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Eric Zuesse
(crosspost with strategic-culture.org)
Micah Zenko is a blogger who posts on a main site of America’s foreign-policy establishment, the Council on Foreign Relations, and he posted there on January 6th, “How Many Bombs Did the United States Drop in 2015?” He calculated: “Last year, the United States dropped an estimated total of 23,144 bombs in six countries. Of these, 22,110 were dropped in Iraq and Syria.”
His curiosity about this question had been sparked because he noticed that, “The primary focus — meaning the commitment of personnel, resources, and senior leaders’ attention — of U.S. counterterrorism policies is the capture or killing (though, overwhelmingly killing) of existing terrorists. … I often ask U.S. government officials and mid-level staffers, ‘what are you doing to prevent a neutral [Islamic] person from becoming a terrorist?’ They always claim … this is not their responsibility, and point toward other agencies, usually the Department of State (DOS) or Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where this is purportedly their obligation internationally or domestically, respectively.” But, Zenko noted, “The problem with this ‘kill-em’-all with airstrikes’ rule, is that it is not working.”
One reader-comment there was, “This is b/c we are fighting an IDEOLOGY. We are not fighting a traditional military.” However, whereas in the non-Islamic world, it’s an “ideology,” it is instead a sect within the Islamic world; and, right now, it’s a rapidly growing one. It is, in fact, an offshoot of the Wahhabist sect of Sunni Islam that the Saud family have been advocating and promoting ever since the year 1744, and upon which they have established the nation that they now own. But, recently, it is inflaming much of the world.
Another, more-extensive, reader-comment, from a Michael Beer, observed: “If the USA were fighting an ideology, then it would be bombing and confronting the ideological heartland, namely Saudi Arabia. There is no significant ideological difference between Saudi Arabia (Wahabbis), Al Nusra, Al Quaeda and ISIIL. … USA’s militarized response to September 11 has cost trillions, killed more than 1 million people and helped rip many societies apart. … Since Obama took office, he has slaughtered thousands of innocent Arab men, women and children to prop up fossil fuel monopolies and to make blood money profits for defense contractors.” Responses to that response were generally in the nature of: “I agree 100% with your comment. If only the average American knew and understood your statements…the farce that is the political system and the military industrial complex would have no leg to stand on.”
So: even regular readers of a U.S. establishment website are coming to recognize that something is very wrong with American foreign policies regarding terrorism. This problem goes deep:
America’s leaders use the word “terrorist” to refer to Shia Islam, and not only to Sunni Islam. But the reality is that all international jihadism except against Israel, has come from fundamentalist Sunni Islam, and is based in fundamentalist Sunni interpretations of the Quran.
The only instances where there has been from Shiites anything like that terrorism — the terror-attacks against the U.S. and Europe, such as 9/11 and Charlie Hebdo — was when the Shiite organization in Lebanon, Hezbollah, in the 1980s and ’90s bombed the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon, Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, and the Israeli Embassy in London, especially so as to punish the U.S. for donating $3 billion each year to enable Israel to continue being an apartheid state oppressing Muslims (called “Palestinians”). Whereas Israel (as long as it continues being an anti-Muslim apartheid state) has sound reason for opposing Hezbollah, no Western country has reason to consider Shiite nations to be a threat — yet the U.S. does, and so do its European satellites. There is important history behind this reality:
Iran is the center of international Shiism. In 1953, the U.S. and UK overthrew, in a U.S.-run coup, the democratically elected non-sectarian and progressive Iranian President Mohammed Mossadegh, and installed there a brutal Shah, who became world-renowned for his tortures and who did with Iran’s oil and gas what the U.S. told him to do with it. Since Iran is the world’s leading Shiia-majority nation, the decades between the installation of the U.S. puppet-Shah in 1953 and his overthrow by the increasingly rabidly anti-U.S. Iranian public in 1979, were a chamber of Iranian horrors that served Washington and the oil-based U.S. aristocracy, and that largely created the ongoing war between Shiia Islam itself, versus the U.S. and its allies. Leading the anti-Shiite war is not the U.S., but instead the al-Saud family, which gained its rule in 1744 on an oath to destroy Shiites. As The Atlantic headlined on 21 September 2010, “Understanding the $60 Billion Saudi Arms Deal: It’s About Iran.” Then, on 8 September 2015, the Congressional Research Service reported that, during the five-year period from October 2010 through October 2014, the U.S. and the Sauds signed deals to deliver $90 billion of U.S. weaponry to them. That’s a lot of weapons-sales, all of which are from America’s arms-makers, to Saudi Arabia, for use by the al-Saud family — enough to join-at-the-hip America’s aristocracy to the Saud family, who are the core Saudi aristocrats and the world’s most powerful family.
US Predator drone: the infamous “bug splatter”, symbol of imperial contempt for non-American lives.
On 28 January 2012, the Dayton Business Journal issued a carefully researched study, headlined “Top 10 foreign buyers of U.S. weapons,” and here were the rankings at that time: #1=Saudi Arabia; #2=UAE; #3=Egypt; #4=Taiwan; #5=Australia; #6=Iraq; #7=Pakistan; #8=UK; #9=Turkey; #10=S. Korea.
He who pays the piper calls the tune: those are the American aristocracy’s main allies.
The Western countries are allied with the royal families — all of them fundamentalist Sunnis — that own and run Saudi Arabia (the al-Sauds), Qatar (the al-Thanis), Kuwait (the al-Sabahs), Bahrain (the al-Khalifas) and the six royal families of UAE. All of those aristocratic families — even when they have conflicts between each other, such as the al-Thanis versus the al-Khalifas — all of them are led by the al-Sauds, because King Saud is by far the world’s richest person, owning and controlling at least a trillion dollars and perhaps in the tens of trillions, most of which is owned secretly but even the visible part is over a trillion (and was over ten trillion when oil was at $100/barrel).
Perhaps none of the other royal families has anyone who controls more than a trillion dollars. Neither Forbes nor Bloomberg, in listing the world’s billionaires, includes any royal family, because capitalism gets a bad image if the public come to know that most of the world’s wealth is inherited, not earned by the owner. It’s mainly the result of two things: conquest, plus inheritance. The origin of King Saud’s wealth goes all the way back to the time 1744, when the jihadist preacher Muhammad Ibn Wahhab agreed with the Arab gang-leader Muhammad Ibn Saud, for Saud and his descendants to exterminate all Shiia and take over the world and impose Wahhab’s version of Sunni Islam, and for Wahhab’s followers to recognize and accept the Saud family’s right to control the government.
That’s what America has become allied with. The American Government now doesn’t represent the American people — at least not in international relations. It represents the Sauds, who hate especially Iran and the Shiite secularist Bashar al-Assad who leads Syria, but also hate the Russians, for not only having been consistently opposed to jihadists (that’s to say, consistently opposed to Sunni extremists such as those Arab potentates send around the world), but for having friendly relations with Shiite-led countries, which these Arab potentates aim to destroy if not take over. Increasingly since 1970, U.S. foreign policy serves those potentates — and, above all, serves the Saud family.
Here are snapshots of the two most-recent American Presidents greeting the Saudi King:
No Saudi King has ever bowed to any U.S. President. Hierarchy exists in international power. However, for U.S. Presidents to bow to Saudi Kings does not mean that the U.S. Government subordinates itself to the Saud family in all matters, but only that in an overall sense the U.S. Government in international affairs serves primarily the interests of the Saud family — the world’s richest family. That’s what these bows mean; that’s what they actually signify.
The Sauds keep control over their own country not only by means of the local clergy authenticating the Sauds’ authority from God to rule, and by means of the U.S. supply of weapons and training to the Sauds’ army, but also by means of the Sauds’ iron control over all their nation’s news-media, so that the Saudi public will continue to accept the political status-quo in their country and will believe that anyone the Sauds kill is deserving of death. If any of these means of controlling the public — weapons, media, and clergy — were to end, violent revolution would break out in their country, and the Saud family (or at least ones that survive) would all flee abroad, perhaps mostly to America. They’d still be enormously rich because of their having diversified their portfolios so as to be not entirely dependent upon the economic output of only one land, Saudi Arabia. However, they’d be operating from abroad, to try to regain control over the mayhem that their family has been building towards since 1744.
The Saudi public are brainwashed so much that they admire ISIS. On 19 March 2015, the muslimstatistics website bannered “Saudi Arabia: 92% approve of ISIS representation of Islam and Sharia law – Poll.” (One can’t reasonably blame the Saudi public for what they don’t know, and for what they do know that’s actually false. But that’s how things actually are: they’re mental slaves.) Therefore any ‘democracy’ which might follow after the end of the Sauds’ rule there would inevitably be just as extremist as the al-Sauds themselves are but incredibly violent and chaotic, and probably led by the Wahhabist clergy directly (which would be the only remaining authority there), basically cutting the Saud family out of the political picture and installing instead a professedly jihadist government (which the Sauds are not — they couldn’t be that and simultaneously retain any support from their subordinate aristocracies, especially the American and other non-Islamic ones).
Saudi Arabia, under the al-Sauds, is the world’s largest market for U.S.-made weapons, and, unlike Israel, which buys U.S. weaponry with three billion dollars annually that’s donated by U.S. taxpayers, the far larger volume of U.S.-made weapons that King Saud buys for his country are being bought with cash from Saudi Arabia’s taxpayers — not from America’s. America’s “military-industrial complex” depends very heavily upon that market. It includes not only the Sauds, who buy the most U.S. weapons, but #2=UAE; #3=Egypt; #4=Taiwan; #5=Australia; #6=Iraq; #7=Pakistan; #8=UK; #9=Turkey; #10=S. Korea.
Several commentators have noted the similarity between the Islamic law that’s applied by ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and the Islamic law that’s applied by the Saud family in Saudi Arabia. When the U.S. Government allies with the Sauds, the only agreement or disagreement about anything is with the personnel in charge, not on any matter of principle, because the U.S. Government is already allied with extremist Sunnis. The U.S. Government is allied with Arabic royal families — and, above all, with the Sauds. (In fact, the top royal Sauds were also the top financial donors to Al Qaeda, at least pre-9/11.)
America’s foreign policies are therefore personal, not based on principles (except on the principle: Might makes right, and wealth means might; so, wealth means right).
When the U.S. Government opposes Shiite-led nations such as Iran and Syria, the purpose isn’t to defeat terrorism (except perhaps against Israel), but to serve the aspirations of the Sauds and their friends.
If the U.S. Government were serious about protecting its people against terrorist attacks, then the U.S. Government would apologize to the people of Iran and would switch its alliances within the Muslim world to Iran and away from the Saud family. This would not mean that the U.S. would have to endorse Shiite sectarianism: in fact, Iran’s chief ally abroad is the Shiite leader of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, whose basic commitment (as a leader of the Ba’ath Party) has always been to oppose any control over the state by any religion.
On 21 April 2015, International Business Times headlined “Christians Threatened By ISIS In Lebanon Turn To Hezbollah For Help,” and their Alessandria Masi reported from Ras Baalbek Lebanon, and interviewed “Rifat Nasrallah [who] commands the Christian militia of Ras Baalbek, aligned with Shiite group Hezbollah, to fight the Islamic State group in Lebanon.” His army were allied with “Hezbollah fighters. The members of the Shiite militia, which the European Union and the U.S. both consider a terrorist group, are concerned about the Sunni jihadis from Syria enough to make common cause with Christians. In fact, the Christians of Ras Baalbek and the Iran-backed militants are downright friendly to each other. … They are pioneering a new approach: Christians and Shiites together, against the Sunni extremists. … ‘The only people who are protecting us are the resistance of Hezbollah,’ Nasrallah said. ‘The only one standing with the army is Hezbollah. Let’s not hide it anymore.’” ISIS was spreading from Syria into Lebanon.
Indirectly, their common enemy then was the United States (and its European allies) — because the U.S. was actually allied with the Sunni extremists who were fighting to bring down the non-sectarian Shiite, Bashar al-Assad, in Syria, and replace him with a fundamentalist-Sunni leader, in accord with the desires of the Arabic oil families.
It would be wrong to say that the United States is a terrorist nation, but the U.S. is the world’s leading backer of international terrorism. The U.S. supplies the weapons through its fundamentalist-Sunni allies in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Kuwait, UAE, and Libya. The U.S. is serving as the most important international agent of the Saud family.
That’s the reality. The Big Lie about terrorism is that the West (U.S. and its subordinate aristocracies in Europe) opposes international terrorism. International terrorism in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, drives millions of refugees from those countries into Europe, but the United States is allied with the Saud family producing this refugee crisis there. That’s just a fact.
And even some regular readers of propaganda-sites for the American aristocracy have come to understand this.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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