Arab instability and US strategy

Arab instability and US strategy
Joseph Massad, al-Jazeera, 17 July, 2012

A year and a half into what US media and officials began to refer to as the “Arab Spring”, there has been little democracy achieved across Arab countries, even in those countries that saw the overthrow of their despotic US-supported regimes. The main change in the region has been its loss of regime stability and a new instability that reflects negatively on imperial capital investment and the overall imperial strategy in the region. This is not to say that, despite its initial fumbling, US imperialism has not since been able to capture many of the threads of the new political game in the region and control them; it is that it no longer controls all the threads. This lack of full control means that Washington has therefore been unable to restore stability, which, in US terms, is defined as dictatorial regimes that are staffed by obedient servants to US diktat and its junior partner in the region, the Jewish settler-colony. In Yemen, the US has become the new direct absolute ruler of the country, no longer ruling through a dictator agent. They are killing and maiming Yemenis at will under the pretext of fighting the terror of al-Qaeda, which did not even exist in Yemen before the US decided to intervene in that impoverished country. The terror that US forces and their ambassador Gerald Feierstein have imposed on the country has been the major achievement of the Obama administration since the Arab revolts started in Jan 2011. The other Arab country where the US commands immense control is Bahrain, though all attempts by the Bahraini dictatorship, the Saudi mercenaries, reportedly aided by US and British military and security support and consultation, to crush the revolt have been valiantly resisted by a fearless oppressed population.

While regional and imperial capital is abandoning Bahrain slowly to neighbouring Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Dubai, with the mass exodus of the expatriate community, US military presence, not to mention the hegemony of Saudi mercenaries, has intensified. Indeed, the Saudis floated the proposition in May to annex Bahrain altogether to the kingdom and transform it demographically, and thus be done with the whole affair of a majority of Shi’a being oppressed by a sectarian Sunni monarchy. In their ongoing revolt, Saudis in the Qatif and Al-Ahsa’ regions have responded to this proposal in the past few days, demanding that, in defiance of Saudi despotism and its imperial designs on Bahrain, that they secede from Saudi Arabia and be reunified with Bahrain, of which they had been part before the Saudi state took them over. In Libya, the instability has been legion, except in the oil sector, a situation that parallels that of Iraq nine years after the US-led invasion and occupation of the country. The recent Libyan elections have confirmed NATO’s man in power, Mahmoud Jibril, though his ability to control the country (the oil fields, which are in NATO hands, excepted) is next to nil. As for the Qatari-Saudi election competition in Tunisia and Egypt (Saudis support the forces of the ancien regime and the Salafists, while Qatar supports the Muslim Brothers), the Qataris won hands down, though the Saudis are imposing their conditions. US officials, as expected, play all sides, allying both with the military rulers of Egypt and with the Muslim Brothers, not to mention the liberal secular parties. …more