You can’t tell the players without a scorecard, and even with a scorecard it’s impossible to tell who’s winning and who’s losing, except for the US, which is definitely losing. From Daniel Lazare, via davidstockmanscontracorner.com:
“The enemy of your enemy is your enemy,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Congress earlier this month. But it’s not so simple. In today’s Middle East, a country can be another country’s enemy one day, its friend the next, and both simultaneously on the third.
Netanyahu is as good an example as any. His come-from-behind triumph in Tuesday’s election places him at the head of a grand anti-Iranian coalition that includes the Republicans on Capitol Hill, the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, and ISIS militants battling Iranian-backed forces in Syria and Iraq. But Netanyahu clinched his victory by rejecting Palestinian statehood and issuing racist warnings that Israeli Arabs were going to the polls “in droves” to vote to unseat his Likud government – all examples of the pugnacious nationalism that has made him persona non grata in Sunni capitals that otherwise approve of his pro-Iranian stance.
So is Netanyahu a friend of the Sunnis, an enemy, neither, or both?
Or take Saudi Arabia. It has reportedly told Israel that it will allow its warplanes to fly over its territory to save fuel while attacking Iranian nuclear sites – provided that is, Israel makes progress in its negotiations with the Palestinians. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Saudis Said to Aid Israeli Plan to Bomb Iran.”]
But now that negotiations appear to be kaput, will the Saudis withdraw their offer or decide that bombing Iran trumps solidarity with Sunnis in Gaza and the West Bank?
To continue reading: Washington’s Mindless Interventionism
