Withdrawing From Syria: Trump Sets Cats Among Flocks Of Pigeons

Withdrawing From Syria: Trump Sets Cats Among Flocks Of Pigeons

                                                                                           Saeed Naqvi

When Dore Gold, one of the most powerful voices in Israel’s strategic community, raises his hands, skywards, and exclaims “today I feel as vulnerable as the Kurds”, who have been abandoned by Donald Trump, one fact can be cast in stone: West Asia has changed. A panic war cannot be ruled out. But war with whom? Situated in a comparable circumstance, Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammad bin Salman, on his knees in Yemen and the Aramco compound, is flourishing the flag of peace at Tehran. But then who hit the Iranian tanker outside Jeddah? These regional conflicts will not tamely wind down; they will zig-zag their way out.

The Saudi “messenger” to Tehran, happens to be Pakistan’s Prime Minister. Surely, Imran Khan will carry the peace message, but he will also unfurl his Jammu and Kashmir agenda before the Iranian leadership. This, when Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping will also be circling around that issue and addressing a host of others. It must be clear as daylight to New Delhi that Trump’s withdrawal from West Asia is synchronizing with his “pivot to Asia”, which means expanded conflict with China. Western media’s dedicated coverage of the disturbances in Hong Kong, human rights in Xinxiang, all signal a long term Sino-US standoff. Since the days of Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister, India has been active in the “Quard” with Japan, Australia and the US. Ambiguities in the international system made it possible to play both the options – quard and bilateral relations with Beijing. But Trump is likely to be more jealous as US-China tensions rise? New Delhi will have to toss up a coin with the same image on both sides.

It is exactly 33 years ago that President Ronald Reagan and the General Secretary of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev mooted such innovative arms control ideas at Reykjavik, Iceland, that even strategist like Henry Kissinger found them unacceptably radical. And yet, when sense sank in, the intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed the next year paving the way to a changed world order. Change is in air, but of a different order.

Trump has been characteristically blunt. “The United States has spent eight trillion dollars fighting in and policing the Middle East (West Asia). Thousands of our great soldiers have died or been badly wounded. Millions of people have died on the other side.”

“Going into the Middle East is the worst decision ever made in the history of our country. We went to war under a false and now disproven premise: weapons of mass destruction. There were none.” This is Trump’s rationale for “slowly and carefully bringing our great soldiers and military home”. He says his focus is on the Big Picture. “USA is now greater than ever before.” That is his line for the 2020 elections.

Trump has been making allegations against his predecessors even before. Watch his interview to Jake Tapper of the CNN on the eve of the 2016 elections. He was vehement that Obama and Hillary Clinton spent millions “in Syria which, in fact, went to terrorists”. Soon after this allegation, Obama’s Defence Secretary, Ashton Carter, told a Congressional hearing before live TV cameras that a $500 million project to train militants had to be terminated because the “Jihadis” so trained had walked away with all the expensive equipment and joined some other group.

This was quite as mysterious as the origins of the Islamic State. The sudden establishment of the Islamic state in Mosul remains an uninvestigated whodunit. When the IS charged towards Baghdad in 2014, wielding the latest arms mounted on Humvees straight from the showroom, sources in Baghdad and Najaf were quite convinced that the IS was a US project.

What Erdogan has been offered is a poisoned chalice. This is clear as daylight in Trump’s own words. The tone is of malicious glee: “Turkey, Europe, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Russia and the Kurds will now have to figure the situation out.”

The recipe for the countries listed above to stew in their own juices is available possibly unknowingly even in Turkish statements. The Kurdish forces Erdogan is bombing had in their custody thousands of Islamic State detainees, many of them foreigners. State Department spokesmen are on record: “The US has pressed France, Germany and other European nations to take back captured IS fighters, but they refused.” In fact Turkish sources have amplified this statement. Some 12,000 IS fighters are distributed over seven prisons in north-east Syria. Of these, 4,000 are “foreigners”, which means neither Syrian nor Iraqi. List of IS members and their families taken back by western countries is almost comical: France (18 children), US (16 adults and children), Germany (fewer than 10), Australia (8 children), Sweden (7 children) and Norway (5 children). It is in the nature of groups like the IS to slip through even well laid nets. How many IS fighters are lying low in Syria’s north is anybody’s guess. But the Kurds along the Syria-Turkey border, who kept a steady gaze on the IS will now be hopelessly distracted by the Turkish offensive. Until the other day, the US was with the Kurds. What if these IS jihadis are let loose, say, across the border into Turkey? Erdogan will have to cope with trouble makers of a more lethal make than the Syrian Kurds.

Pundits like New York Times, Thomas Friedman, see West Asia exposed to a different kind of danger as a result of US withdrawal. Ever since the Iraq-Syria border was opened, the Iranians have an easy land bridge from Tehran, Iraq, Syria to Lebanon. Friedman’s anxiety is that this “tightening of the noose around Israel” will now go unchecked because that was one of the roles the US played in the region. “This brings the Iran-Israel shadow war into the open.” By the act of pulling out, Trump has set several cats among several flocks of pigeons all over the place.

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Netanyahu And MbS Have Lost Their Swagger: Has West Asia Changed?

Netanyahu And MbS Have Lost Their Swagger: Has West Asia Changed?

                                                                                          Saeed Naqvi

In West Asia, the tide has turned against Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammad bin Salman, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and President Trump is doing nothing about it. So long as Trump’s “B” team kicked and ranted the smell of war lurked. John Bolton, Bibi Netanyahu, bin Sultan and bin Zayed reinforced each other’s war lust until enlightenment dawned: Trump was using them to beat the drums of war to a deafening crescendo in order to exert maximum pressure on those whom he was out to strike a deal with. The “B” team despaired” because Trump wouldn’t pull the trigger.

The disabling of units at Aramco and occupation of Najran are body blows. MbS, in the bleakness of his circumstance, is having to eat crow. Bibi is meanwhile hobbling with corruption cases and the elusiveness of durable power. I am not convinced that Trump is a wounded stag quite yet. In fact, by initiating impeachment proceedings against the President, the 79 year old House leader Nancy Pelosi may have over exposed a 76 year Joe Biden, leaving the way open for America’s first woman President, Elizabeth Warren, 70, now that the 78 year old Bernie Sanders must slow down with a serious heart condition. But that’s a digression although it has a bearing on the radically changing situation in West Asia. It may still be pre mature to fall back on the Marxist appraisal that the immense power of the Jewish lobby and petro dollars will turn to dross once Imperialism loses interest in the House of Saud and Israel. That stage may not have been reached but a trend has been noticeable.

Why did Riyadh and Tel Aviv panic at the prospect of Iran being brought into the tent by the US regularizing its nuclear intentions? The fact that Barack Obama-John Kerry team were creating a self-regulating balance of power in West Asia, meant that they were shedding their hands-on-interest in the region. “Pivot to Asia” was beckoning.

MbS’s meteoric rise was accompanying by such high wire acts as the detention of the kingdom’s billionaires in Riyadh’s Ritz Carlton hotel or the macabre dismemberment of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. For seasoned observers of Saudi Arabia, the abandoning of the old style of diplomacy, furtive movements behind silken curtains, in favour of the recklessness of the Crown Prince, did foretell dangers ahead. A fall was feared, but not a nosedive.

MbS may have been able to cover up reversals in Syria particularly after Russians entered the proceedings. But it was universally acknowledged that the pointless war in Yemen was going disastrously, draining the kingdom’s coffers, building a humanitarian catastrophe and helping create a battle tested Houthi “Vietcong” enlarging their dependence on Iran. When future historians record the rise and fall of MbS, they will put down his hubris to endless supply of petrodollars attracting an endless and wasteful supply of US and British arms incapable of coping with simply configured drones. Carelessness induced in this fashion helped further consolidate the Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hashd al Shaabi in Iraq and Houthis in Yemen. This is the Shia arc Saudis should be worried about not the Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Hamas, which is Israel’s brainchild for its own reasons. And Hamas is true blue Sunni.

It is ironical that one should be tossing a Persian saying at MbS: Der ayad, durust ayad. Arrival of wisdom, however late is to be welcomed: the realization that the five year long war with Yemen has been a ridiculous waste in which American arm dealers and mercenary armies made unspeakable sums of money.

The artificial Shia-Sunni faultline was created for two reason: to scare the oil rich GCC with Iran’s rise and sell them arms and, secondly, to break the morale of Iran, the only county in West Asia which stands up for Palestinian rights, much to Israel’s annoyance.

On current showing, the trick has not worked. That which was never intended appears to be the outcome. Low key pilgrimages, confined largely to Shias, have, in the Shia-Sunni competition, demonstrably burgeoned. Arba’een, the 40^th day of Hussain’s martyrdom, has become an annual walk from Najaf to Karbala, a distance of 80 miles, in which last year 20 million pilgrims from all over the world participated, far in excess of the annual Haj of Mecca. This cannot please the Saudis.

This year, the congregation is expected to be much bigger. Further, traffic from the shrine of Imam Raza in Mashad to Karbala and Najaf and onto Bibi Zainab’s shrine in Damascus is likely to be frenetic. This, because the Iraq-Syria border is now open, exactly what Riyadh and Tel Aviv were fiercely opposed to. By mid-October, this part of West Asia will have pilgrims in all directions, like a maze of flyovers.

One aspect of the recent disturbances in Southern Iraq is to deter attendance at Arba’een. These uncertainties will wax and wane so long as relations with Iran are not firmed up. Supreme leader Ayatullah Khamenei is firm: revert to the nuclear deal as it was on May 8, 2018 and lift sanctions before any dialogue is possible. The French have offered a compromise formula: that some of the countries who have had to impose sanctions against Iran lift restrictions to initiate an official level conversation which then prepares for a higher level engagement.

President Macron of France had taken the audacious initiative to invite Foreign Minister Zarif unannounced during the August G7 summit in France. But at the UNGA in September, President Hassan Rouhani made a strong pitch for “regional issues to be settled by regional powers”. This would tend to obviate a French role for the time being.

Recently UAE’s bin Zayed did send a delegation to Tehran. Is MbS chastened enough to tread the path towards regional peace without holding America’s hand? When that happens, West Asia will have changed.

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Successful Attack On Aramco Possible Only With Help Inside The Kingdom

                                                                                          Saeed Naqvi

In a world where the victor’s narrative prevails, there is not even grudging acceptance of the truth that the ‘confident and over lusty’ Saudi’s were trounced in the oil fields of Aramco in the eastern province. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who peers through his binoculars 24X7, instantly raised his finger: “Iran”.

If Iran was the source from where the drones came, where were all the $ trillions worth of defensive batteries sold by the US to protect the very citadel of world oil? Or is it even more humiliating to accept reversal at the hands of an impoverished, ill equipped adversary? Asymmetric victories as in David and Goliath, are demoralizing for arms merchants. In such success, ingenuity trumps vast arsenals.

In recent years, the west has quite unambiguously placed, Houthis, Zaidis, indeed, Yemenis in a huge pile called Shias. The Shia-Sunni faultline has been attempted by East-Coast strategists eversince the Ayatullahs ousted the Shah in 1979 and the Saudis began to have palpitations at the sight of a rival pole in Tehran, as a result of a fracture in the Ummah.

The external fracture was severely compounded by an internal one when extremists opposed to Wahabism occupied the holy mosque at Mecca, demanding that the House of Saud vacate the holy shrines. In the ensuing battle, over 130 people were killed. American and French military help was needed. It must be put down to obsequiousness, a worship of Saudi petro dollars that details of how the West helped lift the siege of Mecca have been removed from the narrative.

It is common knowledge that Saudis do not allow non-Muslims in the city of Mecca, leave alone the great mosque. How then did western, Christian soldiers enter the mosque? Regular Mullahs were mobilized to help them recite the “Kalima”, an essential pre condition for conversion to Islam. Faiths were changed to save the mosque and the face of the House of Saud.

While the revolution in Iran and in Mecca took place simultaneously in 1979, it is the latter event which gives the Saudis nightmares to this day. The enunciation of the Shia-Sunni faultline became possible after the revolution in Tehran. This is supposed to have subsumed the Israel–Palestinian faultiline a turn that is useful to Tel Aviv and Riyadh.

In contemporary diplomacy, where propaganda is all, Israeli publicity lists Hamas in the nasty Iran, Hezbollah, Syria (Alawi) Shia axis when everybody knows that Hamas is 100 percent Sunni. What worries Riyadh and Tel Aviv is something more fundamental. Hamas is Mulsim Brotherhood with deep links in Egypt, Qatar and Turkey.

If Yemen is Shia, why was Prince Naif bin Abdel Aziz, present King Salman’s brother, busy building up a Mujahideen force in Yemen at the same time he was creating such a power in Afghanistan? What was the link?

American expertise, Saudi money and huge Pakistani logistical help created the Mujahideen in Afghanistan who helped expel the Soviets in 1989. It is a measure of the low esteem in which sub continental Muslims are held by the Saudi ruling class, that Naif considered religious zeal being instilled in the Afghan-Mujahideen as a temporary requirement. For the long term, thoroughbred Arabs had to be trained in Yemen because here too there was a real and present “Soviet danger”, in the context of the Cold War.

Aden and Southern Yemen had in 1967 come under Egyptian-Nasserite, and therefore Soviet influence. Naif’s countermove is the origin of the Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

When Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman rained bombs on Sanaa, past four years, he may not be aware that he was bruising a city continuously inhabited for 2,500 years. Prophet Mohammad sent his cousin and son-in-law, Ali, as the Qazi of Sanaa. The old city of Sanaa reminded me of Jaisalmer, its narrow lanes hemmed in by multistoryed structures. The facades of these high structure have exquisite geometrical designs. Suited to Jaisalmer’s harsh summers, on the other hand the façade, without colourful design, is easy on the eye because it does not reflect any light.

The Shia-Sunni narrative in Yemen is not straightforward. When Mustafa Kemal Pasha, Ataturk disbanded the Khilafat after World War-I, a system of Imamate continued in Yemen until 1962. A system of Imams leading the community is internal to Shias who may be segregated between those looking upto twelve or seven or an endless line of Imams. Iranian, sub continental, Lebanese, Kuwaiti or Bahrain Shias are known as Isna Ashari or twelvers.

Zayd Ibn Ali, brother of Muhammad al Baqir, the fifth Imam, did not accept the twelve system and shifted base to Yemen giving rise to a whole Zaidi sect. This unique Imamate lasted till 1962.

Since Ali, the first Imam, was the Qazi of Sanaa in 630 where he built a handsome mosque, Zaid could claim that affiliation too. But Yemen was constantly in the eye of the storm because of the shifting Saudi politics. Its personality was riven between its innate Shia roots and external Wahabi pressures.

This was the confusing maze, when MbS, his fingers burnt in Syria, embarked on a war in Yemen. Americans gleefully encouraged the war to sell arms to the prince of all narcissists. The war has been a disgraceful stalemate for the Crown Prince. Doggedly battling uneven odds the Houthis (Zaidis who derive their name from their leader Abdul Malik al Houthi) are improving by the day as warriors, fighting for their ancient land, and their faith, which in these four years has by association with the Iranians, been more firmed up with Shias. The Saudis have thrown into the battle money and mercenaries even from such far off places as Colombia and Peru. After the attack on Abqaiq, Aramco, Houthi armed forces duly claimed responsibility: “This operation came after an accurate intelligence operation and advance monitoring and cooperation of honorable and free men within the Kingdom.”

Phrase “within the Kingdom” will give Riyadh sleepless nights for months to come.

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Ill Wind For West: Houthis Hit Aramco, Netanyahu Wobbles

Ill Wind For West: Houthis Hit Aramco, Netanyahu Wobbles

                                                                                        Saeed Naqvi

Attack on Aramco, decline of Benjamin Netanyahu, departure of John Bolton from the White House are all honeyed music to the leadership in Iran. In April, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, in a talk at New York’s Asia Society, was categorical: dialogue with Washington was not possible because the “B” team wanted war with Iran. The “B” team was Bolton, Bibi Netanyahu, (Mohammad) bin Salman and (Mohammed) bin Zayed. And now the “B” team has disintegrated.

Many foreign technicians are engaged to operate oil facilities in Saudi Arabia. It is interesting that they were not hit. Loss of American lives would have provoked retaliation in Washington. This, though, would not have been the first time the US and British personnel were killed. Over 30 foreigners lost their lives when Islamist extremists attacked three compounds in Riyadh in May, 2003.

That however was a totally different circumstance. There was anger at foreign military personnel on the land which houses Mecca and Medina. The attacks took place within a month of the US occupation of Iraq. The Saudis involved in the attack on the Riyadh compounds were no different from the ones who flew into the twin-towers on September 11.

This time the Saudis who have been relentlessly pummeling Yemen for nearly five years, creating a humanitarian catastrophe of unspeakable proportions are getting their just desserts.

Since news of military reversals is never aired in a society as closed as the Saudis, regimes end up underestimating the tenacity of their adversaries. Ingenuity comes in where military hardware is lacking. It was ingenuity which caused the great Mervaka tank in the Israeli armory look so vulnerable while confronting the Hezbollah in the 2006 war. Also, just the other day, on June 20 to be precise, an inexpensively configured Iranian drone brought down a $15.9 million US drone in the Gulf.

The drone attack by the Houthis on Saudi Aramco’s Abqaiq oil processing facility in Buqyaq, is devastating for the Saudis, ofcourse. But it is much more worrying for the American military industrial complex. The question uppermost in the minds of the Saudi ruling elite will be: $ trillions of Western arms which we have bought over the years cannot protect “our crown jewels?” the US arms market may take a profound hit worldwide, not a happy development when Trump is looking for deep pockets to clean out the Chinese in the trade war.

A weakened Netanyahu is further bad news for the “B” team. No cooing dove himself but his high tolerance level for outlandish schools of thought as his projected partners was harmful for Israeli image worldwide.

Netanyahu is not a very “likeable” person. This was seen as one of the ingredients in the anti Semitism sweeping through the western world. The persistent lobbying by the Israeli leader to demonize Iran has not worked. Indeed, it has boomeranged. In fact, he himself has had egg on his face as, for instance, at the high powered conference in Warsaw past February with the known purpose of isolating Iran. Russia slammed the planned meeting at the very outset as “counterproductive” because of its obsession with Iran.

The conference collapsed after Israeli foreign minister, Israel Katz, crossed all possible diplomatic red lines. “Poles suckled anti Semitism from their mother’s milk” he accused his hosts. The conference was in tatters. A meeting scheduled in Jerusalem to carry forward ideas from Warsaw was cancelled. Can you blame Poles for nursing a guilt for which they are so publicly insulted?

Here is an opportunity for the leader of Blue and White party, Benny Gantz to make Israel not just feared but also loved. I have in years past travelled around the length and breadth of the Israel, Gaza, the West Bank with my dear friend, the late Eric Silver. Israel then was never a harsh, forbidding place it appeared to be in the Netanyahu years.

Just after Trump was elected President, two grand old men, leaders of the strategic community, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski turned up in Oslo as guests of the Nobel Foundation. I could distil two points from their punditry: that the principal task of US foreign policy was to keep two points of the compass, Beijing and Moscow, as far apart from each other as possible. It is clear as day light that not only are the two points not far from each other, but they are getting increasing intertwined. The second point had even greater urgency. The Arab-Israeli faultline was losing saliency to the Shia-Sunni faultline. There was an assumption that the Sunnis, being numerically superior, would in the end prevail. And with US and Israeli support, they could ask for the moon.

To get the calculations right one must set aside Indonesia, world’s largest Muslim country and Malaysia, both Sunni but different from the Arab world. In Indonesia, particularly, there is a quaint coexistence of Islam and Hindu culture. Even though Islam is the religion of an overwhelming majority, Mahabharata and Ramayana define the nation’s culture.

The Gulf Co-operation Council or the GCC put their heads together largely in response to the Iranian revolution of 1979. But it is far from a Wahabi-Salafi dominated homogenous group. In Bahrain, the conflict is unique: an 80% majority Shia population is treated by the Wahabi ruling Sheikhs as the only opposition. In 2011, when the Arab spring was in the air, US diplomat Jeffrey Feltman had very nearly worked out a power sharing arrangement between the Sheikh and the main opposition. The arrangement was scuttled by the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia who saw any arrangement with Shias as a compact with Iran and therefore the devil. He saw Iran as “the head of a snake which had to be cut off.”

Has this approach worked for the Saudis? They are sitting on a heap of rubble in Yemen, in Aramco and in Syria. Iran, meanwhile, has consolidated itself with Hezbollah in Beirut, Hashd al-Shaabi (in Iraq) and the Houthis in Yemen. Will this be sufficient provocation for the scattered “B” team to regroup?

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Is Ladakh Part Of The Buddhist Ring Encircling China?

Is Ladakh Part Of The Buddhist Ring Encircling China?

                                                                                         Saeed Naqvi

Hardline Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka have celebrated the creation of a new Buddhist entity in Ladakh. It is an optical illusion that Jammu and Kashmir has been neatly divided into Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh, that is, Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist entities. The projection of Ladakh as purely Buddhist is odd because in the combined population of Kargil and Leh, Muslims are a majority according to the 2011 census.

New Delhi has also been keeping a steady gaze on Sri Lanka where Buddhist, Muslim and Christian factors came into play during the April 21, Easter Sunday massacre. Indian Intelligence had alerted their counterparts in Colombo as early as April 4 that a major act of terror would be executed in the island nation, possibly near Easter. When the bombs were detonated in Colombo’s Churches and hotels killing nearly 300 people and injuring 500 more. Indian Intelligence looked very impressive after the event. Then Intelligence agencies from the US, UK, Israel, Australia, India, all descended on Colombo with state of the art technology. Everyone was out to hold Colombo’s hand. A petrified establishment, it was hoped, would fall into the Western lap. Machinations would then follow to steer Sri Lanka away from the Road and Belt Embrace.

Spanish Anthropologist, Joseba Zulaika’s famous dictum is worrisome: “Counter terrorism is terrorism’s best friend.” Hints of terror cells in South India, the cover up in Sri Lanka, the political turnstile in the Maldives makes this Indian Ocean triangle a source of anxiety.

All the more worrisome because the current phase of terrorism is not just Muslim anger, revenge, vendetta. It has been identified as energy to be harnessed as an asset. It all began with the Afghan Mujahideen in the 80s. Just take a look at what some scholarly investigations in Sri Lanka have found.

Sniffer dogs, making a round of the Hilton hotel found nothing but the hotel staff asked the handlers to examine another branch of the hotel. At this new location something mysterious was experienced. The dogs would not stop barking in front of one room. There was some humming and hawing, and excuses by the management as to why the room could not be opened. It was occupied by employees of the US embassy. According to Dr. Michael Roberts of the University of Adelaide, Australia, when the embassy officials ultimately opened the room, Sri Lankan police found two bomb detectors which, the officials explained, were for their own safety. The overawed Sri Lanka police appears not to have pursued the obvious line of inquiry. Sniffer dogs would bark only if the detectors had been in contact with material which went into the manufacture of bombs.

One complicating factor is the divergent foreign policy preferences of the President, a votary of China’s Belt and Road initiative, and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe who has exerted every muscle to sign the Status of Forces Agreement which would give the US Military a free run of an island. Note the head on conflict. The Prime Minister is keen that SOFA is signed before the Island’s general elections next year.

There are some tell-tale details. I have earlier mentioned a research paper, “Weaponization of Religion” by Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake. According to her, the growing Chinese influence on the island may well have been the target of the Easter attacks.

Not only were hotels targeted which had Chinese affiliations, but the six Chinese who lost their lives were from the South China Institute of Oceanography. Western agencies would not look at this data. They were, quite tellingly, focused only on the clash of civilizations and conflicts across faiths.

Tibet, Ladakh, Bhutan, Sikkim, Mongolia, Myanmar and Sri Lanka, are all bound by Buddhism, though sometimes of distinct Mahayana and Hinayana strands. How many of these would possibly be brought into play in President Donald Trump’s strategy of encircling China?

When Trump entered the White House in 2016, his avowed aim was to upturn everything Barack Obama had ever erected in the arena of foreign affairs, as in other areas. But his demoniacal desire to eradicate Obamaism from its root has run into that constant called American national interest.

The Obama-John Kerry team’s priority became the nuclear deal with Iran, signed in 2015 for a reason: focusing on West Asian affairs on a daily basis was keeping the administration away from other global priorities that required urgent attention – the pivot to Asia, for instance. Despite Israel and Saudi Arabia throwing every monkey wrench at hand into the 5+1discussions with Iran, the team determinedly concluded the deal with several objectives but one which often goes unnoticed.

Lyndon Johnson’s colourful image was instructive. “It is better to have the camel in the tent, peeing out, than to leave him out peeing in.” Iran was going to be part of West Asian balance of power along with Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Qatar. Washington would then have the time to focus on Asia Pacific.

To be characteristically contrary, Trump walked out of the nuclear deal, made a mess with Europe, North Korea, raised stakes everywhere. But eventually he picked up the thread where Obama had left it: “Pivot to Asia” but only after having soiled much turf enroute. The US support to the protests in Hong Kong, playing up the Taiwan-China differences, shady US behaviour in Sri Lanka, the Economic showdown with Beijing are all part of Trump’s risky, untidy “contain China” movement set by his predecessor. But with Trump you know nothing until you do. Who would have expected him to propose a meeting with President Hassan Rouhani on the margins of the UN General Assembly? Or that he would initiate direct talks with the Houthis in Yemen either with Saudi concurrence or without it, sailing above their heads? Either Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be hopping mad at this turn or he will be pleased as punch in case he was in the loop and these leaks are only designed to set up adversaries. Who knows?

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Modi Feted By Muslim Countries: For Indian Muslims “Umma” A Mirage

Modi Feted By Muslim Countries: For Indian Muslims “Umma” A Mirage

                                                                                          Saeed Naqvi

“A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country.” This Biblical dictum would fit Prime Minister, Narendra Modi like a glove, because Indian Muslims continue to paint him in lurid colours while leaders of the global Umma shower petals of adoration on him.

When Saudi Arabia’s highest Civilian Honour, King Abdulaziz Sash was conferred on Modi by King Salman bin Abdulaziz at the Royal Court in Riyadh on April 3, 2016, the acceptance of it was an act of supreme selflessness on the part of Indian Prime Minister.

Selfless, because any other Indian politician so honoured by the Keeper of Islam’s two holiest shrines, Mecca and Medina, would have publicized the event for Muslim votes. But Modi has been quite clear on this one point: he is not interested in Muslim votes.

On the contrary, his growing unpopularity among Indian Muslims is in inverse proportion to his expanding popularity among Hindus with geometric progression.

In fact a case study for social psychologists might well be traces of masochism in the behavior of President Mahmoud Abbas. He conferred “The Grand Collar of the State of Palestine” on Modi who happens to be the closest friend, indeed soulmate, of Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Mahmoud Abbas’s dedicated tormentor. Abbas’s obsequiousness may well be traced to his fervent hope that Modi will put in a good word with his Israeli friend.

Mahmoud Abbas’s voiceless wailing is, for that reason, also inaudible. None of the GCC or other significant Arab countries are interested in the Palestinian cause eversince US and Israeli strategists have given a new blue print for West Asia. The Sunni-Shia faultline supersedes the Arab-Israeli faultline focused on the Palestinian issue. Iran is the only regional country single mindedly dedicated to Palestinian rights. Iran considers Hamas as the authentic voice of Palestinian resistance. The Ramallah leadership is seen as a Western poodle.

Other than fawning over Modi, Riyadh keeps a steady gaze on other power centres, near and far. Saudi princes have visited the Maldives to receive the island nation’s highest honour – “Rule of Nishan Izzuddeen”. The US and all its allies out to play a helpful role in making things difficult for China’s Belt and Road initiative, are making a beeline for any real estate in the Indian ocean – Maldives, Sri Lanka, an atoll anywhere. Little wonder, then, even this Muslim nation (Maldives, that is) has held Modi in a loving gaze. The Nishan Izzuddeen has been conferred on him too.

Modi being the apple of Saudi eyes has obviously been infectious in other GCC kingdoms. Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa al Khalifa conferred “Kind Hamad Order of the Renaissance” on him. The ruler of UAE, Shaikh Mohammad bin Zayed graced Modi with the “Order of Zayed” medal, the Kingdom’s highest civilian order. Zayed has done one better. He has set aside acres of land around Abu Dhabi’s grand Akshardham temple.

Modi has not left untouched the destroyed nation of Afghanistan as well. On June 4, 2016, he became the recipient of the nation’s highest award named” Amir Amanullah Khan”. A pity, he will not be able to catch up with Morarji Desai. The late Prime Minister received Pakistan’s highest honour, Nishan e Pakistan in 1990.

For the self flagellating Indian Muslims, a scrutiny of the catalogue listed above may be instructive. The lesson is not that Modi is the darling of the Muslim world. Individual Muslim countries ingratiate themselves with India, which he represents. Raw self interest is the operating factor. That Indian Muslims are under pressure does not matter a jot to the great “umma”. That is the point.

In the days of yore these very same nations had erected a body like the Organization of Islamic Conference but it looked operational only so long as there were competing blocks affiliated to one or the other power centre. In those days, India mattered.  The Indian “Muslim” factor was of some consequence but only minimally.

Did we not send a thoroughbred Muslim, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmad to the OIC in Rabat and were snubbed? We fell between stools on that and other occasions. Why did we need to have a Muslim, and none else, as ambassador to Riyadh? To neutralize the influence of the Ambassador of Pakistan who, by virtue of being Muslim, would strike a better rapport with the Saudis? Did the Americans, Europeans and the rest of the world send Muslim envoys to Riyadh? South Block’s job should have been to identify the best person for that posting – Hindu, Muslim, Sikh anybody, based on merit and not on communal considerations.

You miss the basic point (they will say) there are those arrangements to be made for thousands of Haj pilgrims. Fair enough, for that kind of assistance the mission in Jeddah could have been suitably staffed.

Has not the logic of New Delhi’s appointments to that one station for the past 70 years been made to stand on its head by Modi. Despite his record with Muslims, he has been graced by award after award by Saudis and others on the US leash.

Saudi monstrosity in Yemen, repression in its Eastern oil being province; Bahrain where an overwhelming majority are the opposition; UAE, financing mercenaries (along with the Saudis) and firepower to destroy Yemen, once a proud, civilized nation.

Is this the “Umma” from which you, Indian Muslims, expect Modi to have picked up lessons of peace, compassion, charity? And is this Umma of any value to you in your distress, whether in Kashmir or elsewhere?

Indonesia, Malaysia, Iran, Turkey are all Muslim but caught in the whirlpool which is what the current world order is. When President Bill Clinton decisively intervened during the Kargil war, there was still hope that some kind of order was being sought to be imposed. That hope has dissipated in the Trump era.

In brief, Muslims must remember that their holiest of shrines are elsewhere, but their salvation is here in India and its people, all of whom are under pressure. Together, we shall overcome. Hundreds of years of social, cultural commerce cannot be wilfully rubbed out.

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Why Scale Walls When Two Constables Could Have Arrested Chidambaram?

Why Scale Walls When Two Constables Could Have Arrested Chidambaram?

                                                                                           Saeed Naqvi

Bollywood stunt artistes would end up with fractured bones if they tried to imitate CBI’s field staff scaling the high walls of former Home Minister, P. Chidambaram’s Jor Bagh bungalow with orders to arrest him. The swoop, in full glare of the media, would have unnerved the “D” company, or El Chapos but they would have dug tunnels in the loo, predictable means of escape. A sophisticated mind like Chidambaram’s, cool and calculating, contrived cunning passages to the Congress office for a press conference that evening.

It was not a simple arrest. That would have required barely two constables. It was mounted as a TV extravaganza for the entire nation – and beyond – so that they would be in awe of the power of the state. It requires mastery of the electronic media for perfect choreography on such a scale. Consider the contrast of Sonia Gandhi making a weak tepid intervention. “Rajiv Gandhi also won with two thirds majority” but he did not indulge in “actions like this” or words to that effect.

Chidambaram’s arrest has come as a shock to the party which has only one of its wings operating coherently – it’s legal team, particularly the Kapil Sibal-Abhishek Manu Singhvi duet. Let the party now prepare itself for more tantalizing television.

Open rebellion in Madhya Pradesh is on the cards, where Jyotiraditya Scindia may change sides as a conscientious objector along with a number of MLA’s. Should that happen, Rajasthan cannot be far behind.

Bhupinder Singh Hooda’s rebellion in Haryana will unnerve the Gandhi family that much more because Robert Vadra owes a few to him.

My crystal ball tells me that the BJP’s relentless hunt for states is designed to accumulate a sufficient number of states to make a bid towards major constitutional changes. The BJP likes milestones. Who knows in 2022, the 75^th anniversary of Independence, the nation may wake upto a Presidential form of government. The climax, ofcourse, will be reached in 2025, Centenary of the RSS, by which time the Ram Mandir may have been built, as the crowning glory, preparatory to the declaration of Hindu Rashtra. At this point my reverie is broken by a whisper: “Your fantasy has not taken into account the plummeting economy, the common people, the diversity of India.”

Well, it is these democratic roadblocks that the power of electronic media helps remove. The 2019 election results are a classical example. Economy, on which so much breast beating is taking place today, was as bad prior to the elections. In the interest of electoral victory, the cameras were not allowed to pry into that story. A requirement of the present regime is not just a control of the media but its “comprehensive” control.

It is generally not recognized that the mushroom growth of the electronic media is a gift of neo-liberal economic policies inaugurated in 1991by Finance Minister, Manmohan Singh. It was in admiration for these economic policies that Sonia Gandhi made him Prime Minister. Chidambaram was Finance Minister in this sequence.

When the Babari Masjid was demolished in December 1992, the event was covered only by Doordarshan and a VHS weekly magazine called Newstrack. New Economic policies proceeded to spawn a culture of consumerism which clamoured for more advertisement space. Followed the mushroom growth of TV channels. Competition for TRP ratings conditioned programmes – four “Cs”, Cinema, Cricket, Crime and Communalism, emerged as the favourites. Communalism it was that the politician latched onto, and with rich dividends.

Meanwhile, accelerated globalization was reinforcing trends in India. For instance, the post 9/11 Islamophobia amplified by the global media, coincided almost exactly with the explosion of communalism in India. When Narendra Modi arrived in Ahmedabad in October 2001 to replace Keshubhai Patel as Chief Minister, he was not even a member of the assembly. That is when the world’s (and India’s) attention was riveted on the occupation of Afghanistan. Islamophobia was in the air globally, reinforcing saffron in India. Modi was in luck.

Televised fireworks on an unprecedented scale in Afghanistan, targeting Osama bin Laden, must have gone some distance in muffling the world’s reaction at the horrors of Godhra and the 2002 Gujarat pogrom. An already unbridled western media broke loose in Afghanistan. I shall never forget Geraldo Rivera of Fox News flourishing a revolver in front of the camera: “I shall shoot Osama dead if I see him.” This was the new tone of the “free media” at its best command performance. Can you see traces of this intemperance in the copycat Indian media?

The Chidambaram drama draws inspiration from another genre of western media. Colour revolutions, the Syrian uprising, numerous examples, most recently, the continuing protests in Hong Long. Let us consider Hong Kong, for example.

To stop criminals from becoming fugitives elsewhere, the Hong Kong administration proposed an Extradition Bill, extradition to the mainland, that is. Groups in Hong Kong saw this as an encroachment on their special status (echoes of Kashmir?).

Violent protests led to the withdrawal of the Bill, but the protests, begun in March, would not end. It was generally speculated that western agencies were stoking them. A photograph appeared in local newspapers of leader of the protests, Joshua Wong, discussing strategy with Julie Eadeh of the US Consulate in a Hong Kong hotel. This tended to confirm foreign interference. But quite brazenly, the protest continued.

The point is this: supposing scores of western journalists had not descended on the territory with their multiple camera units, would the protests have continued?

Conversely, the yellow vest protest movement has lasted for nearly a year in France and elsewhere in Europe without the spur of a saturation coverage. What explains its longevity? It is a genuine movement – one that western establishments are not interested in playing up, unlike the one in Hong Kong.

Against this perspective, the highly televised drama of walls being scaled by cops betrays a purpose much larger than the simple arrest of Chidambaram.

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