MoA—More foreign involvement in the war in Libya will be bad for that country but it might be good for Syria. In 2011, after NATO had supported Islamists to destroy the Libyan state, many of those fighters were transferred to Syria to help to destroy that country. Weapons from Libya were transported via Turkey to Syria to support the ‘rebels’ against the government. Both flows are now reverting
MoA—Two and a half years ago the clown prince tried to attack and occupy Qatar. The given ideological reason was the Qatari support for the Muslim Brotherhood. But the real reason was the Saudi need for more money which MbS tried to gain through a real estate and resource grab. The project failed when Turkish troops came to Qatar’s aid.
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—James Le Mesurier, the founder of the White Helmets, has died. He was found to have plummeted from a height to the street outside his home, and authorities are reportedly calling it a suicide. Le Mesurier has a history with British military intelligence and was fundamentally involved with an extremely shady narrative management operation geared toward manufacturing support for yet another imperialist military intervention in yet another Middle Eastern nation, so obviously any claims of suicide should be taken with a grain of salt no smaller than a Buick.
ANDRE VLTCHEK—This religious extremism—Wahhabism—has been exported to all corners of the world. Paradoxically and bizarrely, it has been intertwined with Western, particularly North American, “culture”. Extreme capitalism has been thriving all over the Kingdom. More oil, more kitsch.
PEPE ESCOBAR—The opposition sees the internal Saudi dynamics as MBS being Trump’s man in Riyadh – because of the oil angle – while the CIA, like Khashoggi, would rather deal with a constitutional monarchy and have its own asset in command. Total instability reigns. The only certainty is that the Houthi movement’s increasingly sophisticated offensive will continue to be deployed inside Saudi Arabia, unless MBS shelves his vicious war. Otherwise, he’d better start booking a one-way ticket to London.