Eric Zuesse

It’s now war between the fundamentalist Sunni Sauds who own the world’s most oil-rich nation Saudi Arabia, versus the fundamentalist Sunni Thanis who own the world’s most gas-rich nation Qatar; and, America’s aristocrats (especially the Israeli and Jewish ones, plus the Mercers who funded Trump’s campaign) seem to be lining up behind the royal Sauds. The royal Sauds are the main family financing the fundamentalist Sunni group Al Qaeda. The royal Thanis are the main family financing the more moderate fundamentalist Sunni group, Muslim Brotherhood.

These are the two main families vying for the leadership not only of Arabia, but of international Islam. Until now, both families have been backed by the U.S. aristocracy. But that might now be beginning to change — and the U.S. join the Sauds against the Thanis.

The difference between the Sauds and the Thanis is that whereas the Sauds are committed to destroying Iran and all Shiite Muslims, the Thanis instead aim to bring together Sunnis and Shiites into a broader Islamic control over the world. The Sauds say that Iran is the terrorist threat to the world, and that the Thanis aren’t sufficiently hostile against ‘terrorists’ (i.e., against Shia, such as Iran’s rulers; or against Shia-tolerating Sunnis, such as Qatar’s rulers, and their Muslim Brotherhood).

This is why the Muslim Brotherhood is more moderate than Al Qaeda: whereas the Muslim Brotherhood (even after America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, which started the global Sunni-v-Shiite war by the Sauds and the Americans against Shia) seeks to unify the world’s Muslims, Al Qaeda has increasingly come to be at war against Shiites and not only against other non-Sunnis (and Al Qaeda has to be anti-Shiite, especially now, because the rabidly anti-Shia Saud family are Al Qaeda’s main funders — Al Qaeda would lose its chief funder if it accepted Shia, so it doesn’t accept them).

Furthermore, both Iran and Qatar — and the Muslim Brotherhood — have official policies rejecting the apartheid Israeli government, its authority over Palestinians. By contrast, the Sauds are increasingly allied with Israel’s aristocracy, not only because both aristocracies are obsessed to overthrow the Shia leaders in Iran, Syria and Lebanon, but because both the Saudi and the Israeli aristocracies are bonded with (and rely upon) America’s, in order to be able to carry out their own military operations. On July 2nd, Abdel Bari Atwan, a reliably accurate analyst of Arabic international relations, headlined “The Saudi-Israeli Alliance” and explained the Sauds’ policies (including their opposition to the Thanis) in that light.

On 9 June 2017, I had headlined what’s basic here: “All Islamic Terrorism Is Perpetrated by Fundamentalist Sunnis — Except Terrorism Against Israel”. So, for the U.S. and Europe (and the many other regions that suffer Islamic terrorism), Islamic terrorism comes only from fundamentalist Sunnis; and Iran and Shia have no real involvement in it. (The U.S. aristocracy and their agents say things such as “Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism” but know that it’s not true and that Saudi Arabia is that.) Furthermore, the world center for all aspects of it (including the production of suicide-bombers) is Saudi Arabia. The only reason why the Muslim Brotherhood is now being focused upon, as being especially bad, is that the Sauds are now at war against the Thanis, who especially back the MB. And the Sauds are determined to win dominance over all of global Islam, and thus to crush Iran, Qatar, and any other potential contender for that throne. Thus the Sauds view everything, above all, in a Sunni-v-Shia context.

The Muslim Brotherhood first became viewed by the Sauds to be soft on Iran, after the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, and the Sunni group ISIS then arose in Iraq in 2006. But the Muslim Brotherhood split away from other fundamentalist Sunni groups first in Lebanon that year (2006). Samuel Helfont headlined in the Spring 2009 issue of Orbis, “The Muslim Brotherhood and the Emerging ‘Shia Crescent’”, and he explained the MB’s response to Shia (specifically Hezbollah) efforts to cooperate with the MB in that country:

The Muslim Brotherhood has responded positively to these outreach programs. The best example of this occurred in the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War.
Despite the fact that Hezbollah fought fiercely against Israel throughout the war, much of the Sunni Arab establishment condemned Hezbollah’s actions. The regimes in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia criticized Hezbollah in ways that they would never have criticized a Sunni group fighting the Israelis. Moreover, the prominent Kuwaiti Sheik Hamid al-Ali denounced Hezbollah’s actions and described them as resulting from Iran’s imperial ambitions. In addition, the influential Wahhabi Sheik Abdullah bin Jabreen in Saudi Arabia declared it to be ‘‘illegal for Muslims to join, support, or pray for the militant group Hezbollah.’’32

Contrary to the Sunni establishment, the Muslim Brotherhood supported Hezbollah throughout the conflict. The Brotherhood organized rallies backing Hezbollah fighters and the influential Muslim Brotherhood linked scholar, Yusuf al-Qaradawi rejected the Saudi fatwa against praying for Hezbollah. In the Egyptian daily al-Wafd he declared ‘‘The Shias are a part of the Islamic Ummah.’’ He explained that the Shias say ‘‘there is no God but God,’’ and that ‘‘They agree with us in many of the fundamentals and disagree [only] on some doctrines.’’ Qaradawi therefore insisted that ‘‘It is obligatory to aid this [Hezbollah’s] resistance against the enemy Israel.’’33 Qaradawi later posted a fatwa on his website, Islam Online, reinforcing the idea that Shias are ‘‘Muslims who believe in the Oneness of Allah and the Prophet Muhammad,’’ and emphasizing that ‘‘We should try to make use of what we have in common for the benefit of all Muslims.’’34 Qaradawi has also defended Iran’s pursuit of nuclear technology, declaring that a ‘‘nuclear Iran is not a threat to regional countries,’’35 and that ‘‘It is obligatory on all Muslims to resist any possible attack the U.S. might launch against Iran.’’36
The statements of other leading figures in the Muslim Brotherhood depict a similar conciliatory attitude toward Iran and the Shias.

Israel is opposed mainly by three jihadist, or Islamic terrorist, organizations, all of which focus especially upon Israel: Shiite Hezbollah, Sunni Islamic Jihad, and Sunni Hamas. Islamic Jihad started in 1981 as an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas started in 1987 as an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. (There also is a secular, anti-imperialist, terrorist organization: al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades.) Thus: Israel really does have good reason to fear and detest the MB. But The West simply does not. The claims by the U.S. government on that are hoaxes.

On 2 May 2017, Reuters headlined “Hamas softens stance on Israel, drops Muslim Brotherhood link”, and this enormous concession by Hamas to separate from its very foundation, was hidden by the Western press: not a single U.S. (or UK or Canadian or Australian) ’news’ medium (other than Reuters itself) published that historic news-report. That news-article, furthermore, closed by stating an important universally unreported reason why the Saud family loathe and fear the (Thani-backed) Muslim Brotherhood: “The Brotherhood denies links with Islamist militants and advocates Islamist political parties winning power through elections, which Saudi Arabia considers a threat to its system of absolute power through inherited rule.” In backing the Sauds against the Thanis, the U.S. aristocracy are supporting not only dictatorship, but hereditary rule. It doesn’t get more right-wing than that: racist-fascist — an extension from ancient tribalism. Some of America’s operations against the U.S. aristocracy’s main target, Russia, and even against just ethnic Russians (such as in the break-away parts of Ukraine), rely upon long-established native local pro-Nazi (racist-fascist) militias who enjoy doing the dirty-work that U.S. troops would have to be paid in order to do, if they would be willing to do it at all; so, there is really no limit to the political extreme that America’s aristocrats back, in order to achieve their coercive ends for conquest. In fact, the U.S. government was — along with the Ukrainian coup-regime that it installed in a bloody coup in February 2014 — one of the three governments that voted at the U.N. against a resolution to condemn racism, genocide and Holocaust-denial. The U.S. ‘news’media — owned and controlled by U.S. aristocrats — didn’t report it. And, a few months later, Obama’s U.N. Ambassador went to Ukraine and elicited cheers from her racist-fascist rabidly anti-Russian invited audience. So: America’s supporting the Sauds, makes sense.

That’s some of the relevant background in order to understand America’s position regarding the conflict between the Sauds and the Thanis.

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On July 3rd, the U.S. aristocracy’s Politico bannered “Nonprofit urges multinational companies to shun Qatar” and opened:

A U.S. nonprofit is warning businesses to avoid getting entangled with the Qatari government, alleging that the tiny Gulf state, currently embroiled in a regional diplomatic dispute, harbors terrorists and is a funder of extremist groups.The letter is evidence of the extent to which the blockade imposed upon Qatar by the governments of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates [all being ruled by Sunnis] has implications far beyond the borders of the involved nations. The U.S., which has called for an end to the dispute, has close ties with Qatar as well as the countries blockading it.

“Qatar has a long history of providing support for extremism and terrorism, including but not limited to vast financial and material support to internationally designated terrorist groups and willing accommodation of internationally designated or wanted terrorist leaders and financiers,” Counter Extremism Project CEO Mark Wallace wrote in his letter.

Over seven footnoted pages, Wallace details Qatar’s alleged misconduct, including sections on “terror financing overseas,” “money laundering,” “harboring of terrorist individuals” and “risk to employees resident in Qatar.” Wallace accuses Qatar of offering financial support, either directly or indirectly, to Hamas, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the Taliban.

A version of the letter sent last week to American Airlines was also provided to POLITICO by the Counter Extremism Project. Additional versions of the letter will be sent to 11 different companies from around the world, including Siemens, Volkswagen, Credit Suisse, Barclays, Royal Dutch Shell and AccorHotels, later this week and early next week. Portions of each letter are specific to the recipient company but the arguments laid out against the Qatari government remain the same in each. …

Nowhere in the entire article, is the letter itself linked to, or otherwise shown to Politico’s readers — it might as well be a print medium, for all the access it provides to the alleged evidence, there.

Furthermore, Politico keeps secret from its readers the crucial fact that the Counter Extremism Project keeps its financial backers, its donors, secret. We don’t even know whether the Saud family (or their agents) are funding it, and/or whether the Israeli regime (which is allied with both the Sauds and the U.S.) does.

Is that ‘news’ report, itself, propaganda, instead of journalism? Is any ‘news’ that uses, as sources, the spokespersons for employers (or other funders) whose identities are secret? Shouldn’t such sources (where the reader is being kept ignorant of whom is paying for the propaganda) be automatically excluded from use as sources, since their agenda is secret? What does this agenda-hiding say about Politico (other than that the most effective way to advertise in it is to become a ’news’-source in it)?

Here is what is known — though not from Politico — about the Politico article's main source, the Counter Extremism Project:

It was “launched in September 2014” and its three “Senior Leadership” are:

Mark Wallace, CEO. Founder both of CEP in 2014, and UANI — United Against Nuclear Iran — in 2008.

Frances F. Townsend, President. George W. Bush Advisor on Homeland Security. UANI Advisory Board along with John Bolton, Jeb Bush, Bill Richardson, and other neocons.

David Ibsen, Executive Director. President of UANI. Back in 2014, he was a propagandist for the Thanis’ Al Jazeera against ISIS, but now he’s a leading anti-Thani propagandist for CEP’s secret funders, against the Thanis. As the President of UANI, his big funders were hidden by the anti-Iranian (though not enough to satisfy Saudi Prince Salman, who runs the country of which his father is the titular head) Obama regime, but UANI’s financial information became penetrated by Eli Clifton at lobelog on 6 July 2015 headlining "Document Reveals Billionaire Backers Behind United Against Nuclear Iran” and exposing the Israeli-American families of billionaires Sheldon Adelson and Thomas Kaplan as UANI’s big funders. In fact, “Adelson famously proposed launching a first-strike nuclear attack against Iran to send a message to Tehran’s nuclear negotiators” (actually just a demonstration-nuclear-bombing “somewhere in Nebraska” so as to force a stop to Iran’s nuclear program; Adelson didn’t like Obama’s negotiating with Iran, but demanded they be forced), wrote Clifton; so, Adelson might even be called a super-neocon (especially by Nebraskans). However, now, under Trump, Adelson and Saudi Prince Salman are in the driver’s seat.

On 9 December 2016, the Washington Post mentioned in an aside, within an article about then President-elect Trump, that,

His biggest supporters: casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, who gave a total of $21.2 million to support his run. They were followed by Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus ($7.6 million), [wrestling-magnate, Linda] McMahon ($7.5 million), Dallas banker Andy Beal ($4.4 million) and hedge fund executive Robert Mercer ($3.4 million).

So, this is some of the context that Politico excluded, and it shows the mindset of the actual people who were funding this U.S.-Saudi-Israeli campaign against the Thanis. And also it shows the mindset of the people who funded Trump’s victory. Trump’s biggest donor, Adelson, was rabid against Iran’s government — and so too is Trump’s regime. (But whether Trump will join Adelson and Salman against Thani isn’t yet clear.)

On 8 July 2014, James Dorsey wrote about the beginning of the alliance between the Saud family and the Israeli aristocracy, and then just twelve days later, David Hearst headlined “Saudi Israeli alliance forged in blood” meaning Palestinian blood, and:

The attack on Gaza comes by Saudi Royal Appointment. This royal warrant is nothing less than an open secret in Israel, and both former and serving defense officials are relaxed when they talk about it. Former Israeli defence minister Shaul Mofaz surprised the presenter on Channel 10 by saying Israel had to specify a role for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in the demilitarisation of Hamas. Asked what he meant by that, he added that Saudi and Emirati funds should be used to rebuild Gaza after Hamas had been defanged.

What had happened is that after the failure of Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud’s effort on 31 July 2013 to pry Russia away from its alliance with Iran, Bandar and Obama locked themselves together in arms to overthrow Iran’s ally in Syria, Bashar al-Assad. Whereas Bandar’s bête noire was Iran and Shia, Obama’s was Russia and Russians; but, both America and Saudi Arabia were committed to conquering both Syria and Iran. Obama didn’t satisfy Prince Salman enough about that, but he satisfied him some. And America’s and the Sauds’ all-out backing for the tens of thousands of jihadists whom they and their Al Qaeda-allied groups had already imported into Syria to take down and replace Assad, was now operating full-force, with the 21 August 2013 U.S.-Saudi-Turkey-staged sarin gas attack in East Ghouta Syria that they pinned on Assad as a ‘justification' to invade Syria.

Where Hearst referred to the UAE (United Arab Emirates) as joining with the Sauds and the Americans, that occurred during the Obama years, but the UAE is now importantly involved in the Sauds’ blockade of Qatar; and the Trump Administration is only mostly backing that blockade. State Department chief Rex Tillerson, and some others in the Trump regime, back restraint, and are not fully on-board the Sauds’ anti-Thani campaign, as of yet.

Again, in Yemen, the Sauds are leading an anti-Shiite alliance of the U.S. and of the six royal families who own UAE. The invasion of Yemen displays the same alliance, though not all members performing the same functions as they were in Syria: the U.S. provides the training and the weapons (as it did in Syria), and the Saudi government provides the money and the pilots who bomb Yemen, while the UAE provides the torturers inside the prisons in Yemen, where the CIA writes the questions for interrogators to ask, and UAE thugs ask the questions and deliver the pain and the death if the American minders aren’t satisfied with a prisoner’s answers. Or, as the AP’s Maggie Michael headlined her blockbuster news-report about this on 23 June 2017, “In Yemen’s Secret Prisons, UAE Tortures and U.S. Interrogates”. So, if Trump is intensifying the policies that Obama had followed (not quite to the satisfaction of the Sauds), then Trump is doing it by restoring the policies that George W. Bush had earlier championed (such as torture). And the American public seem comfortable about that, because, as Gallup headlined on 19 June 2017, “George W. Bush and Barack Obama Both Popular in Retirement”.

Back on 23 June 2016, James B.T. Dickey headlined, “Strategy for Saudi-Iran War to Come?” and he noted that Saudi King Salman al-Saud’s anointed successor son Prince Salman al-Saud, was dissatisfied that under President Obama, “Americans do not regard a resurgent Iran as an existential threat,” and Dickey noted that “Washington’s effort at rapprochement with Tehran, exemplified by the Iranian nuclear deal, is only one of many issues that have led the Saudis to believe they can no longer count on Uncle Sam to have their back.” Under Obama, America’s bête noire was Russia and Russians, not Iran and Shiites. But under Trump now, America is 100% dedicated to the interests of the Sauds and of Israel’s aristocrats; so, America’s current bête noire is Iran and Shiites. Whereas Obama relied upon America’s aristocrats (who crave to conquer Russia), Trump relies upon Saudi Arabia’s and Israel’s aristocrats (who crave to conquer Iran and its allies). However, Saudi Arabia’s and Israel’s aristocrats aren’t the ones who own and control America’s media. So, in American media, the chief demons now are Putin and Trump. And the Sauds, who funded and helped to organize the 9/11 attacks, seem to be safe, and are buying $350 billion of U.S.-made weaponry, which will make the future U.S. economy far more dependent upon them than ever before.

The U.S. aristocracy explain the wars in the Middle East — the wars that are so important to the bottom lines of America’s international corporations such as Lockheed Martin — as being caused by local Middle Eastern tensions. On 19 November 2016, right after Trump’s electoral win, the New York Times bannered, “How the Iranian-Saudi Proxy Struggle Tore Apart the Middle East”, and Max Fisher wrote that,

Saudi Arabia and Iran are waging a struggle for dominance that has turned much of the Middle East into their battlefield. Rather than fighting directly, they wield and in that way worsen the region’s direst problems: dictatorship, militia violence and religious extremism.
The history of their rivalry tracks — and helps to explain — the Middle East’s disintegration, particularly the Sunni-Shiite sectarianism both powers have found useful to cultivate. It is a story in which the United States has been a supporting but constant player, most recently by backing the Saudi war in Yemen, which kills hundreds of civilians. These dynamics, scholars warn, point toward a future of civil wars, divided societies and unstable governments.

It would be nice if ‘the Saudi war in Yemen, which kills hundreds of civilians’ were a fair characterization of the conflict that Save the Children reported on 19 December 2016 kills vastly more: “an estimated 1,000 children are dying every week” from the war and the results of the war. Having ‘accuracy’ such as that, called America’s ‘newspaper of record’, might qualify as referring to the ‘record’ of U.S. propaganda, instead of any record of U.S., or any, news, at all. It would delight the Sauds to call that type of article ‘news reporting’. This NYT article closed:

President-elect Donald J. Trump will enter office having echoed Saudi Arabia’s view of the region.
Iran “took over Iraq,” he said at a rally in January. “They’re going to have Yemen. They’re going to have Syria. They’re going to have everything.”
Mentioning both the president-elect and Hillary Clinton, Dr. Gause said he doubted that any administration could reset the Middle East’s power struggles.
“I do not think that the fundamental problem of the region,” he said, “is something that either Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton could do that much about.”

Furthermore, said the Times: “The United States has struggled to restore the region’s balance.”

America doesn’t invade the world; it polices the world — in order to ‘restore’ ‘balance’. Good to have that reassurance. No wonder people subscribe to that newspaper, and vote for people such as Trump, who allege that Iran ‘took over Iraq’ — the U.S. didn’t invade and conquer it — and that Iran is ‘going to have Yemen’ (which Sauds are, in fact, bombing with American planes and bombs). It’s good to be informed whom ‘the bad guys’ are. By the bad guys. So that we’ll all know how bad they really are, to deceive their readers and make ‘democracy’ that much more dysfunctional, by voters who are being lied-to in the most basic ways, about very important matters.

Furthermore, when considering the likelihood of Trump’s deciding to go full-force against the Muslim Brotherhood (and backing the Sauds against the Thanis), one might consider that Gulf News had headlined on 18 June 2014, “US document reveals cooperation between Washington and Brotherhood”, and reported that:

The Obama administration conducted an assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2010 and 2011, beginning even before the events known as the “Arab Spring” erupted in Tunisia and in Egypt. The President personally issued Presidential Study Directive 11 (PSD-11) in 2010, ordering an assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood and other “political Islamist” movements, including the ruling AKP in Turkey, ultimately concluding that the United States should shift from its longstanding policy of supporting “stability” in the Middle East and North Africa (that is, support for “stable regimes” even if they were authoritarian), to a policy of backing “moderate” Islamic political movements.
To this day, PSD-11 remains classified, in part because it reveals an embarrassingly naïve and uninformed view of trends in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region.
The revelations were made by Al Hewar centre in Washington, DC, which obtained the documents in question.

Through an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, thousands of pages of documentation of the US State Department’s dealings with the Muslim Brotherhood are in the process of being declassified and released to the public. …

But PSD-11 still hasn’t been made public. If it is as was represented there, then it constitutes clear evidence that the “Arab Spring” was supported by President Obama before it even occurred, and that his position, even at that time, back in 2010, favored the Muslim Brotherhood. Obama’s insistence upon regime-change in Syria and in Libya fits that view.

Other sources that testify to the existence of PSD-11 include the testimony to a subcommittee of the House Committee on Homeland Security, by a former Chairman of the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, dated 22 September 2016, in which Peter Hoekstra stated:

In August 2010 Obama signed Presidential Study Directive-11 (PSD-11), which reportedly ordered a government-wide reassessment of prospects for political reform in the Middle East and of the Muslim Brotherhood’s role in the process. Under PSD-11 – which the administration needs to declassify – Obama and Clinton pivoted from the historical U.S. strategy of maintaining order and stability in the Middle East. It instead turned to a strategy that emphasized support for regime change, as well as political and democratic reforms, regardless of the impact on regional stability. PSD-11 directly led to U.S. engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Moreover, on 16 February 2011, the New York Times headlined “Secret Report Ordered by Obama Identified Potential Uprisings” and vaguely described the document, in ways that are consistent with what Gulf News and Peter Hoekstra say about it — that Obama was committed to “regime change” and to the Muslim Brotherhood, throughout the (non-Israeli) Middle East, even before the “Arab Spring” occurred (with or without CIA assistance) in those nations.

Consequently, if Trump is inclined against Obama’s foreign policy, then the U.S. government will be inclined toward the Sauds’ position on this, and away from the Thanis’ position on it. (Trump will then be against the pro-MB position.) This will mean a commitment by the U.S. government to maintain in power the existing fundamentalist Sunni Arab dictatorships, defending the ownership and control over those nations by the families that currently own and control them.

The U.S. government will be committed to dictatorships there, and the only question is the identities of the dictators. Under both Obama and Trump, there will be U.S. honor, prestige, blood, and money, spent, either propping up, or else replacing, the current dictators. Is this good for the American people? Is it good for the people of Syria, or of Iran, or of Yemen, or anywhere? Was it good for the people of Iraq? Whom is it really intended to benefit? America’s weapons-manufacturing firms, perhaps?

When the Times reports that, “The United States has struggled to restore the region’s balance,” whose ‘balance’ is that, really? Maybe some firms’ balance sheets will be restored, in that ‘struggle’? But ‘the region’s balance’? Oh, balance of power, maybe. Between whom and whom? For whom? By whom? Well, at least we know whom it’s to be by — supposedly, it’s got to be by ‘the United States’ (whomever that really represents — which is certainly not the American public, the people that are constantly being lied-to, throughout the entire racket, including the invasions of Iraq, Libya, and Syria).

An article in the Spring 2015 issue of the highly influential journal International Security (a neoconservative and neoliberal Harvard publication), titled “The Myth of Entangling Alliances”, argued against America’s Founders, and said that America’s network of alliances have “restrained the United States” from invasions. It pretended to base this ridiculous conclusion on an objective recitation of the relevant history of the matter.

America’s Founders are being dismissed by lies, frauds, and hoaxes, and the U.S. Constitution has become just so many words to warp and misrepresent, by America’s aristocracy and its influential and well-funded agents.

Whatever decision Trump comes to, whom is it likely to benefit? And whom will it hurt? It would be a good thing if the American government represented the American public, but it doesn’t. And that’s a fact which is unpublishable in the U.S.

Nowadays, international affairs is just the relationships between billionaires, as negotiated and carried out by their agents. In the U.S. and other dictatorships, the public don’t count, at all. And the people of places such as Syria and Yemen count for even less. And that’s true even if those victim-countries are led by leaders who do care, very much, about their public. But, if they do, then the international aristocracy will destroy them. Because, internationally, fascism certainly does reign. That much is absolutely clear. This is today’s world. Not the fantasy world; it is instead the real world. This is not the world that FDR envisioned and worked so diligently for, but the world that the international billionaires have tragically come to impose after he died.

According to the brilliant blogging geostrategist who goes by the pen-name ‘bernhard’ and who posts at his own “Moon of Alabama” blog, the evidence on the Saudi-Thani war, as of July 5th, is that Saudi King Salman and Crown Prince Salman, and UAE’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, are the principals in the campaign to blockade Qatar, and that the plan is collapsing for lack of foreign support. He ends by saying:

They, Mohammad bin Zayed [MbZ] and Mohammad bin Salman [MbS], are the instigators of the campaign against Qatar. The meeting today had to deliver some penalty against Qatar for not giving in to any demand: some additional significant sanctions, a more intense blockade, some threat of military strikes. But the meeting came up with ... nothing.
The clown princes had shot their wad on the very first day. They could not come up with any new measures that were agreeable. Kuwait and Oman reject to push Qatar out of the Gulf Cooperation Council, the UAE would lose all its international businesses in Dubai should the Qatari gas supplies, and thereby its electricity, shut down. An additional blockade of Qatar is impossible without the agreement of the U.S., Russia, and other big states.
Such a huge loss of face will have consequences. When the Saudi clown prince launched the war against Yemen he expected, and announced, that Sanaa would fall within days. Two years later Sanaa has not fallen and the Saudis are losing the war. Qatar was expected to fold within days. But it has enough capital and income to sustain the current situation for many years to come. The war against Yemen and the sanctions against Qatar were indirectly aimed against Iran — the Saudis' arch-enemy. But without investing even a dime, Iran is now the winner from both conflicts. MbS, the Saudi clown prince, has twice proven to be a terrible strategist who endangers his country.
The Saudi King Salman and his son said that neither of them will take part in the upcoming G-20 meeting in Hamburg. Rumors have it that they fear an imminent coup should one of them leave the country.
No one should be surprised if the Salman era finds a bloody end within the next week or month.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.
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