As the influence of Crown Prince Mohamad bin Salman on Saudi Arabia’s decision-making bodies has been increasing, the country has taken an aggressive foreign policy approach.
The most important reason for changes in Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy is the crown prince’s ambitions and inexperience in governing as well as ignoring the realities of the country’s political environment.
The illegal invasion of Yemen, widespread intervention in the domestic affairs of Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Libya as well as cutting ties with Qatar are among obvious effects of the aggressive approach adopted by Saudi Arabia.
The unprecedented strain in Riyadh’s ties with Iran and extensive effort to apply direct or indirect pressure on the Islamic Republic are the measures that can be considered as the crown prince’s foreign policy achievement.
After nearly six years of following such an approach, not only no new achievement has emerged, but also the country has faced the burdensome economic, security and political costs.
Being caught in the Yemeni quagmire coupled with failure in implementing its policies in Syria and Iraq, which were being pursued through financial and intelligence support for the Takfiri terrorist groups are the effects of the aggressive approach. The inept foreign policy has resulted in more debacles, such as the scandal of arresting Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri while in Saudi Arabia and Qatar’s successful resistance in face of widespread pressure by Riyadh.
In recent months, Saudi Arabia have made many efforts to reduce the problems caused its aggressive foreign policy approach.
In this regard, Riyadh has taken some actions. For example, it has taken steps to resolve disputes with Qatar and attempting to get closer to the Yemeni Houthis in order to reach a peace agreement.
Although Saudi Arabia has been trying to review its previous aggressive approaches, there are numerous evidence that the country is seeking to interfere in the regional states’ domestic affairs and dictate its political will through soft and less costly methods. Recent events in Lebanon and Iraq that led to political and security problems along with efforts by the Saudi-affiliated media such as Iran International TV and the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya TV to exploit the recent popular protests in Iran are just a few examples of the Saudi interventionist approach.
Riyadh must learn lessons from the consequences of the aggressive policy toward the countries in the region and of enormous economic and security losses. Saudi Arabia should be aware that pursuing previous policies with tactical changes will also result in unpredictable costs for the country.
TEHRAN (FNA)- The US Congress has passed the so-called "Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019" to turn on a green light for atrocities and any attempt to incite violence to contain China.
The problem is that just like in Iran, the US attempt to incite violence and vandalism won’t work to give the desired result in China. The reasons are plenty.
A large number of facts show that the United States has long been involved in Hong Kong affairs. The Congress proposed from 1984 to 2014 more than 60 bills concerning Hong Kong. WikiLeaks had disclosed that the US Consulate General has repeatedly published opinions aimed at interfering in Hong Kong affairs and frequently met with opposition figures.
From the various support provided by the US National Endowment for Democracy to anti-China elements in Hong Kong, to open meetings between US politicians and Hong Kong's pro-independence leaders; from some US media's biased reporting on the violence to attempts to implement the long-arm jurisdiction through the latest bill, the intentions of those US politicians to bring trouble to Hong Kong and contain China are clear.
The international community has generally slammed and condemned the acts. Indeed, no country would ever allow violence to disrupt its society and undermine its economy. So the act is detrimental for the United States, and for the world, as well as for China.
Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Abbas Mousavi has said that the United States' violation of international norms through such acts will definitely cause serious damage to global stability. The United States has become a target of criticism for inciting violence for its own interests and that its attempt to intervene in Iran or in Hong Kong affairs is unpopular and doomed to failure.
However, in the minds of some politicians in the United States, "riots" could be dealt with employing double standards. A riot happening inside the United States must be heavily suppressed. As a result, people have seen US police dealing harshly with the 2011 Occupy Wall Street campaign and the 2015 Baltimore riots in Maryland. When it comes to external riots in Iran or Hong King, the same politicians immediately change their tones and paint the "riots" as "a beautiful sight to behold".
They ignited and instigated riots, launched wars and "color revolutions", plunging many places in the world into chaos in order to seek political interests and safeguard US global hegemony.
In the past few decades, wherever the United States intervened, turmoil and poverty have been commonplace. That's why when some US politicians professed to stand with Iran or Hong Kong, many netizens ridiculed them. Thus is because when they stood with Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, they were all burned to the ground.
A just cause attracts much support, while an unjust one finds little. By publicly supporting violence in Iran and Hong Kong, the politicians in the United States have seriously violated the basic norms of international law and international relations, and invited uncertainties to the future of their own country.
For example, the United States ignited war and turmoil in the Middle East, which has helped brew a large-scale refugee crisis, and had a tremendous impact on the social order of the Western countries. Its wrong policies and interventions in Latin America have contributed a major role in triggering major flow of illegal immigration into the United States.
Iran is not a kite in the hands of some Americans who could pull it as they wish. Iran’s resolve to implement its Islamic-democratic principles and resist any outside interference in its internal affairs is unwavering. Any attempt to incite violence to contain Iran’s progress is simply not going to work. The same could be concluded about China’s rise.
There is something profoundly deceitful in the Democratic Party and corporate media’s framing of Donald Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria.
One does not need to like Trump or ignore the dangers posed to the Kurds, at least in the short term, by the sudden departure of US forces from northern Syria to understand that the coverage is being crafted in such a way as to entirely overlook the bigger picture.
The problem is neatly illustrated in this line from a report by the Guardian newspaper of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s meeting this week with Trump, who is described as having had a “meltdown”. Explaining why she and other senior Democrats stormed out, the paper writes that “it became clear the president had no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East”.
Hang on a minute! Let’s pull back a little, and not pretend – as the media and Democratic party leadership wish us to do – that the last 20 years did not actually happen. Many of us lived through those events. Our memories are not so short.
Islamic State, or Isis, didn’t emerge out of nowhere. It was entirely a creation of two decades of US interference in the Middle East. And I’m not even referring to the mountains of evidence that US officials backed their Saudi allies in directly funding and arming Isis – just as their predecessors in Washington, in their enthusiasm to oust the Soviets from the region, assisted the jihadists who went on to become al-Qaeda.
No, I’m talking about the fact that in destroying three key Arab states – Iraq, Libya and Syria – that refused to submit to the joint regional hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Israel, Washington’s local client states, the US created a giant void of governance at the heart of the Middle East. They knew that that void would be filled soon enough by religious extremists like Islamic State – and they didn’t care.
Overthrow, not regime change
You don’t have to be a Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi or Bashar Assad apologist to accept this point. You don’t even have to be concerned that these so-called “humanitarian” wars violated each state’s integrity and sovereignty, and are therefore defined in international law as “the supreme war crime”.
The bigger picture – the one no one appears to want us thinking about – is that the US intentionally sought to destroy these states with no obvious plan for the day after. As I explained in my book Israel and the Clash of Civilisations, these haven’t so much been regime-change wars as nation-state dismantling operations – what I have termed overthrow wars.
The logic was a horrifying hybrid of two schools of thought that meshed neatly in the psychopathic foreign policy goals embodied in the ideology of neoconservatism – the so-called “Washington consensus” since 9/11.
The first was Israel’s long-standing approach to the Palestinians. By constantly devastating any emerging Palestinian institution or social structures, Israel produced a divide-and-rule model on steriods, creating a leaderless, ravaged, enfeebled society that sucked out all the local population’s energy. That strategy proved very appealing to the neoconservatives, who saw it as one they could export to non-compliant states in the region.
The second was the Chicago school’s Shock Doctrine, as explained in Naomi Klein’s book of that name. The chaotic campaign of destruction, the psychological trauma and the sense of dislocation created by these overthrow wars were supposed to engender a far more malleable population that would be ripe for a US-controlled “colour revolution”.
The recalcitrant states would be made an example of, broken apart, asset-stripped of their resources and eventually remade as new dependent markets for US goods. That was what George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Halliburton really meant when they talked about building a New Middle East and exporting democracy.
Even judged by the vile aims of its proponents, the Shock Doctrine has been a half-century story of dismal economic failure everywhere it has been attempted – from Pinochet’s Chile to Yeltsin’s Russia. But let us not credit the architects of this policy with any kind of acumen for learning from past errors. As Bush’s senior adviser Karl Rove explained to a journalist whom he rebuked for being part of the “reality-based community”: “We’re an empire now and, when we act, we create our own reality.”
The birth of Islamic State
The barely veiled aim of the attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria was to destroy the institutions and structures that held these societies together, however imperfectly. Though no one likes to mention it nowadays, these states – deeply authoritarian though they were – were also secular, and had well-developed welfare states that ensured high rates of literacy and some of the region’s finest public health services.
One can argue about the initial causes of the uprising against Assad that erupted in Syria in 2011. Did it start as a popular struggle for liberation from the Assad government’s authoritarianism? Or was it a sectarian insurgency by those who wished to replace Shia minority rule with Sunni majority rule? Or was it driven by something else: as a largely economic protest by an under-class suffering from food shortages as climate change led to repeated crop failures? Or are all these factors relevant to some degree?
Given how closed a society Syria was and is, and how difficult it therefore is to weigh the evidence in ways that are likely to prove convincing to those not already persuaded, let us set that issue aside. Anyway, it is irrelevant to the bigger picture I want to address.
The indisputable fact is that Washington and its Gulf allies wished to exploit this initial unrest as an opportunity to create a void in Syria – just as they had earlier done in Iraq, where there were no uprisings, nor even the WMDs the US promised would be found and that served as the pretext for Bush’s campaign of Shock and Awe.
The limited uprisings in Syria quickly turned into a much larger and far more vicious war because the Gulf states, with US backing, flooded the country with proxy fighters and arms in an effort to overthrow Assad and thereby weaken Iranian and Shia influence in the region. The events in Syria and earlier in Iraq gradually transformed the Sunni religious extremists of al-Qaeda into the even more barbaric, more nihilistic extremists of Islamic State.
A dark US vanity project
As Rove and Cheney played around with reality, nature got on with honouring the maxim that it always abhors a vacuum. Islamic State filled the vacuum Washington’s policy had engineered.
The clue, after all, was in the name. With the US and Gulf states using oil money to wage a proxy war against Assad, Isis saw its chance to establish a state inspired by a variety of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabist dogma. Isis needed territory for their planned state, and the Saudis and US obliged by destroying Syria.
This barbarian army, one that murdered other religious groups as infidels and killed fellow Sunnis who refused to bow before their absolute rule, became the west’s chief allies in Syria. Directly and covertly, we gave them money and weapons to begin building their state on parts of Syria.
Again, let us ignore the fact that the US, in helping to destroy a sovereign nation, committed the supreme war crime, one that in a rightly ordered world would ensure every senior Washington official faces their own Nuremberg Trial. Let us ignore too for the moment that the US, consciously through its actions, brought to life a monster that sowed death and destruction everywhere it went.
The fact is that at the moment Assad called in Russia to help him survive, the battle the US and the Gulf states were waging through Islamic State and other proxies was lost. It was only a matter of time before Assad would reassert his rule.
From that point onwards, every single person who was killed and every single Syrian made homeless – and there were hundreds of thousands of them – suffered their terrible fate for no possible gain in US policy goals. A vastly destructive overthrow war became instead something darker still: a neoconservative vanity project that ravaged countless Syrian lives.
A giant red herring
Trump is now ending part of that policy. He may be doing so for the wrong reasons. But very belatedly – and possibly only temporarily – he is closing a small chapter in a horrifying story of western-sponsored barbarism in the Middle East, one intimately tied to Islamic State.
What of the supposed concerns of Pelosi and the Democratic Party under whose watch the barbarism in Syria took place? They should have no credibility on the matter to begin with.
But their claims that Trump has “no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East” is a giant red herring they are viciously slapping us in the face with in the hope the spray of seawater blinds us.
First, Washington sowed the seeds of Islamic State by engineering a vacuum in Syria that Isis – or something very like it – was inevitably going to fill. Then, it allowed those seeds to flourish by assisting its Gulf allies in showering fighters in Syria with money and arms that came with only one string attached – a commitment to Sunni jihadist ideology inspired by Saudi Wahhabism.
Isis was made in Washington as much as it was in Riyadh. For that reason, the only certain strategy for preventing the revival of Islamic State is preventing the US and the Gulf states from interfering in Syria again.
With the Syrian army in charge of Syrian territory, there will be no vacuum for Isis to fill. Its state-building rationale is now unrealisable, at least in Syria. It will continue to wither, as it would have done years before if the US and its Gulf allies had not fuelled it in a proxy war they knew could not be won.
Doomed Great Game
The same lesson can be drawn by looking at the experience of the Syrian Kurds. The Rojava fiefdom they managed to carve out in northern Syria during the war survived till now only because of continuing US military support. With the US departure, and the Kurds too weak to maintain their improvised statelet, a vacuum was again created that this time risks sucking in the Turkish army, which fears a base for Kurdish nationalism on its doorstep.
The Syrian Kurds’ predicament is simple: face a takeover by Turkey or seek Assad’s protection to foil Turkish ambition. The best hope for the Kurds looks to be the Syrian army’s return, filling the vacuum and regaining a chance of long-term stability.
That could have been the case for all of Syria many tens of thousands of deaths ago. Whatever the corporate media suggest, those deaths were lost not in a failed heroic battle for freedom, which, even if it was an early aspiration for some fighters, quickly became a goal that was impossible for them to realise. No, those deaths were entirely pointless. They were sacrificed by a western military-industrial complex in a US-Saudi Great Game that dragged on for many years after everyone knew it was doomed.
Nancy Pelosi’s purported worries about Isis reviving because of Trump’s Syria withdrawal are simply crocodile fears. If she is really so worried about Islamic State, then why did she and other senior Democrats stand silently by as the US under Barack Obama spent years spawning, cultivating and financing Isis to destroy Syria, a state that was best placed to serve as a bulwark against the head-chopping extremists?
Pelosi and the Democratic leadership’s bad faith – and that of the corporate media – are revealed in their ongoing efforts to silence and smear Tulsi Gabbard, the party’s only candidate for the presidential nomination who has pointed out the harsh political realities in Syria, and tried to expose their years of lies.
Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don’t care about Syria, or its population’s welfare. They don’t care about Assad, or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of American power – and the personal wealth and influence it continues to bestow on them.
World oil supplies have been at the centre of every major crisis in the Middle East for the last seven decades. Having nearly 67 per cent of world oil reserves, the region has dominated every major country’s foreign policy.
The recent crisis between Iran on one side and Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the US on the other reinvokes memories of the first major oil crisis of 1973 when the commodity was used for political leverage. On 6 October 1973 Egypt and Syria, supported by many other Arab countries, attacked Israel to liberate their territories occupied by the Zionist state six years earlier. What became known as the October War marked the first time Arabs had hope of gaining back their lands and revenging their humiliating defeat in the June 1967 war.
Suffering heavy losses and fearing defeat, Israel sought help for its ally, the US, which quickly came to the rescue by launching Operation Nickle Grass eventually delivering over 22,000 tonnes of tanks, artilleries, spare parts and other supplies to the Israeli army over a period of 32 days in non-stop air links between the US and Israel. Considering their options, Arab countries – led by the major Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) member Saudi Arabia – responded by imposing an oil embargo on countries that supported Israel’s continuous occupation of Arab lands.
OAPEC’s embargo targeted the US, the Netherlands, UK, Canada and Japan. It later widened to include Portugal, South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The boycott lasted from October 1973 to March 1974 stalling industry, economic growth and leading to huge fuel shortages for consumers in the targeted countries. When the embargo ended global oil prices jumped by 400 per cent to about 12 dollars per barrel.
It was the first time such Arab solidarity manifested itself in an effective coordinated policy in pursuit of legitimate interests; i.e. liberating occupied lands.
Can the Arabs nowadays repeat their success and force Israel, and its supporters, to at least accept just and fair political settlement to end the conflict in the Middle East?
The Arab world and the entire Middle East have changed so much over the last 46 years since oil was legally and legitimately weaponised. Saudi Arabia, for instance, has further aligned itself with American regional policy which says the real threat is Iran and not Israel. This meant that the Palestinian occupied land, or occupied Syrian Golan Heights for that matter, are no longer pan-Arab issues. This gave Israel a free hand to invade Lebanon in 1982, sieging an Arab capital, Beirut, and launching dozens of sporadic attacks in Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon. Since 1973, OAPEC has lost its strength for different reasons including a lack of political will. OAPEC’s member countries, generally, failed to diversify their economies away from oil, as their main source of revenue, making them vulnerable to an oil embargo on the scale of that seen in 1973.
But the Arabs can no longer, at least in the foreseeable future, use oil to their advantage for a fundamental reason; that is the death of Arab nationalism and the demise of Arab solidarity.
Trump says he does not want war after attack on Saudi oil facilities – [Cartoon/Arabi21]
Learning the massive lesson of 1973, western countries advanced in finding alternative energy sources while making sure to maintain sufficient supplies should events in the Middle East bring about major disruption.
They also reverted to old, more articulated policies towards the Arab world by making sure to fragment the region’s collective interests.
The ideas of Bernard Lewis (1916-2018), a British American historian, proved to be useful and practical. Lewis once envisioned a fragmented Middle East in which tribal, sectarian and ethnical struggles, rooted or implanted in the region, need to be stirred up in order for their destructive powers to kick into effect. He believed the expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait in 1991, not only obliterated the Iraqi state but, most importantly in his opinion, ended the doctrine of Arab nationalism for good taking with it any manifestations of wider effective Arab solidarity amongst the nation states.
In his article “Rethinking the Middle East” published in 1992 he predicted that the region will be dominated by its latent forces of self-destructive currents. Such forces will not only inhibit the rise of the Arab nation state but also end all forms of solidarity among nations ushering in, instead, support for sects, tribes and ethnicities.
Indeed; this is what is going on now in the region. Since the so called “Arab Spring” in 2011, countries like Syria, Yemen and Egypt, home to different sects and ethnicities, are witnessing increased internal conflicts within their own borders weakening the state itself. In Libya for example, where there is no religious difference as 98 per cent of the population is Sunni Muslim, a different conflict is emerging. People of small minorities like the Tebu, Amazigh and Karaghila – tribes mainly in Misrata tracing their origins to Turkey – are increasingly identifying with outsiders and do not see themselves as part of Libya. This diminishes social solidarity even within countries themselves let alone at the pan-Arab level.
Lewis, regularly, consulted by neocons decision makers, particularly during George W. Bush administration, figured that, given such internal conflicts when properly nurtured, the entire region will be controlled by outsiders where the US should be dominate power.
This is what we are witnessing today, unfortunately. In such circumstances, solid pan-Arab solidarity on the scale of 1973 will only be remembered but never repeated!
Photograph Source: Mайкл Гиммельфарб – Public Domain
As part of then-Prime Minister (PM) Theresa May’s supposed preparations for a no-deal Brexit, the government asked different departments of the UK’s civil service, including those responsible for food, agriculture, medicine, and chemicals, to come up with impact assessments. The worst-case scenarios (not leaked or released at the time of writing) were codenamed Black Swan. Michael Gove, the future Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (basically the deputy PM), dismissed Operation Black Swan as a “film about a ballet dancer” and even denied that it is a government document.
Despite government claims to the contrary; Operation Yellowhammer was not a worst-case scenario but contingency plans for likely outcomes of a no-deal Brexit. May’s Yellowhammer documents were leaked to the Mail on Sunday and warned of Britain’s vulnerability to chemical supplies for water purification.
The updated Yellowhammer documents prepared for the incoming Johnson government were also leaked, in this instance to the Sunday Times. Among other things, the documents note that Britain’s importation of packaged medicaments could be severely disrupted by border queues in the event of a no-deal Brexit, particularly where refrigerated medicines are concerned. It also notes the potential unavailability of foods and food price increases. The documents expose the flaws in the corporate, neoliberal globalized order that robs nations of their self-reliance.
But the very politicians now voting to stop a no-deal Brexit in order to prevent this kind of potentially dangerous disruption are the same who supported the infliction of similar pain on other, more vulnerable countries. The first was Libya in 2011. Parliament’s own inquiry into the bombing (led by the US as part of NATO’s mission) found that Britain’s involvement was based on erroneous intelligence.
LIBYA
The bombing also appeared to be a violation of international law, as it violated UN Security Council Resolution 1973. UNSCR 1973 allowed states to use “all necessary measures … to protect civilians” from Libya’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi. But the British Parliamentary report later acknowledged that civilians were not actually in danger. UNSCR 1973 also invokes Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which does not authorize military intervention in other states, but rather, allows the use of military operations to enforce actions short of invasion; for example, international blockades.
At the time, Dominic Grieve–now one of the politicians trying to stop a no-deal Brexit–was PM David Cameron’s Attorney General. Grieve’s job was to provide legal advice to the Cameron government on the Libya bombing. But the government refused to release Grieve’s advice in full. This suggests that Grieve advised that bombing Libya could constitute a war crime. If so, this could make Grieve himself complicit in war crimes. In addition, Grieve voted for the bombing in March 2011.
Another Parliamentary inquiry into the bombing states: “[we] respect the decision not to publish the advice [by Grieve] in full but are disappointed that the Prime Minister [Cameron] felt unable to share the advice with us on a private and confidential basis as this would have enabled us to scrutinise the operation in Libya more effectively.”
In 2018, with Britons still obsessed with Brexit, the UN Food and Agricultural Organization reminded people of the consequences of NATO’s actions, including the ongoing civil war trigged by the bombing in 2011: “the crisis has exacerbated pre-existing challenges associated with agricultural production in Libya, including water scarcity, animal and plant diseases, desertification and labour shortages.”
Let’s also consider the case of Iran. Under Article IV of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran is entitled to enrich uranium for civilian energy. The US and EU, including Britain, accuse Iran of wanting to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapons programme. But successive reports of UN International Atomic Energy Agency find no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons programme. In order to force Iran into agreeing to a uranium enrichment limitation deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)), the US and EU imposed sanctions on Iran.
But the sanctions led to the kind of effects on Iran feared by those who now want to stop a no-deal Brexit in the UK. The science journal Nature reported that “A tightening of already draconian international economic sanctions against Iran is causing serious shortages of certain drugs, vaccines and other key medical supplies in the country, medical researchers and public-health officials are warning.”
Britain’s then-Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, told the Iranians that unless their government was compelled by popular pressure to agree to what became the JCPOA, “We can definitely make the pain much greater.” This appears to have been a violation of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit collective punishments.
Under May and as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hammond was aware of the Yellowhammer documents and now, having been sacked by Boris Johnson, is serving Parliament an independent MP trying to stop a no-deal Brexit, fearing that the same “pain” that he helped to inflicted on Iran could happen to Britons in the event of a no-deal departure from the EU.
CONCLUSION
These examples show that the very politicians who now fear the dire impacts of a no-deal Brexit for Britain are the same who were part of the political machinery that inflicted similar misery on poor, vulnerable populations. Nobody in British media even notices. The Yellowhammer documents also remind us that the real enemies of people are their governments; in this case an explicitly reckless one willing to harm its population for the sake of political survival.
In the US-and-allied nations, the standard way of interpreting wars and international relations is archetypally exemplified by the internationally respected award-winning American war-journalist Marie Colvin, of the London Sunday Times. Her career was stellar, if not absolutely unmatched: she won the “Journalist of the Year” award from the Foreign Press Association, plus five other international journalism prizes, for herself and her publisher. This “consummate war reporter” had started out from a military family, and then Yale, and then UPI, and then interviewed Muammar Gaddafi in 1985 and subsequently, and was clearly on her way up to the top of her profession. But the first really big event in her career was the event that caused her to live the rest of her life with a black eyepatch over her blinded left eye.
It all started in that same year of 1985, but not in Libya. She was also covering in that year the separatist war by the Tamil Tigers, to break off, from Sri Lanka (Ceylon), the far-northern and far-eastern sections of that country, so as to create an independent nation, which would be controlled by Tamils, and no longer be merely a region within the nation of Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is not Tamil-majority, but is instead overwhelmingly Sinhalese population. Marie Colvin was embedded there, along with the anti-Government fighting forces, Tamil separatists, anti-Sinhalese fighters who were at war against Sri Lanka’s Government. This was a Tamil-versus-Sinhal war, and she was reporting it, from the standpoint of the separatist-Tamil rebels.
Her much-celebrated career ended 27 year later, with her own death, on 22 February 2012, in Homs Syria, while she was embedded with anti-Government forces there, who were trying to overthrow Syria’s Government, instead of to overthrow Sri Lanka’s or Libya’s Government.
In all three of those instances — from the very start, to the very the end, of her illustrious career — she was embedded along with, and her articles were in support of, anti-Government forces that the UK-US aristocracy supported, in order to break up countries that this aristocracy were hoping to ‘free’, so as to take control over them, away from the existing independent Governments there. This was her constantly recurring pattern, from her start, to her widely lionized end, as being a promoter of US-UK international empire: journalism that embraces and unquestioningly accepts and endorses imperialism, while never indicating to its audience that it has any connection whatsoever to imperialism.
In between her Sri Lankan start and her Syrian end, she prominently reported several times from Libya, likewise from the standpoint of opponents of that independent nation’s Government. Libya had previously been a vassal state of Turkey (Ottoman Empire), then of Italy (Italian Empire), then was an ‘independent’ nation within the UK-US Empire. And, then, finally — as a result of Libya’s Revolution, which was led by Gaddafi in 1969 — Libya actually did win its independence. Gaddafi became killed in 2011, from forces that had been unleashed by the US-UK Empire and France. That successful assassination happened on 20 October 2011, and America’s Secretary of State promptly and publicly exulted about it, by bragging “We came, we saw, he died — ha ha ha!.”(The Democratic National Committee and its duped voters rewarded her with their Presidential nomination five years later in 2016 because she was ‘the most experienced candidate’, having had lots of such disastrous ‘experiences’, which the duped voters were misled to think to have been an asset, instead of a liability.) Thus, ‘democracy’ was finally being brought to Libyans, by that country’s former foreign imperial masters, plus their agents, Al Qaeda and other local proxy-forces against Gaddafi.
What all of Colvin’s reporting exemplified was ‘journalism’ by a ‘reporter’ who is embedded along with the fighting forces that were being propagandized for by her own nation’s aristocracy — and, though she was American, she was in the employ of American vassals, UK aristocrats. This US-UK aristocracy wanted those countries to become either broken up, or else taken over by themselves entirely; and she was a ‘journalistic’ agent for that, though she was unaware of the fact, and was actually proud of her work, because of her obliviousness to the broader and deeper reality around her.
Here are some crucial details of her career-highlights, in this regard:
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The Tamil Tigers constituted the fighting force of Sri Lanka’s 18% minority of the Sri Lankan population who were 74%-majority Sinhals. Ceylon’s (Sri Lanka’s) Sinhal population had been ruled by the British Empire through that 18% minority of Tamils as UK’s local agents, until Sri Lanka (Ceylon) was finally released from British bondage, and won independence in 1946, when the British Empire was breaking up.
A key Sri Lankan law that passed in 1956, the Sinhala Only Act, made Sinhalese language replace the British-imposed English language as Sri Lanka’s official language. Though the Tamil language had never been Sri Lanka’s official language, many Tamils, who had been accustomed to ruling the land for their British masters, were infuriated that the ‘inferior’ Sinhal people now ruled the land. One of those Sinhals was their own leading aristocrat, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, the progressive who became elected Prime Minister in 1956 and won passage of the Sinhala Only Act and of other laws to actually end British control, but he was assassinated in 1959 by a Buddhist monk because Bandaranaike had just then signed an agreement with the leader of the main Tamil party to bring some degree of local autonomy to the Tamil minority, who were concentrated in the far north and far east. Bandaranaike’s wife, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, was then elected as Prime Minister in 1960, and she not only tried to increase political participation by Buddhists, but she firmly established democratic socialism (or progressivism) as the Government’s policy. But then, the Marxist (dictatorial socialist) Lanka Sama Samaja Party eroded popular support for her government, which became resoundingly defeated in the general election of 1965. Sirimovo became re-elected back into power in 1970. However, her Government’s support of Buddhism and of the Sinhalese language alienated the country’s large Tamil minority, 80% of whom are Hindu (the others: 13% Muslim, 2% Christian, 2% Sikh, and only .8% Buddhist). By contrast, 93% of Sinhals are Buddhist. According to the US Library of Congress in 1988, “93 percent of the Sinhala speakers were Buddhists, and 99.5 percent of the Buddhists in Sri Lanka spoke Sinhala.” (By contrast, the entirety of Sri Lanka is 70% Buddhist, 13% Hindu, 10% Muslim, and 7% Christian — very different from the Tamils.) So: Sri Lanka’s political split was along religious lines — mainly Tamil Hindus versus Sinhal Buddhists — in addition to being along tribal lines; and the Tamils represented, in both respects, supporters of the Hindu caste-system, and of the former British aristocracy, which are America’s vassals, against the Sri Lankan public.
In 1976, the militant separatist Tamil Tigers were born, basically as a reaction against the 1946 freeing of that country from its former colonial British masters.
Starting in 1985, the Tamil Tigers “forcibly occupied more than 35,000 acres of Muslim residential, agricultural and cattle farming land. The government did nothing to help Muslims regain their properties based on title deeds, government permits or the paddy cultivation register. During the ethnic conflict in 1983, 1985, and 1990, more than 12,700 Muslim families were chased out by” the Tiger forces. Wikipedia’s article “Expulsion of Muslims from the Northern province by LTTE” calls the October 1990 portion of that sequence an “ethnic cleansing,” of Muslims, from the north Sri Lankan, Tiger-controlled, city of Chavakachcheri.
Colvin’s ‘news’-‘reports’ were strongly pro-Tamil, anti-Sinhal, but she seems to have known nothing about the country from which she was reporting (at war), and to have cared even less about it. (She even said [12:00-] “The history, and the ability to put into context anything in a war … It didn’t mean anything,” because “it never happens the way you think it’s going to.” She exhibited no interest whatsoever in understanding the background of a war. To her, for example, the war in Chechnya was simply bombings by Russia, “an indiscriminate bombing of Chechen villages,” and she had no curiosity as to why whatever was occurring was actually happening.) Instead, she was obsessed by, and focused only on, the immense suffering that civilians on the US-UK-backed side experienced. Of course, the owner of her newspaper, Rupert Murdoch, probably knew the historical background in this former British colony of Sri Lanka, but her employers never told her about that, and she apparently never asked them about it. They simply couldn’t find any other journalist who was stupid enough to do their bidding in their bosses’ former Empire and who was willing, indeed eager, to accept the pay that they offered to do it. This well-intentioned, but willingly ignorant, employee lost an eye — and was nearly killed — because of her being embedded there, with what were actually (though she never knew it) UK proxy-forces. She thought that she was helping ‘the good guys’ (Tamils) in a war against ‘the bad guys’ (the Government). She was the archetypal star-‘journalist’, having faith in ‘our’ side. She is beloved, by her ‘journalistic’ colleagues, as if she hadn’t been merely the empire’s most effective war-propagandist.
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In 2011, in Libya, she was accepted again into Gaddafi’s tent for an interview, even though she despised him as one of the ‘bad’ guys. (This doesn’t mean “bad” as Hillary Clinton was bad, but instead ‘bad’ as one of the Clinton-Biden-Obama regime’s many victims who all were ‘bad’, in her view. And, of course, the US-UK aristocracy are all ‘good’, in that view: the imperialists’ view.)
In 2012, in Syria, at the conflict in Homs, she was telecasting to CNN, and other TV networks, regarding how evil Bashar al-Assad was for bombing the enclaves there that, in fact, were cooperating with Al Qaeda (though Colvin didn’t report that they were such). It was on 22 February 2012, and Britain’s Telegraph bannered “Marie Colvin: Britain summons Syria ambassador over killing.” This newspaper reported: “In her broadcasts on Tuesday night, Colvin had accused the Syrian Army of perpetrating the ‘complete and utter lie that they are only targeting terrorists.’ Describing what was happening as ‘absolutely sickening’, Colvin said: ‘The Syrian army is simply shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.’” When the US and UK had done more-widespread, entire-city, bombings in World War II, it was fine, in this view; but, now, when Syria’s Government were doing more-targeted versions of that, in order to prevent a takeover of Syria by the US, and a subsequent hand-over of Syria to the Sauds, it wasn’t okay. And, of course, the Western ‘press’-corps, of US-UK invasion-propagandists, place Colvin upon a pedestal, as having constituted the ‘ideal’ ‘ war journalist’.
That’s one way of interpreting wars and international relations — the way that Colvin memorialized.
An excellent docudrama movie about Marie Colvin’s reporting from Sri Lanka in 1985, and Libya in 2011, and Syria in 2012, is the November 2018 “A Private War”. It provides an honest portrayal of her. (Some incompetent critics downgraded the movie because of what actually were deficiencies — basically Colvin’s stupidity and shallowness — in the real person herself. Other incompetent critics, such as at the neoconservative Washington Post, praised it largely because they shared Colvin’s neoconservatism. It’s just an honest, and very skillfully done, biopic.) On the basis of its strictly cinematic values, I consider it a superb film.
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The opposite way — the anti-imperialist viewpoint — of reporting about war and international relations, has been embodied, to cite two prime authentic journalists — NOT propagandists (such as Colvin was) — by Vanessa Beeley, and also by Eva Bartlett. Both of these authentically great reporters have also covered the war in Syria. Here, from them, is this opposite way of interpreting war and international relations:
Those journalists DON’T win awards from the Foreign Press Association, etc., and AREN’T hired by mainstream ‘news’ media, but they are vastly superior to the ones who do.
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