Category Archives: Middle East

The Greater Middle East as an American Garrison: 35 Years of Building Military Bases and Sowing Disaster

Yves here. In a bit of synchronicity, Lambert and I were discussing how bad America is at running an empire. Iraq by any standards was not doing all that well under Saddam Hussein. Growth was lousy due to Western sanctions, and he was thuggish in his methods of maintaining control. Yet he ran a secular government and hostilities between Shia and Sunni were a non-issue. After our invasion, hospitals were basically looted. Electricity barely worked in Baghdad, and wasn’t working all that well long after the US occupied Iraq. Any member of the professional classes that could leave the country did (this was well reported in Australia in 2003 and 2004). So we broke a country…as a demonstration project? For what end? The US also made a botch of the fall of the USSR, with our neoliberal reforms facilitating a plutocratic land-grab in Russia by well-placed insiders, with key Western aides participating in the plunder. OIFVet points out that, contrary to Western ideology, the lives of ordinary Bulgarians was better under the old USSR (Russia is now showing net gains; I’m told Moscow now looks to be on a par with Berlin).

The British took their imperial project far more seriously than we have ours. A big reason that they were more successful is that they built infrastructure, in the form of putting in place a British bureaucracy run by civil servants. And producing those civil servants was the top priority of the education system. C. Northcote Parkinson reports that the top Cambridge and Oxford graduates went to India. The next rank were civil servants in the UK. The ones at the bottom of the heap went into business.

Now there is a lot not to like about a British-style bureaucracy; they are stereotypically rigid and procedure-driven. The Australian Taxation Office is hugely taxpayer-unfriendly if you are a business, compared to the IRS (for instance, when I was there, you needed a receipt for every expense, and not just a credit card receipt. If you had a charge from a newsstand, they wanted to see that it really was a business periodical and not, say porn).

But the rigidity meant it was less easily corrupted, and that no one would question that the government was the paramount authority (a notion that most US regulators seem to have forgotten). Admittedly, with the rise of neoliberalism, no one seems to care about governing well any more, so there hasn’t been much thinking on how to run government in the 20th and 21st century that isn’t really about private sector profiteering.

This article looks at a symptom of the US’ misguided thinking about our imperial project: that of the role of our military bases. It isn’t much discussed in polite company, for instance, that the Saudis had repeatedly asked us to remove our base there because it was causing a lot of discord. We had ignored their request. It took 9/11 to get us to depart.

Peter Van Buren: What Could Possibly Go Right? Four Months Into Iraq War 3.0, the Cracks Are Showing

Yves here. This post, which discusses the barmy US idea that we can create an effective Iraq army having failed in two previous efforts, fails to use a key word: mercenaries. Normally, if you aren’t willing or able to have your own citizens act as soldiers, the next best solution was to hire mercenaries. History shows that does not generally work very well, even though it probably does beat doing nothing. Here, the idea of training locals to do our dirty work, out of allegiance to “Iraq,” a made-up country consisting largely of tribal and ethnic groups that don’t play well together in times of upheaval, is questionable on its face, independent of our poor history with this experiment. But the US seems to be in “if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem will be defined to be a nail” mode.

Gail Tverberg: Eight Pieces of Our Oil Price Predicament

Yves here. As oil prices have come into focus as a result of a recent Saudi decision to facilitate a reset at a lower price per barrel, they’ve come into focus yet again as a critical nexus of economic and political power, and that’s before you get to the complicating overlay of climate change considerations.

This article by Gail Tverberg takes a more sophisticated, multi-persepctive approach than the overwhelming majority of articles on this topic. One of her big messages is that there is no way the world economy is getting divorced from oil any time soon.

Even so, I have some minor points of contention. For instance, she correctly points out that oil producers, even the Saudis, need oil prices to be at a moderately high prices to sustain national budgets. But Riyadh has a very low production break even point, a large cash horde, and plenty of borrowing capacity. The desert kingdom could afford a price war, say to hurt geopolitical enemies or to forestall investment in and development of alternative energy sources. Low oil prices make other energy sources look unattractive, and volatile prices also deter investment, making it well-nigh impossible to forecast cost advantages (if any) and end user takeup.

Low Oil Prices Hurting U.S. Shale Operations

Yves here. In yesterday’s Water Cooler, Lambert posted a link from Bloomberg that indicated that oil at $80 a barrel would pop the fracking bubble, an outcome we’d discussed previously. Some readers in comments expressed doubts.

In fact, it was already happening as oil prices were falling from over $100 a barrel through the nineties. Seasoned energy hands had warned that shale operations could be shut down rapidly, and that has started to take place. However, the author of this article argues that the shutdowns are likely to be delayed and that most US shale operations have low break-even costs, insulating them from the impact of the oil price drop. However, he misses that another driver of the shale boom has been access to super-cheap credit and an overly-bullish mentality that has not factored in the short production lives of shale wells. The junk bond market has been much less accommodating of late, and if that skittishness continues, the prognosis isn’t quite as sanguine for the industry as Cunningham suggests.

John Helmer: CIA Bumbling, Then and Now

Yves here. This post presents some of the CIA’s less-than-proud moments, curiously omitted in a recently-published history of the CIA’s meddling in the Middle East, juxtaposed with some of its more recent miscues.

Peter Van Buren: Seven Worst-Case Scenarios in the Battle with the Islamic State

Yves here. This post describes, in a general way, some outcomes of our current Middle East adventurism, with the Islamic State as its current nemesis. However, at least one of Van Buren’s “worst-case outcomes” strikes me as not bad, which would be a thawing of hostilities with Iran. But I don’t see how Israel tolerates that.

But the looming issue behind all of these scenarios is that the game is being played to justify continued large budget allocations to the military-surveillance complex. The cost of defending the American is more guns in the guns versus butter tradeoff.

Saudis Deploy the Oil Price Weapon Against Syria, Iran, Russia, and the US

Asian stock markets continued to fall today, propelled at least in part by the adverse reaction to the Saudi announcement yesterday that they would let oil prices fall to $80 a barrel. And further reports indicate that the Saudis intend to keep oil prices low enough to force a realignment of prices not just among various grades of crude, but also for intermediate and long-term substitutes.

It is critical to remember that the Saudis have no compunction about imposing costs on other nations to maximize the value of their oil resource long term and hence the power they derive from it. Their oil price cut looks to be a strategic masterstroke.

Michael Klare: Obama’s Oil Weapon

Here Michael Klare argues that the use of energy as a weapon has become even more central in US foreign policy under Obama.

ISIS Battles Kurds Over Border Town Kobani To Maintain Oil Trade

Yves here. One needs to read past the spin on the combatants and the hectoring of the Turks in this post. It does serve to explain why Kobani is a critical piece on the chessboard of the struggle in Kurdistan.

Matt Stoller: The Solution to ISIS Is the First Amendment

Yves here. This post focuses on ISIS as a symptom of what is wrong with US policy-making. One way of reading it is as an introduction to the role of Saudi Prince Bandar and the sway that the Saudis have had over US policy for decades. This obvious fact is curiously airbushed out of most […]

What Drives Obama’s Foreign Policy?

The intensity of US efforts to foment conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East continue to be treated by Mr. Market as a nothingburger, as witnessed by a continued slide in oil prices and continued complacency in global stock markets. Yet it’s hard to miss that there are significant microeconomic implications of the uptick in warmongering. The Administration is clearly going all in for the guns part of the classic guns versus butter budgetary tradeoff.

Don Quijones: Nato-Member Turkey Threatens Western-Owned Banks, Shifts East, Cozies up to Russia

Since the U.S. and EU began imposing and then widening and tightening sanctions against Russia, some U.S. allies have been getting second thoughts. The latest nation to begin severing ties with the U.S.-dominated Western alliance is arguably the most important yet.

Hillary Clinton: The Goldwater Girl Reveals Herself in an Atlantic Interview

As much as I was dutifully chugging along on a normal-NC-fare type of post, the fisticuffs that broke out in comments yesterday over America’s hypocritical and destructive foreign policies (320 comments, an unheard-of level for Links, particularly on a summer weekend), indicates that US war-mongering is the top concern of many readers.

It thus seemed more fitting to highlight a truly disconcerting interview of Hillary Clinton by Jeffrey Goldberg in the Altlantic, in which he came off as more temperate that Hillary. Here is why that alone is striking.

How Many People Did the CIA Process at Its Stare Kiejkuty “Black Site,” and Where Are They Now?

Back-of-the-envelope calculations the CIA processed suggest several hundred people, at least. And we don’t know where they are now.

Should Markets Be Discounting Conflict?

Oil is at $100 owing to its peak production, not Ukraine, and ISIS presents the real risk.