Caroline Glick explains the balance of power in the Middle East right now
…[I]n the minds of the Iranian leadership and those of their Hamas proxies, the Abraham Accords represent the single greatest military and political threat to Iran’s nuclear and hegemonic ambitions. Destroying them is their strategic goal.
The Abraham Accords provide a formal framework for the operational partnership that developed since 2006 between Israel and the Sunni Arab states that, like Israel, are threatened by Iran. In formalizing those ties, the Abraham Accords split the Arab/Islamic world into two camps. The first camp includes Iran and the states and terror groups Iran supports, controls and is allied with. Political forces hostile to Israel in the West support this camp. Members of the Iran camp and its supporters in the West insist the Jewish state is the greatest source of instability and the primary obstacle to peace in the Middle East.
The second camp is comprised of Israel and the Arab states that understand that Iran is the greatest threat to peace and security in the Middle East. Arab members of this camp include Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, Sudan and Morocco. These Arab states believe that in alliance with Israel they will be able to contain and eventually defeat the Iranian regime.
Until the Abraham Accords were formalized, only the Iranian camp had an international presence. The anti-Israel, pro-Iran narrative, which claims that Israel is the greatest threat to regional and world peace, had the stage to itself from Tehran to California. Since the Abraham Accords were signed last September, the Iranian camp has been on the defensive.
In a press briefing on Tuesday, President Joe Biden’s spokeswoman Jen Psaki indicated that the administration is just as unhappy with the Abraham Accords as the Iranians and Palestinians are. In response to a reporter’s question about the Trump administration’s peace efforts, Psaki pretended that the Abraham Accords don’t exist.
This asinine statement put paid the notion that Biden will ever opt for an alliance with the Abraham Accords member nations over the Iran/Hamas axis. Just as the administration refuses to even utter the term “Abraham Accords,” so it insists on ignoring their political significance for the states of the region and their military capacity to contain Iran.
Obama cast his lot with Iran during his presidency, without the support of the American people at the time. Whether he did it for malign reasons or out of enormous incompetence and stupidity is unclear to me, although I think it’s mostly the former.
Biden is doing what he’s told, but he’s also willingly following in Obama’s footsteps, just as he did when he was Obama’s VP. It’s an easy decision for Biden’s advisors (and for Biden, to the extent that he makes decisions these days) because Biden’s general course of action is “when in doubt, just do the opposite of what Trump did.”
I’m not so sure Biden is just doing what he is told. Remember Bob Gates remarking that Joe Biden has been on the wrong side of every national security and foreign policy issue for forty years? I recently read an article in a reliably lefty publication, can’t recall the author right now, showing that Biden has been pro-Iran since shortly after the Iranian Revolution.
He had proposed making a goodwill payment of millions to the regime following the release of the hostages in 1981. The article showed a long-standing inclination on Biden’s part to defer to the mullahs and improve relations. As per Bob Gates comments, what is in it for the United States? Nothing obvious.
Its all Valerie Jarrett, still pulling strings through Obama. She was behind the entire Iran policy, she sees it as her homeland.
darrell:
Valerie Jarrett doesn’t have that kind of power all on her own. This is a stance the left as a whole has taken.
Ed:
I didn’t say Biden is just doing what he’s told. And that’s not what I think. This is what I wrote [emphasis added]:
I will add that Biden has also nearly always been both stupid and wrong for his entire lengthy political career.
The Xiden administration is leading the West toward the fulfillment of Wretchard’s (Richard Fernandez) “The Three Conjectures”…
https://philoofalexandria.wordpress.com/2008/01/22/wretchards-three-conjectures/
I think Obama has always been a stealth Communist, from his early political maturity, because that’s where the readily-accessible power is.
What Glick doesn’t evaluate is whether or not the Biden Administration’s influence carries water any more, in the Middle East. It would appear to me that Biden’s only ability to influence is to send Iran money and suspend Trump sanctions, and defer support of any other enforcement on Iran’s infernal hedgemongering.
With Israel’s and Saudi Arabia’s leadership, the accords appear to be pretty unshaken, and this latest round of hostilities from Hamas seems only to have heightened their popularity. We shall see. I think one of the things Jared saw to was making the US less relevant for policy-making in the region, letting the stakeholders own their problems.
Geoffrey Britain:
Pakistan has managed (possibly with outside help, but not definitively) to attain and stockpile nuclear weapons without destroying themselves. I, for one, thought this would be impossible — that Pakistan would have acceded by now to extremist calls for nuclear holy war. That has not happened, and I think Iran is a more rational actor than Pakistan. That is open to question, of course, but at least Iran has a longer history of nationhood than Pakistan.
Question: what effect would a nearby nuclear blast have on a very large, black, stone? Asking for a friend.
See Emma Sky’s book, The Unraveling, which I read before Biden was ever considered a presidential possibility. It details how Biden as VP had more power than was publicly known and was a major player in favoring Iraq’s Shia politicians — which directly led to the backlash among Sunnis that resulted in the rise of ISIS. Emma Sky is British and was pro-Palestinian, working in Gaza, but then ending up in Iraq, in Mosul, where she distinguished herself (she speaks fluent Arabic) to a point where General Raymond Odierno took her on as his “right hand man” during the Surge. So she had an insider’s view of all the personalities involved and what really went down. She came to intensely dislike VP Joe Biden.
I can’t recommend this book highly enough. Because we’re not done with Iraq and Iran, and here you’ll see Biden described by someone uninvolved in American politics.
“I think Iran is a more rational actor than Pakistan.” That is a delusional statement.
Aggie, Xiden is cutting off arms deals with the Arab Abe countries. I’m not as confident the Abe accords can survive. I hope you are right.
Why anyone would think that the Abraham Accords would survive the ire of the Fellaheen in these countries over whose heads (a gross understatement) these agreements were made is anyone’s guess. I just don’t have sufficient brain power to be a big brain at the CFR or State… so cannot nut out whatever Statecraft N-Body Problem these Wunderkinds think they have solved. There’s only so much video (real or propaganda) coming out of Gaza, West Bank, wherever before it blows sky high.
Which in itself is a motivation for Palestinians and their Iranian friends to ramp things up.
Hey! We are talking real money here. Biden via Hunter (Neice Humper) are in the Mid-East kickback business. Peace (or at least civility) in the Mid-East means no grift for the U.S. political elite. Without the need for refugee camps, foreign aid, etc., where will our “Worthies” get the cash for their retirement?
Nobody audited the pallets of cash sent to the mullahs. Like in the Ukraine, do you actually think that there wasn’t a “finder’ fee” or a “gratuity” involved for some of the “Special People”. Damn Trump was screwing up the international grift business. Cheating President Trump out of re-election to preserve the grift income was the only rational business decision. It is difficult dealing with the “Bearded Ladies”; you can’t just throw all that away because of some blather about “Peace”.
^^^
Yes. Always look for the featherbedding / grift / kickback / money laundering angle when any foreign venture governmental or non-governmental is being touted.
The cart doesn’t always drive the horse, but often it does.
Neo: you are right and Caroline Glick is right, as usual.
Leftoxenomorphs side with the anti-America, anti-West and anti-Israel, rabidly Jew-hating pisslim dogs because pisslam and leftoxenomorphism are very similar religions looking for a very similar outcome: the destruction of everything Western, white and decent and its replacement with collectivism and totalitarianism.
Expecting the current Venezuerican leftoxenomorph government to side with Israel, like Trump did, is like expecting hyenas to invite gazelles to share a salad with them.
The illegitimate usurper bideT handlers are Jew-hating, Israel hating, America hating, decency hating, normalcy hating and humanity hating maggots.
If you understand the nature of an animal you will understand and be able to predict its behavior.
A human and a leftoxenomorph can not share the same world.
A human and a pisslim can not share the same world.
Sooner or later there will be war.
We are at war right now. With both of them.
But in Venezuerica only the leftoxenomorphs and the pisslims are winning because the other side is not even participating.
The current leftoxenomorph government of Venezuerica will be anti-Israel for as long as it exists.
– – – – – –
“neo on May 22, 2021 at 4:21 pm said: This is a stance the left as a whole has taken.”
Exactly.
“F on May 22, 2021 at 7:43 pm said: I think Iran is a more rational actor”
You can not be pisslim and rational. Please re-evaluate the notion that the mullahs are rational. The mullahs are as rational as the 1930s german nazis were. And pisslims often use swastikas on their flags. Pisslim swastikas were seen on Manhattan just a few days ago. There are no “rational actors” in pisslam.
Depends on how one defines “rational”.
(And who are “we” to tell “them” how “they” ought to define it?… Or how they define “proportionate”. Or “victory”—and who knows, maybe more “victories” like this in the future will help them to finally achieve their goal… For that matter, is “Biden” rational? Ah, but that would depend on “his” goals, wouldn’t it….?)
“Why anyone would think that the Abraham Accords would survive the ire of the Fellaheen…?”
One may sympathize with the skepticism (or astonishment?), but they (AA?) just might…this, ironically, because of “Biden”‘s crushing psychological need to ally with Iran (AKA “to rock the casbah” or—more prosaically—“his” thirst for destruction).
Perhaps they real question should be:
“Why anyone would think that the Abraham Accords would survive the ire of “Biden”…?”
(To be sure, “Biden” is where “he” is ONLY by virtue of massive, multi-dimensional fraudulence.)
And so, “America (sic) is back!” is—merely—“Obama is back!” (along with scads and scads of Fentanyl, non-stop, rampant dishonesty and that good ole Obama sense of humor! Hady Amr edition):
https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2021/05/us-sends-diplomat-urge-calm-israel-hamas-fighting-escalates
https://www.jns.org/opinion/bidens-anti-israel-point-man-is-behind-plan-to-fund-palestinians/
Who said that humor is dead in this era of identity politics? (Gives “cancel culture” a whole new meaning, I guess…)
Speaking of humor (Obama-style)….
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/desantis-critical-race-theory-offensive-expect-taxpayers-pay-teach-kids-hate-their
@Barry Meislin:
Re Hady Amr: The most charitable explanation for this would be that since all those Highly Impartial Jews climbing all over the US Middle East Policy Apparatus didn’t work out, some genius wonk had the idea of trying a Highly Partial Levanter for a change. Still, I’d go for the more parsimonious Malice Intended explanation.
We’re living in Killer Klown World.
Me? I’d send a Kardashian Clone with instructions to belittle all non-Armenian genocides and an axe to grind with every ethnic group In Theatre. And nothing else. Let them all fight it out once and for all. It’s not like Jews are the scrawny put-upon kid on the block anymore. They learned Krav Maga and have nukes a-plenty. Well done, and good luck!
What any of it has to do with the USA or the Rest of the West who are steaming full ahead into *their* Götterdämmerung is left as an Exercise for the Reader.
Well yes, one can rarely go wrong with charitability. (Or can one?)
At least the occasional “with charity for all” may well prove useful in achieving balance (a far-eastern value, I understand….) in one’s life. (Tai chi for the soul?)
But not everyone, however entertainingly, would agree: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/851572.With_Charity_Toward_None
As for “…for a change”, note (charitably, of course) that the perfidious, if euphonious, Robert Malley has been around for donkey years. (And, tee hee, heeee’s BACK!…)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK72p66ngvQ
More seriously, however, going the Kardashian Clone route…Good Lord NO!! Surely there are enough of them already in circulation. Moreover, such a strategy would undoubtedly bring us back to “leading from behind”(TM). With a vengeance. (To be sure, there are not a few who wax nostalgic for that inimitably lamentable policy…, so, um, no, no thanks.)
WRT Krav MAGA, while employing it is always a good idea, it seems it will only be acceptable as long as it’s implemented “proportionally” (and I’m pretty sure they’ll also have to change the name if only to make it palatable for many of those whom it’s intended to protect—otherwise, they’d no doubt prefer to be beaten up).
@Barry Meislin:
I wouldn’t wish myself any more misanthropic, but certainly Organised Charity has in its time kicked a lot of cans down the road and been the cause of much evil. Charity performed in person and done quietly is a whole other thing and an important part of being fully human. But not all things Personal translate well to the Institutional: Mrs. Jellyby.
Had never heard of Robert Malley, but now that I know he works for the ICG, I find myself wanting to break out in a rousing rendition of Hatikvah and go re-bomb the King David Hotel. The ICG are a rotten bunch of champagne swilling ghouls who feast on the corpses of messed up countries. They had a very good thing going back during the Tamil Insurgency in Sri-Lanka… endless first class travel and hob-nobbing until eventually the arriviste Rajapaksa Government of rural hicks came to power and threw them out of the country and loaded up on cheap Chinese Artillery and slaughtered the offending Tamils. Peace ensued. How very crass!
I thought I’d lowered the tone with the insertion of Kardashians into the equation, but you, Sir, have Trumped me with your further flight of fancy.
I’d like to see ‘Proportional Krav Maga’ — guess it would require beating one’s opponent with the nearest available beanbag instead of chair.
Worry not. All this may, alas, be beyond our feeble abilities (AKA those damn stars)…
To paraphrase: Some are born misanthropic; some achieve misanthropy; some have misanthropy thrust upon them.
IOW don’t worry, be happy(TM); i.e., embrace “nevermindfulness”(?)—a bromide that’s guaranteed to work (at least occasionally), though not likely to assuage the “liquor is quicker” crowd.
And in other news, we have “Brave New World”, episode #~ (Warning: Before clicking, PUT DOWN that cup of coffee):
https://twitter.com/naomirwolf/status/1395206654115737605
@BM:
I’m working on meditating myself into a ZFG state of mind. It takes time.
Oh… Naomi Wolf was on James Delingpole’s YouTube channel the other day. Haven’t watched, but apparently she’s fed up with Covid Mania and creeping totalitarianism. Was only a matter of time before she became a Loose Can(n)on with an AR-15.
What she does for an encore, I’m not sure. Perhaps convert and start up a Greek Orthodox Nunnery next door to Milo Yiannopoulos — he could be her Spiritual Director.
One reads rumors of impending flip in the Earth’s magnetic poles. There has to be a reason for these happenings.
Whether the cause is geomagnetic reversal, sunspots, flouridation, micro-plastics in the water table or old age, such flashes of relative sanity must be very distressing for her friends.
OTOH, she does occasionally revert to form, if only to reassure them that in spite of everything she’s the same old fruitcake.
https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/conspiracy-theorist-naomi-wolf-claims-fauci-got-1-million-from-israel-665829
Biden certainly reinforced the grift line of thinking when he announced that the US will give huge sums to repair Palestinian homes which were damaged or destroyed — making sure that the money is not diverted to rebuilding Hamas military sites and equipment. Sure, Joe. Remember when he was in charge of all those shovel-ready jobs?
Check out a map of the ME ca. 1918 or so.
You will find that many (most?) of the nations that exist today, simply did not exist back then or the 500 years or so previous to 1918 (being under Ottoman/Turkish rule ).
France, the UK, the League of Nations and eventually the UN basically created out of thin air all the nations (with some exceptions) that presently exist there.
So the notion that Israel does not have a right to exist is total BS.
As Abba Eben put it ” the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss and opportunity.”
Peace will NEVER come to Israel and Hamas/PLO Palestine because the there is only one thing that will satisfy the Arabs; that is, the extermination of every Jewish person in Israel.
Leave it to the incredibly stupid and really really dumb President Bidet and his Obama-commie retreads – that run the WH – to believe that providing aid (that’s right folks !!! OUR TAX Dollars) to the Palestinians will make them seek peace.
Maybe Bidet and his Obama-commie retreads – all driven by a leftist/socialist ideology – should give the PLO/HAMAS the Sudetenland to achieve “peace in our time” in the ME.
How any sentient American could have cast a vote for Bidet / Harris truly escapes me.
I think that “Biden”‘s natural and heartfelt concern for humanity is being expressed here. If one chooses Iran as an ally, then one must—naturally—align oneself with Iran’s loyal allies, whether Hamas or Hizbullah or Yemen’s righteous Houthis. Similarly, one must align oneself against Iran’s enemies, though this is a bit trickier and may require a tad more subterfuge.
Nonetheless, the moral imperative remains…and since “Biden” can count on the unstinting efforts of the vile media as well as the utter moral confusion of the anyone-but-Trump “liberal”/radical nexus, then there may well be “nothing to see here, folks”.
OTOH, here’s the “Son of Hamas”, a man of considered opinions with little patience for knots of the Gordian kind—who appears to have fallen quite a distance from the tree (or has he?)—chiming in with his profound POV:
https://nypost.com/2021/05/22/hamas-founders-son-israel-should-kill-leaders-after-ceasefire/
(Despite his expertise, something tells me he won’t be getting any invitations from the US State Department anytime soon….)
And here’s an interesting brouhaha involving Canadian journalists who are sorely vexed and deeply anguished because they have—thus far—not been allowed by their media bosses to smear, slander, besmirch, pound, hammer and otherwise rake the Zionist Entity over the coals…like practically everyone else.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/5db398/cbc-journalists-told-they-cant-cover-israel-palestine-after-demanding-fairer-coverage?utm_source=reddit.com
“It’s JUST NOT FAIR”, they cry oh so poignantly from the deepest recesses of their souls, that they not be permitted to do this.
And indeed, one can feel their pious pain as they rail against the utter wrongness of it all….
Yes, one may well sympathize with these valiant seekers of Truth that they have not been allowed to participate in the current grotesque orgy, this world-wide global blood libel (otherwise known as the cutting edge of murderous propaganda for only the highest ethical goals).
But I would suggest that they just wait a day or two. Righteous indignation is indeed a glorious things, but patience is a virtue—and while chomping at the bit for a place at the trough, they should think of the sheer pleasure to be had from delayed gratification—when they will ultimately be able to pile on that sinister thing of sheer iniquity and absolute disgust known as the Jewish State.
Look at the bright side, I say!
France, the UK, the League of Nations and eventually the UN basically created out of thin air all the nations (with some exceptions) that presently exist there.
The crucial decisions were incorporated into the Sykes-Picot agreement and where you found the boots on the ground in 1918; the UN had squat to do with it and the League’s role was subject to the sufferance of Britain and France.
Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia are the political expression of discrete ethnic groups. The Kurds are an ethnos without a state. Iran in an approximation of its current borders has had a continuous existence since 1501.
What happened during the period running from 1914 to 1923 was that:
1. The bulk of the Ottoman Empire’s Greek and Armenian populations were expelled or fled in terror when they weren’t killed.
2. The Empire’s Arabophone territories were detached from its Turcophone territories, leaving rump Turkey as a national state with a large and mistreated Kurdish minority. NB. the Ottoman sultan’s authority was by 1881 nominal outside of Anatolia, the Fertile Crescent, the Hijaz, Yemen, and a swath of the North African coast in what’s today Libya. The war eliminated this suzerainty and excised territories which the Ottoman’s had actually ruled.
3. The states of the Arabian peninsula would be run by local grandees, some sovereign, some under British protection. All of the dynasties on the peninsula had established their local pre-eminence by 1833, and some were a good deal older.
4. The Fertile Crescent would be sorted into a number of dependencies. Initially eight dependencies were formed, which were then resorted into five. The British and the French made use of the existing Ottoman subprefectures as building blocs, then made some adjustments. Decisions were made about boundaries on-the-fly and for reasons-of-state, but it would have been perfectly sensible to have a multiplicity of states taking into account cultural factors on the ground. You had four supra-local spectra of vernacular Arabic dialects there and you had confessional minorities in and around the Ottoman province of Basra and in and around the subprefecture of Lebanon. You can conceive of better maps than the one on which Britain and France settled, but the better maps would still have had a multiplicity of states in that set of territories – organized around Basra, Baghdad, Mosul, Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut, &c.
From the “Well-that-didn’t-take-very-long-did-it?” files:
(AKA “From 60 to 0 in five months….”)
https://www.newsmax.com/politics/ratcliffe-biden-israel-middleeast/2021/05/23/id/1022431/
And all is going as planned: “Biden” hasn’t been creating these crises by accident….
…For this is the way to bring down empires. And countries.
(Especially small, thorn-in-the-side countries. All one has to do is (hold one’s nose and) read Obama’s latest doorstopper.)
Correction: not five months, four months. Just a bit under four months, actually, from “Inauguration” Day.
(Talk about efficiency….)
The Abdullah Peace Plan: Offer or Ultimatum?
https://mepc.org/journal/abdullah-peace-plan-offer-or-ultimatum
Thanks for the link, Barry Meislin.
It’s a very succinct account of Ratcliff’s appearance in Sunday Morning Futures.
Ratcliffe: “It’s really hard to believe how we got from America First to America worst in such a short period of time on the foreign policy national security issues.”
Robert Malley founded the icg, he was the one who defended the algerian islamists, (along with khashoggi) he defended hamas (along with khashoggi)
but more importantly ladies and gents, he went to the same paris lycee, that blinken did (that’s why I call him nod) wynken just so you know is wendy sherman who negotiated the iran deal, and the korean framework, (robert spencer described the entire murderers row)