Tag Archives: Saudi Arabia

Just How Swampy Are U.S-Saudi Arms Deals? by Andrew Cockburn

Posted on October 1, 2019 | Leave a comment

Nothing  about Saudi Arabia is on the up-and-up. From Andrew Cockburn at theamericanconservative.com:

CEO of Lockheed Martin, Marillyn Hewson (L) and Ahmad Bin Aqeel Al Khatib (R), Director of Saudi Research and Marketing Group pose for a photo after signing a bilateral agreement, worth $280 billion, between United States and Saudi Arabia at Al-Yamamah Palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on May 20, 2017. (Photo by Bandar Algaloud /Saudi Royal Council/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

The old maxim that “the U.S. government exists to buy arms at home and sell arms abroad” was never truer than today. Our defense budget is soaring to previously undreamed-of heights and overseas weapons deals are setting new records.

Indeed, the arms sales industry has become so multi-faceted that while some American corporations push weapons, other U.S. firms are making money by acting on behalf of the buyers. Thus a Lockheed Martin-Raytheon team recently dispatched to Riyadh to negotiate the finer points of the ongoing $15 billion deal for seven Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) batteries jointly manufactured by the two companies, found themselves facing not Saudis across the table, but a team of executives from the Boston Consulting Group. This behemoth, which has $7.5 billion in global revenues, is just one of the firms servicing Mohammed “Bone Saw” Bin Salman’s vicious and spendthrift consolidation of power in the kingdom.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in Business, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Military

Tagged , , ,

How the Saudi Oil Field Attack Overturned America’s Apple Cart, by Conn Hallinan

Posted on September 30, 2019 | 3 comments

Saudi Arabia has the world third largest defense budget, $68 billion, with which it buys some of the world’s best weapons, but it can’t stop a drone and missile attack on one of its most valuable oil installation. The Houthi attack, if it was indeed the Houthis, may be the moment when the world first became generally aware of a development in the making since World War II: the decentralization of cheap but very violent weaponry. The implications are enormous. From Conn Halinan at antiwar.com:

For all their overwhelming firepower, the U.S. and its allies can cause a lot of misery in the Middle East, but still can’t govern the course of events.

In many ways it doesn’t really matter who – Houthis in Yemen? Iranians? Shiites in Iraq? – launched those missiles and drones at Saudi Arabia. Whoever did it changed the rules of the game, and not just in the Middle East. “It’s a moment when offense laps defense, when the strong have reason to fear the weak,” observes military historian Jack Radey.

In spite of a $68 billion a year defense budget – the third highest spending of any country in the world – with a world-class air force and supposed state-of-the-art anti-aircraft system, a handful of bargain basement drones and cruise missiles slipped through the Saudi radar and devastated Riyadh’s oil economy. All those $18 million fighter planes and $3 million a pop Patriot antiaircraft missiles suddenly look pretty irrelevant.

Continue reading →

3 Comments

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Military

Tagged , , , ,

George Washington Warned Us About Saudi Arabia, by Doug Bandow

Posted on September 30, 2019 | 1 comment

We should have listened to George. From Doug Bandow at theamericanconservative.com:

It’s haunting how accurately our first president predicted our “foreign entanglements” with Riyadh.

President Donald Trump wants to outsource U.S. policy to Riyadh. After the recent attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil fields, he tweeted that his administration was “locked and loaded,” but was “waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!” He later ordered American forces to Saudi Arabia to garrison the Middle East’s most brutally repressive and dangerously aggressive state.

Since he himself ventured to Riyadh in 2017—his first foreign trip—Trump has consistently sacrificed America’s national interests in catering to the preferences of the Saudi royal family. His administration backed the regime’s brutal attack on Yemen, ignored Riyadh’s continuing support for Islamic radicalism, and said little about their mounting human rights violations. Now he is acting as if American armed forces constitute the royals’ personal bodyguards, at the crown prince’s beck and call.

Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, Politics

Tagged , , , , ,

How Yemen’s Houthis are bringing down a Goliath, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on September 27, 2019 | 1 comment

So far the US government’s assertions that Iran was really behind the drone and missile attack on the Saudi Arabian oil installation have been evidence-free, and you have to figure that if it had evidence it would have been made public by now. The realization that the Middle East’s poorest nation can bring down it’s richest goes down very hard with the US establishment. From Pepe Escobar at thesaker.is:

An image taken from a video made available on July 7, 2019 by the press office of the Yemeni Shiite Houthi group shows ballistic missiles, labeled ‘Made in Yemen,’ at a recent exhibition of missiles and drones at an undisclosed location in Yemen. Footage showed models of at least 15 unmanned drones and missiles of different sizes and ranges. Photo: AFP/ Al-Houthi Group Media Office

“It is clear to us that Iran bears responsibility for this attack. There is no other plausible explanation. We support ongoing investigations to establish further details.”

The statement above was not written by Franz Kafka. In fact, it was written by a Kafka derivative: Brussels-based European bureaucracy. The Merkel-Macron-Johnson trio, representing Germany, France and the UK, seems to know what no “ongoing investigation” has unearthed: that Tehran was definitively responsible for the twin aerial strikes on Saudi oil installations.

“There is no other plausible explanation” translates as the occultation of Yemen. Yemen only features as the pounding ground of a vicious Saudi war, de facto supported by Washington and London and conducted with US and UK weapons, which has generated a horrendous humanitarian crisis.

So Iran is the culprit, no evidence provided, end of story, even if the “investigation continues.”

Hassan Ali Al-Emad, Yemeni scholar and the son of a prominent tribal leader with ascendance over ten clans, begs to differ. “From a military perspective, nobody ever took our forces in Yemen seriously. Perhaps they started understanding it when our missiles hit Aramco.”

Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in Energy, Financial markets, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Imperialism, Insurrection, Media, Military, War

Tagged , , ,

How Holes in the Burning Saudi Oil Fields Narrative Could Draw the US Into a War With Iran, by Mnar Muhawesh

Posted on September 24, 2019 | Leave a comment

The US government insists that Iran was behind the attack on the Saudi Arabian oil field, not the Houthis who are claiming credit for the attack. From Mnar Muhawesh at mintpressnews.com:

Tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran are escalating to new heights, drawing the United States into a confrontation with the Islamic Republic after a sophisticated attack targeted Saudi Arabia’s Aramco oil facility — the largest oil processing facility in the world — knocking out half of the country’s oil capacity, or more than 5 million barrels a day, and leaving the oil fields in flames.

The attack was nothing the Kingdom had seen before or expected: According to U.S. and Saudi intel, 18 drones and seven cruise missiles were launched and went undetected by both American and Saudi radar systems. The weaponry even went unnoticed by the U.S. military base nearby, the Prince Sultan Airbase, which is guarded by an American Patriot missile defense system and over 500 U.S. military personnel.

You better believe an attack at this level targeting a crossroad for global oil supplies did more than ruffle a few feathers.

Panic not only struck the Kingdom and the international economy, where oil prices spiked 19 percent — the highest ever recorded one-day increase — but U.S. and Saudi politicians, as well as a chorus of mainstream pundits, began to beat the drums of war targeting an old foe: Iran.

Saudi and U.S. military analysts have presented satellite images of where the missiles landed in the oil fields, purporting to show that the drones/missiles came from the direction of Iran. However, some experts are already countering these claims, pointing out that the images show impact points that are indeed west-northwest, which is the opposite direction of Iran.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in Geopolitics, Governments, Military, Politics, War

Tagged , , , ,

The drone attacks in Saudi Arabia have changed the nature of global warfare, by Patrick Cockburn

Posted on September 24, 2019 | 2 comments

Actually, the nature of global warfare and the increasing decentralization of violence have been going on for over 50 years, but even now it’s not a well recognized trend. From Patrick Cockburn at independent.co.uk:

Saudi Arabia and the US’s failure to defend oil facilities has had an impact on the balance of power 

The devastating attack on Saudi oil facilities by drones and missiles not only transforms the balance of military power in the Middle East, but marks a change in the nature of warfare globally.

On the morning of 14 September, 18 drones and seven cruise missiles – all cheap and unsophisticated compared to modern military aircraft – disabled half of Saudi Arabia’s crude oil production and raised the world price of oil by 20 per cent.

This happened despite the Saudis spending $67.6bn (£54bn) on their defence budget last year, much of it on vastly expensive aircraft and air defence systems, which notably failed to stop the attack. The US defence budget stands at $750bn (£600.2bn), and its intelligence budget at $85bn (£68bn), but the US forces in the Gulf did not know what was happening until it was all over.

Excuses advanced for this failure include the drones flying too low to be detected and unfairly coming from a direction different from the one that might have been expected. Such explanations sound pathetic when set against the proud boasts of the arms manufacturers and military commanders about the effectiveness of their weapons systems.

Continue reading→

2 Comments

Posted in Governments, Military, War

Tagged , ,

Let’s Talk About Saudi Arabia, by Michael Krieger

Posted on September 23, 2019 | Leave a comment

Any close examination of Saudi Arabia and its government yields the question: why would the US ever want to crawl into bed with these corrupt, ruthless, double-dealing kleptocrats? From Michael Krieger at libertyblitzkrieg.com:

All wars require casus belli, ostensible justifications. After all, despite humanity’s long history of vicious warfare, interstate combat often requires a government distant from its working class to motivate its people to kill and die for distant institutions and esoteric ideologies. That said, Washington doesn’t exactly have a strong track record of honesty regarding its rationales for war. Few Americans know or care much for their own history…

– Maj. Danny Sjursen, USA (ret.)

One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting…It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting.

– George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

It’s fall 2019, and nearly twenty years into a series of disastrous and murderous forever wars sold to the public as a necessary response to 9/11, we’re being instructed to prepare for another one. Replace the Q with an N at the end of IRA and you know what I’m talking about. Of course, this shouldn’t surprise anyone considering much of the U.S. foreign policy establishment has been actively scheming for some invented justification to take out Iran (and many others) for decades.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Intelligence, Military, War

Tagged , , ,

Will More US Troops in Saudi Arabia Make America Great? by Ron Paul

Posted on September 23, 2019 | Leave a comment

Trump went all in on Saudi Arabia and now finds he’s playing a weak hand. From Ron Paul at ronpaulinstitute.org:

President Trump deserves credit for resisting the war cries from neocons like Sen. Lindsey Graham and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo after last week’s attack on two Saudi oil facilities. Pompeo was eager to blame Iran because he wants war with Iran and anything that can trigger such a war is fine with him. So he put the president in a difficult spot by declaring Iran the culprit: suddenly the president’s options in the media and in Washington were limited to “how to punish Iran.”

A week has now passed since the attack and Pompeo’s rush to judgement has been shown for what it was: war propaganda. That is because there has still been no determination of who launched the attack. Yemen’s Houthis took responsibility right away and Iran denied any involvement. We have seen nothing to this point that contradicts this.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Military, War

Tagged ,

Trump Falls Into the Aramco Trap, by Tom Luongo

Posted on September 23, 2019 | Leave a comment

Saudi Arabia is counting on the money from an IPO of its oil company, Aramco. Iran would love to scuttle that deal. From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:

Now that I’ve had a week to process it, the attack on the Saudi Abqaiq oil processing facility was more than a brilliant operation, it was a trap.

And, unfortunately, President Trump just fell in it.

My initial reaction to this was that it could have easily been a false flag to gin up a war with Iran on the eve of Israeli elections. The initial spate of questions hadn’t been answered adequately.

As the week went along, however, it became clear that the responses from all concerned to this attack that the those that took responsibility for it, the Houthis in North Yemen backed by Iranian technology, were the ones that did it.

And it all comes down to the same thing, the Saudi Aramco IPO.

This is a $400 billion deal that is vitally necessary for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to pull off. His plans to modernize the Saudi economy rest completely on this deal and keeping the price of oil from collapsing into the $50’s or even $40’s worldwide.

So while Saudi Arabia and Israel had incentives to stage a ‘false flag,’ Iran and its allies had even more incentive to cripple Saudi oil infrastructure to try and scuttle the Aramco IPO by bringing into question the kingdom’s ability to control not only its borders but also its future production.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in Energy, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Military, War

Tagged , , , ,

U.S. Ships More Air Defense Systems That Do Not Work To Saudi Arabia, by Moon of Alabama

Posted on September 22, 2019 | Leave a comment

The elephant in the room concerning the strike on the Saudi Arabian oil installation is Saudi Arabia’s air defenses. From Moon of Alabama at moonofalabama.com:

he Washington Post notices Russia’s offer to sell its air defense systems to Saudi Arabia. It does not like that:

The attack on Saudi Arabian oil facilities last weekend were a disaster for both Riyadh and Washington, with weapons allegedly made in Iran circumventing expensive U.S. missile defense systems.But in Moscow, news of the attack was greeted as yet another chance to mock the United States and its allies — all while extolling the virtues of Russia’s own missile defense technology.

“We still remember the fantastic U.S. missiles that failed to hit a target more than a year ago, while now the brilliant U.S. air defense systems could not repel an attack,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told a briefing on Friday. “These are all links in a chain.”

The Yemeni attack on Saudi oil installations caused serious damage (more photos). In Abqaiq at least five of nine stabilization columns were destroyed. These are needed to make crude oil transportable. The three phase separators that separate the fluids into gas, oil and water were likewise eliminated. Most of the gas storage tanks at Abqaiq were penetrated.


biggerSome 5,000 additional workers are now racing to repair the damage. It will still take weeks if not months to get everything up and running again.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in Geopolitics, Governments, Military

Tagged , ,