U.S. fuels Middle East flames

Re-reporting, editing, comment by Carolyn Bennett

In an area rife with conflict and misery, the U.S. pours weapons of mass destruction.

The United States, according to Free Speech Radio News, is moving ahead with a sixty-billion dollar ($60 billion) decades-long arms deal with Saudi Arabia.

The Defense Department of the Obama administration  has given notice to the U.S. Congress that it plans to push forward with an arms orgy of satellite-guided bombs, fighter jets, helicopters to this conflict-torn area of the world.

Mainstream news sources are touting this pouring on of fuel into the flaming Middle East/Persian Gulf/Southwest Asia region “the biggest arms deal in U.S. history.”

Among the cash-rich profit takers in this latest windfall moral offense to humanity are military industrial complex big-shot Washington political funders and mass media owners Boeing, Lockheed Martin and General Electric.
.
Combine warmongering and greed, cold cash and kickbacks and oil resources in Saudi Arabia and the greater Middle Eastern region and what you get is U.S. foreign policy at its worst. Saudi Arabia occupies roughly four-fifths of the Arabian Peninsula.

Jordan, Iraq, and Kuwait border Saudi Arabia to the north
Persian Gulf, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman border to the east
Oman (part of) to the southeast
Yemen to the south and southwest
Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba to the west

East, along the Persian Gulf, are Saudi Arabia’s abundant oil fields. Since the 1960s, these oil fields “have made Saudi Arabia synonymous with petroleum wealth.”

There have been long-running border disputes with Yemen and Qatar (nearly resolved in 2000 and 2001). The border with the United Arab Emirates remains undefined. A territory of 2,200 square miles (5,700 square km) along the gulf coast was shared by Kuwait and Saudi Arabia as a neutral zone until 1969, when a political boundary was agreed upon. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia each administer one-half of the territory and equally share oil production in the entire area. Though a partition in 1981 legally settled the controversy over the Saudi-Iraqi Neutral Zone, conflict between the Iraq and Saudi Arabia persists and prevents final demarcation on the ground.

The Middle East region consists of the lands around the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, extending from Morocco to the Arabian Peninsula and Iran and sometimes beyond.

The central part of this general area used to be called the Near East (and is today in some government contexts). This name (Near East) was given to the region by some of the first modern Western geographers and historians, who tended to divide the Orient into three regions:

Near East: the region nearest Europe extending from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf
Middle East: the Persian Gulf to Southeast Asia
Far East: regions facing the Pacific Ocean

The “Middle East” construct drawn after World War II is the region made up of the states or territories of Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Palestine (now Israel), Jordan, Egypt, The Sudan, Libya, and the various states of Arabia proper (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, and the Trucial States, or Trucial Oman [now United Arab Emirates].

Subsequent events have tended, in loose usage, to enlarge the number of lands included in the definition. The three North African countries of Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco are closely connected in sentiment and foreign policy with the Arab states.

In addition, geographic factors often require political leaders and others to take account of Afghanistan and Pakistan in connection with the affairs of the Middle East.

Greece is sometimes included in the compass of the Middle East because the Middle Eastern (then Near Eastern) question in its modern form first became apparent when the Greeks rose in rebellion to assert their independence of the Ottoman Empire in 1821.

Oil

Military industrial complex

Political finance

Media ownership

Endless war and conflict

Sources and notes
Free Speech Radio News, October 21, 2010, http://fsrn.org/audio/saudi-us-weapons-deal/7699
Britannica notes on Saudi Arabia

__________________________________________________


Bennett's books available at New York independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; The Book Den, Ltd.: BookDenLtd@frontiernet.net [Danville, NY] Talking Leaves Books-Elmwood: talking.leaves.elmwood@gmail.com [Buffalo, NY]; Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza: http://www.bhny.com/ [Albany, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY] Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]