Has George Bush heard a Filipino Monkey ?

Last Monday, on his final State of the Union address, George Bush was quite tough against Iran, saying : «America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf.»
This speech clearly refers to the US-Iran naval dispute, when an Iranian Revolutionary guards speed boat allegedly threathened US Navy ships (read my previous post).

The US Navy official paper Navy Times published a story explaining that this radio engagement may very well have been hijacked by a heckler nicknamed by the crews of the Gulf region «Filipino Monkey». The entire article is available on the Navy Times website.

Like often in this kind of situation, this last information was virtually not reported in the press. For the media, it is  much more exciting to tell about the dangers of Iran or the threat of war that the facts that contradict this scenario are not given as much importance as the bellicist statements coming from the administration.

It confirms a very old rule : «si vis bellum, para bellum».

French military in the Emirates. A mistake ?

President Sarkozy’s visit to the Gulf ended with the announcement that France will set up a new base in the UAE (a couple of other agreements were signed, including cooperation for a water plant and a civilian nuclear cooperation program).

This is a breaking news.

First, it makes France become the only other foreign country with the US to have a permanent military facility in the Gulf region. And this happens as France has not extended its military bases network abroad recently - the trend is rather to downsize it, due to budget considerations. In Abu Dhabi, four to five hundreds French soldiers will be deployed on a long run.
Second, France did its best to avoid ambiguity. It claimed that this base is not aimed at Iran. And it claimed that the Emirates asked for it –France could’nt frankly say anything else.

This decision may be a major strategic mistake.

The French national interests are in a stable Middle-East. Deploying more troops can only bring more tensions. And the image of France in the region could be serioulsy damaged by such a decision. The recent trend shows that the ‘autonomists’ (ranking first among them are the islamists) are pledging for less Western influence in the region

What if, latter, this military presence is perceived as an occupation ? How would the French soldiers react if they get attacked ? A retreat would be seen as a defeat. A retaliation would trigger a dangerous cycle.

There are certainly many possible solutions to face terrorism. Deploying more Western troops on a muslim soil can definitely not be one of them.

War buzz is good for business

An infamous deal. George Bush’ regional tour in the Gulf was due to rise awareness against the dangers of Iran, pictured as the « world’s leading state sponsor of terror ». By the way, he got the unexpected help of an alleged naval incident, a kind of modern Maddox - you can read Maddox’s history here, enlighted by the recent disclosure of US intel.

But the very first tangible result is an enormous commercial deal : 20 billions dollars of new weaponry to be sold to Saudi Arabia. Actually, a war with Iran is no longer needed : the US military industry (and its powerful lobbies) already harvested its main benefits !

This news brings two thoughts to my mind.

First, we may question how moral it is to use fear in international relations to promote the sale of weapons. Not very moral, indeed, but not new at all !

Second, we must remind the genesis of Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was born from a double move. First, at the end of the soviet occupation of Afghanistan, thousands of jihadis (at the time sponsored by the West) came back home. They found themselves jobless, so to say.
In August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. In the Gulf region, this event caused a huge emotion. The people there believed that their armies were strong, but the Gulf leaders didn’t know how to face Saddam’s potential danger. Since 1945 and the conclusion on the USS Quincy of a long term strategic agreement, US and Saudi Arabia were linked by an « oil for security » deal. Cheap oil against security. And the West gets back part of the money it spends in oil purchases, as the product of the sales of weapons. Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf countries spent billions and billions of dollars to purchase weapons.

Soon after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Ossama Bin Laden offered the late Saudi king Fahd to rise a mudjahideen army, based on his fellow fighters back from Afghanistan, to fight the secular Saddam and free the conservative monarchy of Kuwait. But Fahd was offered by the US the coalition that we know and eventually refused Bin Laden’s proposal.
For the Saudis, that was a major blow. For decade, their country had spent a big part of its income to buy weapons to the West and the first regional crisis caused what was considered by many as a foreign invasion (by the West !). All these billions were spent in loss, as their country was not even able to face alone a very regional security issue.

This humiliation is seen by several analysts as the founding momentum of Al Qaeda. Partly as a reaction to the 1991 Gulf war, Bin Laden established the World islamic front for jihad against the Jews and the crusaders, the first stone of his organization.