The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    jollyroger's picture

    Why are we with the Arabs and not the Persians? I blame Lawrence.

    By jollyroger on Tue, 01/05/2016 - 12:28am |

    From time to time it is useful to raise one's head above the AIPAC  generated miasma of anti-Iranian mania, and ask why, all things taken together, we invariably favor the Arabs (Saudis--with their irredentist head-chopping monarchy that, not incidentally, produced the guys who took down our big buildings--and Sunnis generally) over the Persians (who have women in parliament--shit, they HAVE a parliament!)

    Like everything in the middle east, the roots are in oil politics, as manifested by TE Lawrence and his legwork in raising up the Hashemite kingdoms that bestowed sovereignty over the oil rich Shiite areas of the old *Ottoman province of Syria upon the Sunni kingdoms of Iraq and Saudi. (Recall that Britain was obliged to invent airplane bombardment of civilians in 1922 over Karbala to enforce this mandate upon a restive Shiite population  http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/war.crimes/World.war.2/... ).  If you notice, the line between Iraq and Saudi runs right down the middle of the oil bearing lands that are 95% Shiite.  That didn't just happen yesterday.

    All in all, having made the transition from Sunni to Shia jurisdiction and back into Sunni when I took a bus from Turkey across Persia into Afghanistan, I can safely say that even in 1971 (especially in 1971--the Shah, secular to the core, was in power) the Persians were cooler than the Turks or the Afghans.

    It's time to switch sides.  

    Fuck the Saudis.

    *https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Bell#Creation_of_Iraq,

    Comments

    To be fair, the Saudis, having beheaded al Nimr, may forgo the crucifixion of his (minor) nephew.

     

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-administrat...


    by jollyroger on Tue, 01/05/2016 - 2:05am

    I'm trying to understand - the Sauds behead a Shiite - so all the other countries put sanctions on Iran.

    Insult to injury?

    Having Saudi Arabia & other gulf states trying to overthrow Syria is not sane policy. I know we have trouble telling them apart, but they don't.

    And yes, with Iran cooperating we're trying to impose more sanctions, just as when Syria cooperates (e.g. eliminating chemical weapons) we try to add more sanctions. Sooner or later, they get the point - fucked if you do, fucked if you don't.

    But we have our Benghazi Lawrence, so everything else we do is purely symbolic.


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 01/05/2016 - 10:16am

    JR, the Muslim world is predominantly Sunni with a minority Shia population represented by Iran, even Iraq's Shia population is Persian in origin.

    Promoting Iran as somehow superior to the KSA when the Iranians execute four times as many people,  by strangulation/hanging, as the KSA  who use the instant death 'head-chopping' method instead of the slow strangulation of the superior Persians seems a bit warped or possibly just uninformed. Amerikan's emotions are easily inflamed by visual stimulation such as a video of a Saudi or Islamic State beheading but we never see an Iranian execution with its black tongued, eyes popping slow death.

    Iranian people are still very welcoming ot visitors from what I've heard much as they were during the height of Western influence when you visited but their leaders and government are paranoid and repressive much like the KSA.


    by Peter (not verified) on Tue, 01/05/2016 - 11:48am

    I did not mean by my comment to endorse the Shah.  I saw enough of SAVAK to make me glad to be in the less regulated territory of Afghanistan, truth to tell, and at the time the Turks were still agressively secullar in the Attaturk mold.

     

    That said, and peeling back the superficial variations amongst a still relatively primitive religion, there is more mysticism in the Shia than Sunni strains of Islam, and,of course, the Saudis are Wahabbis,which is a whole different  stinking kettle of fish on its own.

     

    Stepping back from the shia/sunni thing itself, you merely have to look at the status o women to see that the persians are far more modern than the saudis, without necessarily making generalizations about the rest of the islamic world (don't even start talking anout Indonesia.  They just offed some Aussies for being purveyors of exogenous neurotransmitter modifiers.


    by jollyroger on Tue, 01/05/2016 - 1:44pm

    The real bottom line: Iran stands with the Palestinians, the Saudis talke shit but don't really threaten the status quo of the occupation. 


    by jollyroger on Tue, 01/05/2016 - 1:53pm

    Also, this:

     

     

     

     

     


    by jollyroger on Tue, 01/05/2016 - 2:00pm

    With the crisis in Syria and other ME problems you must have misses the severing of relations and support between Iran and Hamas soon after the start of the Syrian civil war and Hamas' pledging support for the rebels as do many Sunni Palestinians. I don't think those relations have been renewed although there was some discussions a while back. Iran demanded that Hamas join them in supporting Assad's Alawite faction against their own Sunni neighbors.

    Iran's interest in the Palestinians seems to be mostly about how they can use them against Israel not their cause and they don't get along well with Palestinians or other Sunni Arabs in Lebanon or elsewhere except for some small groups in  Syria.

    The KSA is anti Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas is MB so there is no support there but they may support the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank and other Palestinians.


    by Peter (not verified) on Tue, 01/05/2016 - 10:57pm

    Arafat was an israeli stooge, and the PA is collaborationist at heart.  Jus' sayin'.


    by jollyroger on Tue, 01/05/2016 - 11:13pm

    The United Semitic Peoples' Kemalist Republic: "One semite, one vote, one state, no yahwists!"


    by jollyroger on Tue, 01/05/2016 - 11:15pm

    oopa


    by jollyroger on Tue, 01/05/2016 - 11:16pm

    Moe, Larry & Yassar? worst comedy timing ever. It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World....


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 01/06/2016 - 11:46am

    k-nick k-nick


    by jollyroger on Wed, 01/06/2016 - 12:45pm

    I don't know about Arafat but the  Islamic State has instructed the Palestinians that before they are worthy of belonging to the IS they must simply destroy Hamas, for their weak MB ideology, but they must butcher the PA for being collaborationists. Only then will they be ready for the Liberation of Palestine.


    by Peter (not verified) on Wed, 01/06/2016 - 1:26pm

    As soon as I recover from the discovery that my rather flippant characterization of the PA somehow placed me adjacent to Jihadi John on some venn diagram, I will respond.


    by jollyroger on Wed, 01/06/2016 - 1:57pm

    As we are learning however slowly, some perhaps many, people in the ME view the Jolly Amerikan as far closer to the Dark Side than any Jihadi John who kills a few enemy while the Amerikan supports the killing of millions of Muslims.

    It may not be fair especially to those people who oppose our bloody wars but it's the reality we face being part of the Beast.

     


    by Peter (not verified) on Wed, 01/06/2016 - 4:30pm

    well, sure. but we do our killing on the video screen and then go home to hug our kids, whereas those ISIS monsters get up close and and personal.

     

    Just ask any corpse, and you'll learn the important difference...


    by jollyroger on Wed, 01/06/2016 - 4:44pm

    We haven't killed millions of Muslims(hundreds of thousands, which is bad enough), and the jihadists have killed more than a few people. Why talk only about the people killed by Jihadi John and not the thousands of others? The Sunni insurgents in Iraq slaughtered almost as many Iraqis as we did.

     


    by Aaron Carine on Wed, 01/06/2016 - 7:22pm

     Why talk only about the people killed by Jihadi John

    Production values make all the difference...

     

    And you are off by several orders of magnitude in your comparisons, plus, to be fair, ALL the net deaths (those killed in the inter communal carnage and the kids who died from the sanctions less the notional Baath murders averted by our intervention) are on our ticket.


    by jollyroger on Wed, 01/06/2016 - 9:33pm

    I was counting the deaths from sanctions. We are indirectly responsible for the deaths of people killed by the Sunni insurgents--it happened because of the invasion--but surely we aren't as responsible as the killers themselves? I'm not off by several orders of magnitude. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Iraq_Family_Hea...


    by Aaron Carine on Thu, 01/07/2016 - 7:48am

    but surely we aren't as responsible as the killers themselves

     

    WE ae a proximate cause--that's enough to recover in court.

     

    There is also substantial opinion to the effect that the current sectarian clusterfuck is less the outgrowth of the logterm sunni/shia shit and more the result of deliberately sectarian divisions imposed by our proconsuls in the run up to the first election following the invasion.


    by jollyroger on Thu, 01/07/2016 - 8:15am

    https://www.globalpolicy.org/political-issues-in-iraq/sectarianism.html

    by jollyroger on Thu, 01/07/2016 - 10:19am

    Lawrence's misconceived constructs for the Middle East superimposed upon religious conflicts and distribution of oil sands have been disastrous. But Lawrence's fundamental mistake was assuming Western values and culture might root there, as evidenced by his famous words,

    "My people are the people of the dessert", T.E. Lawrence said, picking up his fork.


    by Oxy Mora on Thu, 01/07/2016 - 9:16am

    AND, it was Baked Alaska! (Ta-dum)


    by jollyroger on Thu, 01/07/2016 - 9:55am

    Nope, Halva - like "halva country's better than none, ain't it?"


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 01/07/2016 - 11:00am

    And, lo, there was groaning upon the land, and the people rose up with one voice pleading, "wherefore must we dress in this homie's pun raiment?"


    by jollyroger on Thu, 01/07/2016 - 11:16am

    Rent garments and a gnashing of teeth - going biblical on you, dude, better gird up loins while you can fore I let go with my jawbone of an ass.


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 01/07/2016 - 11:53am

    better gird up loins

     

    thus coming back to schlong stashing and teeth gnashing....all threads lead to the same place.

     

     


    by jollyroger on Thu, 01/07/2016 - 2:24pm

    I always pull on strings - never know where they'll lead...

    Though would prefer to keep teeth from gnashing where I stash my loins. Nibbling, fine.


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 01/07/2016 - 4:11pm

    Dreadful coincidence--That pompous ignoramus is, even now, mangling a deconstruction of our relationships with Iran (and the head choppers whom he appears to have misidentified, but what a trivial detail in the overall morass of stupidity, ignorance, and complete self promotion.


    by jollyroger on Thu, 01/07/2016 - 7:47pm