sinopec to develop petrochemical products.

Do you think that China or Saudi Arabia would allow some Uyghurs to get in the way of such a partnership, especially since most of them were probably former farmers, teachers and pharmacists?

It was their bad luck to have lived for eons in East Turkistan that would be colonized by China and renamed Xinjiang in the 18^thcentury by the Qing Dynasty. China might not have been as grandiose a colonizer as Great Britain but it would make damned sure that whatever territory it seized like East Turkistan or Tibet would remain under its control, even if it required the kind of forced assimilation that the British and Americans visited on native peoples.

Xinjiang was the first leg in the Silk Road that connected China to the Arabian peninsula. Not only is it pivotal to Chinese ambitions, it is a mineral-rich region that the “Communists” are determined to control. On August 28, 2008, the Financial Times reported:

The increasing importance of the Muslim-dominated Xinjiang autonomous region as a source of the energy and minerals needed to fuel China’s booming eastern cities is raising the stakes for Beijing in its battle against separatists agitating for an independent state.

“The Chinese didn’t want to let Xinjiang be independent before, but after they built all the oilfields, it became absolutely impossible,” said one Muslim resident in Korla, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution by government security agents.

The desert around the city is punctuated every kilometre or two by oil and gas derricks, each of them topped with the red Chinese national flag, an assertion of sovereignty over every inch of the energy-rich ground.

In 2005, Xinjiang’s local government was allotted only Rmb240m ($35m, €24m, £19m) out of the Rmb14.8bn in tax revenue from the petrochemical industries that are based in the region.

To make sure that the restless natives are blocked from sabotaging such valuable assets, the Chinese have lined up an anti-terrorism expert second to none, especially one that has valuable hands-on experience dealing with jihadists.

This month Erik Prince, the head of Blackwater, signed a deal with China in the name of his new company Frontier Services Group to build a training camp in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang. What a clever title for a new company. Surely, he must understand that the USA was second to none in both expanding and protecting its frontiers in its rise to number one capitalist power in the world. Like Frederick Jackson Turner, Erik Prince understands “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”. Turner wrote “The appeal of the undiscovered is strong in America. For three centuries the fundamental process in its history was the westward movement, the discovery and occupation of the vast free spaces of the continent. We are the first generation of Americans who can look back upon that era as a historic movement now coming to its end.” Yes, it was coming to an end but that has been a long drawn-out process as the agonies of Trump’s wall might indicate.

Many people on the left, especially those with a fuzzy idea of socialism, welcome China’s rise as a new hegemon since anything opposed to the USA has to be backed, even if involves putting Uyghurs into concentration camps, hiring Erik Prince to make sure that those out of prison mind their p’s and q’s, and cozying up to Saudi Arabia. I don’t include myself in that wing of the left and invite you to join the club. We can and must do better.

Louis Proyect blogs at http://louisproyect.org and is the moderator of the Marxism mailing list. In his spare time, he reviews films for CounterPunch.

The Khashoggi crisis: Putting Humpty Dumpty back together

by Dr James M Dorsey 

The killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and potential Western sanctions against Saudi Arabia has sparked renewed debate about the value of the longstanding alliance between the United States and the kingdom.

The debate is not limited to the US or the kingdom, both of which are assessing the reliability of the other even if that is a debate that is waged in Saudi Arabia behind close doors. It is also being discussed In Europe where like in the United States commercial and strategic interests are pitted against values.

And it is on the minds of Israeli leaders who increasingly have concluded that they need to temper expectations that Saudi Arabia would be able to lead a Sunni Muslim alliance in the Middle East capable of confronting Iran and countries like Turkey and Qatar viewed as Islamists akin to the Muslim Brotherhood. Israel increasingly looks at its relationships with Gulf states in transactional rather than strategic terms.

No one is contemplating a full rupture in relations, yet leaders on all sides of the divide realize that the Khashoggi crisis is a watershed that at the very least has fundamentally changed perceptions. Tempered expectations did not stop Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu from travelling to Oman last month, the first such visit in more than two decades, or his culture and sports minister, Mir Regev, from going to Abu Dhabi.

The crisis has consequences even for powers like Russia and China that are unconcerned about rights and other Western concepts of universal values but worry about the threat posed by ultra-conservative Sunni Muslim Islam to their soft underbellies in the Caucasus and Xinjiang.

It calls into question Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s ability to make good on the pledge to steer the kingdom towards an undefined form of ‘moderate Islam’ by cowing the kingdom’s religious establishment into submission and shaving off of the sharp ends of Wahhabism with actions such as lifting the ban on women’s driving.

Much like the United States has in the past two decades had to cope with the fallout of Saudi Arabia’s embrace of an ultra-conservative interpretation of the faith, Russia and China, with their own history of militant attacks, will increasingly confront similar risks.

That is particularly true for China that has framed its crackdown on Turkic Muslims in its north-western province of Xinjiang in what amounts to an almost unprecedented assault Islam as a fight against extremism and political violence.

At the core of the Western debate about Saudi Arabia’s viability as a reliable ally are several myths, including the belief that Saudi leaders over the decades were reformers who needed to tread slowly and cautiously in changing norms in a deeply conservative society as well as the notion that Saudi Arabia propagated an austere, ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam that threatened US interests.

A critic of Prince Mohammed, Georgetown University historian Abdullah Al-Arian last year combed through 70 years of New York Times reporting that repeatedly depicted Saudi leaders as reformersrather than conservative leaders who over the decades made unavoidable accommodations with modernity to fulfil their part of a social contract and ensure their own survival as leaders.

For sure, Saudi Arabia and the United States certainly never did and do not see eye to eye when it comes to values, particularly with regard to human rights and basic freedoms.

Yet, Saudi global funding of Sunni Muslim ultra-conservatism often served US purposes as an anti-dote to communism during the Cold War, no more so than in Afghanistan in the 1980s when ultra-conservative militants forced the departure of Soviet troops and set the stage for the demise of communism or when the kingdom helped the Reagan administration circumvent a Congressional embargo on the sale of arms to the Contras in Nicaragua.

That convergence of Saudi and US interests was severely dented by the 9/11 attacks with 15 of the 19 perpetrators hailing from the kingdom even if both sides realized that they were interdependent. The jury is out on whether the Khashoggi crisis constitutes a significant setback to Saudi Arabia’s US-backed regional ambitions, and if so to what degree.

The discovery by Saudi rulers that they share conservative family values as well as political interests when it comes to President Donald J. Trump and Israel with evangelists and fundamentalist Christians, a significant voting block in the United States and part of Mr. Trump’s support base, is emerging as one route to counter perceptions of the kingdom’s moral standing having been undermined.

Saudi Arabia, to fudge the growing perception of a lack of shared values with the United States reflected in Saudi actions, particularly since the rise in 2015 of the Salmans, King Salman and his son, Prince Mohammed, has poured tens of millions of dollars into public diplomacy and lobbying in the United States.

As part of the effort, the Salmans have sought to project the kingdom as a beacon of religious harmony despite its discrimination of Shiites and long-standing history of prejudice against Jews and Christians.

To that end, they have redirected vehicles the kingdom once used to promote its austere, intolerant interpretation of the faith such as the World Muslim League, to advocate inter-faith harmony.

Working through the kingdom’s various lobbying groups in Washington and contracted US public relations and lobbying firms, the league last month, as the Khashoggi crisis erupted, organized a conference in New York attended by Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders to discuss a cultural rapprochement between the United States and the Islamic world and countering extremism.

The league’s general secretary, Muhammad bin Abdul Karim Al-Issa, a former Saudi justice minister, who in the past in line with ultra-conservative precepts denounced witchcraft defined as including, among other things astrology, the use of plants for medicine, palm-reading, and animal calling, has emerged as the kingdom’s prime spokesman on religious tolerance.

Mr. Al-Issa has advocated tolerance and moderation, promoted dialogue, denounced violence against Israel and recognized the Holocaust, major steps for a country that once tailored its visa requirements to bar Jews from entry.

Mr. Al-Issa was last week present in a meeting between Prince Mohammed and US evangelical leaders close to Mr. Trump, including Reverend Johnnie Moore, Israel-based evangelical political strategist-turned-novelist Joel Rosenberg, former congresswoman Michele Bachmann; and prominent religious broadcasters.

The visit, despite evangelical denials had as much to do with US politics as it was about shared values. Reverend Pat Robertson, a key figure in evangelical circles, made that clear on his influential Christian Broadcasting Network.

Closely following Mr. Trump’s statements on the Khashoggi killing, Mr. Patterson went from warning days after the journalist’s disappearance that “you don’t blow up an international alliance over one person” to denouncing Prince Mohammed.

The message was that politics rather than shared values is likely to determine whether the Khashoggi killing constitutes a watershed or merely a blip in history.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast. James is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title and a co-authored volume, Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa as well as Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa and just published China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom

Bitter 9/11 Consequences

US is caught in the “intervention trap”

Eric Walberg

Seventeen years on, there is little that remains of 9/11 as physical evidence. The tragic site was quickly cleaned up, too quickly in the view of many. Was that to hide incriminating evidence that would have exposed the real perpetrators, or just the instinctual reaction to a messy scene of destruction that you prefer to forget about?

No smoking gun has been found, though there are lots of strange leads, most of which point the finger at:

• Israel (the “dancing Israelis,” Odogo text messages minutes before the planes hit the towers, Netanyahu’s “9/11 was good for Israel”);

• Saudi Arabia (the 15 of 19 Saudi hijackers were assisted by Saudi officials, Saudi funds financed al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and now ISIS; Saudi leaders make veiled threats of future terrorism); and

• Pakistan (conspirators Ahmed Omar Sheikh, Ramzi Yousef, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, Inter-Services Intelligence Director General Mahmud Ahmed).

The US and world economy did not collapse; no more such major terrorist attacks occurred. But the world changed. It put the Saudis in both the US bad books (citizens who lost family in 9/11 are suing the Saudi government in US court, most Americans view Saudi Arabia negatively) and good books (US presidents continue to fawn over the Saudis, fearing what honesty might do to US hegemony).

The new, brash, young (32 years old) de facto Saudi ruler Muhammad bin Salman tours the world, insisting in meetings with Western leaders that they must work closely with the Saudis to fight terrorism, even predicting publicly that more terror attacks will happen if Saudi Arabia is not treated with respect and given the leading role in fighting terrorism. This sounds as much a threat as a genuine heartfelt offer. No one can take Saudi boasts as credible in any real fight against terrorism. But their experience in conducting terrorism is hard to ignore.

Bin Salman’s aggressive, erratic behaviour rivals that of Donald Trump. He abruptly cut all relations with Canada (though careful to leave the order for Canadian Light Armoured Vehicles — actually heavy assault vehicles — in place) over a timid tweet by the Canadian foreign minister protesting Saudi torture and incarceration of human rights activists. Saudi Arabia’s state media fired back by briefly posting a telling picture, hinting of more 9/11s if the Saudis are not happy.

His father, then leader and king, was told the same thing in person by Barack Obama in 2016 and, though angered, just insisted that Saudi law should be respected. Norway and Sweden have also protested in the past without any recriminations.

The message from the fiery Bin Salman to pipsqueak countries: do what we want or else (but we will still buy arms from you). Given that 15 of the 19 nominal hijackers were Saudis, that clandestine Saudi support for ISIS continues, both in Syria and in Afghanistan, and the crown prince circles the globe with veiled threats of more terrorism, this smacks more of blackmail than solidarity. It’s the same message for big guns (US, Britain, etc.) but it is the messenger, little Canada, that he chose to shoot.

Obama saw the threat the Saudis pose and worked to bring Iran into the peace equation in the Muslim East. In March 2016, he said the unsteady condition of the Muslim East “requires us to say to our friends as well as to the Iranians that they need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood and institute some sort of cold peace.” Obama was no friend of Iran, but Trump makes him look like an angel.

Trump has reverted to the Bush-Cheney plan, putting all his chips on Saudi Arabia and Israel as the key to guaranteeing US hegemony in the Muslim East. The pieces of the puzzle were falling into place in 2001. Pakistan’s ISI and rogue Saudis were directly involved in planning and financing 9/11. The idea was/is a Saudi-led hegemony in the Muslim world, where Pakistan would preside in Central Asia.

The Pentagon, CIA, and FBI lied to the 9/11 Commission, not only to protect their links to their own duplicitous agents, but — more importantly — to prevent the whole Saudi/Israeli/Pakistani/US alliance from collapsing in a real Islamic revolution, à la Iran. In short, rely on the perpetrators of 9/11 to keep the US on top, with faithful allies Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Israel — one big happy family.

The US-Israel-Saudi-Pakistani pact dates from 1979, when the US started to pour money into jihadi coffers to undermine the Soviet Union, to the delight of the Saudi and Pakistani leaders. But it spun out of control by 2001. Al-Qaeda proved to be a wildcard. It had its own agenda that was to undermine the Saudi tribal rulers and create a world caliphate. That led to 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Syria. Jerusalem is an illusion of victory, recalling Hitler visiting occupied Paris in 1940.

But it is not the same world today, and the blockbuster Hollywood scenario has gone off-script. The US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq left a power vacuum in the region. Neither Pakistan nor Saudi Arabia is capable of filling it, and the US dare not. Pakistan has moved on, with the new Prime Minister Imran Khan no friend of the US, and Iraqi politics out of US control, with Shi‘is the dominant force, and little love lost for the US. Both countries are moving toward Iran as the only reliable ally, ironically, pushed by the US itself.

This reversion to reliance on the sponsors of 9/11 by Trump, and the gift of Jerusalem to the Israelis, cannot succeed. As Canadians learned when their ambassador was abruptly expelled from Riyadh, the portents are potentially another 9/11. And the world is not swallowing US hysteria about Iran as the real terrorist.

The desperation of Trump, who bullied his way into addressing the UN Security Council, on the 9/11 anniversary, over the threat of Iran to world peace might be laughable if it was not so fraught with the potential for calamity. It looks like an attempt to intimidate and trip Iran up just as it is moving into taking its rightful place in the Muslim East as the locus for Palestinian resistance and undermining the Saudi-Israeli-US axis. To try to pin 9/11 on the one country that has fought unceasingly against terrorism, and is the victim of it, thanks to the “axis,” beggars belief.

America’s sins can’t help but catch up with it, along with its allies-made-in-Hell — Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan (though the latter may already be moving away from the warmongers). As I concluded in an interview with Kayhan in 2015, “All the causes of the rise of terrorism from the 1970s on — extreme poverty and endemic unemployment, in the face of humiliation by US-Israeli hegemony in the region — are still in place. We are caught in the “intervention trap” (invasions and bombings merely give further cause to rebels), and the cycle of violence will continue.

 

Eric Walberg

Ex-Army Officer Reveals Attempts by US Gov'ts to Hide Saudi Links to 9/11

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TEHRAN (FNA)- A former US army officer and freelance writer disclosed that the US administrations have always attempted to conceal links between Saudi Arabia with the hijackers who caused the 9/11 tragedy, regretting that many American citizens are not aware of Riyadh's role in spreading extremism, support for terrorism and crimes in Syria and Yemen.

"Since 9/11, there has been a sustained effort, across both Republican and Democratic administrations, to conceal from the public any indication of Saudi government links to the attacks," Brian McGlinchey told FNA on Saturday.

McGlinchey launched 28Pages.org in July 2014 as an information and activism hub for the nonpartisan movement to declassify 28 pages on Saudi links to 9/11. 

"There is now an effort underway to achieve the release of many thousands of other 9/11 documents that are still being kept secret. Members of Congress have introduced resolutions in both the Senate and the House of Representatives urging the wide declassification of additional 9/11 documents, including many that relate to the investigation of possible Saudi government links to the attacks. Survivors and family members of those killed in the attacks have created a website, declassify911.org, to help build support for the declassification effort," he added.

McGlinchey noted that JASTA has enabled a civil lawsuit to move forward, in which 9/11 survivors, family members and insurers are presenting a case alleging that officials of the Saudi government provided financial and other support to the 9/11 hijackers, and seeking financial compensation from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, saying, "That case is currently in the discovery phase, and the plaintiffs have asked both the US and Saudi governments to produce documents about individuals accused of aiding two hijackers at the direction of Saudi officials." 

McGlinchey explained that JASTA was not created to enable government prosecution, but instead to allow victims of terrorism to sue governments for compensation. The case is complex and moving very slowly, but JASTA is making it possible.

He said that one of the most important questions of 9/11 is why the CIA prevented two FBI agents from alerting FBI headquarters that a known al Qaeda operative and future hijacker had obtained a US visa, adding, "Some people believe the CIA was attempting to turn one of more of the future hijackers into double agents who would provide information about al Qaeda to the CIA. If that’s true, the CIA violated a US law that prohibits it from operating inside the United States."

"Since 9/11, there has been a sustained effort, across both Republican and Democratic administrations, to conceal from the public any indication of Saudi government links to the attacks. As recently reported by 28Pages.org, the FBI told a retired agent not to help 9/11 families pursue their lawsuit against Saudi Arabia because the Trump administration wants to have a good relationship with the kingdom. Over and over again, the US government puts the interest of the Saudi government above the right of the American people to have all the facts about the worst terrorist attack ever carried out on American soil," McGlinchey underlined.

He referred to the Saudi government's largest foreign government lobbying operations in America, spending many millions of dollars each year, and said, "Its influence spreads even wider than Capitol Hill, thanks to its sponsorship of think tanks and institutes that mold the opinions of journalists, legislators and the public. In June, 28Pages.org reported that the director of a national security program at Syracuse University had registered with the US Department of Justice as a public relations agent of Saudi Arabia."

"Last year, 28Pages.org revealed that Saudi lobbyists had tricked US military veterans into lobbying against JASTA, flying them to Washington without telling them that the lobbying campaign was organized and paid for by the kingdom," McGlinchey said.

He explained that in addition to the US intelligence community, there are many different interest groups who want to preserve close US-Saudi relations, and said, "One of the most prominent is the American weapons industry, which has enriched itself by arming Saudi Arabia and pressuring the US government to maintain its close relationship with the kingdom."

"The American public has a general distrust of Saudi Arabia and is disturbed by the kingdom's violations of human rights. However, the average citizen is not very well-informed about the kingdom's role in spreading Salafist extremism around the world. Nor does the average American realize that the Saudi government, working with the US government, has played a major role in destabilizing Syria. Similarly, thanks to a lack of reporting by US media, most Americans are unaware of the horrible human toll of Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen," McGlinchey concluded.