Yesterday, I watched Fox News Sunday, hosted by Chris Wallace. It was very informative and surprisingly candid about how bad things are getting in the Mideast. I suggest you watch it. For purposes of this blog, I’ll summarize its content as it discussed the Mideast. The Mideast crisis is clearly getting worse across many nations, and could lead to very serious consequences for the entire world as soon as later this year.
Chris Wallace surprised me by firmly asserting that he thought the rift between Israel and the Obama administration was more the fault of Obama than Netanyahu. He cited Netanyahu’s peace feelers after his election victory and Obama’s brusque rejection of them. Panelist Bob Woodward stated he thought the worst threat in the Mideast came from the Iran nuclear negotiations (more on that later). Panelist Laura Ingraham called Obama’s attitude “petulant,” and fellow panelist Liz Cheney typified Obama’s policies as not connected to the real world (I think many nations agree with that view). I think it was panelist Judy Woodruff who warned that American Jewish voters will start switching to the GOP due to Obama’s intensifying anti-Israeli policies and attitudes. The fact that Obama has threatened to abandon Israel at the UN and take a more pro-Iranian tilt entered into their discussion. Some of these views used to be “fringe” topics; now things are deteriorating so rapidly that mainstream commentators are discussing them.
Let’s do a quick review of the rapidly-increasing Mideast chaos. The nation of Yemen, which Obama months ago hailed as policy success for his administration, has morphed into one of Obama’s greatest foreign policy failures. The nation has descended into religious conflict between Iranian-supported Houthis and Sunni tribal factions. However, Iran is an enemy of the USA, Israel and the West, and they now control Yemen’s capital, the Red Sea approaches to Egypt’s Suez Canal (a huge strategic choke point), and today I heard on cable news that they have also captured a key Yemenite air field. If so, Iran can fly in major weaponry to them, including heavy cruise missiles to block the Suez Canal. It is also reported that the Sunnis of Yemen are heavily dominated by either Al Queda or ISIL-aligned groups. There are, apparently, no “good guys” left in Yemenite positions of power. The Obama administration has effectively surrendered the nation to the Islamic terrorists and extremists, and has withdrawn even its military Special Forces troops (first link). The Shiite-Sunni war is rapidly increasing in Yemen as Sunni terrorists blew up two Shiite mosques and caused a horrific number of casualties (137 dead and 345 wounded according to the second link).
Syria is still in civil war and has disintegrated as a nation. Russia is committed to keeping Assad in power over at least the eastern portion of Syria so Russia retains access to its Syrian naval base. ISIL began in Syria, seized control of large chunks of Iraq and has terrorists and extremists in many Islamic nations in the Mideast and Africa declaring loyalty to ISIL. Even Morocco, in West Africa, is threatened by ISIL terrorists and just took down a group of ISIL-aligned terrorists cells (third link). Iraq, of course, is a disaster. After the US military conquered the nation and removed Saddam Hussein, the diplomats and the State Department lost it to the Iranians. Obama’s decision to hastily withdraw all US forces from the nation led to a situation where ISIL could conquer much of western and northern Iraq with impunity. However, I believe the Bush administration made a horrendous decision as well that led to Iraq’s disintegration. The Bush administration outlawed the Baathist party and dismissed the entire Iraqi army. This created a vast pool of well-trained and skilled terrorists. There have been media reports that some of Saddam’s generals are leading ISIL forces. What Bush should have done was call in Saddam’s Baathist generals and assign each Iraqi division a section of Iraq and told them to keep order, make sure water and utility services function and terrorism stops. They should have been put on the US payroll and bonuses should have been offered monthly to whatever Iraqi army division created the greatest degree of law and order in its jurisdiction. If this had been done, the US would not have needed many troops there and the Iraqis would have built up their own post-Saddam Iraq as pro-American allies. This friendly policy is essentially what General MacArthur did in Japan after World War II. He recognized and honored Emperor Hirohito and worked through the intact Japanese internal structures as much as possible. The Japanese military and people, switched instantly from fanatical resistance to orderly cooperation, and became US allies. Bush should have emulated MacArthur’s wise example.
Libya is also descending into civil war, if it is not already there. The Obama- and NATO-led attacks on the Khaddafy regime, which had assisted the West in suppressing Al Queda, was vastly preferable to the anarchy and Islamic terrorists-oriented factions that have followed in his wake. There have been many reports that much of Libya’s weaponry was relocated with US help via Turkey to Syria’s rebels fighting Assad. If that report is true, then instead of building an anti-Assad army, that policy gave birth to ISIL.
Egypt would now likely be in a state of civil war or anarchy if Obama’s and Iran’s pro-Muslim Brotherhood policy had prevailed. Thankfully, Egyptian general al-Sisi overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood dictator-in-the-making and this has kept Egypt from sliding into the internal chaos that Iran wants to have happen in all the Sunni nations so that Shiite Iran can conquer them easily via its surrogates.
The Kurds in northern Iraq and Syria are an island of stability, but are still threatened by ISIL. The USA has supposedly shipped heavy weapons to the Kurds, but little reaches them. The reason is a cosmically-stupid policy decision by the Obama administration. The weaponry is shipped (supposedly) to the Kurds via the Iranian-aligned Iraqi central government in Baghdad, as Senator Cruz of Texas notes in the fourth link. In doing it this way, Obama pretends to arm the Kurds, but is actually sending US arms to the Iranian-backed Shiites in Iraq, who keep them for themselves. Again, Obama’s policies help Iran. Many media articles and my previous posts have documented that Iranian generals and military forces are inside Iraq helping them fight ISIL. I think that this situation reveals a huge “blind spot” in the thinking of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and other Sunni governments. I believe that whatever Iraqi territory that is retaken from ISIL by Iran and its Shiite allies inside Iraq will stay under Iranian Shiite control just as all portions of Eastern Europe retaken from the Nazis by the Russians after World War II stayed under Soviet rule. The Sunni nations of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and supported by Egypt ought to intervene inside Iraq just as Iran has done, and these Sunni nations should drive out ISIL forces and put regions of western and northern Iraq under their control. If they don’t, the growing Shiite Iranian empire will soon be on their doorsteps.
Israel is a shining light of stability in the Mideast, but it inexplicably draws Obama’s greatest wrath. Senator McCain has stated that Obama should get over his “tantrum” about Netanyahu’s decisive victory in the Israeli election (fifth link). Sen. McCain is right, but Obama’s “tantrum” shows no sign of letting up. Indeed, Sen. McCain added that Obama’s “priorities are so screwed up it is unbelievable.” I think Sen. McCain speaks for a majority of the world and the US electorate in that observation.
Now we are facing the possible release of a very bad nuclear deal Obama is seeking with Iran. If Obama surrenders on the USA’s past policies and rewards Iran with a continued nuclear program, a pathway to nuclear weapons, and lessened sanctions, it could set off a chain of events which will lead to either war, the collapse of US financial dominance of the world or both. Keep in mind that Israel (who is most threatened by the Iranian nuclear program), Saudi Arabia (which is very threatened by an Iranian nuclear program), Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Kuwait and other Sunni Mideast nations have been excluded from the nuclear talks the USA and the West are conducting with Iran. Because they are not participants in this negotiation, they are not bound to abide by any of its terms. What if these nations form their own military alliance dedicated to opposing Iran’s dominance of the Mideast, south central Asia and northern Africa? What if Israel announces openly that it is a major nuclear power and Saudi Arabia becomes one instantly by taking delivery of a number of the Saudi-financed Pakistani nukes? What if Saudi Arabia finally gets so upset with the Obama administration’s pro-Iranian policies and actions that it either (A) declares all nations may pay for Saudi and OPEC oil in any currency they desire and that US dollars are no longer required for payment? If Saudi Arabia really gets provoked by Obama sufficiently, it could declare oil will no longer be priced in US dollars and that US dollars cannot be used to buy Saudi oil (or other cooperating OPEC members’ oil either). If this happens, it will collapse the US dollar on global markets, throw all markets into chaos, likely collapse the US bond market and equity markets and skyrocket the price of gold and silver (at least in US dollar terms). A collapse of the US petrodollar market could cause such a tectonic shift in all global financial/monetary markets that it could lead to the fulfillment of a specific biblical prophecy: the collapse of the current “Babylon the Great” system of global finance, as prophesied in Revelation 17-18. It could happen very suddenly. I want to stress that I’m not specifically prophesying this will occur, but I do want to point out that this is a very real but unspoken danger which is not being discussed by establishment media analysts.
As Sen. McCain asserted, Obama’s policies are “so screwed up that it is unbelievable.” Those ‘”screwed up” policies of Obama could suddenly backfire on Obama (as well as the USA and the entire world) in a way that no one will ever be able to put it back together the way it was.
- http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-yemen-al-qaida-20150321-story.html
- http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/03/20/3-suicide-bombings-target-shiite-rebel-mosques-in-yemen/25070699/
- http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/03/22/morocco-dismantles-islamic-state-linked-network-planning-attacks-interior/
- http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/feb/08/ted-cruz/ted-cruz-says-obama-refuses-directly-arm-kurds-isi/
- http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/22/politics/john-mccain-steve-israel-obama-netanyahu/
- http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/02/25/report-us-military-no-longer-able-to-fight-2-wars-at-same-time/?intcmp=latestnews
