Category Archives: Middle East

William J. Astore: Seventy Years of Military Mediocrity

How the US has developed military muscle at the expense of brainpower.

Saudi Oil Strategy: Brilliant Or Suicide?

Does it make sense to look at the Saudi strategy within the oil industry alone, or do analysts need to start factoring in deflationary economic policies around the world?

The Balance of Power in the Middle East Just Changed, U.S.-Iranian Relations Emerge from a 30-Year Cold War

Don’t sweat the details of the US/Iran nuclear accord. What matters is that the calculus of power in the Middle East just changed, big time.

Andrew Bacevich: Washington in Wonderland, Down the Iraq Rabbit Hole (Again)

The many false and self-defeating premises behind our continued intervention in Iraq.

Michael Klare: Delusional Thinking in Washington, The Desperate Plight of a Declining Superpower

How US superpower overreach has hit the breaking point, yet the officialdom acts as if somehow doing more will succeed.

How the China’s New Silk Road is Shifting Geopolitics

Even though China’s Silk Road initiative is in its early stages and still opportunistic, traditional rivalries could impede progress. Even so, the US is concerned about how China has gotten and is making countermoves.

Bill Black: The BBC Dismisses a Real Greek Economist as a Sexy “Ideologue”

Yves here. I know some readers have begged to differ, but Very Serious People are not described in the same terms as pop culture icons. Thus, as Bill Black points out, the “rock star” branding of Varoufakis is a way to depict him as a colorful, entertaining lightweight.

Since the U.S. Military Lost the Last Two Wars It Fought, Is There Reason to Think “Boots on the Ground” Anywhere Is a Good Idea?

We are what we repeatedly do, and what our military repeatedly does is lose. Sending them into Ukraine or Iraq would be demented.

OPEC Fires First Shot In Global Oil Price War

Yves here. Some readers took issue with our view that the Saudis, and now OPEC, decision against curbing production to support oil prices, was a classic example of predatory pricing, in which a player produces at an uneconomical cost in order to inflict damage on competitors, force them to curtail operations on a permanent basis, and then harvest higher returns later via having thinned out suppliers. As the post below indicates, it’s now increasingly recognized that the Saudis want oil prices lower, and a big reason is to weaken US shale operators (we also suggested that the Saudis also have geopolitical aims for this move, since the countries that get whacked have either been unfriended by Riyadh or are official enemies).

Analysts have taken almost entirely to discussing the Saudi “fiscal breakeven” which is the oil price it needs to raise enough revenues to funds its government, at $90 a barrel, to contend that the Saudi’s can’t afford to allow prices to remain low for all that long. But the desert kingdom has a lot of unused borrowing capacity and clearly does not see its near-term budget issues as a driving consideration. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, based on a Citigroup analysis that has been making the rounds, argues that the Saudis have misread US shale economics and also contends that many producers have hedged their output, insulating them from the downdraft. Despite its detail, the Citigroup analysis diverges in so many respects from other accounts that I’d like to see more corroboration (recall Goldman’s similarly celebrated forecast that oil was going to over $200 a barrel).

Oil Tanks After OPEC Fails to Cut Production; US Shale Gas Targeted?

After a testy meeting, OPEC agreed to maintain current production targets. The failure to support oil prices via reducing production led to a sharp fall in prices on Thursday, with West Texas Intermediate crude dropping by over 6% and Brent plunging over 8% before rebounding to finish the day 6.7% lower, at $72.55 a barrel. Many analysts believe that oil could continue its slide to $60 a barrel.

A Truce In The Holy Oil War?

Yves here. This development, of Qatar potentially falling in line with Saudi Arabia, would represent a meaningful shift in Middle Eastern dynamics. But whether this is the beginning of the end of ISIS, or of the “holy oil war,” is another matter. ISIS started out as Prince Bandar’s private army, and it is not hard to imagine that the Saudis wield considerable influence. Among other things, the Saudis remain mighty unhappy over the fact that the US did not escalate in Syria in 2013, and has refused (in a rare show of wisdom) to attack Iran.

Five Bedrock Washington Assumptions That Perpetuate Our Middle East Policy Train Wreck

Yves here. As much as I consider myself to be reasonably jaded, I was nevertheless gobsmacked to read Andrew Bacevich’s list of “Washington assumptions” that underlie US policy-making in the Middle East. They aren’t just detached from reality, they are so wildly at odds with reality as to look deranged. I’d really like to believe that Bacevich is simply describing the all-too-common syndrome of coming to believe your own PR. But as he tells it, these “Washington assumptions” aren’t simply the undergirding talking points for key domestic and foreign constituencies; they really are policy drivers.

This thinking underlying these “Washington assumptions” is not just arrogant but has a rigidity that is almost religious in nature. The neocon vision, that the US has the right to remake the world, combined with how confidence in US virtue and exceptionalism seems to be rising even as our policy initiatives looks more and more mendacious and destructive even to our close allies (well, save the UK).

You can see another set of Washington assumptions at work in the TransPacific Partnership negotiations: that no prospective treaty member will ever question the benefits of free trade (as in they’ll never look at the fine print of what the deal is really about), that they will also want to ally themselves with the US as the better hegemon than China (if nothing else, the US is willing to act as the consumer of the last resort, a role China is not keen to assume, since that is tantamount to exporting jobs).

So this post also serves to demonstrate why Kissinger in his recent public pronouncements looks vastly more responsible than the crew in charge of our foreign affairs. As much as the deservedly-derided doctor was far too willing to team up with unsavory types to achieve what he considered to be American ends, his notion of “realpolitik” explicitly took morality out of the picture. Watching the US manage to devise even worse policies out of a warped, ideologically-driven notion of virtue is both perverse and chilling, like watching someone with a mental illness play out their delusions. And although mad leaders are sadly common in history, it’s another matter completely to see a technocratic class taking that role.

The Greater Middle East as an American Garrison: 35 Years of Building Military Bases and Sowing Disaster

Yves here. In a bit of synchronicity, Lambert and I were discussing how bad America is at running an empire. Iraq by any standards was not doing all that well under Saddam Hussein. Growth was lousy due to Western sanctions, and he was thuggish in his methods of maintaining control. Yet he ran a secular government and hostilities between Shia and Sunni were a non-issue. After our invasion, hospitals were basically looted. Electricity barely worked in Baghdad, and wasn’t working all that well long after the US occupied Iraq. Any member of the professional classes that could leave the country did (this was well reported in Australia in 2003 and 2004). So we broke a country…as a demonstration project? For what end? The US also made a botch of the fall of the USSR, with our neoliberal reforms facilitating a plutocratic land-grab in Russia by well-placed insiders, with key Western aides participating in the plunder. OIFVet points out that, contrary to Western ideology, the lives of ordinary Bulgarians was better under the old USSR (Russia is now showing net gains; I’m told Moscow now looks to be on a par with Berlin).

The British took their imperial project far more seriously than we have ours. A big reason that they were more successful is that they built infrastructure, in the form of putting in place a British bureaucracy run by civil servants. And producing those civil servants was the top priority of the education system. C. Northcote Parkinson reports that the top Cambridge and Oxford graduates went to India. The next rank were civil servants in the UK. The ones at the bottom of the heap went into business.

Now there is a lot not to like about a British-style bureaucracy; they are stereotypically rigid and procedure-driven. The Australian Taxation Office is hugely taxpayer-unfriendly if you are a business, compared to the IRS (for instance, when I was there, you needed a receipt for every expense, and not just a credit card receipt. If you had a charge from a newsstand, they wanted to see that it really was a business periodical and not, say porn).

But the rigidity meant it was less easily corrupted, and that no one would question that the government was the paramount authority (a notion that most US regulators seem to have forgotten). Admittedly, with the rise of neoliberalism, no one seems to care about governing well any more, so there hasn’t been much thinking on how to run government in the 20th and 21st century that isn’t really about private sector profiteering.

This article looks at a symptom of the US’ misguided thinking about our imperial project: that of the role of our military bases. It isn’t much discussed in polite company, for instance, that the Saudis had repeatedly asked us to remove our base there because it was causing a lot of discord. We had ignored their request. It took 9/11 to get us to depart.