Category: Politics – non-US

The Foreigner’s Gift – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “The Foreigner’s Gift, The Americans, the Arabs and the Iraqis in Iraq” by Fouad Ajami, published in 2006. This was a repetitive, non-chronological mishmash of the author’s observations about the history of the Middle East intertwined with goings-on in Iraq up until the book’s writing.


The author, an American citizen, grew up in a Shia family in Lebanon. He interviewed all kinds individuals– soldiers, students, government officials, academics, etc.– of different religions, different sects, during his visits to different regions of Iraq in 2003, 2004 and 2005. There were conflicting reports of whether ordinary Iraqis viewed the Americans as “occupiers” or “liberators.”

The author argued that American president George W. Bush wanted to spark a pan-Arab reform movement in the Middle East by attacking Iraq. However, clearly, the American vice president’s motive was profiteering. Yet– anyone who has read his or her history and has basic knowledge about human nature, would know that centuries-old hostilities and hatreds between the Sunnis and Shias is never going to be resolved; not even by someone like Mahatma Gandhi!

Gandhi stopped the fighting between Hindus and Muslims only momentarily. Even he had a crack public relations team who got him featured prominently in the history books, as someone who was more powerful than he actually was. Suffice to say, the American presence in Iraq in the past thirty years has been yet another instance of too many alpha males with hubris syndrome who won their propaganda war. For decades, they have refused to take lessons from seeing military conflicts ranging from: the 1950’s end of French colonialism in Indochina to the 1947 partition of India to the 1980’s civil war in Lebanon, and many others.

Of course, oil threw a wrench in the works. Now, almost twenty years later, the current American government is making a much more aggressive push to reduce its dependence on foreign oil. This, by constantly reminding its citizens that they can assist with energy-related initiatives that arguably slow the changing of planet earth’s atmospheric conditions, that adversely affect humans; changing that has allegedly been caused by humans. So the energy-related issue is a whole other ball of wax now.

But human nature doesn’t change. In America (never mind Iraq), there are still racial tensions and cancel culture. Plus, there is an incidental ideological aspect to the masking order of the COVID crisis: that of forcing Westernized, yet religious Muslim males to empathize with their female relatives. The males now know how it feels to be required to cover their faces.

Read the book to learn of the good consequences and bad consequences of removing Saddam Hussein from power, as seen through many interviewees’ eyes, and the author’s take on the situation, given his knowledge of Middle East history.

Ghosts of the Tsunami – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Ghosts of the Tsunami, Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone” by Richard Lloyd Parry, published in 2017.

As is well known, cancer cases will cluster among residents near even peacetime nuclear facilities that are working properly. Sadly, Japan’s poor foresight on its energy policy turned it into a boatload of misfortune waiting to happen.

In March 2011, an earthquake and tsunami in Japan reminded the world yet again how one disaster can lead to another, especially when it comes to the use of nuclear energy. After radioactivity (colorless and odorless) from its three melted-down nuclear reactors spread across Japan’s countryside, leaving a huge number of people sick and dead, it closed its remaining fifty reactors. Taking a lesson,–Germany, Italy and Switzerland stopped their nuclear energy programs.

The author, however, focused mostly on the no less traumatic deaths (some of them needless) and destruction in one small place, caused by the disasters. He spent an extensive amount of time corresponding with victims in the fishing village of Onagawa on the island of Honshu, where there occurred a large percentage of needless drownings at the local elementary school: 74 of 108 kids, and 10 of the 11 teachers.

The Kitakami river overflowed its banks, but school administrators failed to take precautionary measures to evade the flooding. “Within five minutes– the time it had taken them to evacuate their classrooms– the entire school could have ascended hundreds of feet above sea level, beyond the reach of any conceivable tsunami.”

Read the book to learn about the victims’ families’ quests for finding their loved ones and for the true details of how they died, and whether their deaths were preventable.

Guatemala

The Book of the Week is “Guatemala, A Cry From the Heart” by V. David Schwantes, published in 1990.

In November 1988, the author, a businessman, traveled to Guatemala with others from the Center for Global Education. The author described a little of the political history that led to Guatemala’s sorry state of affairs in the 1980’s. For the reason of brevity, the author obviously could not cover all aspects of the historical backdrop that came together to create that decade’s spate of violence and oppression. However, he did know Geopolitics 101.

The reason Guatemala (and so many other countries in the world) have been unable to escape their vicious dictatorship cycle is that [drumroll, please!]:

Foreign interventionists and the nation’s leadership made investments in:

the tools of WARFARE (military weapons and divide-and-conquer political, cultural and social infiltrators that caused instability)

rather than

tools of modernity (education, infrastructure, healthcare and communications)!

It was like a George Carlin joke. Two previous Guatemalan presidents (Arevalo and Arbenz) had successful land-reform programs that spurred JFK to develop the Alliance for Progress. But prior to the Kennedy administration, those programs devolved into ugly political goings-on, thanks to two previous American presidents.

Beginning with the Nixon administration (on the recommendations of Nelson Rockefeller): “Stability was to be our first priority in foreign relations… Thus in 1972, when the average Guatemalan peasant earned just over $80 per year, the U.S. sent almost $7 million in weapons to that country… The U.S. had sent a billion dollars to Guatemala so far this decade, but I saw few signs that the money was making much difference.” Plus, in the late 1980’s, it sold the Guatemalans M-16 rifles. Then again, the Reagan administration cut back on providing financial aid when Guatemala was found to have one of the worst human-rights-abuse records in the world.

To push the above point about stability (or accidentally-on-purpose elimination of), the State Department encouraged fundamentalist Christian and Catholic missionaries to evangelize to the peasants to make them more accepting of their fate (starving). The peasants were led to believe their fate was in the hands of a supreme being. Other ideas pushed on them were: “turn the other cheek” and “money-changing is evil” and “sharing is a virtue” to get them to collectivize (and be smeared as Communists– more on this in a little while).

The author visited the government district of Guatemala City. “In front of the palace were dozens of heavily armed, crisp, polished soldiers. In front of the cathedral were beggars.”

The author spoke with a Catholic minister, various of whose politically active family members had been murdered in previous years. He was an activist pushing for redistribution of land. Roughly 70% of Guatemala’s land was owned by 1% of the people. The peasants had a religious, cultural, emotional attachment to the land, especially with regard to corn, their staple food. However, they were unskilled, uneducated, and scattered.

In 1986, the minister managed to help peasants (who had previously worked individually) to acquire a little land and work collectively, but in 1987, an arsonist burned it. The one percenters launched a smear campaign against the minister, calling him a Communist. In reality, he was pushing the economic system of socialism, as the peasants owned the means of production (the land). If the government had owned the land, that would have been the political system of Communism.

By the early 1980’s, the elites were acquiring farms in volume. And corn could be imported less expensively than it could be grown. Peasants had to borrow money to purchase fertilizer and pesticides, which made them indebted forever. They were less likely to starve if they grew sugar, coffee, sorghum or soybeans.

The author interviewed a worker at a healthcare clinic funded by UNICEF and humanitarian groups in the Netherlands and Canada. A U.S. embassy representative told the author that 40% of Guatemalan children died before the age of 5. The author had heard higher figures from other sources.

The clinic worker– as had the others who had risked their lives to talk with the author– played music during their conversation, just in case spies were present. His residence consisted of eleven family members in two huts, with no plumbing or electricity. They had a wood-burning stove whose smoke gave the women tuberculosis. He was proud that his mother was still alive at 54 years old (a ripe old age in Guatemala). Further, he considered himself wealthy compared to other peasants, as he had access to coffee trees, chickens, ducks, avocados and bananas.

The government began to crack down on males who expressed displeasure with the government. The males were abducted, conscripted, or recruited for hard manual labor, burned, arrested, tortured, or killed if they had Marxist / Leninist books in their homes, or said or wrote anything unpatriotic. Snitches were paid a small sum to spy on peasants and report back to the hierarchy of military leaders of which the government was comprised, up to the federal level.

In 1984, victims of Guatemala’s “dirty little war” formed a political group to help others similarly situated. The group gave bus fare and medical care to women searching for their missing male relatives. They risked their own lives by participating in demonstrations, and searching for their husbands, brothers and sons at detention centers, morgues, and cemeteries. Guatemalan culture dictated that males were the sole breadwinners for their families. But starving women were forced to make and sell tortillas in order to feed their families.

Read the book to learn the wealth of additional details on Guatemalan history and culture that the author learned from personal experience, interviews and documents.

The Bookseller of Kabul / The Bin Ladens

The First Book of the Week is “The Bookseller of Kabul” by Asne Seierstad, translated by Ingrid Christophersen, originally published in 2002.

“To him, power is more important than peace. He’s mad enough to jeopardize the lives of thousands just so he can be in charge. I can’t imagine why the Americans want to cooperate with a man like that.”

-Said of the Afghan warlord Padsha Khan, who took over Central Asia after the Taliban left in 2002.

The Americans hired Khan to look for members of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar. The warlord used the American-provided money, weapons (such as B-52’s and F-16 fighter planes), communications devices (such as a satellite phone) and intelligence devices (all of which were also provided to the warlord’s enemies) to kill his enemies in a local conflict in the provinces– instead of seeking America’s enemies.

This paperback tersely yet effectively described the culture of strict Muslim households as seen through the lifestyle (as dictated by its eventual patriarch, Sultan, the oldest son– the favorite child) of a few generations and branches of the Khan family tree. Crazy about books, in the early 1970’s, Sultan opened his first bookshop in Kabul. With his obsessively hard work, his business grew to three shops in a few decades.

As is well known, in September 1996, Afghanistan became a theocracy under the Taliban. Sultan’s behavior and attitudes was typical for a man of his generation and entrepreneurial bent. He traveled to Tehran, Tashkent and Moscow to acquire all kinds of books to sell. He did jail time for offering subversive ones. In Afghanistan, there was actually book-burning in November 1999.

Sultan decreed that his sons quit high school to manage his stores, and his wife performed the administrative work. During the most politically oppressive times, he, his wife and four children lived in Pakistan. After the Taliban were driven out of his native land of Afghanistan in 2002, his family returned. War was the order of the day for his son’s entire seventeen-year lifetime, as the country then devolved into civil war among warlords.

Against the wishes of his extended family and his first wife, Sultan married a sixteen-year old girl. The girl’s family needed the customary gifts bestowed on them, including supplies, food and animals.

Sultan risked his life, paying people-smugglers in order to go to Pakistan primarily to visit business contacts (and his family), as, after 9/11, the country closed its border with Afghanistan. Lahore in Pakistan had no regard for intellectual property laws, so Sultan could get two to three thousand percent profit margins on stolen texts of books he had printed there. The kind of lawlessness that existed on the Afghan side of the Khyber pass included a free-for-all on hashish and weaponry.

Read the book to learn a wealth of additional characteristics about Sultan’s culture, such as wedding rituals, pilgrimages, and about the draconian segregation of the sexes and enforced inferiority of the females.

The Second Book of the Week is “The Bin Ladens, An Arabian Family in the American Century” by Steve Coll, published in 2008.

This large volume described the culture of what Americans would consider to be a huge family of Middle Easterners with the last name Bin Laden, whose households ranged from the strictly Muslim to the very Westernized, over a few generations and branches of its family tree.

Born around the dawn of the twentieth century, one of the family’s major patriarchs was the entrepreneurial Mohamed, a construction contractor who played well with others, and joined the Hadhrami community in Yemen. He kissed up to the Saudi Arabian government in order to build his business.

In the mid-1930’s, King Abdulaziz ibn Saud began to reap riches from oil. This led to various developments in terms of the evolution of the country’s infrastructure and acquisition of Western aid.

During WWII, Great Britain and the United States lavished copious monetary assistance on Saudi Arabia to keep it away from Communist temptations. The Saudis opted to pave roads instead of building railway lines, as automobiles would allow them to prosper by selling oil. Aramco, the jointly owned American and Saudi oil company, did business with Mohamed, too.

Strictly Muslim, Mohamed– a polygamist, was a typical man for his time and place. Of his 54 children, his oldest son, Salem, was born in the mid-1940’s. As such, Salem grew up to become chair of several multi-national corporations his father eventually grew, that built mosques, dams and reservoirs, and renovated the buildings and grounds of pilgrimage regions and military installations.

At the dawn of the 1950’s, the Bin Ladens’ companies were awarded business by the Saudi government partly because American contractors couldn’t deal with the Saudis, as the Saudis were too corrupt. Even so, the Saudi government’s officials, who were big spenders living high on the hog, went deep into debt, and turned out to be bad payers.

About a decade later, Mohamed’s businesses, which were developing structurally complicated kinds of shell companies– acquired a reputation for inexperienced laborers, doing shoddy work and missing deadlines.

President John F. Kennedy initially supported Egypt’s leader Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1962, but the latter sent guerrilla soldiers to Yemen to agitate for a new government there, and exchanged hostile words with Saudi Arabia’s government. In 1963, the United States changed its mind, probably for various secret geopolitical reasons.

In order to protect Saudi Arabia’s southern frontier from Nasser’s imperialist aspirations, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers cooperated with Great Britain to provide the Saudis with missiles and military infrastructure there. Mohamed’s contribution was to build roads.

Osama was one of Mohamed’s biological sons, born in January 1958, when his mother was about fifteen years old. His parents divorced in his early childhood. His mother remarried. Mohamed died when he was nine years old. During (what would be equivalent to) junior high school, he joined an after-school Islamic study group. He was later recruited into the Muslim Brotherhood; an anti-Nasser, Koran-purist group approved of by Saudi Arabia’s king in the early 1970’s.

That was a time of foreign-policy contradictions for the Saudis and the West. In 1973, the former imposed an oil embargo meant to harm the Americans (for helping the Israelis), Egyptians and Syrians. At the same time, the Saudis accepted financial aid from the Americans, as the former supplied oil to the latter’s troops in Vietnam. The Saudis also purchased vast quantities of U.S. Treasury Bonds.

Salem became the leader of a few of the most Westernized branches of the family (his younger siblings), encouraging the education of females. He purchased properties in the United States, and began to collect private jets. His relatives had identity crises, caught between two cultures.

At seventeen years old, Osama married a fourteen-year old. She bore him a son, and pursuant to the Koran, he obeyed a laundry list of prohibitions: didn’t covet his neighbor’s wife, and banned photography, music, gambling and alcohol from his life. He did, however, teach his children hunting and shooting, and seemed to have no problem with violating certain religious laws. He quit college and entered the family business.

In early 1985, Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd and Salem met with American president Ronald Reagan. The king secretly funneled money to a Cayman Islands account to fund the Contras (of the infamous Iran-Contra affair).

Read the book to learn how numerous other historical events shaped the activities of Salem and Osama and vice versa through the second half of the twentieth century into the new millennium.

ENDNOTE: Even with all the information the author was able to glean– the story was like Swiss cheese. The United States has suffered the usual in terms of intelligence-gathering in recent decades: incompetence, hubris and inter-agency rivalry, not to mention political and economic inter-dependence between the Arabs and the United States. Other wrenches in the works include the complex web of Bin Laden business dealings and entities, many of which are offshore. Enough said.

City of Gold

The Book of the Week is “City of Gold, Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism” by Jim Krane, published in 2009.
Location and entrepreneurial opportunists played a big role in making the city of Dubai the westernized hub of modernity it is today. It is located across the Persian Gulf from Iran.
Beginning in 1894, Dubai’s ruling family paved the way for it to become a trading hub, providing financial incentives to Arab, Persian, Indian and Baluchi merchants to use Dubai’s port rather than Iran’s ports. However, a side effect of prosperous trade invited smuggling of black-market goods including firearms, gold, slaves, diamonds and drugs.
The mid-twentieth century finally saw the game- changing discovery of oil in Dubai. In September 1958, the city got a new ruling sheikh who began to introduce better living to his people through infrastructure and utilities. In December 1971, Dubai and other territories in the region shed their British-protectorate status. At the last minute, Iran made a land-grab, but the remaining areas of the seven sheikhdoms became the United Arab Emirates.

Abu Dhabi held 88% of the land and 90% of the oil. So, through the 1970’s, Dubai’s ruling family further reduced Dubai’s financial dependence on oil by branching out into trade, construction and services– importing cheap labor to do it. The city built an aluminum smelter, a seaport and a dry dock– which in the 1980’s, repaired vessels from Iran that were damaged in its war with Iraq. The gentrification trend inevitably involved a little eminent-domain abuse, Arab-style, but Dubai citizens and capitalist expatriates needed luxurious places to live in the desert.

From the late 1990’s into the 2000’s, with the introduction of the Internet, Dubai lured the world’s biggest technology and media companies with generous financial incentives, building corporate villages for them. In 2000, Dubai allowed foreigners to buy real estate. The following year, the city had a stock market.

After 9/11, Arab investors transferred their money from the United States to Dubai. In February 2006, New York State Senator Charles Schumer and the media whipped up a frenzy of anti-Arab hysteria by telling the public that Dubai owned some of America’s most important Eastern-Seaboard ports. Hillary Clinton and hate-spewing pundits piled on. “Yet Dubai and the UAE remained among America’s closest Arab counter-terror Allies, even though the United States government has problems with Dubai’s freewheeling trade with Iran.”

Fast forward to 2007. Dubai’s small population of about a million citizens (mostly royal family members) allowed the government to adopt a socialist policy of generous entitlements, including an average annual $55,000 in stimulus money, and low-cost or no-cost: cooling of their lavish homes, car-fuel, food, education, healthcare, and water.

One last factoid: Dubai keeps its population safe because “The government is on the lookout for any form of radical expression, whether it’s Saudi Wahhabism, Salafism, or radical Shiite theology from Iraq and Iran. The Muslim Brotherhood cannot operate openly.”

Read the book to learn about: how the British stifled Dubai’s growth, and many more details on the city’s political, economic and cultural history, beginning with ancient times.

Secrets of the Kingdom

The Book of the Week is “Secrets of the Kingdom, The Inside Story of the Saudi-U.S. Connection” by Gerald Posner, published in 2005. There has been a two-faced relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia (also called the Kingdom) for forever. The author provided numerous examples (it got a bit tabloidy) of the greed and power-hunger of historical figures who have adversely affected countless people’s lives by controlling oil prices one way or another. The consequences of the power-brokers’ actions have run the gamut from inconvenience and economic hardship to ruined lives and needless deaths through the decades of the twentieth century into the twenty-first.

In 1973, Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal told Aramco (the oil company jointly owned by the United States and Saudi Arabia’s royal family) to refrain from shipping oil to America to create an artificial oil shortage to push prices up, leading to record profits for mostly the royal family and Aramco. Another excuse for having fun with oil-pricing was the Yom Kippur War.

By the mid-1970’s, Faisal and his family members were deriving inconceivable riches from oil. American businesspeople of all kinds (including executives of financial institutions) were overly eager to get the lucky Saudis (numbering in the thousands) to spend those riches on the trappings of modernity and luxury goods. The Kingdom imported foreigners to fill undesirable jobs, and contracting jobs.

The United States government became an accomplice to the culture of corruption (bribery and money laundering) that permeated the country. There was also a culture of anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic practices, called the “Arab boycott” (for more information, see this blog’s post, Bitter Scent). In March 1975, King Faisal was assassinated but not much changed.

June 1977 saw president Jimmy Carter of the United States sign an anti-Arab-boycott bill (which got an “A” for effort), but even his policies were handcuffed by the Saudis’ control over oil prices. Inter-agency rivalry raged between the National Security Council and the Justice Department over suppressing the latter’s investigations into Aramco’s (secret, highly lucrative and criminal- in American civil law) transactions.

In the late 1970’s, U.S. colleges such as USC, Duke and Georgetown got small endowments from the Saudis for creating Islamic or Arab studies departments. Even the Smithsonian jumped on the bandwagon.

To make the 1970’s an even more eventful decade for oil-pricing manipulation, there occurred the American president-Carter-brokered peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. The Iranian Revolution prompted the president to send American troops to the Kingdom to protect the oil there. But refused to sell it missiles. So it got missiles from China.

Yet more ugliness that affected geopolitical dynamics included a terrorist attack in Mecca in November 1979, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the following month; not to mention the Iran-Iraq War. Around this time, the United States became the globe’s biggest importer of oil from the Kingdom and a supplier of weaponry to it.

In June 1982, King Fahd became the new leader of Saudi Arabia. Radicals forced Islamic extremism on ordinary Saudis– telling them when to pray, how to dress, how to eat, how to live, and whom their enemies should be– non-Muslims, Israelis, Jews, women.

Greedy American dealmakers didn’t care. They secretly knuckled under on the Arab boycott, even though it was against American law. They hoped to make, or were making megabucks, in the Kingdom and other Arab nations. This included former president Carter, who needed money for his presidential library. He allowed weapons seller Adnan Khashoggi to hold a 1983 fund-raiser for him in New York.

Lest one forget that the Iran-Contra Affair revealed honor among thieves– even sworn enemies (!): In 1983, “Israel supplied the weapons [missiles to Iran] and the Saudis paid for them.”

In 1985, Saudi Arabia bought military planes from Great Britain instead of from the United States, as the Israel lobby in America did achieve small victories from time to time. Nevertheless, terrorist attacks continued through the 1990’s.

Fast forward some years. As is well known, 9/11 was a particularly thorny, game-changing event for everyone involved in Middle Eastern politics, as a significant number of Americans died. It led to many outrages, but initially, little punishment for the planners, aiders and abettors (mostly from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia– NOT Afghanistan and NOT Iraq) of the terror attacks.

The George W. Bush administration coddled almost three hundred outright terrorists, government officials and royal-family members who had special knowledge of and ties to the guilty, by allowing them all to leave the United States on seven private flights while all other flights were suspended, within a week of the attacks. Those special people were never questioned, though they would have been valuable witnesses in connection with the investigation into the attacks.

Read the book to learn about a wealth of other ethical conflicts American government and business leaders faced, and still face in trying to: keep oil prices low, minimize worldwide bloodshed, and make maximum profits (never mind ethics); and additional history on the Kingdom, including its relationship with Osama bin Laden, and a national security scheme it allegedly put in place that, if triggered, would deliberately (!) make it a cancer cluster like Chernobyl. Forever.