Pax Amercana vs offshore balancing

The latest jargon justifying imperialism, as if straight from the business page contrasts Pax Americana, where if they behave well, clients become more prosperous and more democratic. If that fails but you have a few reliable regional partners, there is an offshore balancing system, where the empire’s quislings bear the primary responsibility for dealing with crises on the ground, and US military strategy is oriented toward policing the seas and skies. Nothing new except the name.  The British were masters of ‘offshore balancing’.

Since the Cold War, and especially since 1991, the Pax Americana idea has predominated. But in the Middle East, Dohat lectures, there has been no real evolution toward democracy among our network of allies; instead, their persistent corruption has fed terrorism and contributed to al-Qaeda’s rise. All is the fault of the stupid, greedy towel heads. Apparently Bin Laden can’t see the difference between local and foreign greedy bastards.

Hence the Bush administration’s post-9/11 decision to try to “start afresh, by transforming a rogue state into a regional model”, a foundation for a new American-led order that would be “less morally compromised than the old”. That order did not, of course, emerge. Instead, the obliteration of Iraq destroyed the only vaguely functional regime in the Middle East, killing 100,000s of innocent Iraqis (who knows how many? According to the invader chief, General Tommy Franks, “We don’t do body counts).

IS continues to confound. Not only for its ability to outmanoeuver the US (remember it is a rag-tag unfunded collection of wildly courageous jihadists fight a monster Goliath) but for its defiance in pursuing its grim revolutionary justice despite the threats of empire. They believe in the old fashion justice of Muhammad’s time (though Muhammad was very sparing in cuttings, encouraging remorse, forgiveness and financial compensation paid to the victim or heirs of a victim in the cases of murder, bodily harm or property damage.

The world’s bastion of peace is packing up its bombs and tanks in a humiliating retreat from the desert of Yemen. How could this be? After all, the US has been directing events in Yemen, more or less, since WWII, dominated by US dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh. After the collapse of the Arab world’s only communist state, South Yemen, in 1991, it looked like clear sailing. But sadly, fantasy and reality have little in common in the intractable Middle East.

Yemen is most celebrated as the fatherland of jihadist Osama Bin Laden (his father was a Yemeni-born Saudi construction billionaire with close ties to the Saudi royal family). Osama was energized in his tender youth in the 1970s to travel the Middle East exhorting independence fighters to fight the kufar with increasingly alarming tactics—and success. But that is ancient history now. He was gunned down unarmed by US special forces in Pakistan in 2011 and dumped unceremoniously in the ocean, in yet another US insult to the Muslim world.

The Zionists and Saudi Arabia are seeking to create more “destruction and war” in Syria amid efforts by Iran to establish peace in the Arab country, says an author and journalist in Toronto.

Reagan and "friends' in 1985

US Secretary of State John Kerry is pursuing “a non-militaristic” solution to the Syrian crisis, “but at the same time cowing to US foreign policy, said Eric Walberg, a Canadian writer on the Middle East, Central Asia and Russia.

Saudi duplicity is backfiring royally. The architect of Abdullah’s worst foreign policies Tuwaijri is gone, but does Abdullah’s successor Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud have the guts to face Saudi Arabia’s many nightmares?

The death of King Abdullah in January 2015 confirmed the contradictions at work in Saudi politics. The architect of Abdullah's destructive policies, President of the Royal Court Khalid al-Tuwaijri, was immediately dismissed, replace by Prince Muqrin. Tuwaijri was the key player in foreign intrigues—to subvert the Egyptian revolution, to send in the troops to crush the uprising in Bahrain, to finance ISIL in Syria in the early stages of the civil war along his previous ‘ally’ Prince Bandar bin Sultan.

As Abdullah lay dying, the Zaidi Shia Houthis in Yemen were occupying the presidential palace in Sana, a plan plotted by former Yemeni dictator Saleh and the United Arab Emirates (Saudi allies), keen to undermine the democratic transformation of Yemen that Islah, the Yemeni Muslim Brotherhood, was trying to effect.