Trump Seethes, Qatar Leaves, and the Saudis Near Collapse: What a Week.

09/06/2017 — Joshua Alexander

In the wake of the Daesh-claimed attack in Tehran that left 17 innocents dead, the Trump creature let fly an uncharacteristic press statement on the attacks (uncharacteristic in that somebody wrote it for him, and it wasn’t a tweet), the sheer irony of which cannot be conveyed in words, but we’ll try. Concerning Iran, the statement concluded that “[w]e underscore that states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil that they promote.” One is almost embarrassed for them.

Tehran, on the other hand, resorted to no platitudes, but hit the nail on the head right away—“The fact that Islamic State has claimed responsibility proves that [the Saudis] were involved in the brutal attack,” the Revolutionary Guard said. Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, in a statement specifically pushing back against Trump’s tragicomedy in prose, named “US clients” as the backers of the Islamic State (IS) bandits who attacked the parliament and the shrine of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

And where would they get that idea? Well, not that our regular reader need reminding, but for the new kids, one of the tastier tranches of Killary emails released just before the election contained a u.$ state department memo (as if more evidence was necessary), detailing who, indeed, were funding IS. The state department says: “We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical groups in the region.”

This scheme has been unravelling of late, however. With IS serving only the purposes of a shrinking number of u.$. clients, sowing hatred between Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait etc. all against the middle, the game of terrorist-funding telephone is over and nobody can guess what the original message was. The music has stopped, and there aren’t enough chairs… game metaphors. No? Okay, inter-imperialist rivalry and struggle among u.$. client states for total command of the wet work in the middle east is upon us, and Qatar, once golden boy of u.$. “counter-terrorism” schemes is left out in the cold, specifically for supposedly LITERALLY JUST SAYING that hating Iran makes no sense.

No, seriously, and then they blamed Qatar for supporting IS and Yemen’s heroic Houthis at the same time. I swear I’m not making this up. They’ve been blockaded and kicked out of the gulf cooperation organization which they helped found, but don’t worry, Iran will pick up the slack.

But why all the blockading and general hysteria? Literally a single word in favor of Iran can spark a blockade, alienation and the specter of regional war. Why? Mainly, because virtually all agree, although they don’t say so publicly, that the princes are doomed, broadly speaking. Saudi Arabia is on the verge of financial and social collapse. The regime has turned to the medieval pressure-valves of pogrom, conspiracy and war for outlet, but to no avail. They have upped scares about homosexuals, condemn uppity women as witches and have established an anti-witch directorate, as well as unleashing bloody repressions against the Shia minority, who live as third class “citizens”. Saudi Arabia is lashing out like a wounded animal, and it may just take the region with it.

An alienated Turkey may just move closer to Iran, Kuwait wants to break the blockade, the Syrian Arab Army makes gains every day, and the condottieri of IS—here serving turkey, there Israel, there Saudi Arabia—are growing short on patrons.

Meanwhile Iran moves forward, supporting the valiant fighters of Hezbollah, the Houthis resistance, the Syrian Arab Army, and rank up among Cuba and the DPRK for assistance to national liberation movements and friends of progressive humankind worldwide (and not to mention virtually bankrolling the Palestinian freedom struggle at this point). Iran is like a reverse canary in the mine for u.$. and co. strength worldwide. Each Iranian gain is a u.$. loss.

So yeah, I suppose Trump is right, in a funny way. Iran does bring this bandit violence on itself. It doesn’t have to support Palestinian freedom, Syrian sovereignty, the Bolivarian revolution and the brave resistance of People’s Korea, but it does. And god preserve them as long as they do.