Tag Archives: Saudi Arabia

As Donny Waits for the Sheik to Tell Him Who to Shoot …

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From the moment he “won” on November 8, 2016, I’ve tried to imagine what America’s intelligence and military leaders would do if reality TV host Donald Trump gave an order for a full-fledged, consequences-be-damned attack on some country. (Shooting off $120 million worth of cruise missiles at a mostly empty Syrian airfield doesn’t compare.) Today, we’re closer than ever to finding out.

My geezer buddies and I were observing a fall tradition hiking the Grand Canyon last week, only to emerge to find Trump “locked and loaded” and apparently waiting for the Saudis to tell him who to shoot and when. The Saudis are very major customers of Trump Inc., so the leader of the free world has obligations to the people who pay his bills, and those are just the obligations we know about.

Frankly, I haven’t heard a convincing explanation for what Iran has to gain from sending drones to blow up some Saudi oil facilities. The only scenario that fits is basically a variation on Osama bin Laden’s (highly successful) strategy to draw the United States into a land war in the Middle East and inflame a new generation of jihadis.

But since we’re talking Trump here — a guy who is bored with briefings and quite likely has never read a book on Middle East history or diplomacy, and calculates everything based on how friendly someone is to his bank accounts — all he needs to be convinced is a reminder of the favors he owes his “investors.” In this case that would of course include noted bone saw artist, Mohammed Bin Salman.

The U.S. military and the vast American intelligence apparatus though are a whole different species of animal. The betting line would be that given an order the militarists and spy world careerists will salute and charge into any breach their commander orders. It’s what they’re trained to do. Certainly the military, anyway.

But I have to think — naively, perhaps — that everyone with any sophisticated judgment of character long ago concluded that Trump is, to quote Rex Tillerson, “a [bleeping] moron” and a highly compromised one at that. Watching him insult their work and value to Vladimir Putin’s face was galling enough, but conceding and cooperating with such an abject fool — for the permanent historical record — doesn’t strike me as something they’re eager to have on their resume.

Trump, who is notoriously gutless about firing anything face to face — note pretty much everyone dismissed from the White House by tweet — is probably hoping the Saudis don’t demand he drop some “shock and awe” on Tehran. I mean, tracking all that rocket activity could really cut into his golf time. And in truth, he may be spared that dilemma by Sultan Bone Saw’s concern that a bigly war with Iran’s air force could quickly demolish much of the rest of the House of Saud’s oil production/cash printing macinery. That would be a serious bmmer. Money (i.e. subsidies to its citizens) being the primary way the Saudi tribe keeps control in their grim, corrupt desert theocracy.

The situation has got a lot of people talking about why exactly the United States owes Saudi Arabia anything? We’ve been handing them billions of dollars a month for well over 75 years — both before and after 15 of their spoiled brat off-spring flew jets into buildings on 9/11 and murdered 3000 Americans.

The old guard Saudis were bad enough and young Mohammed Bin Bone Saw appears to be worse. His coziness with Jared Kushner and the financially bungled Kushner Properties, Inc. withstanding, the Saudis have all the resources they need to fight it out with Iran if that’s their idea of righteous retribution. (And for the record, I still need a lot more cnvincing it is was Iran behind the drone strikes.)

Nevertheless, it is abundantly clear that Trump has a “special relationship” with the Saudis that goes well beyond pumping gas into American SUVs. The general publc may be a little foggy about this, but real generals and the wonky spy nerds are certainly not, and up to some point at least that crowd has to decide whether to attach their reputations to kill orders from a bought-off buffoon.

What Not to Do in Response to Paris.

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Lambert_to_the_SlaughterBy the sound of the usual drum beaters you’d think 2003 was 1200 years ago not just 12. After the attacks in Paris the other night you’ll be relieved to know that once again the solution to this problem is “relatively easy”, certainly if you’re listening to someone, a wandering minstrel candidate for example, who doesn’t really have to do anything.

Eight guys with machine guns and suicide belts creating horror and havoc in big, pleasant city Westerners are both familiar with and care about, (i.e. not Baghdad or Beirut), is qualitatively different. Therefore, just like 2003, our pathway to peace is obvious. Invade someone. Syria in this case, maybe a part of Iraq too (again). Kill the dictator. Assad. And ISIS. Wherever they are. And take over the country. Then, although this tends to get all boring and nuancy, restore all the usual government functions like courts and sewage systems and Departments of Motor Vehicles and then, after a while toss the keys to some reasonable people and book a flight home.

For the life of these deep thinkers, they can’t understand why Barack Obama and his hand-wringers wasted seven years crippling us with socialized medicine and strangling off the innovation of Wall Street instead of killing Muslims, somewhere, anywhere. Hell, it’s gotten so bad a guy can’t take his date to the movies in America without the fear of being machine-gunned down by some maniac.

Oh wait. Sorry. I had my psychotic terrorists confused there for a second.

I have to remember. We’re only talking Muslims here. THEY are the ones (the only ones) who want to come here and kill us.

Lacking any kind of productive ideas from the conservative intelligentsia (sic), all of whom, like a chorus of wind up toys, are chanting for a re-run of “shock and awe” and “nation-building”, serious-minded adults who can remember all the way back to the dim twilight of 2003 have to apply a set of (very) hard-learned lessons.

For example:

A: Precisely like Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, what ISIS wants more than anything is an apocalyptic war with the infidels. That’s us. Or really anyone who let’s women drive cars and practice total patriarchal control. And that would be a war,  preferably in a place where ISIS can most easily marshal a constant supply of fresh recruits. In 2003 the Bushies gave al-Qaeda everything they wanted plus a wet kiss, by not only coming to war in the Middle East, but by storming into the wrong country, oblivious to the centuries-old tribal insanities they were setting loose.

B: Whacking a dictator sounds like great fun, but replacing him with something better means accepting — at best — a couple decades of civil war, suicide bombings, insurgent whack-a-mole and ruinously expensive corruption on an epic scale, with no guarantee, ever, that “good guys” will eventually settle in and keep the water and electricity flowing, much less allow girls to go to school. And who gets handed the check for this?

C: The cry of “war!” plays well to arm chair commandos watching FoxNews. But fighting an “apocalyptic cult” like ISIS, which can cause more hysteria with eight guys invading via the AutoRoute in rental cars from Belgium than holding an entire city of two million people (Mosul, Iraq) argues less for a coalition of 100,000 crusaders charging across the sand into Damascus then another Orwellian step up in cyber-spying. And not just on 22 year-old jiihadis pissed-off by the loose morals of the West, but their oil rich/Saudi benefactors funneling money to them, very likely via sacrosanct Swiss banks. There’s no fist-pumping fun in nerds somewhere voiding a bank account.

But even if you know and accept all this, and aren’t fear-mongering for votes in a Republican primary, the horror in Paris … this horror in Paris … is going to require a more aggressive response to ISIS and religious radicalization.

A proper sequencing of tactics demands first weakening both ISIS on the ground and its world-wide supply and training network by attacking their revenue/quartermaster stream. I have no doubt Team Obama is well aware of this. But getting richer-than-Croesus Sunni sheiks to comply with American foreign policy goals is the stuff of fantasy. Their tribes are going to outlive any tribe in D.C. Leverage on that crowd will require a very deep and broad financial/intelligence coalition, meaning the Chinese as well, if not the Russians, too. Good luck with that.

Then, American liberals, weighing the alternative of yet another recklessly prosecuted ground war favored by the usual chickenhawks — take a bow Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio — may have to accept a heightened level of racial profiling, if only as a consequence of better intelligence-sharing with Western Europe. Personally, I’m certain this is already going on, with the FBI and others under the strictest orders to be as circumspect and low-profile as possible. But it’ll have to get tighter.

Finally, someone should start encouraging Americans to grow a little perspective and toughen up, before something happens here, again.

Our heavily-armed homegrown terrorists are regularly slaughtering more of us in schools, restaurants and movie theaters than any ISIS fanatic could ever dream of, and we accept it as a price we must pay for our freedom. (That of course would be the freedom to imagine that like some B-movie hero we’ll be the guy with the conceal-carry permit who riddles the fanatic with bullets, saves the day and gets the girl).

If we can avoid hysteria over the semi-weekly rampages we endure here with such unsettling equanimity in the Homeland, we need to remind ourselves to react with the same dispassion when eight guys in rental cars roll over the Canadian border and do a Paris number on The West Village or Yankee Stadium.