The New Turn

Washington's Orwellian foreign policy maneuver

by Justin Raimondo

"To understand what is going on with the $60 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and a number of small Gulf potentates – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the UAE – we have to go back to Seymour Hersh's last piece in the New Yorker, "The Redirection," which revealed, among other things, that the U.S. is funding Sunni radical groups possibly linked to al-Qaeda in Lebanon and in the Eastern reaches of Iran. It's all part of a new turn in American foreign policy in the Middle East, toward the Sunni "mainstream" and away from our former Shi'ite allies-of-convenience in Iraq. Having smashed the Ba'athist regime and handed Mesopotamia over to the Iranians, the Americans are taking a U-turn and aligning with their former enemies in readiness for the next war of "liberation" on the neocon agenda: the battle for Iran.....

....However, the corrupt Arab monarchs of the Kingdom, the Gulf states, Jordan, and Egypt (which is, for all intents and purposes, a monarchy) are the wrong sorts of allies. The effectiveness of bin Laden's propaganda is heavily dependent on our continued support for one of the last bastions of absolutism on earth. In a region of the world where the irresponsibility and outright decadence of the Sunni "moderate" elites is so ostentatious, it is suicidal to align ourselves with regimes that have little popular support.....

Not that there was anything to betray to begin with – it was all a lot of malarkey, anyway. Our real goals in the region have little to do with "democracy" – which, if installed in the Middle East, would give us the victory of Hamas-like groups from the Nile to the Euphrates – and everything to do with exploiting the divisions in the Arab-Muslim world....

The antiwar movement is focused exclusively on Iraq, but that Rubicon was crossed fours years ago: now we approach the River Styx, the demarcation line between the world of the living and Hades, the land of the dead. As we make the approach, ghosts and demons weep and wail, warning us away – yet we keep on going, walking blindly ahead, until we're standing at the edge of oblivion.

It won't take much to push us over – and it's a long way down."