Philippa Kaur

More stories

  • 88 Shares169 Views

    in World Politics

    The Catholic Bishops’ War Against Joe Biden

    The political faction of the Catholic Church known as the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is facing a major problem. Though it was never meant to play a political role, for historical reasons, it has allowed itself to do what all individual Americans find themselves compelled to do: choose a side. It has fallen into one of the two cultural-political grooves Americans are expected to follow and identify within a binary world of opposition between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans.

    Since the church’s traditions stretch back two millennia, a majority of US bishops feel that they logically belong on the conservative side. But having once been instructed to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, Christian prelates have a Biblical precedent for avoiding a partisan political stance. Moreover, for nearly two centuries, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority effectively marginalized the Catholic Church as a potential political force. Even though it stands as the largest single Christian denomination, the Catholic hierarchy in the US has traditionally deferred to the dominant worldview of Protestant nationalism in an officially secular nation whose coins nevertheless proclaim that in God they trust and whose flag, when pledged to, represents “one nation, under God.”

    Why Is Joe Biden’s Presidency Anathema to So Many US Catholics?

    READ MORE

    In other words, a relatively stable historical pax religiosa commanded that Catholics let the Protestants rule, going about their business on the sidelines. Things, alas, become troublingly complex on those rare occasions when a Catholic is elected president. This happened once before, but ended after less than three years, on November 22, 1963, with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Now it has happened again with the election of Joe Biden. The bishops feel they must choose between their adherence to a pan-Christian right-wing agenda in the US culture wars and their support of a member of their flock who legally holds the reins of secular power in the most powerful nation on earth.

    Quoted by AP, Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City expressed what he formulates as a paradox that Biden must account for: “It can create confusion. … How can he say he’s a devout Catholic and he’s doing these things that are contrary to the church’s teaching?”

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    Devout:

    Attached by conscience to a set of guiding principles often of religious inspiration that manifests itself through an intimate sense of personal devotion but taken by people with an presumptuous sense of their own authority to signify unthinking obedience of all individuals to their own personal set of values.

    Contextual Note

    There are two simple answers to the archbishop’s question, one secular and the other theological. On the secular side, Biden can claim to be “a devout Catholic” because the US Constitution protects freedom of speech. On the spiritual side, traditional Catholic theology actually holds conscience in higher regard than ecclesiastic law.

    Like most hypercompetitive Americans, bishops clearly believe in the virtue of asserting one’s power, which in US culture means committing to pushing one’s influence always a bit further than seems natural. But in the more ancient Catholic tradition, bishops are meant to be guides of the flock, supporting the effort of the faithful to live up to the ideals of the Christian community. The community is neither a military organization dedicated to violence nor a profit-focused enterprise out to crush its rivals. One contemporary American theologian, Marcel Lejeune, calls the Catholic community “a difficult mess, wrapped up in grace. More like a family.”

    Embed from Getty Images

    Catholic Bishops are not expected to play the role of theologians. They neither make nor enforce the law of the church, known as canon law. They are specifically called upon to teach, but neither to legislate nor to judge. Pope Benedict XIV, in a 1740 encyclical on the duties of bishops, described them “as tender parents of the lambs,” the faithful who compose their flock. Bishops may teach and preach, but not overreach.Canon 383 states that “a bishop should act with humanity and charity toward the brothers and sisters who are not in full communion with the Catholic Church.”

    So why, in the name of charity, do a majority of US bishops want to publicly shame Joe Biden? USCCB President Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles complains that “our new President has pledged to pursue certain policies that would advance moral evils and threaten human life and dignity, most seriously in the areas of abortion, contraception, marriage, and gender.”

    The Washington Post reports that once Biden’s election was confirmed, the USCCB created “a special working group to address issues surrounding the election of a Catholic president who in some cases promotes policies in conflict with Catholic teaching and the bishops’ priorities.” Perhaps realizing that the reconciliation of a church’s pastoral teaching and the democratic practices of the surrounding secular society may require more complex reflection than the bishops are capable of processing or tolerating, “the working group was disbanded, and the topic moved to the USCCB’s doctrine committee.”

    Archbishop Naumann complained that Biden’s public position “can create confusion.” Michael Sean Winters, author of “God’s Right Hand: How Jerry Falwell Made God a Republican and Baptized the American Right,” commented on the bishops’ stance: “What it showed is that most of the speakers are confused in ways that are unique, and common, to ideologues.” Michelle Boorstein, writing for The Washington Post, adds this remark: “The USCCB is akin to an industry group of equals and has no authority over bishops themselves; only the Vatican does.” Moreover, as theology professor Steven Millies has observed, “What we’re seeing now is an effort to please donors who want a church which will wage a culture war.” In short, the American way.

    Historical Note

    Winters documents how the Protestant American right not only captured God but enlisted the Catholic hierarchy in support of their Republican God. For most of the 20th century, working-class American Catholics tended to be Democrats. At the same time, because of their low social status, second-generation Catholic immigrants were disproportionately attracted to the military and law enforcement. This eventually created an identification within the Catholic community with the militaristic values of US nationalism and the enforcement of laws dictated by an essentially white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant power structure.

    John Kennedy’s election in 1960 troubled many people in the traditional power pyramid who were relieved to see him die in Dallas. Still, Kennedy’s election demonstrated that Catholics could have a role to play among the ruling elite. That may have been a factor in the new strategy of the Protestant right — formerly indifferent to the question of abortion that appeared to obsess only the Catholic Church — as they began to court the Catholic electorate. Protestant fundamentalists strove to show their solidarity with Catholics by not only embracing the “pro-life” cause but even turning it into the principal casus belli of the new culture wars designed to permit the Republicans to dominate politics and orientate policy toward the neoconservative norm that became dominant in the 1980s, infecting the Democratic Party as well.

    The absurdity of the Catholic hierarchy’s commitment to the positions of the Protestant fundamentalists’ worldview is best demonstrated by that same hierarchy’s indifference to the Vatican’s consistent opposition to nationalistic militarism and the scandal of war. If the sacrifice of human life constitutes the basis of their moral stance, abortion cannot even begin to compete with the loss of life and utter destruction wrought by American wars. And yet the bishops have never demonstrated the slightest concern with imperial slaughter.

    Most recently Pope Francis asserted that “in recent decades every single war has been ostensibly ‘justified’” by its proponents. At the same, he asserts that “it is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a ‘just war.’”

    The two most authoritative theologians and philosophers in the Catholic tradition — St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas — both insisted on the authority of the individual’s conscience and the difficulty of justifying war. As T. Hoffman points out, “Aquinas argued that the binding character of conscience, whether erring or not, means that acting against conscience is always evil.” Even if the bishops think Biden is wrong, it is presumptuous of them to judge his conscience. As for war, Biden could be held to account as the major Democratic promoter of George Bush’s clearly unjust and illegal invasion of Iraq. But that has never troubled the American bishops.

    *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

  • 88 Shares169 Views

    in World Politics

    Are Americans Waiting for a Cyber Apocalypse?

    America has a serious infrastructure problem. Maybe when I say that what comes to mind are all the potholes on your street. Or the dismal state of public transportation in your city. Or crumbling bridges all over the country. But that’s so 20th century of you.

    America’s most urgent infrastructure vulnerability is largely invisible and unlikely to be fixed by the Biden administration’s $2-trillion American Jobs Plan. I’m thinking about vulnerabilities that lurk in your garage (your car), your house (your computer) and even your pocket (your phone). Like those devices of yours, all connected to the internet and therefore hackable, American businesses, hospitals and public utilities can also be hijacked from a distance thanks to the software that helps run their systems. And don’t think that the US military and even cybersecurity agencies and firms aren’t seriously at risk, too.

    Escaping Thucydides’ Trap: Keeping the Peace Between Rising and Reigning Powers

    READ MORE

    Such vulnerabilities stem from bugs in the programs — and sometimes even the hardware — that run our increasingly wired society. Beware “zero-day” exploits — so named because you have zero days to fix them once they’re discovered — that can attract top-dollar investments from corporations, governments and even black-market operators. Zero days allow backdoor access to iPhones, personal email programs, corporate personnel files and even the computers that run dams, voting systems and nuclear power plants.

    It’s as if all of America were now protected by nothing but a few old padlocks, the keys to which have been made available to anyone with enough money to buy them (or enough ingenuity to make a set for themselves). And as if that weren’t bad enough, it was America that inadvertently made these keys available to allies, adversaries and potential blackmailers alike.

    The recent SolarWinds hack of federal agencies, as well as companies like Microsoft, for which the Biden administration recently sanctioned Russia and expelled several of its embassy staff, is only the latest example of how other countries have been able to hack basic US infrastructure. Such intrusions, which actually date back to the early 2000s, are often still little more than tests, ways of getting a sense of how easy it might be to break into that infrastructure in more serious ways later. Occasionally, however, the intruders do damage by vacuuming up data or wiping out systems, especially if the targets fail to pay cyber-ransoms. More insidiously, hackers can also plant “timebombs” capable of going off at some future moment.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Russia, China, North Korea and Iran have all hacked into this country’s infrastructure to steal corporate secrets, pilfer personal information, embarrass federal agencies, make money or influence elections. For its part, the American government is anything but an innocent victim of such acts. In fact, it was an early pioneer in the field and continues to lead the way in cyberoperations overseas.

    The US has a long history of making weapons that have later been used against it. When allies suddenly turn into adversaries like the Iranian government after the shah was ousted in the 1979 revolution or the mujahideen in Afghanistan after their war against the Red Army ended in 1989, the weapons switch sides, too. In other cases, like the atomic bomb or unmanned aerial vehicles, the know-how behind the latest technological advances inevitably leaks out, triggering an arms race. In all these years, however, none of those weapons has been used with such devastating effect against the US homeland as the technology of cyberwarfare.

    The Worm That Turned

    In 2009, the centrifuges capable of refining Iranian uranium to weapons-grade level began to malfunction. At first, the engineers there didn’t pay much attention to the problem. Notoriously finicky, such high-speed centrifuges were subject to frequent breakdowns. The Iranians regularly had to replace as many as one of every 10 of them. This time, however, the number of malfunctions began to multiply and then multiply again, while the computers that controlled the centrifuges started to behave strangely, too.

    It was deep into 2010, however, before computer security specialists from Belarus examined the Iranian computers and discovered the explanation for all the malfunctioning. The culprit responsible was a virus, a worm that had managed to burrow deep into the innards of those computers through an astonishing series of zero-day exploits.

    That worm, nicknamed Stuxnet, was the first of its kind. Admittedly, computer viruses had been creating havoc almost since the dawn of the information age, but this was something different. Stuxnet could damage not only computers but the machines that they controlled, in this case destroying about 1,000 centrifuges. Developed by US intelligence agencies in cooperation with their Israeli counterparts, Stuxnet would prove to be but the first salvo in a cyberwar that continues to this day.

    It didn’t take long before other countries developed their own versions of Stuxnet to exploit the same kind of zero-day vulnerabilities. In her book, “This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends,” New York Times reporter Nicole Perlroth describes in horrifying detail how the new cyber arms race has escalated. It took Iran only three years to retaliate for Stuxnet by introducing malware into Aramco, the Saudi oil company, destroying 30,000 of its computers. In 2014, North Korea executed a similar attack against Sony Pictures in response to a film that imagined the assassination of that country’s leader, Kim Jong-un. Meanwhile, Perlroth reports, Chinese hackers have targeted US firms to harvest intellectual property, ranging from laser technology and high-efficiency gas turbines to the plans for “the next F-35 fighter” and “the formulas for Coca-Cola and Benjamin Moore paint.”

    Over the years, Russia has become especially adept at the new technology. Kremlin-directed hackers interfered in Ukraine’s presidential election in 2014 in an effort to advance a far-right fringe candidate. The next year, they shut down Ukraine’s power grid for six hours. In the freezing cold of December 2016, they turned off the heat and power in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. And it wasn’t just Ukraine either. Russian hackers paralyzed Estonia, interfered in the UK’s Brexit referendum and nearly shut down the safety controls of a Saudi oil company.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Then, Russia started to apply everything it learned from these efforts to the task of penetrating US networks. In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, Russian hackers weaponized information stolen from Democratic Party operative John Podesta and wormed their way into state-level electoral systems. Later, they launched ransomware attacks against US towns and cities, hacked into American hospitals, and even got inside the Wolf Creek nuclear power plant in Kansas. “The Russians,” Perlroth writes, “were mapping out the plant’s networks for a future attack.”

    The United States did not sit idly by watching such incursions. The National Security Agency (NSA) broke into Chinese companies like Huawei, as well as their customers in countries like Cuba and Syria. With a plan nicknamed Nitro Zeus, the US was prepared to take down key elements of Iran’s infrastructure if the negotiations around a nuclear deal failed. In response to the Sony hack, Washington orchestrated a 10-hour internet outage in North Korea.

    As the leaks from whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in 2013, the NSA had set up full-spectrum surveillance through various communications networks, even hacking into the private phones of leaders around the world like Germany’s Angela Merkel. By 2019, having boosted its annual budget to nearly $10 billion and created 133 cyber mission teams with a staff of 6,000, the Pentagon’s Cyber Command was planting malware in Russia’s energy grid and plotting other mischief.

    Unbeknownst to Snowden or anyone else at the time, the NSA was also stockpiling a treasure trove of zero-day exploits for potential use against a range of targets. At first glance, this might seem like the cyber-equivalent of setting up a network of silos filled with intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) to maintain a rough system of deterrence. The best defense, according to the hawk’s catechism, is always an arsenal of offensive weapons.

    But then the NSA got hacked. In 2017, an outfit called the Shadow Brokers leaked 20 of the agency’s most powerful zero-day exploits. That May, WannaCry ransomware attacks suddenly began to strike targets as varied as British hospitals, Indian airlines, Chinese gas stations and electrical utilities around the US. The perpetrators were likely North Korean, but the code, as it happened, originated with the NSA. The bill for the damages came to $4 billion.

    Not to be outdone, Russian hackers turned two of the NSA zero-day exploits into a virus called NotPetya, which caused even more damage. Initially intended to devastate Ukraine, that malware spread quickly around the world, causing at least $10 billion in damages by briefly shutting down companies like Merck, Maersk, FedEx and, in an example of second-order blowback, the Russian oil giant Rosneft as well.

    Sadly enough, in 2021, as Kim Zetter has written in “Countdown to Zero Day,” cyberweapons “can be easily obtained on underground markets or, depending on the complexity of the system being targeted, custom-built from scratch by a skilled teenage coder.” Such weapons then ricochet around the world before, more often than not, they return to sender. Sooner or later, cyber-chickens always come home to roost.

    Trump Makes Things Worse

    Donald Trump notoriously dismissed Russian interference in the 2016 election. His aides didn’t even bother bringing up additional examples of Russian cyber-meddling because the president just wasn’t interested. In 2018, he even eliminated the position of national cybersecurity coordinator, which helped National Security Adviser John Bolton consolidate his own power within the US administration. Later, Trump would fire Christopher Krebs, who was in charge of protecting elections from cyberattacks, for validating the integrity of the 2020 presidential election.

    Embed from Getty Images

    The SolarWinds attack at the end of last year highlighted the continued weakness of this country’s cybersecurity policy and Trump’s own denialism. Confronted with evidence from his intelligence agencies of Russian involvement, the president continued to insist that the perpetrators were Chinese.

    The far right, for partisan reasons, abetted his denialism. Strangely enough, commentators on the left similarly attempted to debunk the idea that Russians were involved in the Podesta hack, 2016 election interference and other intrusions, despite overwhelming evidence presented in the Mueller report, the Senate Intelligence Committee findings and even from Russian sources. But this denialism of the right and the left obscures a more important Trump administration failure. It made no attempt to work with Russia and China to orchestrate a truce in escalating global cyber-tensions.

    Chastened by the original Stuxnet attack on Iran, the Putin government had actually proposed on several occasions that the international community should draw up a treaty to ban computer warfare and that Moscow and Washington should also sort out something similar bilaterally. The Obama administration ignored such overtures, not wanting to constrain the national security state’s ability to launch offensive cyber-operations, which the Pentagon euphemistically likes to label a “defend forward” strategy.

    In the Trump years, even as he was pulling the US out of one arms control deal after another with the Russians, The Donald was emphasizing his superb rapport with Vladimir Putin. Instead of repeatedly covering for the Russian president — whatever his mix of personal, financial and political reasons for doing so — Trump could have deployed his over-hyped art-of-the-deal skills to revive Putin’s own proposals for a cyber-truce.

    With China, the Trump administration committed a more serious error. Stung by a series of Chinese cyber-thefts, not just of intellectual property but of millions of the security-clearance files of federal employees, the Obama administration reached an agreement with Beijing in 2015 to stop mutual espionage in cyberspace. “We have agreed that neither the U.S. [n]or the Chinese government will conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information for commercial advantage,” Barack Obama said then. “We’ll work together and with other nations to promote other rules of the road.”

    In the wake of that agreement, Chinese intrusions in US infrastructure dropped by an astonishing 90%. Then, Trump took office and began to impose tariffs on Chinese goods. That trade war with Beijing would devastate American farmers and manufacturers, while padding the bills of American consumers, even as the president made it ever more difficult for Chinese firms to buy American products and technology. Not surprisingly, China once again turned to its hackers to acquire the know-how it could no longer get legitimately. In 2017, those hackers also siphoned off the personal information of nearly half of all Americans through a breach in the Equifax credit reporting agency.

    As part of his determination to destroy everything that Obama achieved, of course, Trump completely ignored that administration’s 2015 agreement with Beijing.

    Head for the Bunkers?

    Larry Hall once worked for the Defense Department. Now, he’s selling luxury apartments in a former nuclear missile silo in the middle of Kansas. It burrows 15 stories into the ground and he calls it Survival Condo. The smallest units go for $1.5 million and the complex features a gym, swimming pool and shooting range in its deep underground communal space.

    When asked why he’d built Survival Condo, Hall replied, “You don’t want to know.” Perhaps he was worried about a future nuclear exchange, another even more devastating pandemic or the steady ratcheting up of the climate crisis. Those, however, are well-known doomsday scenarios, and he was evidently alluding to a threat to which most Americans remain oblivious. What the Survival Condo website emphasizes is living through five years “completely off-grid,” suggesting a fear that the whole US infrastructure could be taken down via a massive hack.

    .custom-post-from {float:right; margin: 0 10px 10px; max-width: 50%; width: 100%; text-align: center; background: #000000; color: #ffffff; padding: 15px 0 30px; }
    .custom-post-from img { max-width: 85% !important; margin: 15px auto; filter: brightness(0) invert(1); }
    .custom-post-from .cpf-h4 { font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
    .custom-post-from .cpf-h5 { font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 1px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
    .custom-post-from input[type=”email”] { font-size: 14px; color: #000 !important; width: 240px; margin: auto; height: 30px; box-shadow:none; border: none; padding: 0 10px; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-pen-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: center right 14px; background-size:14px;}
    .custom-post-from input[type=”submit”] { font-weight: normal; margin: 15px auto; height: 30px; box-shadow: none; border: none; padding: 0 10px 0 35px; background-color: #1878f3; color: #ffffff; border-radius: 4px; display: inline-block; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-email-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 14px center; background-size: 14px; }

    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox { width: 90%; margin: auto; position: relative; display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap;}
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label { text-align: left; display: block; padding-left: 32px; margin-bottom: 0; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px;
    -webkit-user-select: none;
    -moz-user-select: none;
    -ms-user-select: none;
    user-select: none;
    order: 1;
    color: #ffffff;
    font-weight: normal;}
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label a { color: #ffffff; text-decoration: underline; }
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input { position: absolute; opacity: 0; cursor: pointer; height: 100%; width: 24%; left: 0;
    right: 0; margin: 0; z-index: 3; order: 2;}
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:before { content: “f0c8”; font-family: Font Awesome 5 Free; color: #eee; font-size: 24px; position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0; line-height: 28px; color: #ffffff; width: 20px; height: 20px; margin-top: 5px; z-index: 2; }
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:before { content: “f14a”; font-weight: 600; color: #2196F3; }
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:after { content: “”; }
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:after { position: absolute; left: 2px; width: 18px; height: 18px; margin-top: 10px; background: #ffffff; top: 10px; margin: auto; z-index: 1; }
    .custom-post-from .error{ display: block; color: #ff6461; order: 3 !important;}

    And it’s true that modern life as most of us know it has become increasingly tied up with the so-called Internet of Things (IoT). By 2023, it’s estimated that every person on Earth will have, on average, 3.6 networked devices. Short of moving to a big hole in the ground in Kansas and living completely off the grid, it will be difficult indeed to extricate yourself from the consequences of a truly coordinated attack on such an IoT.

    A mixture of short-sighted government action — as well as inaction — and a laissez-faire approach to markets have led to the present impasse. The US government has refused to put anything but the most minimal controls on the development of spyware, has done little to engage the rest of the world in regulating hostile activities in cyberspace, and continues to believe that its “defend forward” strategy will be capable of protecting US assets. (Dream on, national security state!)

    Plugging the holes in the IoT dike is guaranteed to be an inadequate solution. Building a better dike might be a marginally better approach, but a truly more sensible option would be to address the underlying problem of the surging threat. Like the current efforts to control the spread of nuclear material, a nonproliferation approach to cyberweapons requires international cooperation across ideological lines.

    It’s not too late. But to prevent a rush to the bunkers will take a concerted effort by the major players — the US, Russia and China — to recognize that cyberwar would, at best, produce the most pyrrhic of victories. If they don’t work together to protect the cyber-commons, the digital highway will, at the very least, continue to be plagued by potholes, broken guardrails and improvised explosive devices whose detonations threaten to disrupt all our lives.

    *[This article was originally published by TomDispatch.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

  • 113 Shares149 Views

    in World Politics

    What the UAE-Turkey Rivalry Means for Europe’s Energy Security

    In recent months, the United Arab Emirates has adopted a number of stances inimical to Turkish ambitions in the Mediterranean. This has taken the form of closer relations between the UAE, Greece and Greek Cyprus, more joint military exercises, and increased energy collaboration with Israel via the Abraham Accords. But with President Joe Biden in the Oval Office, the UAE has toned down its overt military posturing and complemented its strategy with economic means. The shift relies on hydrocarbon pipeline proposals that exclude Turkey with the aim to diminish its geopolitical importance to Europe.

    Discovery of Natural Gas Exposes Turkey’s Political Rifts

    READ MORE

    The UAE views Turkey as a threat for two reasons. First, Ankara supports the Muslim Brotherhood, which the Emiratis have designated as a terrorist organization. Second, Turkey has been active both militarily and economically in North Africa, Syria and the Horn of Africa. In 2019 and 2020, competition between Abu Dhabi and Ankara flared, with both powers directly funneling mercenaries and money to Libya, stepping up competition in Somalia and castigating each other in diplomatic statements. The UAE also aligned with Greek Cyprus, Greece, France and Egypt against Turkey while providing financial and possibly military support in the form of mercenaries to anti-Turkish actors in the region.

    Energy Games

    During Biden’s first months in office, however, the UAE has undertaken two major actions that indicate a softer approach toward Ankara. First, on January 29, Abu Dhabi declared that it was ready to work closely with the UN on Libya. Second, the UAE began dismantling its base in Assab, in Eritrea. Although this move comes largely in an attempt to extricate itself from the war in Yemen, it also means losing a critical power-projection site that has acted as a counterbalance to Turkey’s and Qatar’s presence in Suakin, in Sudan. This does not mean that Abu Dhabi considers Turkey to be any less of a threat. On the contrary, recent UAE actions portend a refocusing on investment in pipelines and infrastructure in the eastern Mediterranean to blunt Ankara’s energy ambitions, especially concerning Turkey’s role in Europe’s energy security.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Moscow’s influence on Europe’s energy markets has emerged as a concern for the European Union and the US, with Russian supplies accounting for 40% of European gas consumption. Turkey is commonly floated as a solution because it can connect alternative pipelines from the Caspian and Central Asia. Turkey becoming an important energy transportation hub would give it leverage over the EU and allow it to better play the US, Western Europe and Russia against each other.

    However, the UAE’s attempts to lock Turkey out of the eastern Mediterranean energy pipelines threaten Ankara’s goals of becoming a larger player in the EU’s energy market. The UAE is attempting to do this by joining the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum (EMGF) — comprised of Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Israel, Jordan and Palestine — as an observer. Although the EMGF claims to be open to anyone, its ostensible purpose is to lock Turkey out of the Mediterranean hydrocarbons market, especially with the EastMed pipeline project. This pipeline would transfer gas from Cyprus and Israel to Greece and then further on to Europe; it is a major reason for Turkey’s involvement in Libya. The EastMed faces certain financial and political struggles, and the UAE’s endorsement of the project could galvanize initiative and create a breakthrough in rallying a coalition to circumvent Turkey on the energy market.

    Moreover, Abu Dhabi’s improving relations with Israel provide it more alternatives in convening an anti-Turkish coalition. The Abraham Accords also augment the UAE’s ability to constrain Turkey by allowing Abu Dhabi to collaborate with Israel on joint pipeline projects. If the UAE manages to connect itself to the EastMed, or any other, pipeline, Turkey’s status as an energy alternative to Russia would diminish in the eyes of Europe and the US. It appears as if the UAE has already taken initiative in this regard: On October 22, 2020, Israeli state-owned Europe Asia Pipeline Company signed a binding memorandum of understanding with MED-RED Land Bridge, a company that has both Israeli and Emirati owners, to transport oil from the UAE to Europe.

    The joint venture would rely on the Eilat-Asheklon pipeline, built by Israel and Iran in the 1960s, that would send Emirati hydrocarbons from Eilat, on Israel’s Red Sea coast, to Ashkelon, on the Mediterranean. Though this is an oil pipeline, this portends future initiatives that could see Emirati gas transported through Israel to Greece, via a connection to the EastMed. Furthermore, Emirati oil tankers disembarking in Eilat would come with an increased security presence in the area. Though not a military base, the venture could make up for the power projection loss from the now defunct base at Assab.  

    Economic Foothold

    An Emirati bid to manage an Israeli port at Haifa represents another Emirati attempt to cement an economic foothold in the eastern Mediterranean. The port at Haifa is also close in proximity to Lebanon and Israel’s disputed oil blocs, some of whose drilling licenses have been awarded to France’s Total. As noted by Amos Hochstein, the former coordinator for international energy affairs at the US State Department, the UAE could adopt a larger role in resolving this dispute, which would free up more gas reserves that could be exported around Turkey. UAE mediation would also draw it economically closer to France, which has, for the most part, confronted Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean. If Total receives new oil blocs, a French economic dimension could also align against Turkey in the region, bolstering the UAE’s initiatives.

    The Emirati bid for Haifa’s port comes after DP World, Abu Dhabi’s shipping and operations company, completed the Port of Limassol in Cyprus in 2018. Both actions represent the UAE’s push to bolster its infrastructure in the region, which would complement future pipeline initiatives. The UAE then signed a military cooperation agreement with Cyprus on January 12, which signified a deepening of this relationship. It followed an Emirati-Greek military partnership and a trilateral meeting between the UAE, Greece and Greek Cyprus, evidencing that Abu Dhabi is trying to complement military measures with diplomatic coalitions.

    Cyprus proves critical to the UAE’s energy ambitions. Not only is the island a vital connecting point for the EastMed pipeline, but it also recently discovered gas, both of which provide Europe with an alternative to Turkey’s energy supply. This gas will flow to Cairo via a pipeline agreed upon in 2018, where it will be liquified and exported to Europe. These pipelines may not decisively change Turkey’s role in Europe’s energy security, but they nevertheless threaten Ankara’s energy ambitions and indicate that the UAE is undertaking a multifaceted strategy to undermine its rival.

    Though both Turkey and the UAE would prefer to see each other’s geopolitical significance diminished in the eyes of Western Europe and the US, it would be best for Europe if the two actors worked together. Europe would face a crisis if a jingoistic Russia cuts off the gas deliveries to the continent. Moscow has already threatened Ukraine’s energy supply. As many have argued, Emirati-Turkish competition erupted because of a power vacuum left by incremental US withdrawal from the region. However, if the US and other disinterested states could attempt to broker a détente following the lifting of the blockade on Qatar, collaboration between Ankara and Abu Dhabi could prove a viable supplement for Europe’s energy security.

    *[Fair Observer is a media partner of Gulf State Analytics.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

  • 63 Shares129 Views

    in World Politics

    The Media’s Love of Pseudoscience

    One inevitable consequence of the rise of the consumer society and the ever more sophisticated technology it requires to survive and expand is the progressive replacement of every aspect of natural human culture by consumable simulacra. When the process involves linking the increasing variety of simulacra together into the semblance of a coherent whole that can be treated as a system, the result is hyperreality. The scientist Alfred Korzybski remarked that “the map is not the territory.” Hyperreality exists as a kind of map that so completely covers the territory that it finds a way of replacing all its original features.

    Like the map, everything hyperreality contains is artificial, made to facilitate our understanding but also to deceive us into believing we may rationally account for all the details. But in contrast with maps, hyperreality carries the illusion of having more than two dimensions. The illusion owes its impact in part to the sophisticated methods of fabrication, but even more so to the fact that we collectively want to believe in the coherence of the three dimensions.

    Will Big Pharma Continue to Own the World’s Health?

    READ MORE

    What we fail to notice, however, is that in contrast with Einsteinian space-time — which scientists recognize as the fundamental structure of the universe — hyperreality lacks the fourth dimension, time. Reality is always becoming itself. Hyperreality has already become what it is. It exists as a static prop, like a Hollywood movie set. Its various elements sit alongside each other to prop up the world we are invited to believe in.

    Much of the belief depends on the production of canned ideas that become a convenient substitute for perception. In our technology-orientated world, pseudoscience plays a key role. While scientists struggle with the structural uncertainty of quantum mechanics or their frustrating quest to understand dark matter and dark energy, humanity relies on its media to consume pseudo-science and build its faith in hyperreality.

    Pseudoscience enters our lives every day through the innumerable studies our various media present as “news.” By the time any body of research takes the form of a media-friendly story, it will undergo a hyperreal transformation. One glaring example is a piece of manipulated research that has in recent weeks made the rounds of the right-wing media in the US. On April 26, it even featured in the discourse of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. Newsmax covered it in an article with the title: “White Liberals More Likely to Have Mental Health Problems, Study Shows.”

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    White liberal:

    A mythical being invented by the media in the US to found the hyperreal idea that US society is composed of a pair of diametrically opposed camps distinguished on the basis of two artificially defined value systems, apparently designed with the specific purpose of preventing the majority of citizens from becoming aware of the wide range of serious political issues that any complex democracy will be permanently faced with

    Contextual Note

    In a remarkable performance on Monday focused on the burning question of the enforced wearing of masks, Carlson managed to demonstrate how devoted he is to pseudo-scientific distortion as he claimed that “a Pew survey from last month found that 64% of white Americans who classify themselves as ‘liberal’ or ‘very liberal’ have been diagnosed with an actual mental health condition.” Not only was the Pew survey published in March 2020, making it at best old news, but the figure he cited was significantly higher than what reported by other right-wing news outlets. And there was no diagnosis but self-reporting: “34 percent of liberals reported having mental health problems,” according to The Washington Free Beacon.

    Embed from Getty Images

    But the problem isn’t in the details. It is much broader, affecting the entire culture. It stems from three combined sources of hyperreal distortion.

    The first is the survey itself. Because it produces statistics that can be displayed in a graph, people attribute to it the status of science. An enterprising PhD candidate with a personal political agenda and a Twitter account, hoping for a career in either statistics or politics (or both), can then step up and make it look even more scientific by “breaking down” the statistics, correlating them with other statistics and using terms proper to specialized language such as “aggregate indexes” and “dispositively.” The young man in question, Zach Goldberg, has defined for himself the mission of reporting on the status of whiteness and wokeness in the US.

    The second source of distortion is the propensity of the media to use both the primary source (the Pew survey) and the secondary source (Goldberg’s tweets) to announce some deep truth about society itself. With the aim of attracting readers and viewers, the media jump at the opportunity to reveal a deep, disturbing truth. Most articles about climate change, health, diet, economic trends, the cosmos and UFOs fall into this pattern. They all begin with something rooted in reality and based in either scientific fact, social observation or polling. But they quickly transform that basis into the illusion of a new and troubling feature of our everyday hyperreality.

    The third source of distortion is the need in the US to reduce everything to an oppositional binary choice. Even as the idea of gender diversity has now displaced the obvious and very real binary division between male and female, most Americans believe there are two subsets of humanity called “liberal” and “conservative.” Even the analysis of subtle social scientists such as George Lakoff feeds into this requirement of hyperreal belief in US society. Americans are conditioned to believe that they themselves are, or at least should be, in their essence, either a liberal or conservative. This is an amazing ideological accomplishment.

    The surveys themselves sometimes undermine the dominant binary thesis by highlighting the inconsistencies within the categories. But the hyperreal binary distinction remains as the ultimate buttress of a political system that requires the belief in oppositional thinking. It underpins an electoral system designed to create the conviction that the two parties authorized to govern represent the dual essence of the American electorate.

    Historical Note

    The binary meme has been both complicated and reinforced by the reemergence in recent years of Americans’ awareness of the racial divide. This awareness, to some extent, lay dormant following the legal gains and cultural shifts associated with the 1960s civil rights movement. In an article published by Tablet magazine last August, during protests over the murder of George Floyd, Zach Goldberg documented the rise of this new sensitivity to the abiding racial question in the US as reflected in the news. He traced statistics from the media over the past 50 years to demonstrate the rise of the phenomenon he identifies with the “wokeness” that has infected the minds of white liberals.

    To make his point, Goldberg presents two dubious assertions as if they were truisms. He begins by citing “the absence of legal discrimination in the post-affirmative-action era.” This is technically true but culturally false. One prominent feature of hyperreality consists of using the formality of the explicit to hide the implicit. In this case, the inert text of the law obfuscates the informal, organic reality of culture. 

    .custom-post-from {float:right; margin: 0 10px 10px; max-width: 50%; width: 100%; text-align: center; background: #000000; color: #ffffff; padding: 15px 0 30px; }
    .custom-post-from img { max-width: 85% !important; margin: 15px auto; filter: brightness(0) invert(1); }
    .custom-post-from .cpf-h4 { font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
    .custom-post-from .cpf-h5 { font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 1px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
    .custom-post-from input[type=”email”] { font-size: 14px; color: #000 !important; width: 240px; margin: auto; height: 30px; box-shadow:none; border: none; padding: 0 10px; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-pen-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: center right 14px; background-size:14px;}
    .custom-post-from input[type=”submit”] { font-weight: normal; margin: 15px auto; height: 30px; box-shadow: none; border: none; padding: 0 10px 0 35px; background-color: #1878f3; color: #ffffff; border-radius: 4px; display: inline-block; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-email-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 14px center; background-size: 14px; }

    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox { width: 90%; margin: auto; position: relative; display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap;}
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label { text-align: left; display: block; padding-left: 32px; margin-bottom: 0; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px;
    -webkit-user-select: none;
    -moz-user-select: none;
    -ms-user-select: none;
    user-select: none;
    order: 1;
    color: #ffffff;
    font-weight: normal;}
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label a { color: #ffffff; text-decoration: underline; }
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input { position: absolute; opacity: 0; cursor: pointer; height: 100%; width: 24%; left: 0;
    right: 0; margin: 0; z-index: 3; order: 2;}
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:before { content: “f0c8”; font-family: Font Awesome 5 Free; color: #eee; font-size: 24px; position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0; line-height: 28px; color: #ffffff; width: 20px; height: 20px; margin-top: 5px; z-index: 2; }
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:before { content: “f14a”; font-weight: 600; color: #2196F3; }
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:after { content: “”; }
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:after { position: absolute; left: 2px; width: 18px; height: 18px; margin-top: 10px; background: #ffffff; top: 10px; margin: auto; z-index: 1; }
    .custom-post-from .error{ display: block; color: #ff6461; order: 3 !important;}

    Goldberg then claims that, thanks to their media, white liberals are guilty of “concept creep” when they claim that racial injustice is real. He cites “the immense absolute improvements in the quality of life of the average Black person over the past half century” as if it was a documented fact. The key word here is “absolute.” Although he offers no details, Goldberg is almost certainly thinking of the statistics — his unique source of absolute truth — that demonstrate some measurable progress in material wealth within the black community.

    Goldberg’s hopes to find and punish the culprits who have led white liberals to adopt a belief system predicated on the defense of blacks. He affirms that “publications like The New York Times have helped normalize among their readership the belief that ‘color’ is the defining attribute of other human beings.” He wants us to “de-emphasize these categories and unite in pursuit of common interests.”

    This abstract advice has some merit, but it is at odds with social reality. Zach Goldberg, Tucker Carlson and many others on the right have been contributing with their own “concept creep” to instill a belief in what is truly a hyperreal category, their designated enemy: the white liberal.

    *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

  • 75 Shares129 Views

    in World Politics

    Is MAGA Whistling in the Dark?

    The nationalist plank of radical-right, populist ideology asserts that the US is — and always will be — the overriding dominant world power on every measure. Yet such a belief flies in the face of the laws of history, a population ecology view of nation-states and power relations, and the life-cycle model that has applied to every empire and hegemonic state.

    Charismatic Leadership and the Far Right

    READ MORE

    There is no persuasive argument to suggest that this model will not apply to 21st-century superpowers. On the one hand, the MAGA bluster and noisy and intimidating rhetoric and associated violence that have typified the US radical right in recent years — especially since Donald Trump’s election in 2016 — could be regarded simply as the radical right being themselves (conforming to stereotypes). On the other hand, it also suggests fear-based defensive posturing at the dawning realization that US exceptionalism is not guaranteed amidst the inexorable rise of China.

    As US global power declines, will radical-right assertions and objectives based on assumptions of US exceptionalism look increasingly absurd and unachievable? Will a wounded and inherently paranoid radical right become even more reactionary and dangerous? Is an ineffectual Republican Party, the “sick man” of American politics, a prime target for a radical-right coup?

    The US Exceptionalism Belief

    According to researcher Hilde Eliassen Restad — and discussed by this author in “The New Authoritarianism: A Risk Analysis of the Alt-Right Phenomenon” — the concept of US exceptionalism that has existed since WWII encompasses three essential elements. First, the United States is both different to and better than the rest of the world, not just Europe and the “Old World.” Second, the US enjoys a unique role in world history as the prime leader of nations. Third, it is the only nation in history that has thwarted, and will continue to thwart, the laws of history in its rise to power, which will never decline.

    Embed from Getty Images

    These elements underscore a belief that US superiority and superpower status are warranted and inevitable in every respect. This supremacist belief is embedded in US radical-right ideology. The US exceptionalism thesis does not allow the US to accept a primus inter pares role in relation to Russia and China, for example. Trump’s radical-right version of US exceptionalism involved slogans such as “America First” and “Make America Great Again,” the rejection of diverse and allegedly un-American ideas such as multilateralism and universal health care, the repudiation of ethnoreligious equality in favor of white Christian nationalism, and unilateral actions against other countries. Such action included military strikes against Iranian and Syrian targets, sanctions on Iran, Syria, Russia and China, and ethnoreligious discrimination against citizens of Muslim-majority countries.

    Perhaps the most salient element of the US exceptionalism doctrine, as projected by the Trump administration, was that of infinite, undiminished, dominant US power literally forever. However, such a doctrine defies the laws of history, which assume a population ecology model of nation-states in which nations grow, mature and eventually decline. As this author has previously pointed out, implicit in this model is the life-cycle concept and the inevitability of eventual decline. In 1997, William Strauss and Neil Howe applied the concept in their study of US history and its likely future in the 21st century.

    Nevertheless, Trump and the US radical right believe that the US will always be the dominant global power and that no other nation will ever overtake and replace it. Increasingly, this faith-based belief is being challenged by China on all main parameters — economic, military, political, science and technology — and by Trump’s abject mismanagement and absent leadership during the COVID-19 crisis.

    In particular, Trump’s anti-Chinese rhetoric and various attempts to challenge an expansionist China clearly demonstrate US anxiety that its perceived exceptional mantle is not guaranteed. Under the Trump administration, the US banned Huawei 5G technology over what it perceived as a national security threat. Washington has also sent naval forces to the Far East to challenge Beijing’s claim to large tracts of the South China Sea, including islands under the sovereignty of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam

    Exceptionalism vs. Military and Diplomatic Failures

    Both the veracity and validity of US exceptionalism have also been challenged by military and diplomatic failures. For example, the inevitable collapse of the Iranian regime and/or its compliance with US demands never materialized. This is despite the aggressive bombast of Trump and his courtiers, the imposition of additional US sanctions on Iran, the withdrawal from the nuclear deal in 2018, the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani in 2020 by a US drone strike and bellicose statements implying an impending war.

    US failures in foreign policy toward the Middle East are encapsulated in a 2020 report for the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. The report argues that US assumptions about its exceptional status and entitlement to dictate a “new world order,” which includes its domination of the region, are both misguided and not fit for purpose. “Preventing hostile hegemony in the Middle East does not mean the United States must play the role of hegemon itself,” the report states.

    The report advocates a new holistic paradigm based on regional security and multilateral relations, in which US bilateral relations with countries in the Middle East are determined by regional security, rather than the latter being a constant casualty of individual bilateral interests. US foreign policy in the Middle East has failed to achieve its purpose. Diplomatically and militarily, the US was pushed out of Syria and marginalized by Russian and Iranian alliances with Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president. Under Trump, Washington could not force Iran to capitulate to its nuclear and other demands. In Yemen, the US-backed Saudi military offensive against the Houthis rebels was unsuccessful. Finally, a US attempt to introduce an imposed solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would have negated UN resolutions on Palestinian nationhood went nowhere.

    The formal opening of diplomatic relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel in August 2020 is a positive development and one likely to benefit US foreign policy assumptions to some extent. Yet it also underscores the likelihood that the UAE sees mutual defense advantages against Iran as more important than its support for the Palestinians. However, popular support for such a position among Arab nations is not guaranteed, and such negativity may prove troublesome for Arab governments. In addition, the apparent enthusiasm for better relations with Israel may mask an overriding fear in the UAE and Saudi Arabia that without Israeli involvement, the US may embark on a strategic military withdrawal from the region, which would make them vulnerable to any Iranian machinations.

    A Prognosis

    These collective failures also indicate that US supremacy and purported exceptionalism are in decline. Those countries that have relied heavily on American supremacy for support and protection — whether diplomatic, military, economic or psychological — against enemies or predatory regimes may have to consider new security-and-defense policies and arrangements in the medium to long term. This applies not just in relation to the Middle East, but also to Southeast Asia that faces Chinese expansionism and European members of NATO that endured repeated threats by Trump about reduced funding for the alliance and even American withdrawal. However, the Biden administration is likely to herald a return to traditional US support for NATO, at least in the short term. Yet the prospect of some future radical-right presidency may see a return to a review of American support for NATO.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Nevertheless, the US decline will be a long-drawn-out process throughout the 21st century, rather than a rapid collapse. The capacity of the US to try to maintain its superpower status should not be underestimated. There will be moments of temporary rally and some periods of hardly noticeable decline, but overall, the downward trend will be inescapable. No nation can defy the laws of history and their underlying life-cycle and population ecology models. While “forever” is a long, long time, in historical terms, nations have a more limited term. Whether, as other declining imperial and quasi-imperial nations have done over the millennia, the US will learn to adapt and find a new role in an evolving world order remains to be seen.

    Over the rest of this century, the US radical right are likely to continue with their egregious ideology and activities. On the one hand, they are likely to be in denial about the US decline. Yet on the other, they will probably take advantage where they can by offering themselves as the nation’s only viable savior from, or antidote to, such decline. Ominously, like a terrified dangerous animal trying to avoid being caged and subdued, the radical right are also increasingly likely to engage inside the US in ever more audacious and violent behavior designed to scare and cow moderates or challengers and even to subjugate mainstream political parties and representative democracy.

    Expect to see, for example, the GOP turned from a mainstream, one-nation, conservative party into a nakedly authoritarian radical-right party akin to the AfD in Germany, Fidesz in Hungary and other populist far-right parties — all courtesy of Trump and his Republican fifth columnists in Congress. Expect to also see an increase in online and social media attacks as well as physical violence against radical-right targets, whether political, institutional, ethnoreligious minorities or other vulnerable groups. The violent insurrection on Capitol Hill in January, and other radical-right plots to abduct or even murder prominent politicians and officials, is part of the “new normal.”

    *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

  • 125 Shares129 Views

    in World Politics

    What Will It Take for MBS to Rehabilitate His Image?

    On April 10, the Saudi Ministry of Defense announced the execution of three soldiers after what it called a “fair trial” in a specialist court. The men were convicted and sentenced to death for the crimes of “high treason” and “cooperating with the enemy.” Aside from the men’s names, no further details were provided.

    Ali al-Ahmed, a Washington-based critic of the regime, tweeted a video — which has not been independently verified — of what appears to be soldiers burning and stamping on a picture of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). In the tweet, Ahmed says he was “told this video was behind executing the 3 Saudi soldiers.”

    Biden’s Policy Shift on Yemen Rings Alarm Bells in Riyadh

    READ MORE

    Given the opacity of the Saudi regime, the soldiers could have been executed for any number of reasons, such as being involved in the illicit sale of weapons to Houthi rebels in Yemen (the trial and executions were carried out in the military’s Southern Command close to the Yemeni border). Or it may have been a case of lèse-majesté — the burning of the photograph — that enraged MBS.

    If it is the latter, it gives further credence to the image of an unstable and violence-prone leader, whom the CIA blames for ordering the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Try as he might, Mohammed bin Salman cannot put that one crime behind him. He was angered that Khashoggi — at one time a close associate of senior members of the ruling family — had departed from the kingdom and had the temerity to criticize the prince in columns he wrote for The Washington Post.

    Throwing Critics in Prison

    Western businessmen and politicians, anxious to do business with Saudi Arabia, could set aside many of the actions of this unruly and impulsive prince. These include the Saudi-led war in Yemen, which MBS thought he would win in a few weeks but has now entered its seventh year; the blockade of Qatar in June 2017, which did not end until January 2021; the seizure and forced resignation of the then-Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri, in November 2017; and the arrest and detention of more than 400 Saudi businessmen and senior members of the royal family, some of whom were allegedly tortured and only released when they signed over companies and surrendered millions of dollars in a mafia-style shakedown.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Even the imprisonment of Loujain al-Hathloul, a Saudi women’s rights activist, caused barely a flicker of concern in Western boardrooms and corridors of political power. Hathloul and her family allege that since her arrest in May 2018, she was tortured in detention and subjected to electrocution, flogging, sexual abuse and waterboarding in secret prisons before she was finally brought to trial. Among those responsible for the torture, she claims, was Saud al-Qahtani, a confidante of the crown prince who was heavily implicated in the Khashoggi murder. Hathloul was finally released but under strict conditions in February of this year. The allegations of torture were never investigated by Saudi authorities.

    The arrival of Joe Biden in the White House took away the protection that his predecessor had provided to the crown prince. In February, President Biden released a declassified CIA report on the killing of Khashoggi. He has also withheld arms sales to the Saudis to pressure MBS to end the war in Yemen. Biden has also signaled that human rights issues — having been kicked into the long grass by Donald Trump, the former US president — are now back on the agenda. Thousands of political prisoners are languishing in the Saudi prison system. This includes the scholar and author Salman al-Odah, against whom the public prosecutor is seeking the death penalty, and the aid worker Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, who in March was sentenced to 20 years in prison after being convicted of writing anonymous tweets critical of the regime.

    PR Will Not His Image

    Biden’s stance on Saudi Arabia is a problem for MBS, but just how much of a problem remains to be seen. Biden is, after all, a pragmatist who may, in the end, not exact much of a price on the human rights front before waving through the weapons deal. But with every step MBS takes to rehabilitate his image and rebrand the kingdom as a modern, open society where “moderate Islam” flourishes, he is shadowed by a remarkable and doggedly courageous woman: Hatice Cengiz, the fiancé of the murdered Jamal Khashoggi.

    When MBS attempted to use the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) to purchase Newcastle United, a football club in the UK, Cengiz was there to challenge the takeover bid. It failed, to the great chagrin of the crown prince. When more recently he dangled a $100-million purse to secure the heavyweight fight between Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury for the kingdom, Cengiz used The Telegraph newspaper to express her anger. “I cannot believe after all this time, and all the evidence showing his guilt, that the Saudi Crown Prince is still being considered as a ‘host’ for such world sporting events, which he is using for political reasons and to clean his image,” she said in a statement. 

    Indications are that Saudi Arabia will host the fight, but MBS may have to pull even more than $100 million out of the PIF to do so. But sports events and expensive PR campaigns will not take away the stain of the killing of Khashoggi. To rehabilitate his image, MBS would have to give justice to Hathloul, drop the charges and release Odah, end the unjust incarceration of Sadhan and release thousands of other prisoners of conscience. Mohammed bin Salman would have to take responsibility for his actions and acknowledge his crimes — which he cannot do. 

    What he can and will do is to play for time and hope that Trump or one of his lackeys returns to the White House in 2025.

    *[This article was originally published by Gulf House.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

  • 113 Shares149 Views

    in World Politics

    Will Big Pharma Continue to Own the World’s Health?

    The news from India concerning the ravages of COVID-19 is now beyond alarming. New York Times correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman describes a nation stricken by “the fear of living amid a disease spreading at such scale and speed.” In what sounds like the screenplay of a sci-fi catastrophe film, scientists are talking about an invasion by a “double mutant.” Doctors say the peak is still weeks away as hospitals, filled to capacity, lack the means to keep patients alive.

    The Biden administration has exceptionally called into question the US policy of hoarding vaccines for domestic use. It has agreed to share with India millions of doses of AstraZeneca vaccine that was stockpiled while awaiting authorization for use on the US market. This became possible because it turns out the stock of authorized vaccines will be sufficient for domestic needs.

    Following a telephone conversation with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, President Biden explained, somewhat cryptically, that the US would be sending “the actual mechanical parts that are needed for the machinery they have to build a vaccine.” Does this mean India will be able to manufacture vaccines whose patents are held by Western pharmaceutical companies? The Indian Express notes that Biden’s initiative “comes after criticism of Washington over its delay in responding and its earlier cold shoulder to a request for lifting the freeze on export of raw materials linked to vaccine manufacturing.”

    Bill Gates and the Zero-Sum Vaccination Game

    READ MORE

    Everyone should know by now that the ice pack for America’s cold shoulder was provided a year ago by philanthropist Bill Gates, who continues to oppose the sharing of know-how and industrial secrets with those who need it most on the grounds that it undermines his logic of industrial production. Even when the taxpayer foots the bill, Gates believes private companies should retain the right not only to skim off all future profits but to manage the scarcity that ensures the vaccine’s long-term profitability.

    Criticism of Gates has been rife in recent weeks, but nothing has been done to rectify an increasingly dangerous situation. The progressive populist website Public Citizen gives the details of a news conference in Washington, DC, led by Senator Bernie Sanders and several other lawmakers, accompanied by “leaders of labor, public health, faith and other civil society groups.” They urged the Biden administration to “join 100 other nations in supporting a temporary waiver of World Trade Organization (WTO) rules that now give a few corporations monopoly control over where and how much COVID-19 vaccines and treatments are made.”

    Bernie Sanders stated the basic case: “Poor people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and throughout the world have as much a right to be protected from the virus, to live, as people in wealthier nations. To me, this is not a huge debate, this is common human morality.”

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    Common human morality:

    An idea inherited from the past but clearly superseded in the present by the laws of free market capitalism that place economic interest above human need as the principal criterion governing public morality.  

    Contextual Note

    The above quote by Bernie Sanders also featured in an article on another popular progressive website, Common Dreams. Jake Johnson covered it for Salon. Though it was a DC news conference headed by a prominent political figure, none of the major corporate outlets apparently considered it worthy of attaining The New York Times’ vaunted standard of “all the news that’s fit to print.” No one would deny Sanders’s exceptional weight of moral authority, acknowledged even by those who don’t share his “democratic socialist” agenda. So why wasn’t this news?

    Embed from Getty Images

    The simple answer to that question is that in today’s hypercompetitive world, where everything is about power and profit, the corporate media apparently have no idea what to do with the idea of morality. The institutions known as the liberal corporate media – The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC and even much of broadcast news — stopped showing an interest in common morality the moment they began placing their trust in the likes of the CIA, the NSA and the countless lobbies as their most reliable source of political truth and practical wisdom. To the degree that the various conservative media have always believed in the merits of a dog-eat-dog world where all must fend for themselves in a struggle for personal advantage, they tend to treat the very idea of common human morality as an unfortunate attribute of “snowflakes,” the sign of a weak character.

    Bernie Sanders grew up in a moment of history when the notion of a common human morality still had some impact on human behavior. Over the past half-century, it has been replaced by the kind of realism that focuses on personal ambition, private profit and the acquisition of power. Today’s media can only see Sanders’ invocation of common morality as a quaint vestige of former times.

    Historical Note

    In October 2020, the World Trade Organization published an optimistic take on how the current intellectual property rules could effectively meet the needs of a human race confronted with a global health problem. Subsequent events have revealed how disingenuous their claims were. “Collaboration and cooperation among health technology developers, governments and other stakeholders,” it suggested, “can be positively supported by the IP system as well as by guidance on lawful cooperation among competitors under a country’s domestic competition policy regime.”

    In a Politico article with the title “Why waiving patents might not boost global access to coronavirus vaccines,” the authors, Ashleigh Furlong and Sarah Anne Aarup, sum up the current state of the debate concerning the campaign to institute a temporary waiver of the reigning intellectual property rules to permit the production of vaccines in the countries where they are most needed: “By some accounts, the IP waiver is the answer to producing more desperately needed jabs, but it’s being blocked by Big Pharma and wealthy nations guarding their bottom line. Others attest that the waiver makes no sense for vaccines and is being backed by people who are seizing the issue as their chance to make more sweeping changes to the current IP system.”

    The “others” in the last sentence would undoubtedly include Bill Gates. This confrontation could potentially become a significant moment in history. Sadly, it will have required the death of millions of people to provoke the “sweeping changes” that are clearly needed to reform a deeply perverse system.

    The first indications of a historical shift may appear as soon as next week. On May 5, in response to an initiative of India and South Africa, the WTO’s General Council will meet to consider a patent waiver permitting nations in need to manufacture the vaccines whose IP is now jealously guarded by for-profit pharmaceuticals. According to the National Herald, the “United States so far has remained non-committal on the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) move of India and South Africa over this.” On Monday, the White House informed reporters “that no decision has been made yet” in response to the legislators’ demand for the US to back the proposal.

    The suspense will grow in the coming days. Will Biden dare to defy Bill Gates? Does the president of the United States hold more power than the pharmaceutical industry? Before proving himself to be the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt — a claim his supporters have made — can Biden show even a slight aptitude to emulate the other, earlier Roosevelt, the trust-busting Teddy?

    Theodore Roosevelt was not just a “rough rider” but also a rough and tough opinionated character. Yet he reflected something that still existed in his day, the idea of a common human morality. He expressed it through his trust-busting but also in various pronouncements. “This country,” he intoned, “will not permanently be a good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a reasonably good place for all of us to live in.” He could even demonstrate political analysis: “This crooked control of both the old parties by the beneficiaries of political and business privilege renders it hopeless to expect any far-reaching and fundamental service from either.”

    No establishment Democrat or Republican, not even Bernie Sanders, would dare to pronounce such an obvious truth today, when the corruption that fuels the political system has been sealed into the economic ideology that governs it.

    *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

  • 100 Shares179 Views

    in World Politics

    Biden Scores Key Wins in First 100 Days

    US politics has certain steadfast traditions. Evaluating a new president 100 days into their job is one of them, a custom that began when Franklin D. Roosevelt took the helm as the 32nd president in 1933. Many a time, these evaluations tend to pit the new president’s performance against their previous contemporaries. Fortunately for Joe Biden, the bar that Donald Trump had set was so low that it would have been impossible to not best it, even with a mediocre performance.

    How Joe Biden Looks at the World

    READ MORE

    President Biden has proved that he is a shrewd politician, even if he is not the charismatic orator that Barack Obama was, in whose administration Biden served as vice-president from 2009 to 2017. To properly gauge the Biden administration, in addition to comparing the president’s performance against that of his predecessors, one must also evaluate him against his own campaign promises.

    Bipartisan Politics Redefined

    Without a doubt, the most significant achievement thus far for Biden has been the passage of his $1.9-trillion stimulus package, dubbed the American Rescue Plan. The bill was passed in both chambers of Congress without the support of a single Republican senator or House representative. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy summed up the Republican sentiment: “This isn’t a rescue bill; it isn’t a relief bill; it is a laundry list of left-wing priorities that predate the pandemic and do not meet the needs of American families.”

    Even Obama, a political novice compared to Biden, managed to get three Republican senators to cross the aisle when he pushed through his American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009. That bill, in response to the global financial crisis, consisted of $787 billion in government spending, which later rose to $831 billion.

    Embed from Getty Images

    A detailed analysis of a draft version of Biden’s plan did show meaningful Republican support for many aspects of the bill, including the all-important $1,400 stimulus payment per person. Despite this, and the seasoned politician that he is, Biden could not make meaningful headway in his efforts to rekindle bipartisan politics, a campaign promise he mentioned in his inaugural address to the nation.

    Talking about President Biden’s bipartisan politics, Utah Senator Mitt Romney tweeted: “A Senate evenly split between both parties and a bare Democratic House majority are hardly a mandate to ‘go it alone.’ The President should live up to the bipartisanship he preached in his inaugural address.”

    Facing stiff GOP resistance, Biden, the astute politician that he is, has done the next best thing: He has redefined bipartisanship to go beyond elected Republican officials. When asked, “Have you rejected bipartisanship?” in a recent White House press conference, he responded: “I would like Republican — elected Republican support, but what I know I have now is that I have electoral support from Republican voters. Republican voters agree with what I’m doing.”

    A Flurry of Executive Actions

    Biden has signed a flurry of executive orders, presidential memoranda, proclamations and notices. Signing these presidential decrees at a pace eclipsing his recent predecessors, Biden’s executive actions reversed many of the decisions made by Trump in the areas of immigration, economy, equity, environment and the coronavirus pandemic. Of noteworthy significance are the ones related to gun control, gender equity, the prison system and the pandemic.

    Calling gun violence a public health epidemic, the Biden administration announced specific actions to tackle the proliferation of “ghost guns.” In addition, Biden will nominate David Chipman to serve as the director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, an organization that has not had a confirmed head since 2015.

    On March 8, celebrated worldwide as International Women’s Day, Biden signed an executive order establishing the White House Gender Policy Council. The aim of the council is to promote gender equity by combating systemic bias, discrimination and sexual harassment. On the same day, he signed an executive order guaranteeing an educational environment free from all forms of sexual discrimination.

    In many of her speeches, Angela Davis, the outspoken, firebrand activist, has described the American prison system as a business proposition to incarcerate black people and profit from it. In 2003, Davis talked about “slavery and the prison industrial complex” at the fifth annual Eric Williams Memorial Lecture that she delivered at Florida International University. On January 26, Biden signed an executive order to eliminate for-profit prison centers as a step toward reforming the nation’s flawed incarceration system.

    It was heartening to read Biden’s executive order that acknowledges the fact that a disproportionate number of people of color are in prison, that mass incarceration does not make our communities safe, and incarceration levels will decrease if the federal government’s reliance on privately-operated, for-profit criminal detention centers is reduced. While it is a far cry from the criminal justice system reform the country sorely needs, it is a laudable step in the correct direction.

    In stark contrast to the woefully inadequate response from the Trump administration, Biden has taken several decisive actions to address the coronavirus pandemic. He halted the US withdrawal from the World Health Organization and mandated wearing masks on federal property for 100 days. He also boosted the supply of vaccines and personal protective gear. Finally, Biden ensured that the response to the pandemic is equitable, data-driven and that care and treatment are accessible to everyone.

    Time Is of the Essence

    Coming off the high of passing the American Rescue Plan, Biden has launched the even more ambitious American Jobs Plan worth $2 trillion in spending over eight years. This initiative aims to invest in the country’s infrastructure and create new jobs. The hefty bill would be footed by reversing many of Trump’s tax cuts. These include raising the corporate tax rate to 28%; Trump slashed taxes from 35% to 21% in 2018, the biggest corporate cut in US history. Biden also aims to eliminate tax breaks for fossil fuel companies and block loopholes that allow for tax havens and offshoring jobs. Finally, the administration has proposed increasing the global minimum corporate tax rate to 21%.

    .custom-post-from {float:right; margin: 0 10px 10px; max-width: 50%; width: 100%; text-align: center; background: #000000; color: #ffffff; padding: 15px 0 30px; }
    .custom-post-from img { max-width: 85% !important; margin: 15px auto; filter: brightness(0) invert(1); }
    .custom-post-from .cpf-h4 { font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
    .custom-post-from .cpf-h5 { font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 1px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
    .custom-post-from input[type=”email”] { font-size: 14px; color: #000 !important; width: 240px; margin: auto; height: 30px; box-shadow:none; border: none; padding: 0 10px; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-pen-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: center right 14px; background-size:14px;}
    .custom-post-from input[type=”submit”] { font-weight: normal; margin: 15px auto; height: 30px; box-shadow: none; border: none; padding: 0 10px 0 35px; background-color: #1878f3; color: #ffffff; border-radius: 4px; display: inline-block; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-email-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 14px center; background-size: 14px; }

    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox { width: 90%; margin: auto; position: relative; display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap;}
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label { text-align: left; display: block; padding-left: 32px; margin-bottom: 0; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px;
    -webkit-user-select: none;
    -moz-user-select: none;
    -ms-user-select: none;
    user-select: none;
    order: 1;
    color: #ffffff;
    font-weight: normal;}
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label a { color: #ffffff; text-decoration: underline; }
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input { position: absolute; opacity: 0; cursor: pointer; height: 100%; width: 24%; left: 0;
    right: 0; margin: 0; z-index: 3; order: 2;}
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:before { content: “f0c8”; font-family: Font Awesome 5 Free; color: #eee; font-size: 24px; position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0; line-height: 28px; color: #ffffff; width: 20px; height: 20px; margin-top: 5px; z-index: 2; }
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:before { content: “f14a”; font-weight: 600; color: #2196F3; }
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:after { content: “”; }
    .custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:after { position: absolute; left: 2px; width: 18px; height: 18px; margin-top: 10px; background: #ffffff; top: 10px; margin: auto; z-index: 1; }
    .custom-post-from .error{ display: block; color: #ff6461; order: 3 !important;}

    Relying on a strategy to fund his ambitious infrastructure and jobs plan by primarily taxing large corporations will not pass muster with Republican lawmakers. It may even face resistance from centrist Democratic senators, such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.

    With a razor-thin majority in Congress, Joe Biden has accomplished more than what I had expected in his first 100 days. Yet there is no guarantee that the Democratic Party can hold onto the House and Senate majority in November 2022. If recent history is any indication, the House majority does usually switch party after midterm elections, as it happened for Trump, Obama and Bill Clinton during their first terms in office.

    Whether the president’s redefinition of bipartisanship gains acceptance or not, time will tell. But as the savvy politician he is, Biden knows that he has limited time to advance his key agenda items in the next 20 months.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More