US sending more troops to Saudi Arabia amid rising war tensions
The Trump administration Friday announced that it is sending more troops along with air and missile defense systems to Saudi Arabia in the wake of the September 14 strikes against two Saudi oil facilities that temporarily cut Saudi Arabia’s oil production in half and sent global oil prices soaring by 20 percent last Monday.
The announcement followed a White House meeting between US President Donald Trump and his National Security Council to discuss proposals for military action against Iran, which Washington and the Saudi monarchy have blamed for the attacks.
Tehran has vehemently denied these accusations. The Houthi rebels, who control the bulk of Yemen, claimed responsibility, declaring the attacks an act of self-defense against the murderous US-backed war that the Saudi monarchy has waged against Yemen for nearly four-and-a-half years, killing nearly 100,000 Yemenis and driving 8 million more to the brink of starvation.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford, who together with US Defense Secretary Mark Esper presented a menu of options to Trump for military action against Iran, told the media that the number of US troops being deployed to the Saudi kingdom would not be “in the thousands.”
This would suggest that the Pentagon is sending another Patriot missile defense battery. Some 600 US troops are already deployed at Prince Sultan airbase outside of Riyadh manning Patriot missile launchers. They were sent into Saudi Arabia after the sabotage of commercial tankers in the Persian Gulf, which, as with the attacks on the Saudi oil facilities, Washington blamed on Iran without presenting a shred of evidence.
The cost of the Patriot missile defense systems run into the billions while the price of each missile that they fire is estimated at $5 million. This massively expensive weaponry proved useless in countering drones costing a few thousand dollars that devastated the world’s largest oil refining facility.
The dispatch of the anti-missile unit appeared to be on the low end of the scale of military options presented to Trump by General Dunford and Secretary Esper. These reportedly included air strikes against targets ranging from Iranian military facilities to oil refineries and nuclear sites.
“It is my job to provide military options to the president should he decide to respond with military force,” General Dunford told the Associated Press Friday before going into the National Security Council meeting. He added, “In the Middle East, of course, we have military forces there and we do a lot of planning and we have a lot of options.”
Iran has warned that any attack on its territory would lead to “all-out war.”
The White House also unveiled a new set of unilateral economic sanctions against Iran targeting the country’s central bank, its sovereign wealth fund and an Iranian company that US officials claim is used to conceal financial transfers for Iranian military purchases.
Speaking at the White House alongside Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Trump touted the new measures as “the highest sanctions ever imposed on a country,” while at the same time asserting that his administration is pursuing a policy of restraint in its escalating confrontation with Iran.
President Donald Trump and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison listen to the National Anthem during an State Arrival Ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Friday, Sept. 20, 2019. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
Financial analysts, however, suggested that there was far less than met the eye in the new US sanctions. The Central Bank of Iran had already been targeted under previous sanctions and its assets frozen. Those entities continuing to do business with Iran are already defying multiple sanctions imposed by the Trump administration last year after it unilaterally and illegally abrogated the 2015 nuclear agreement between Tehran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, plus Germany.
The Russian Foreign Ministry issued an immediate response to the new US measures denouncing them as “illegitimate.”
“This will not affect our approaches to Iran,” said Zamir Kabulov, the director of the Russian Foreign Ministry Second Asian Department. “As we planned, we will continue to cooperate with Iran in the banking sector. This will have no effect [on Moscow’s position] …”
While Beijing, which counts Saudi Arabia as its second-largest source of oil imports, was somewhat more circumspect, it is highly unlikely that any new measures will affect its own ties to Iran. China accounts for half of Iran’s sharply reduced oil exports, and Beijing and Tehran this month signed $400 billion worth of deals connected to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) of which Iran is a key component.
The sanctions imposed by the Trump administration after ripping up the nuclear agreement in May 2018 amount to an economic blockade, tantamount to a state of war. They have led to shortages of food and medicines, leaving cancer patients to die.
This has been combined with a relentless campaign of military attacks on Iranian-backed forces in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, carried out by Israel with political and logistical support from Washington.
The pretense by the US government and its slavish stenographers in the US media that the attacks on the Saudi oil installations constitute some unprovoked act of aggression that came out of the blue is entirely hypocritical.
Whatever the precise connection between Iran and these strikes, the government in Tehran is under enormous pressure to find some way of countering the US attempt to strangle the country’s economy and starve its people into submission.
In his remarks at the White House Friday, Trump veered between self-praise for his “restraint” in relation to Iran and boasting to the media that that he could order military strikes “in one minute; I could do it right here in front of you.” He added, “Whether it’s now or in three weeks doesn’t make any difference.” He also repeated—for the fourth time—his macabre claim that he could end the war in Afghanistan overnight if he wanted to kill “tens of millions of people,” presumably by dropping a nuclear bomb.
No doubt, Trump recognizes the immense popular hostility to another war—the most recent poll indicates 80 percent opposition to the US going to war against Iran—as well as the catastrophic implications of a confrontation with Iran, in which 70,000 US troops and US warships deployed in the region would all become targets.
Whatever the US president’s opinions, however, there are powerful objective forces driving US imperialism toward war and influential sections of the US ruling establishment and the military and intelligence apparatus demanding an armed attack on Iran.
In his remarks at the White House on Friday, Trump also provided a crude rationale for his decision to tear up the nuclear agreement with Iran. Explaining—in the language of an aggrieved Mafia boss—why the US was unable to draw the European powers into a “coalition” for aggression against Iran, he said that: “sometimes you find that people have made a lot of money that you’d want in the coalition. They’ve made a lot money with Iran, which is—you know, when President Obama made that deal, not only was it a bad deal, but the United States didn’t partake, in a business sense.”
He continued: “And other countries—Germany, France, Russia, many other countries—made a lot of money with Iran. And we didn’t make money with Iran, which—that was just one of the many bad parts about the deal. Everyone else is making money and we’re not.”
US Attorney General Barr invokes “state secrets” to cover up Saudi
involvement in 9/11
Pollak:
Everything Joe Biden Said About Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy Actually
Describes Barack Obama’s
Everything
former vice president Joe Biden said about President Donald Trump’s foreign
policy speech on Thursday actually applies to the policy that Biden carried out
together with former President Barack Obama — and not Trump.
Even if these measures could be enacted in
a country in which three individuals own as
much wealth as the bottom half of the
population, it would be child’s play for billion-
dollar corporations to circumvent them.
Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren mixes anti-corruption demagogy with identity politics at New York City rally
On Tuesday, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, a leading contender for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, spoke to a crowd of 10-15 thousand people at Washington Square Park in lower Manhattan.
The crowd was a mixture of campaign supporters and bystanders, many from New York University across the street. Warren spoke under the park’s historical arch, which was festooned with campaign banners and surrounded by her most vocal supporters.
She was introduced by two New York state Democratic politicians and Maurice Mitchell, the head of the Working Families Party, a paper organization that was set up by the unions—including the corrupt United Auto Workers—in 1998 and endorses various Democratic candidates, including Bernie Sanders in 2016.
Warren began by making a dishonest and self-serving reference to the women killed at the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in 1911 at the nearby Brown Building. She recounted in some detail the horrible deaths of the scores of women in one of America’s worst industrial accidents. Warren proceeded to elicit the loudest applause of the evening from her supporters by telling the audience that, “We’re not here because of men at all. We’re here because of some hard-working women.”
She was referring the Triangle Shirtwaist workers, but these women came from the largely immigrant working class in lower Manhattan, which was, a century ago, socialist-minded and would have known exactly what to call a capitalist politician appealing to them for votes for the Democratic Party.
Warren then put forward two of her main campaign proposals: to fight corruption and tax the wealthiest Americans two percent of their annual income.
The thrust of Warren’s first argument was that she would enact laws to fight the excessive influence of corporations in government. While she correctly observed that “Corruption and influence peddling has seeped into every corner of our government,” she offered no explanation of why this was the case but sought to attribute nearly the entire social crisis of capitalism to “corruption” alone.
“So, what has this corrupt business as usual gotten us? The extinction of one species after another as the earth heats up, children slaughtered by assault weapons, the highest levels of inequality in a century, wages that barely budge, crippling student loan debt, shrinking opportunity for the next generation.”
She even managed to explain Trump’s far-right policies in terms of the president’s corruption: “Donald Trump is corruption in the flesh … He tries to divide us, white against black, Christians against Muslim, straight against queer and trans and everyone against immigrants. Because if we’re all busy fighting each other, no one will notice that he and his buddies are stealing more and more of our country’s wealth and destroying the future for everyone else.”
In other words, if only the rich had less influence in the government, then life could improve for millions. She made proposals such as banning former officeholders from becoming lobbyists, and full transparency in meetings with lobbyists. “Anyone who wants to run for federal office will have to put their tax returns online,” she said.
Even if these measures could be enacted in
a country in which three individuals own as
much wealth as the bottom half of the
population, it would be child’s play for billion-
dollar corporations to circumvent them.
A set of “reforms” that leaves large-scale wealth intact is no surprise coming from Warren. As she said in an interview with CNBC in July, “I am a capitalist. Come on. I believe in markets.”
On Tuesday, she also called for the impeachment of Donald Trump based on his supposed collusion with Russian agents outlined in the Mueller report.
The second element of her program that Warren raised was her plan to tax assets above $50 million at an annual rate of two percent. With the billions from this tax, she said, “We can make technical school, community college and four-year college tuition free for everyone who wants to get an education.” She also proposed making childcare and pre-kindergarten education free to all.
She framed her housing plan—to reduce rental costs by 10 percent over the next ten years, a laughably inadequate figure in New York City—in terms of race. “My housing plan will help families living in formerly redlined areas buy a home and start building the kind of wealth that government-sponsored discrimination denied their parents and grandparents,” she said. Her proposals to reduce global warming were also pitched to the politics of racial identity: “My climate plan includes justice for the Black and Brown communities that have struggled with the impact of pollution.”
She remained silent on foreign policy, neither raising the trade war with China nor the vast and expanding American military machine, nor Trump’s war threats against Iran.
She was equally silent on the role of her own party in the growth of inequality and the “corruption” that she attacked. As the WSWS noted when she announced her campaign in December, she has nothing to say “on the role of the Democratic Party in the growth of economic inequality, particularly the Obama administration’s bailout of the banks and its decision to block any efforts to punish the Wall Street speculators who triggered the 2008 global financial collapse.”
Warren’s proposed reforms, however, do attempt to make inroads into the support Bernie Sanders has among millions of young people and sections of the working class. Most polls in the last week show that Warren is now closing the gap with Sanders and Biden making her one of the top three in the contest for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
Tuesday’s rally itself was an effort on the part of the Warren campaign to capture the support by younger people who are currently leaning toward Bernie Sanders with appeals to restriction on the influence of corporations and demagogic references to the massive social inequality in the United States.
Jacobin, the magazine affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which supports Sanders, was indignant that the Working Families Party had endorsed Warren.
Concerned about a threat from the Warren campaign to its own efforts to integrate itself with the Democratic Party leadership, the magazine notes, “Her proposals (domestically, at least) are, on the whole, solid progressive policies, though never stronger than Sanders’. But not until the last few weeks has she even made rhetorical nods to building the kind of movement that Sanders argues we need, much less done anything to actually build that movement.”
Not much of the layer of younger people who attended Sanders’ Brooklyn rally in March or a similar one in Washington Square Park in 2016 were to be seen. The crowd, at least those who had come to the rally to see Warren, were largely in their thirties and forties and the minority of younger people were mostly curious bystanders. Certainly, holding a rally at night with floodlights and cheering in front of a large university is bound to attract some attention from students.
Warren’s speech did not convince many of the bystanders, especially students. One NYU student : “She’s just like the other Democrats, she gets up on the podium and makes all these promises, but they mean nothing. They continue to bomb and kill people across the world. Despite what they say even people like Sanders back the American military and its crimes in the Middle East.
“I was interested in Bernie in 2016 but then he backed Clinton and didn’t do anything about Yemen or about occupations in Palestine. I am not interested in anyone from either party for 2020; they all fight for the same big business interests that profit from American war.”
US Attorney General Barr invokes “state secrets” to cover up Saudi
involvement in 9/11
Last week, it was
revealed that the Trump administration has taken extraordinary steps to
continue the 18-year cover-up of Saudi government involvement in the September
11, 2001 terror attacks.
On Thursday, September
12, one day after the 18th anniversary of the attacks on New York and
Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people, a federal court filing revealed
that Attorney General William Barr has asserted the "state secrets"
privilege to block the release of an FBI report detailing extensive relations
between some of the 19 hijackers and Saudi government officials. Victims of the
attacks and their families are pushing for access to the 2007 report as part of
a lawsuit against the Saudi government launched in 2003 charging the despotic
monarchy with coordinating the mass killings.
Barr declared there was
a “reasonable danger” that releasing the report would “risk significant harm to
national security.”
The court filing also
revealed that the FBI has agreed to turn over to the families’ lawyers the name
of a Saudi individual that is redacted in a four-page summary of the FBI report
released in 2012. The summary lays out evidence concerning three Saudis who
provided money and otherwise assisted two of the hijackers in California in
finding housing, obtaining driver’s licenses and other matters.
Government
investigations have established that the two people who are named in the FBI
summary, Fahad al-Thumairy, a former Saudi consulate official, and Omar
al-Bayoumi, suspected by the FBI of being a Saudi intelligence officer, were
working in coordination with the Saudi regime. The third person, whose name is
redacted, is described in the FBI summary as having assigned the other two to
assist the hijackers.
Lawyers for the
families last year subpoenaed the FBI for an unredacted copy of the summary
based on the contention that the third person was a senior Saudi official. But
as part of the court filing, citing the “exceptional nature of the case,” the
FBI issued a protective seal to prevent the name of the third Saudi from
becoming public. The agency also refused to provide any of the other
information requested by the families.
An FBI official said
the agency was shielding the name to protect classified information related to
“ongoing investigations” and to protect its “sources and methods.”
In fact, the
extraordinary measures taken to conceal the role of the Saudi regime in the
9/11 attacks are driven by the need of US imperialism to maintain its
reactionary alliance with the Saudi sheiks and continue the false cover story
on 9/11 that has served as an ideological pillar for aggression in the Middle
East and the buildup of a police-state infrastructure within the US, carried
out in the name of fighting a “war on terror.”
The Saudi monarchy has
been a key ally of the United States in the Middle East for 70 years, and since
9/11 it has become, alongside Israel, Washington’s most important partner in
the region. It has played a central role in the bloody wars for regime change
in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, which have killed more than a
million people and destroyed entire societies. It is also the world’s biggest
purchaser of US arms.
Its intelligence
agencies have long worked in the closest collaboration with the CIA and the
FBI. The exposure of Saudi complicity in 9/11 immediately implicates sections
of the US intelligence establishment in facilitating, it not actively aiding,
the terror attacks, and sheds light on the multiple unanswered questions about
how 19 men, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals, could carry out such a complex
operation.
The 9/11 attacks were
eagerly seized upon by the George W. Bush administration, with the support of
the Democratic Party and media allies such as the New York Times,
to implement longstanding plans to wage aggressive war in the Middle East.
The cover-up of Saudi
involvement has been carried out over three administrations, Democratic and
Republican alike. It began within hours of the attacks themselves. Eight days
after the attacks, at least 13 relatives of Osama bin Laden, accompanied by
bodyguards and associates, were allowed to secretly leave the US on a chartered
flight. One of the passengers, a nephew of the supposed number one on
Washington’s “most wanted” list, had been linked by the FBI to a suspected
terrorist organization.
The US association with
bin Laden went back decades. Under the CIA’s Operation Cyclone, conducted
between 1979 and 1989, the US and Saudi Arabia provided $40 billion worth of
financial aid and weapons to the mujahedeen “freedom fighters” waging war
against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, an operation in which then-US ally bin
Laden played a key role. The proxy war in Afghanistan was pivotal in the later
creation of Al Qaeda.
In July of 2016, the US
government released to the public a 28-page section, suppressed for 14 years,
of a joint congressional inquiry into 9/11. The 28-page chapter dealt with the
role of the Saudi government and contained abundant and damning evidence of
extensive Saudi support for the 9/11 hijackers in the period leading up to the
attacks.
Among its revelations
were:
▪ Two of the Saudi
hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, lived for a time in Los Angeles
and San Diego in 2000, where they obtained pilot training. They were given
money and lodgings by Omar al-Bayoumi, who worked closely with an emir at the
Saudi Defense Ministry. Both were under CIA surveillance while attending an Al
Qaeda planning meeting in 2000 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and placed on a “watch
list” for FBI monitoring if they came to the United States. Nonetheless they
were allowed to enter the US on January 15, 2000.
▪ Al-Bayoumi “received
support from a Saudi company affiliated with the Saudi Ministry of Defense,”
drawing a paycheck for a no-show job. The company also had ties to Osama bin
Laden. His allowances jumped almost tenfold after the arrival of al-Hazmi and
al-Mihdhar. Al-Bayoumi had found an apartment for the two, which they shared
with an informant for the San Diego FBI, advancing them a deposit on the first
month’s rent.
▪ Al-Bayoumi’s wife
received a $1,200 a month stipend from the wife of Prince Bandar, then the
Saudi ambassador to the US and later head of Saudi intelligence. The wife of
his associate, Osama Bassnan, identified by the FBI as a supporter of bin
Laden, received $2,000 a month from Bandar’s wife.
▪ Three of the
hijackers stayed at the same Virginia hotel as Saleh al-Hussayen, a Saudi
Interior Ministry official, the night before the attacks.
Despite such evidence,
and much more, the bipartisan 9/11 Commission appointed by George W. Bush
concluded that there was no conclusive evidence that “senior” Saudi officials
played a role in the 9/11 attacks. When the 28-page section of the
congressional report was released in 2016, Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan,
denounced all suggestions of Saudi involvement as baseless.
However, former
Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, a member of the 9/11 Commission, said,
“There was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the
hijackers, and some of those people worked in the Saudi government.”
Former Democratic
Senator Robert Graham, cochair of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into the 9/11
attacks, said that there was “a pervasive pattern of covering up the role of
Saudi Arabia in 9/11 by all of the agencies of the federal government, which
have access to information that might illuminate Saudi Arabia’s role in 9/11.”
In the lawsuit filed by
the families of the victims, he filed an affidavit that stated, “I am convinced
that there was a direct line between at least some of the terrorists who
carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and the government of Saudi Arabia.”
It is significant, but
not surprising, that the corporate media has given only the most perfunctory
and muted coverage to the moves by the Trump administration to once again
suppress the role of the Saudi regime in 9/11, and the Democrats have been
completely silent.
One should compare this
response to damning evidence of Saudi culpability and US cover-up in relation
to an event that took nearly 3,000 lives to the hysteria of the anti-Russia
witch hunt led by the Democratic Party, the New York Times and
the bulk of the media, based on completely unsubstantiated charges.
Pollak:
Everything Joe Biden Said About Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy Actually
Describes Barack Obama’s
Johannes Eisele / AFP Getty
12 Jul 20193
3:48
Everything
former vice president Joe Biden said about President Donald Trump’s foreign
policy speech on Thursday actually applies to the policy that Biden carried out
together with former President Barack Obama — and not Trump.
In his speech, at City University of New York, Biden called
Trump an “extreme” threat to the country’s national security. No one has yet
taken Biden to task for describing the sitting commander-in-chief in such
alarmist terms.
But that wasn’t even the most bizarre aspect of Biden’s speech.
He said the main problem in Trump’s foreign policy was … Charlottesville,
Virginia. Biden went on to recite a version of the debunked “very fine people”
hoax, claiming that Trump had drawn a “moral equivalence between those who
promoted hate and those who opposed it.” That, he said, was a threat to
America’s mission of standing for democratic values in the world.
But in fact, Trump
specifically condemned the neo-Nazis
in Charlottesville on multiple occasions. The entire premise of Biden’s speech
was a lie.
Biden went on to claim that Trump’s foreign policy rejects
democratic values and favors the rise of authoritarianism worldwide. He cited
Trump’s warmth to Russian president Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator
Kim Jong-un. And he claimed that Trump has undermined America’s alliances with
democracies in favor of flattery from dictators.
Apparently Biden forgot that Obama literally bowed to the Saudi
king; that he abandoned the pro-democracy protests during the Green Revolution
in Iran; that he pushed for a “reset” with Russia and abandoned our Czech and
Polish allies on missile defense; that he promised Putin he would be even more
“flexible” after he won re-election; that he tried to normalize relations with
the Cuban dictatorship without securing any democratic reforms there; that he
gave the store away to the communist dictatorship in China; and that he
abandoned Israel, a betrayal in which Biden himself played a direct and
shameful role, condemning Israel for building apartments in a Jewish neighborhood
of Jerusalem.
Trump praises dictators as a negotiating tactic; Obama praised
them because he, too, thought America was a problem.
One of the few times the Obama administration embraced
democratic change was during the Arab Spring, when “democracy” meant the rise
of the Muslim Brotherhood — which had no interest in freedom, only in power.
In 2008, the Obama campaign cast Biden as a foreign policy guru,
though he had been wrong on almost every foreign policy issue in his career. On
Thursday, he mostly ignored his own record.
Astonishingly, Biden claimed credit
for Trump’s success in crushing the so-called “Islamic State,” saying he worked
with Obama “to craft the military and diplomatic campaign that ultimately
defeated ISIS.” In fact, Biden was complicit in the rise of ISIS. He was
Obama’s point man on Iraq when the U.S. suddenly pulled out of the country,
leaving a vacuum that ISIS filled. He did not object when Obama called the
terror group “junior varsity.”
Biden offered nothing new in terms
of solutions to current foreign policy challenges. He claimed that the Iran
nuclear deal had been a success — on the very day Iran was reportedto have been
cheating all along. He said the U.S. should re-enter the deal once Iran did,
offering no idea how to ensure that it did so. On North Korea, Biden promised
he would “empower our negotiators,” whatever that means.
He said that he would get “tough”
with China, which Trump is already doing (and which Biden previously suggested he
would not do). And
on immigration, he ridiculed the very idea
of borders — literally: “I respect no borders.”
And this is the best Democrats have on foreign
policy.
Joel B. Pollak
is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social
Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard. He is a
winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the
co-author of How
Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from
Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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