MIDDLE EAST

primary main 525 Q jet trump kid shitcoin 2B soc fund

oops see lower case

see arab tag

525 qatar lux jet trump keep after; trump will visit none of std 3 mil ally on trip

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an 5 25

Donald Trump insists that he is maintaining a strict distance between his presidency and his business interests, and he maintains that he is avoiding conflicts of interest by letting his son, Eric Trump, handle the Trump Organization.

But in an article published by the New York Times on May 5, journalists Eric Lipton and David Yaffe-Bellany report that during Trump's presidency, his business is making more foreign deals than ever.

The deals, according to Lipton and Yaffe-Bellany, are being orchestrated by Eric Trump and his older brother, Donald Trump Jr.

"It is a rush to cash in that involves billions of dollars with few precedents in American history," the Times reporters explain. "A luxury hotel in Dubai. A second high-end residential tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Two cryptocurrency ventures based in the United States. A new golf course and villa complex in Qatar. And a new private club in Washington. In many cases, these new deals promoted over the last week will personally benefit not only Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., but also, President Trump himself."

IFrame Content

This "marathon of deal making," according to Lipton and Yaffe-Bellany, "has been so rapid that many elements have drawn limited public attention in the United States, despite most of it being out in the open."

Trump White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told the Times, "The president's assets are in a trust managed by his children. There are no conflicts of interest."

But author Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University in Houston, said of the Trump family's foreign deals, "There’s nothing like it."

*Read the full New York Times article at this link (subscription required).

AN 7 23

A government watchdog group Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington (CREW) published a bombshell report on Thursday that former President Donald Trump raked in millions of dollars from five Middle East nations while he was in the White House.

Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Kuwaitwere all identified as having deep monied ties to Trumpworld, which CREW uncovered from the indicted ex-commander-in-chief's income disclosures.

CREW's discovery comes amid investigations into allegations made by Trump and congressional Republicans that President Joe Biden and his family engaged in corruption in Ukraine and China.

"Trump made at least $9.6 million from countries in the Middle East during his presidency, according to years of reporting and a CREW analysis of his tax returns," CREW found. "That means Trump pulled in at least six times his official presidential salary in side income from the Middle East alone during his time in office. The total is likely much higher, but public reporting only sheds light on the most high-profile instances of profiteering, and he is only required to report certain types of income on his tax returns."

Trump's refusal to divest, or separate, himself from his family's financial entanglements sparked "an endless number of c**onflicts of interest** by blurring the lines between the government and his businesses," CREW explained. "The profiteering paid off, and Trump raked in tens of millions from international business interests during his time in office."

Trump and his friends on Capitol Hill "frequently visited and held events at his clubs, hotels and golf courses, advertising to those looking to influence the government that Trump properties were open for business. Foreign governments and officials in particular took advantage of the open opportunity to ingratiate themselves with the president," CREW revealed.

"The $9.6 million that we know Trump made from Middle Eastern countries during his presidency is likely just the tip of the iceberg. CREW tracked conflicts of interest involving multiple countries that are not even present on his tax returns.For example, officials from Iraq, Oman and Yemen made visits to Trump properties while he was president. Because we don't know the total cost for these visits, we did not include them in the tally," wrote Crew. "What we do know is that becoming president was Trump's best business decision, and his tax returns show how great the office was for his bottom line. As the 2024 election creeps closer, foreign interests including those in the Middle East are already buying access to Trump and pouring money into his pockets."

an 6/20

Russia and Turkey just escalated a war while you weren’t watching

The Washington Monthly June 6, 2020

Russia and Turkey just escalated their two-front war over which country will be the big dog in the Middle East. The two rivals have been at this game for a…

ME plan critique

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/jared-kushner-gives-birth-to-travesty-of-the-century/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/how-the-uns-middle-east-peace-plan-was-trounced-by-its-own-members/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/it-is-a-war-plan-trump-netanyahu-deal-decried-as-shameful-attack-on-palestinian-rights

no lnx

‘It is a war plan’: Trump-Netanyahu deal decried as shameful attack on Palestinian rights

President Donald J. Trump delivers remarks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2020, in the East Room of the White House to unveil details of the Trump administration’s Middle East Peace Plan. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)]

Written by Julia Conley / Common Dreams January 28, 2020

Human rights advocates condemned U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “annexation plan” for large swaths of Palestinian territory as the two leaders on Tuesday presented what they termed a “peace deal” for Israel and Palestine.

Critics joined Palestinian leaders in rejecting the premise of the so-called “vision for peace,” which was drafted by the White House and Netanyahu without the input of Palestinians.

The resulting plan is “shameful and disingenuous,” tweeted Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

They could have guaranteed justice, and brought everyone into this peace deal.

Instead these two embattled heads of state, impeached and indicted, have a “ just us” peace deal.

It’s shameful and disingenuous! https://t.co/THIniOEv8B

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) January 28, 2020

The plan aims to expand and make official Israeli control of Palestinian territories while assuring Palestine that it will be afforded “a pathway to a future state”—but one that will have no military of its own and in which Israel will maintain security control over some areas.

“This is not a peace plan,” tweeted Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. “It is a war plan.”

This is not a peace plan, it is a war plan.

A war on peace

A war on justice

A war on freedom

A war on equality

A war on Palestinian existence

— (((YousefMunayyer))) (@YousefMunayyer) January 28, 2020

“It’s stunning that Donald Trump doesn’t know that this is insulting to Palestinians,” tweeted James Zogby, founder of the Arab American Institute.

It’s stunning that @realDonaldTrump doesn’t know that this is insulting to Palestinians. It’s not a “state” it’s a “Bantustan.” Palestinians lose more land w/out sovereignty & independence. Israel gets more land & keeps settlements. It’s Trump’s plan to try to legalize illegality https://t.co/RDE6iJ0krf

— James J. Zogby (@jjz1600) January 28, 2020

“This plan is simply a rubber stamp for the Israeli government’s continuing violations of international law, separate-and-unequal policies, land grabs, and human rights abuses against the Palestinian people,” said the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights in a statement. “Any attempt to address the Israeli-Palestinian issue that does not begin and end with the full acknowledgment of the Palestinian right to self-determination, freedom, justice, and equality is a non-starter.”

Major points within the deal include:

Jerusalem will be established as Israel’s “undivided” capitol, undermining Palestinians’ aim to recognize East Jerusalem as their capitol;

the recognition of the majority of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine;

the recognition of the Jordan Valley, which makes up a third of the occupied West Bank, as part of Israel; and

the refusal by Israel to grant Palestinians the “right to return” to their homes lost in the Six-Day War and other conflicts.

Palestinians in occupied territories held protests on Tuesday ahead of the deal’s announcement. Larger demonstrations are planned for Wednesday.

“I am not against peace, but what is being talked about is not peace,” Ahmed Shafiq, a student in Gaza, told The Guardian. “Peace is not imposed on people.”

The so-called “peace deal” amounts to “an endorsement of Israel’s aggression, allowing it to take over whatever Palestinian lands it wants and punishing the victims for daring to object to having their homeland stolen,” said Omar Baddar, deputy director of the Arab American Institute, in a short video the group released.

Want to know why this “ultimate deal” is a sham & a disgrace that will never lead to peace? @OmarBaddar explains:#DealOfTheCentury #Apartheid pic.twitter.com/1k9Ig0q9ND

— Arab American Instit. (@AAIUSA) January 28, 2020

A map released showing Trump and Netanyahu’s vision for the future of Palestine resembled “a Native American reservation” more than a sovereign state, said entrepreneur Shahed Amanullah.

This doesn’t look like a state. It looks like a Native American reservation. https://t.co/ZwHMt0L0V7 pic.twitter.com/S2gO5gdV4t

— Shahed Amanullah (@shahed) January 28, 2020

“This is not a peace plan,” tweeted Omar. “It is theft. It is erasure.”

Munayyer of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights called on Americans and the international community to reject Trump’s attempt to “whitewash the apartheid reality alongside his Israeli partners-in-war-crimes.”

“The only suitable response from people of conscience is to reject this effort and demand immediate accountability for Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights,” Munayyer said. “The separate-and-unequal reality the Israeli government has imposed on Palestinians, with the support of the U.S., flies in the face of the values Americans claim to uphold. Freedom, justice, and equality for Palestinians is the only way forward.”

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from occupied Palestine, slammed Trump and Netanyahu for releasing the plan as both are facing re-election campaigns and legal battles.

“It’s fitting that the Trump-Netanyahu plan was released by a forever impeached president on the same day that Netanyahu was indicted for corruption,” Tlaib tweeted. “This political stunt gets us no closer to peace or justice.”

It’s fitting that the @realDonaldTrump–@netanyahu “plan” was released by a forever impeached President on the same day that Netanyahu was indicted for corruption.

This political stunt gets us no closer to peace or justice. As a member of Congress, I consider it a non-starter. https://t.co/PIYYZ75PWc

— Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (@RepRashida) January 28, 2020

“This is a political ploy by both leaders to distract from their abuse of power, designed to help Netanyahu win the election in less than six weeks,” Emily Meyer, co-founder of Jewish progressive group If Not Now, said in a statement. “The plan itself is a plan for permanent Israeli military occupation and control, not a plan for peace. It is simply a continuation of Trump’s strategy since entering office: to disenfranchise Palestinians and deny their rights, their agency, and even their identity.”

aha: arabs saudi corrupt murderous monarchy, extreme unequal, bad to women and immigrant labor, slaughter civilians in yemen, and burning down the world, chummy with trump and all bushes, bandar bush, poppy gulf 1 nahyirah, gulf 2 wmd bush shrub.

extract oil from ground, then extract $ from US

"resource curse" leads to consolodation of power and then corruption; in saudi monarchy already consolidated, tho sometime you gotta get rid of excess princes.

no lnx wapo

Disgrace in the desert: The shameless return of business and government leaders to Saudi Arabia

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin during the Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Wednesday. (Hamad I Mohammed/Reuters)

By Ali AlAhmed

October 31, 2019

Ali AlAhmed is founder and director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs.

This week, many of the world’s business and government leaders have convened in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for the 2019 Future Investment Initiative, the Saudi regime’s annual money fest to promote doing business with the kingdom. Instead of the romanticized moniker “Davos in the Desert,” it would be better to call it a “Disgrace in the Desert.”

Last year’s event was shunned by most leading financiers due to disgust over the shocking murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi-born critic and Post contributing columnist.

So, what has changed this year to entice President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and top executives of BlackRock, Blackstone and Goldman Sachs to show up?

Well, here’s what hasn’t changed: The CIA’s finding that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s effective ruler, was the one who ordered Khashoggi’s brutal execution in Istanbul. To date, none of those implicated has faced any serious punishment or accountability.

What has also not changed: Saudi Arabia remains not only a rogue state by most international standards — it also makes an unstable strategic partner for the United States and others, fundamentally incompatible with Western business practices. The entire kingdom is now controlled by a ruthless 30-something whose first instinct is to imprison, torture, expropriate and murder.

will Americans let Trump trigger World War III for Saudi Arabia and Israel?

Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J. S. Davies / Independent Media Institute

On Saturday, September 14, two oil refineries and other oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia were hit and set ablaze by 18 drones and 7 cruise missiles

trump tax lawyer replaced by non-enitity

919

Netanyahu vows to annex large swathes of West Bank ‘in maximum coordination with Trump’Jake Johnson / Common Dreams

819

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trumps-pressure-valve-against-iran-is-approaching-a-bursting-point/

no lnx

Trump’s pressure valve against Iran is approaching a bursting point

Written by Jefferson Morley / Independent Media Institute August 29, 2019

Israeli attacks in three Middle East countries are pushing a volatile region that is already the scene of two long-running wars closer to a third. The lethal strikes show how the Trump administration has effectively outsourced the military component of its “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran to the Israel Defense Forces. As a result, one U.S. ally—Israel—is attacking another American ally—Iraq—supposedly for the sake of advancing American interests.

U.S. policy is literally at war with itself. More than 4,500 U.S. soldiers have been killed defending the Iraqi government and armed forces that Israel is now attacking. Last year, the United States gave Iraq $1.2 billion in total assistance. But then Washington gave Israel $10.8 billion, which it is now using to debilitate the forces the U.S. military has spent years building up.

On Saturday, Israel confirmed that its warplanes struck an Iranian-operated base in Syria that was allegedly preparing to launch a major drone attack against Israel. On Sunday, an armed drone struck a Hezbollah media center in the suburbs of Beirut. Hezbollah said it was the first Israeli attack in Lebanon since Israel and Hezbollah fought to a draw in 2006. Later Sunday, another drone strike in Iraq killed a commander of one of the Iranian-backed militias, known as Popular Mobilization Forces (PMFs).

Israel did not confirm or deny the latter two attacks, but most news sites, including Israeli sources, assume Israel was responsible. Last week, “senior American officials” told the New York Times that Israel was behind several other unattributed attacks in Iraq.

Israel says that the PMFs constitute a threat to its security, by enabling Iran to move its short-range ballistic missiles closer to Israel. But Iraqis see the PMF, a coalition of some 60 militias, as necessary protection against ISIS. The PMF sprang up in 2014 when ISIS routed the Iraqi government forces and took over much of western Iraq. Supported by Iran and blessed by Iraq’s Ayatollah Sistani, the PMF fought alongside U.S. troops in driving ISIS out of western Iraq. Without the PMF, ISIS would probably still hold large swaths of the country.

Since 2017, the Iraqi government has been incorporating PMF personnel and weapons into its armed forces, with the goal of lessening the country’s dependence on Iran and gaining military units with battlefield experience. Faleh al-Fayadh, the chairman of the PMF coalition, is Iraq’s national security adviser. The idea was to weave the two forces together. Now Israel hopes to divide them.

Not surprisingly, the Israeli attacks are being denounced in a country where the U.S. is far from popular.

Iraqi prime minister Adil Abdul Mahdi ordered the U.S. military to ask permission before undertaking any flights in the country. (U.S. commanders said they would comply “immediately.”) Iraq’s ceremonial president Barham Salih called the attacks “a blatant, hostile act” that crossed the red line of Iraqi sovereignty. A pro-Iranian bloc holding 10 percent of the seats in the Iraqi parliament called the attacks a “declaration of war.”

But if Iraqis think the Israeli attacks are a declaration of war on them, there’s no doubt whom the Americans favor. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted Sunday that the U.S. fully supports Israel’s “right to defend itself.” More than 15 years after attacking Saddam Hussein’s regime, the United States supports a secret war on the government that replaced him.

“The attacks in Iraq underscore the contradictions in U.S. policy,” said Paul Pillar, former CIA analyst for the region. “Here we have the administration not only not criticizing but actually applauding Israel for an armed attack on the territory of a friendly state that we are trying to help in other ways.”

Pressuring Iraq to join the campaign of “maximum pressure,” Pillar said in a phone interview, “is totally contradictory to the prosperity and stability of Iraq. They are dependent on trade with Iran and they are dependent on the popular mobilization forces for security. The attacks only increase Iraqi resentment of [the] United States and increase Iraq’s sense of dependence on Iran to protect itself.”

The reason why Israel and the United States are so hostile to Iran is that the Islamic Republic has taken advantage of U.S. blunders since 9/11 to consolidate its prestige and allies, while the U.S. and its allies have lost strength.

The U.S. policymakers sought to replace Saddam Hussein’s government with an anti-Iranian regime in 2003. They failed. Iran cultivated good relations with the new government and gained power and influence in Baghdad where it once had none.

In 2011, U.S. policymakers thought they could overthrow Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria by supporting Syrian “moderates” (of whom there were few) and al-Qaeda linked fundamentalists (of whom there were many). They failed. Iran supported Assad and (with Russian, Iranian and U.S. help) has mostly routed ISIS. Iran is now entrenched in Assad’s Syria as it never was before.

In 2015, U.S. policymakers thought Saudi Arabia could defeat the Houthi rebels in Yemen and deal a blow to Iran, the Houthis’ ally. They thought wrong. The Saudi coalition has inflicted the world’s worst humanitarian crisis on Yemen, yet achieved none of its goals. Now the U.S. is seeking peace talks to end the war, and the Houthis are openly embracing the Iranians.

Now U.S. policymakers expect the Iraqi government to ignore Israeli attacks and support the U.S. campaign against Iran, a larger neighboring country that supports its economy and bolsters its security. With the U.S. track record in the region, there’s little reason to think this will succeed. What Trump’s Iran policy lacks in coherence, it makes up for with recklessness.

Of course, the incoherent Trump could change his mind. He ordered and called off an attack on Iran for shooting down an unmanned surveillance drone, a sign that he has no desire to be a wartime commander-in-chief going into an election year. At the G7 summit, he played along with the gambit of French President Emmanuel Macron to open the door to talks with Iran. If the U.S. lifts sanctions, Iran is willing to talk, President Rouhani replied.

The Israelis are worried Trump might accept. After all, Trump threatened North Korea with fire and fury, only to warm up to Kim Jong Un and embrace negotiations over the objections of his advisers. Israeli escalation in Iraq—and the expected response from Hezbollah—will make it harder for Trump to change directions on Iran, which is why the attacks are likely to continue.

Jefferson Morley is a writing fellow and the editor and chief correspondent of the Deep State, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has been a reporter and editor in Washington, D.C., since 1980. He spent 15 years as an editor and reporter at the Washington Post. He was a staff writer at Arms Control Today and Washington editor of Salon. He is the editor and co-founder of JFK Facts, a blog about the assassination of JFK. His latest book is The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster, James Jesus Angleton.

This article was produced by the Deep State, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

https://www.alternet.org/**2019/06**/palestinians-dismiss-economic-portion-of-kushner-plan-as-dead-on-arrival/

no lnx

Palestinians dismiss economic portion of Kushner plan as dead-on-arrival

written by Jon Queally / Common Dreams June 24, 2019

The economic proposal purportedly designed to help foment Israeli-Palestinian peace and made public over the weekend by Jared Kushner, top advisor and son-in-law to President Donald Trump, fell predictably flat as Palestinians rejected it immediately as not tethered to reality and an insult to those who continue to struggle while living under the U.S.-backed military occupation of the Israelis.

Part of what has become know as Kushner’s “Deal of the Century” proposal to end the Israel-Palestine conflict, it was treated as largely unserious by Palestinians and those who advocate for their liberation.

According to Reuters:

The “peace to prosperity” plan, set to be presented by White House senior adviser Jared Kushner at an international conference in Bahrainnext week, includes 179 infrastructure and business projects, according to details of the plan and interviews with U.S. officials. The approach towards reviving the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process was criticized by the Palestinians on Saturday.

The ambitious economic revival plan, the product of two years of work by Kushner and other aides, would take place only if a political solution to the region’s long-running problems is reached.

More than half of the $50 billion would be spent in the economically troubled Palestinian territories over 10 years while the rest would be split between Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan. Some of the projects would be in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, where investments could benefit Palestinians living in adjacent Gaza, a crowded and impoverished coastal enclave.

The answer from Palestinians — abrupt and dismissive — was emphatic: the proposal is a nonstarter.

“Palestine is not for sale,” said the Hamas government in Gaza in response.

In an interview on Al-Jazeera, Palestinian rights activist Ali Abunimah, co-founder and editor of the Electric Intifada, was incredulous and saidKushner — who has a “real credibility problem” to begin with — “can’t tell us he cares about ending poverty for Palestinians while inflicting more poverty on them.”

As opposed to something that anyone who has seriously studied the issue would dare present as a serious solution, Abunimah characterized it as nothing more than “slick marketing” and the “repackaging of recycled and hollow slogans that fail to address the root problem: Israeli occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid.”

Watch:]

Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) Executive Committee, echoed others in the Palestine Authority who said that it makes no sense to talk about economic investments until the political crisis at the heart of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian lands is ended.

“First lift the siege of Gaza,stop the Israeli theft of our land, resources and funds, give us our freedom of movement and control over our borders, airspace, territorial waters etc.,” Ashrawi said on Saturday. “Then watch us build a vibrant prosperous economy as a free and sovereign people.”

Trump’s economic apartheid plan has been met with a resoundingly cold reception on all fronts: Israeli officials dismiss it as irrelevant, neighboring Arab states call it a bribe, and Palestinians say it fails to address any genuine political aspirations. https://t.co/j0Vq72xvD0 pic.twitter.com/67V42p1upf

— The IMEU (@theIMEU) June 23, 2019

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said the same as he rejected the proposal on Saturday. “The economic situation should not be discussed before the political one,” Abbas said. “As long as there is no political solution, we do not deal with any economic solution.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/pence-says-the-us-has-been-a-force-for-good-in-the-middle-east-for-nearly-200-years-heres-what-historians-say/

For nearly 200 years, stretching back to our Treaty of Amity and Commerce with Oman, the United States has been a force for good in the Middle East. Previous administrations in my country too often underestimated the danger that radical Islamic terrorism posed to the American people, our homeland, our allies, and our partners. Their inaction saw the terrorist attacks from the U.S.S. Cole; to September 11th; to the expansion of ISIS across Syria and Iraq — reaching all the way to the suburbs of Baghdad. But as the world has witnessed over the past two years, under President Trump, those days are over. —Vice President Michael Pence, Remarks, Warsaw Ministerial Working Luncheon, February 14, 2019

Eight historians responded to our request for comment; their full statements and recommended sources are on the Political Uses of the Pastpage).

The vice president starts with the 1833 treaty with Oman, and so shall we, even though it’s an odd place to start. As Will Hanley of Florida State University noted in his reaction to Pence’s claim, the treaty itself is a piece of routine boilerplate, not so different “from dozens of other 1830s agreements between Middle East authorities and representatives of American and European states.” But there was at least one innovation, as Hanley explains: “The Sultan of Muscat inserted a clause saying that he, rather than the US, would cover the costs of lodging distressed American sailors. A more accurate statement [by Pence] on this evidence would be ‘For nearly 200 years, stretching back to our Treaty of Amity and Commerce with Oman, representatives of the United States have pursued standardized agreements in the Middle East and enjoyed meals that we haven’t paid for.’”

Vice President Pence made this broad statement at a ministerial meeting on terrorism, but his mind was primarily on Iran. His intent was to draw a contrast between the United States and Iran, with the former being a “force for good” in the region and the latter being a perpetrator of continual violence. But by going back to 1833 to reference a routine and fairly boring trade agreement with a minor kingdom, he appears to be grasping at straws.

If Pence was looking for good done by the United States in the Middle East, he could have asked some of the historians who reacted to his statement. He may have learned from Joel Beinin how “American missionaries established some of the leading universities in the Middle East: The American University of Beirut, The American University in Cairo and Robert College in Istanbul. The Medical School of AUB is among the best in the region.” He may have been interested to hear from Indira Falk Gesink that “after World War I, most of those polled in the regions surrounding Syria wanted the US as their mandatory power (if they wanted any).” He may have learned from Lior Sternfeld how the United States has sponsored “schools, universities, and orphanages” and took a stand against its European allies and Israel during the Suez Crisis of 1956.

But if he had asked and had learned about these efforts, he would also have learned from Professor Beinin that many of the missionaries who established these schools went to work for the CIA in the postwar period, “so even the very best thing that Americans have done in the Middle East since the early 19th century was corrupted by government efforts to exert power over the region in order to control its oil.” And Pence would have also had to hear Professor Sternfeld tell about the 1953 coup in Iran that cemented a brutal regime in place for the next quarter-century and how, as described by Professor Gesink, “from that point on, US actions in the Middle East were guided by demand for oil and anti-Communist containment.” Finally, he would have had to hear about how much that 1953 coup has to do with our relations with Iran now.

Historians who replied to our request for comment could not find much “force for good” in the historical record. Instead, they find “death, displacement, and destruction” (Ziad Abu-Rish), support for “the most ruthless and brutal dictators at every turn” and the “most fanatical and chauvinistic nationalist and religious forces at every turn” (Mark Le Vine), “intense and destructive interventions … characterized by public deception, confusion, and mixed motives” (Michael Provence), “a moral compromise with authoritarianism” (Indira Falk Gesink), and actions that have “contributed to breakdowns in security, widespread violence, and humanitarian disaster” (Dale Stahl).

Homage to the Shah after coup d’état, 5 September 1953, The Guardian – Unseen images of the 1953 Iran coup.]pix

Three historians below recommend The Coup: 1953, The CIA, and The Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations by Ervand Abrahamian, and this book is incredibly pertinent today. Previous historical accounts and justifications by 1950s policymakers made the coup all about Mosaddegh’s unwieldiness to compromise or said it was all about winning the Cold War. Abrahamian instead shows that it was about oil, or, more specifically, “the repercussions that oil nationalization could have on such faraway places as Indonesia and South America, not to mention the rest of the Persian Gulf.” And for this, Iran and the Middle East got, courtesy of the United States, the brutal Mohammad Reza Shah. The shah crushed the democratic opposition, filling his jails with thousands of political prisoners, and left “a gaping political vacuum—one filled eventually by the Islamic movement.” And so here we are.

Mike Pence’s incredibly blinkered statement can be viewed as an extreme counterpoint to the right-wing view of Obama’s Cairo speech, in which the president mildly acknowledged that the US had not always been on the side of right in the Middle East, and that its history of actions have come back to haunt us all. Such things, it seems, must not be spoken in the muscular Trump administration, even if it means abandoning an understanding that might actually be useful. “For me as an historian,” Mark Le Vine notes below, “perhaps the worst part the history of US foreign policy in the region is precisely that scholars have for so long done everything possible to inform politicians, the media and the public about the realities there. Largely to no avail.” Indeed, Mike Pence here appears intent on utterly blocking out history and historical thinking, even as he dreams of a long and glorious past.

Browse and download sources recommended by the historians below from our Zotero library, or try our in-browser library.

Ziad Abu-Rish, Assistant Professor of History at Ohio University

I’m only going to tackle the “force for good” claim, without getting into the claims about Trump compared to his predecessors or the notion of “radical Islamic terrorism.” Let’s give Vice President Pence a chance at being correct… *Read more*

Joel Beinin, Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History, Emeritus, Stanford University

American missionaries established some of the leading universities in the Middle East: The American University of Beirut, The American University in Cairo and Robert College in Istanbul. The Medical School of AUB is among the best in the region… *Read more*

Indira Falk Gesink, Baldwin Wallace University

I think this is a much more complicated question than is generally acknowledged. On the one hand, some American private citizens have had long-lasting positive impact—for example the founding of educational institutions such as Roberts College, the American University in Beirut (originally the Syrian Protestant College), and the American University in Cairo. At that time, the US generally was viewed positively in the region. … *Read more*

Will Hanley, Florida State University

It’s not possible to use historical evidence to support a black-and-white statement like “The United States has been a force for good in the Middle East.” Even if it were possible, the slim 1833 treaty between the US and the Sultan of Muscat is meager evidence. … Read more

Mark Andrew Le Vine, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History, UC Irvine

This statement is ridiculous even by the standards of the Trump administration. The US has been among the most damaging forces in the Middle East for the last three quarters of a century. … Read more

Michael Provence, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History, University of California, San Diego

The United States had no role in the Middle East before 1945, apart from private business and educational initiatives. Within a couple years of 1945, the US tilted toward Israel in its first war, began overthrowing democratic Middle Eastern governments, and propping up pliant dictators. … Read more

Dale Stahl, Assistant Professor of History, University of Colorado Denver

I see this statement as “more or less false” because there are clear examples where the United States has not had a positive influence in the Middle East. One needn’t reflect very far back into that “nearly 200 years” of history to know that this is so. … Read more

Lior Sternfeld, Penn State University

While the US had some moments where it was a force for good, with projects like schools, universities, and orphanages, it was also a source for instability in cases like the 1953 coup against Mosaddegh that overturned the course not just of Iran but of the region in its entirety. Read more

yikes

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/jared-kushner-thinks-he-has-deal-century-middle-east-peace-it-would-have

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/the-foreign-policy-money-trail-in-washington-how-middle-eastern-powers-fund-government-think-tanks-and-influence-us-legislation/

The 2016 elections awakened Americans to a startling reality: the country’s political system is ripe for foreign interference. The Russians took full advantage of social media with bot armies and through unregistered foreign agents. While their influence garnered considerable attention and has led to increased enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), one area has remained largely off the congressional and media radar screens. Yet it remains a vital part of the way other governments try to influence policy in this country: the foreign funding of think tanks.

This story originally appeared at Tom Dispatch.

Most Americans undoubtedly have little idea what a think tank actually does. Having worked at two of them myself, it’s fair to say that even those of us who have labored inside these basic building blocks for policymaking in Washington are often still trying to figure out just what many of them do. Still, whether you know it or not, you’ve certainly seen think-tank employees on cable news, heard them on the radio, or read their op-ed pieces.

After all, think tanks are homes for so many of the “experts” who are the go-to sources for media coverage of foreign and domestic policy topics on just about any day — and are often key go-to sources for those making policy in Washington, too). You know, the former Department of Defense official you caught on NBC News discussing Iran or the Middle Eastern expert you saw quoted in Newsweek critiquing the Trump administration’s policies there. Outside the public eye, members of Congress and executive branch officials rely heavily on think tanks for expertise on a wide range of issues, for key congressional testimony, and even for quite literally helping craft public policy.

Those who run Washington generally trust the inhabitants of think tanks of their political bent to provide the intellectual foundations upon which much of public policy is built. At least in some cases, however, that trust couldn’t be more deeply misplaced, since cornerstones of the ever-expanding think-tank universe turn out to be for sale.

Every year foreign governments pour tens of millions of dollars into those very institutions and, though many think tanks are tax-exempt non-profits, such donations often turn out to be anything but charitable gifts. Foreign contributions generally come with critically important strings attached — usually a favorable stance toward that country in whatever influential work the think tanks are doing. In other words, those experts you regularly read or see on screen, whose scholarship and advice Washington’s politicians and other officials often use, are in some cases being paid, directly or indirectly, by the very countries on which they are offering advice and analysis. And here’s the catch: they can do so without ever having to tell you about it.

The Money Trail From Foreign Governments to Think Tanks

“I’ve never had to worry in my years at CAP about an analyst or me saying X, Y, and Z and worry about a funding source. Never thought about it. Never,” explained Brian Katulis of the Center for American Progress (CAP). He was speaking at a Middle East Institute (MEI) event in January entitled “The Role of Think Tanks in Shaping Middle East Policy.” MEI President Paul Salem echoed this sentiment, noting that funding, particularly foreign government funding, shouldn’t ever shape a think tank’s work. “Independence,” he proclaimed, “is sacred.”

Such comments, like the events themselves, are just the norm in Washington think-tank life — unless, that is, you follow the money, in which case they seem both striking and supremely ironic. On any given day, Washington is, in fact, awash in foreign-policy events at think tanks. There, experts convene to publicly discuss just about every topic you’d want to hear about — except one, of course: their funding. And that is what made the Katulis-Salem exchange particularly interesting. What they and their follow panelists never mentioned at an event extolling the importance of think tanks in helping craft political Washington’s Middle East policies was this: both CAP and MEI have received millions of dollars from authoritarian governments in the Middle East.

MEI has publicly reported receiving millions from Saudi Arabia and lesser amounts from the Persian Gulf states of Oman and Qatar. By far its largest donor, however, seems to have been the United Arab Emirates (UAE), reportedly making a “secret” $20 million contribution to that think tank, earmarked to “hire experts in order to counter the more egregious misperceptions about the region” and “to inform U.S. government policymakers.” In other words, in the spirit of that MEI panel title, the UAE’s funding was explicitly designed to shape that think tank’s — and so U.S. — policy considerations.

While hardly in that $20 million range, CAP has also publicly reported receiving at least $1.5 million from the UAE.

And keep in mind that those two think tanks are hardly the only ones receiving donations from countries in the Middle East. The Center for a New American Security, for instance, received $250,000 from the United Arab Emirates to produce a study on the need for the U.S. to export military-grade drones to countries like… the UAE. That think tank’s subsequent report on the topic notes that the U.S. doesn’t export drones to the UAE and other countries, but should because “this reluctance to transfer U.S. drones harms U.S. interests in tangible ways.” Never mind that a third of those killed in drone strikes in the devastating war in Yemen are civilians.

The Brookings Institution received a $14.8 million donation from Qatar. In fact, according to a New York Times analysis, nearly all of the most prominent foreign-policy think tanks in Washington have accepted money from authoritarian regimes in the Middle East or elsewhere. And that, in turn, is just the tip of the iceberg, since think tanks are not legally required to publicly disclose their funding.

Charity or Influence Buying?

If think tanks are to be believed, the money they receive from such funders changes little. Recent events at a number of think tanks, including the Center for American Progress and the Middle East Institute, should, however, give pause to anyone who assumes that such institutions are by their nature insulated from the influence of foreign funders.

Recently, serious questions have been raised about whether CAP’s ties to the UAE, itself a close ally of the Saudi royals, contributed to its awkward response to the brutal murder of Washington Post journalist and Saudi citizen Jamal Khashoggi in that Kingdom’s embassy in Istanbul, Turkey. Following that killing, CAP released a response condemning the Saudis for their involvement in Khashoggi’s murder, but not calling for specific consequences to punish the Kingdom.

According to reporting by the Intercept’s Ryan Grim, such consequences were stripped from the statement by a CAP staffer who just happened to be Brian Katulis. Then, in December, CAP largely sat on the sidelines as the Senate passed a historic resolution to end U.S. involvement in the devastating Saudi-UAE war in Yemen. At the MEI event in January, Katulis dismissed those giving “energy and dynamism” to “the Yemen debate” for ignoring “the full complexity of the challenges.” Jamal Khashoggi’s name wasn’t even mentioned.

Despite MEI head Salem’s claim that “independence is sacred,” there’s reason to question how independent scholars can be when their work is, at least in part, dependent on foreign funding. In at least one case, for instance, Salem’s institute published the work of Fahad Nazer, who was directly on the Saudi payroll. While earning $7,000 a month as a foreign agent for Saudi Arabia, Nazer wrote several pro-Saudi articles for both think tanks and mainstream media outlets, including one for MEI that made no mention of his financial ties to the Saudis. That March 2018 article did, however, encourage yet more U.S. support for the country’s ruling crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who, Nazer wrote, would “be good for Saudi Arabia, the United States, and the world.”

Just seven months later, bin Salman would reportedly authorize the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi and, in January 2019, Nazer himself would become the official spokesperson for the Saudi Embassy in Washington.

Blurred Lines and Lack of Transparency

Nazer’s case also illustrates a growing pattern of interactions between think tanks that receive foreign funding and the registered foreign agents of those countries. In fact, Emirati foreign agents last year reported contacting think tanks at least 85 times, according to an analysis of Foreign Agents Registration Act filings for a forthcoming report on the Emirati lobby in the U.S. by the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy, which I direct.

Perhaps not surprisingly, CAP’s Katulis and MEI were among the top think-tank contacts for UAE’s foreign agents. According to 2018 filings, Katulis was contacted at least 12 times by the Harbour Group, which the UAE paid more than $5 million in 2018 to “influence U.S. policy,” according to the firm’s FARA filings. Katulis was a particular focus for them because he was helping to organize a “study tour” in which think-tank experts would take a luxurious trip to both the UAE and Saudi Arabia. That group also contacted MEI at least 14 times on behalf of the UAE, directing most of its efforts towards a “speaking engagement at MEI” for the Emirati ambassador to the U.S., the same man who had directed that “secret” $20 million contribution to the institute.

Under current law, it is perfectly legal for think tanks that receive funding from foreign governments to also work with foreign agents registered to represent those very governments. FARA includes an exemption for those engaged in “bona fide… scholastic, academic, or scientific pursuits.” Like many parts of the FARA statute, it’s not at all clear what “bona fide” means, but think tanks are presumably exempt from registration if they meet this threshold.

While the work done by both think tanks and registered foreign agents can sometimes overlap, the two are worlds apart on one critical score: transparency. Under FARA, registered foreign agents are required to disclose a considerable amount of what they do, including whom they’re working for, how much they’re being paid, and whom they’re contacting, as well as when and where they do it, on behalf of foreign principals like the United Arab Emirates. And most of that information is available online. Anything they distribute on behalf of a foreign backer must also include a “conspicuous statement” to let anyone know that what they’re reading is being distributed on behalf of a foreign principal.

Think tanks receiving funding from foreign sources are, however, not required to do any of the above.

As is appropriate during tax season, most of this should, in the end, be blamed on the Internal Revenue Service. Think tanks usually operate as tax-exempt organizations and, according to the IRS, “a tax-exempt organization is generally not required to disclose publicly the names or addresses of its contributors set forth on its annual return.”

While MEI and CAP do both disclose their funding sources on their websites — for which they should be commended — many think tanks do not. And few, even among those that do, mention any potential conflicts of interest that might be reflected in their published reports or the speeches and media appearances of their members. Even more worrisome, a Project On Government Oversight investigation by Lydia Dennett found numerous examples of think-tank experts not reporting or mentioning financial ties to foreign governments when testifying before Congress. Hiding such potential conflicts of interest is likely to leave the public and policymakers with the impression that they’re hearing truly objective experts, when they may, in fact, be taking testimony from someone who is functionally or literally on the payroll of a country with a deep stake in what they’re telling Congress.

If think tanks are to remain credible sources of foreign-policy expertise, such ties must, at the very least, be laid bare.

A first step would simply be to require think tanks to publicly disclose any foreign funding they receive, something easily done by amending the IRS code. In addition, just as registered foreign agents are required to include a “conspicuous statement” letting readers know they’re working on behalf of a foreign power, think tanks should have to fully disclose their funding sources and any potential conflicts of interest in all their written products, as well as at speaking engagements, especially testimony before Congress. It should also be incumbent upon the media to do a better job of vetting sources. Sure, journalists are extraordinarily busy, but if a simple Google search can reveal that the Middle East “expert” you’re quoting is being paid by a country in the Middle East, it behooves you to tell your readers that.

Finally, transparency is essential, but it’s well past time for think tanks themselves to focus on the track records of the countries they’re getting money from. The Brookings Institution did just that by cutting ties with the Saudis shortly after the murder of Khashoggi and, soon after, MEI, too, announced that it would decline any further funding from the Saudi government. More recently, and following the questions raised about CAP’s involvement with the United Arab Emirates, that think tank announced that it would no longer accept UAE money. As a CAP spokesperson said, “It’s just the right thing to do.”

CAP, MEI, and Brookings are, however, the exceptions. Most think tanks haven’t done “the right thing” and dropped funding from autocratic regimes. Nor are they likely to voluntarily increase transparency about that funding. The burden then falls on Congress to enact reforms ensuring that senators and representatives will know when the expert they’re hearing discuss a specific country or the region it’s in is being paid by that very same country. Failure to act could leave Americans asking a simple and uncomfortable question: Which country is buying U.S. foreign policy today?

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Who Is Behind Trump’s Links to Arab Princes? A Billionaire Friend

The financier Tom Barrack told the 2016 Republican National Convention that Donald J. Trump “played me like a Steinway piano” in the 1988 deal that began their friendship.CreditCreditShawn Thew/EPA, via Shutterstock

By David D. Kirkpatrick

June 13, 2018

The billionaire financier Tom Barrack was caught in a bind.

In April 2016, his close friend Donald J. Trump was about to clinch the Republican presidential nomination. But Mr. Trump’s outspoken hostility to Muslims — epitomized by his call for a ban on Muslim immigrants — was offending the Persian Gulf princes Mr. Barrack had depended on for decades as investors and buyers.

“Confusion about your friend Donald Trump is VERY high,” Ambassador Yousef al-Otaiba of the United Arab Emirates emailed back when Mr. Barrack tried to introduce the candidate, in a message not previously reported. Mr. Trump’s image, the ambassador warned, “has many people extremely worried.”

Not deterred, Mr. Barrack, a longtime friend who had done business with the ambassador, assured him that Mr. Trump understood the Persian Gulf perspective. “He also has joint ventures in the U.A.E.!” Mr. Barrack wrote in an email on April 26.

The emails were the beginning of Mr. Trump’s improbable transformation from a candidate who campaigned against Muslims to a president celebrated in the royal courts of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi as perhaps the best friend in the White House that their rulers have ever had. It is a shift that testifies not only to Mr. Trump’s special flexibility, but also to Mr. Barrack’s unique place in the Trump world, at once a fellow tycoon and a flattering courtier, a confidant and a power broker.

During the Trump campaign, Mr. Barrack was a top fund-raiser and trusted gatekeeper who opened communications with the Emiratis and Saudis, recommended that the candidate bring on Paul Manafort as campaign manager — and then tried to arrange a secret meeting between Mr. Manafort and the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. Mr. Barrack was later named chairman of Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee.

But Mr. Manafort has since been indicted by the special prosecutor investigating Russian meddling in the presidential election. The same inquiry is examining whether the Emiratis and Saudis helped sway the election in Mr. Trump’s favor — potentially in coordination with the Russians, according to people familiar with the matter. Investigators have also asked witnesses about specific contributions and expenses related to the inauguration, according to people familiar with those interviews.

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Mr. Trump in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 2017, for an Arab summit meeting. “It all started with you and JK and I,” Mr. Barrack wrote in a congratulatory email to the Emirati ambassador about the meeting; the initials refer to Jared Kushner.CreditStephen Crowley/The New York Times]

A spokesman for Mr. Barrack said he has been advised he is not a target of the special prosecutor. Investigators interviewed him in December but asked questions almost exclusively about Mr. Manafort and his associate Rick Gates, said a person familiar with the questioning.

Mr. Barrack has steered clear of any formal role in the administration; he has said he rebuffed offers to become treasury secretary or ambassador to Mexico. (He sought a role as a special envoy for Middle East economic development, but the idea never gained traction in the White House.)

Instead, he has continued making money, as he has for decades, working with the same Persian Gulf contacts he introduced two years ago to Mr. Trump. Mr. Barrack’s company, known as Colony NorthStar since a merger last year, has raised more than $7 billion in investments since Mr. Trump won the nomination, and 24 percent of that money has come from the Persian Gulf — all from either the U.A.E. or Saudi Arabia, according to an executive familiar with the figures. Colony NorthStar has not disclosed the investors in its funds.

Mr. Barrack’s email correspondence with Ambassador Otaiba, which has not previously been reported, was provided to The New York Times by an anonymous group critical of Emirati foreign policy, and it illustrates the formative role Mr. Barrack played as a matchmaker between Mr. Trump and the Persian Gulf princes.

Mr. Barrack’s representatives did not dispute the authenticity of the emails. His spokesman said in a statement that Mr. Barrack “sees his business in the Middle East as a way to help political dialogue and understanding, not the other way around, and he does so through relationships that span as far back as the reign of even some of the grandfathers of the current regional rulers.”

But having the ear of the president, say other executives and former diplomats who work in the gulf, has only enhanced Mr. Barrack’s stature in the region.

“He is the only person I know who the president speaks to as a peer,” said Roger Stone, a veteran Republican operative who has known both men for decades. “Barrack is to Trump as Bebe Rebozo was to Nixon, which is the best friend,” Mr. Stone added, referring to the wealthy real-estate developer who is best remembered for his closeness to President Richard Nixon during his impeachment process.

Mr. Barrack’s closeness to Mr. Trump extends to the president’s family. By 2010, he had acquired $70 million of the debt owed by Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, on his troubled $1.8 billion purchase of a skyscraper at 666 Fifth Avenue in New York. After a call from Mr. Trump, Mr. Barrack was among a group of lenders who agreed to reduce Mr. Kushner’s obligations to keep him out of bankruptcy.

A month after his first outreach to Ambassador Otaiba, Mr. Barrack wrote again on May 26 to introduce Mr. Kushner, who was preparing for a role as a presidential envoy to the Middle East.

“You will love him and he agrees with our agenda!” Mr. Barrack promised in another email.

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Mr. Trump and Mr. Barrack, the chairman of his inaugural committee, during the president’s inauguration concert at the Lincoln Memorial.CreditKris Connor/REX, via Shutterstock

A Billionaire Buddy

Thomas J. Barrack Jr. and Donald J. Trump first met in the 1980s, and Mr. Barrack got the better of the encounters. He negotiated Mr. Trump into overpaying for two famous assets: a one-fifth stake in the New York department store chain Alexander’s in 1985, and the entire Plaza Hotel in 1988. Mr. Trump paid about $410 million for the Plaza and later lost both properties to creditors.

But Mr. Barrack nonetheless parlayed the deals into a lasting friendship, in part by flattering Mr. Trump about his skill as a negotiator.

“He played me like a Steinway piano,” Mr. Barrack recounted in a speech at the Republican convention.

At 71, Mr. Barrack is the same age as President Trump and shares his fondness for expensive trophies. He owns a 700-acre winery and polo ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley in California, sold a seven-bedroom mansion in Santa Monica last year for $38 million, and snapped up an Aspen ski resort for a reported $18 million just in time for the start of the season.

Yet people who know him well say he still tells new acquaintances that he is truly honored to meet them, cheerfully doling out superlatives like “first-class,” “amazing” and “brilliant.” He invariably tells the story of his own success as a parable about luck and perseverance, never about talent.

He grew up speaking Arabic as the son of Lebanese immigrants to Los Angeles; his mother worked as a secretary and his father ran a grocery store in Culver City. By 1972 he had earned a law degree from the University of Southern California and he interviewed for a job with Nixon’s personal lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach. As Mr. Barrack tells the story, he returned moments later to drop off a book about football that they had discussed, and his gesture won him a job over candidates with more prestigious degrees.

Dispatched to Saudi Arabia because of his Arabic skills, Mr. Barrack was enlisted as a squash partner for “a local Saudi,” he often says, and the Saudi turned out to be a son of the king and his first big break in business.

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Mr. Barrack, left, playing polo in the Hamptons in 2017. He owns a 700-acre winery and polo ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley in California.CreditRebecca Smeyne for The New York Times

In the decades to come, Mr. Barrack cultivated relationships across the region, once befriending an elderly Bedouin on a bus who turned out to be an executive of Aramco, the Saudi oil giant. Mr. Barrack invited his new Bedouin friend to stay with him in Newport Beach, Calif., while seeking a medical treatment, and the favor landed Mr. Barrack an assignment to help Aramco buy 375 Blue Bird school buses, the biggest deal in his life at the time.

His friends describe him as a concierge to the Persian Gulf royals, helping them buy American or European homes, looking after their children on visits to the West and vacationing with them at his home in the south of France. After his private equity firm bought a resort built by the Aga Khan on 35 miles of the Sardinian coast, Mr. Barrack, a Catholic, opened a halal restaurant to welcome gulf royals who came by in their yachts.

As a young lawyer, Mr. Barrack once negotiated drilling rights with Ambassador Otaiba’s father, who was then the Emirati oil minister. The emails show that Ambassador Otaiba later worked with Mr. Barrack to help seal a 2009 deal in which his private equity firm sold the L’Ermitage Raffles hotel in Beverly Hills to a joint venture half owned by an Abu Dhabi investment fund for $41 million. Three years later, Ambassador Otaiba invested $1 million in a fund that Mr. Barrack had set up to buy homes on the cheap after the real estate crash, according to the emails.

When Ambassador Otaiba worried about Mr. Trump’s proposed Muslim ban — “even someone as nonjudgmental as I am, had a problem with that statement” — Mr. Barrack wrote back that Mr. Trump was “the king of hyperbole.”

“We can turn him to prudence,” Mr. Barrack wrote in an email. “He needs a few really smart Arab minds to whom he can confer — u r at the top of that list!”

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Jared Kushner, right, during Mr. Trump’s meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Oval Office in March.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

A Shift In Policy

Mr. Barrack’s efforts began to pay off. Mr. Kushner met Ambassador Otaiba in May 2016. Soon after, Mr. Barrack and Ambassador Otaiba began working to arrange a secret meeting between Mr. Manafort, who became Mr. Trump’s campaign manager that June, and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia,the dominant adviser to his father, King Salman.

Mr. Barrack had befriended Mr. Manafort in the 1970s, when they were both living in Beirut and working for Saudi interests. Early in 2016, when Mr. Trump faced the prospect of a contested nomination fight at the Republican convention, Mr. Barrack had recommended Mr. Manafort for the job of campaign manager. “The most experienced and lethal of managers” and “a killer,” Mr. Barrack called him in a letter to Mr. Trump.

Prince Mohammed was widely seen as an ambitious protégé of the Emirati rulers, and in an email to the Emirati ambassador, Mr. Barrack presented a Manafort meeting as a prelude to a meeting with Mr. Trump.

“I would like to align in Donald’s mind the connection between the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia which we have already started with Jared,” Mr. Barrack wrote to Ambassador Otaiba on June 21, 2016. “I think it is important that you be the center pin!!”

Mr. Barrack had competition. The Saudi prince had tried to reach the Trump campaign through “a midlevel person” at the rival private equity giant Blackstone, Mr. Barrack wrote in a follow-up email. “Obviously I would like the meeting to be arranged by you and me rather than Blackstone,” Mr. Barrack told the ambassador.

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Yousef al-Otaiba, the Emirati ambassador to the United States, with theHouse speaker, Paul Ryan,center, in Abu Dhabi in January.CreditJon Gambrell/Associated Press

Mr. Barrack also pitched Mr. Manafort on the value of the Emirati connection.

“Paul is totally programmed on the closeness and alignment of the U.A.E.” and agreed to meet Prince Mohammed “because he is a friend of your boss and the U.A.E.,” Mr. Barrack wrote.

The emails show that the meeting was scheduled for June 24, and that Mr. Manafort sought to meet at the prince’s hotel to avoid the news media. But a spokesman for Mr. Barrack said that Mr. Manafort had canceled at the last minute for scheduling reasons.

Regardless, Mr. Barrack’s advocacy apparently proved effective. The day after the meeting was scheduled, Mr. Barrack forwarded to the ambassador a message from Mr. Manafort with a “clarification” that modulated Mr. Trump’s call for a Muslim ban.

A few weeks later, on July 13, Mr. Barrack informed Ambassador Otaiba that the Trump team had also removed a proposed Republican platform provision inserted to “embarrass” Saudi Arabia. The provision had called for the release of redacted pages about the kingdom in a report on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

When Mr. Trump won in November, Ambassador Otaiba was eager to pull Mr. Barrack even closer. “We have a lot of things that we will have to do together. Together being the operative word,” he wrote in a note congratulating Mr. Barrack on Mr. Trump’s upset victory.

“Let’s do them together,” Mr. Barrack responded.

Later, Mr. Barrack attended a dinner party at Ambassador Otaiba’s home with other Arab ambassadors and former American officials (the chef was from the world-renowned Inn at Little Washington). Mr. Barrack offered to make introductions in the new administration. “Tell me who is high on your hit list.”

“Thanks to you, I’m in consistent contact with Jared and that has been extremely helpful, for both sides I think,” Ambassador Otaiba wrote Mr. Barrack.

They celebrated again in May 2017, when Mr. Trump made his first foreign trip as president, to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia for an Arab summit meeting.

“It all started with you and JK and I so congratulations on a great beginning,” Mr. Barrack wrote to Ambassador Otaiba, referring to Mr. Kushner by his initials.

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Paul Manafort, center, who became chairman of the Trump campaign after a recommendation from Mr. Barrack, has pleaded not guilty to charges of financial fraud and lying to federal investigators.CreditAl Drago for The New York Times

Things Go Sour — But Not For Barrack

Two weeks after the Riyadh meeting, Mr. Trump began to align himself firmly with the Saudis and Emiratis against their rivals around the region. When those two states imposed an embargo on their neighbor Qatar — home to a major United States air base — Mr. Trump broke with his own administration to throw his weight squarely behind the Saudis and Emiratis.

He quickly congratulated Prince Mohammed when he assumed the title of crown prince — and commended him again when he summarily detained about 200 businessmen and rivals in a consolidation of his power. This spring, Mr. Trump handed the Saudis and Emiratis an even greater victory by pulling out of the nuclear deal with their nemesis, Iran. In turn, the gulf monarchs have made only pro forma protests against Mr. Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Yet many of the connections facilitated by Mr. Barrack have brought liabilities, too.

The linkages between Mr. Trump and the Saudis and Emiratis have come under new scrutiny. A few months after Mr. Barrack arranged the initial introductions, George Nader, a Lebanese American businessman and a top adviser to the de facto ruler of the U.A.E., met with the candidate’s son Donald Trump Jr. at the Trump headquarters in New York. In that Aug. 3, 2016, meeting, Mr. Nader reported that the rulers of both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates supported the Trump campaign and offered their assistance, according to people familiar with the discussion.

Such help would have violated campaign laws, and Mr. Nader is now cooperating with the special prosecutor, who is examining that meeting as well as a string of others that followed, according to people familiar the matter.

Mr. Manafort has pleaded not guilty to charges of financial fraud and lying to federal investigators in connection with his work for Russian-backed interests in Ukraine. Mr. Gates, whom Mr. Barrack hired to help run the inauguration and then as a Washington consultant, has pleaded guilty to making false statements to investigators and agreed to cooperate with the special prosecutor.

Mr. Kushner has also given testimony to the special prosecutor.

But Mr. Barrack’s business is still going strong,in part as a result of his continuing relations with the Saudis and Emiratis. When his company was looking for partners in its $400 million purchase last year of a landmark Los Angeles office tower, One California Plaza, it sold a $70 million stake to an Israeli insurance company. Another $70 million stake went to a state investment company controlled by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, according to a person familiar with the deal.

What is more, Mr. Barrack may profit more directly than ordinary shareholders or executives from the investments he helps bring in, because in some cases, according to Colony NorthStar filings, he earns the extra fees known as carried interest on profits from funds he raised — as if he were a partner in a private equity firm rather than merely a chairman of a publicly traded company.

Friends of Mr. Barrack argue that his long history of business in the Persian Gulf shows that the investments are unrelated to any White House connections.

Yet one thing has shifted.

Until recently, Mr. Barrack’s most prominent gulf customers were neither the Emiratis nor the Saudis — but their bitter rivals the Qataris, who bought the film studio Miramax and a Paris soccer team from him, among other marquee properties. During the campaign, Mr. Barrack reached out to the Qataris as well, helping set up a meeting between Mr. Trump and the emir of Qatar in Trump Tower in September 2016.

“Tom wanted Qatar to know he arranged it,” said a person involved in meeting, “and he wanted Trump to know he arranged it.”

But Mr. Trump’s stance on the dispute with Qatar appears to have cast a shadow over Mr. Barrack’s business there: None of the gulf investments that Mr. Barrack’s company has brought in since Mr. Trump’s nomination have come from Qatar.

“We still consider Tom a friend and partner,” said a senior Qatari official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering the White House. “But with all the recent things that have happened we have suspicions about the level of his involvement in this crisis.”

Ben Protess, Maggie Haberman and Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Arab Princes Embrace Trump, Set Up by Tycoon Matchmaker. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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https://www.ecowatch.com/syria-another-pipeline-war-1882180532.html

Syria: Another Pipeline War

The fossil fuel industry's business model is to externalize its costs by clawing in obscene subsidies and tax deductions—causing grave environmental costs, including toxic pollution and global warming. Among the other unassessed prices of the world's addiction to oil are social chaos, war, terror, the refugee crisis overseas, and the loss of democracy and civil rights abroad and at home.

As we focus on the rise of ISIS and search for the source of the savagery that took so many innocent lives in Paris and San Bernardino, we might want to look beyond the convenient explanations of religion and ideology and focus on the more complex rationales of history and oil, which mostly point the finger of blame for terrorism back at the champions of militarism, imperialism and petroleum here on our own shores.

America's unsavory record of violent interventions in Syria—obscure to the American people yet well known to Syrians—sowed fertile ground for the violent Islamic Jihadism that now complicates any effective response by our government to address the challenge of ISIS. So long as the American public and policymakers are unaware of this past, further interventions are likely to only compound the crisis. Moreover, our enemies delight in our ignorance.

As the New York Times reported in a Dec. 8, 2015 front page story, ISIS political leaders and strategic planners are working to provoke an American military intervention which, they know from experience, will flood their ranks with volunteer fighters, drown the voices of moderation and unify the Islamic world against America.

To understand this dynamic, we need to look at history from the Syrians' perspective and particularly the seeds of the current conflict. Long before our 2003 occupation of Iraq triggered the Sunni uprising that has now morphed into the Islamic State, the CIA had nurtured violent Jihadism as a Cold War weapon and freighted U.S./Syrian relationships with toxic baggage.

During the 1950's, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers rebuffed Soviet treaty proposals to leave the Middle East a cold war neutral zone and let Arabs rule Arabia. Instead, they mounted a clandestine war against Arab Nationalism—which CIA Director Allan Dulles equated with communism—particularly when Arab self-rule threatened oil concessions. They pumped secret American military aid to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon favoring puppets with conservative Jihadist ideologies which they regarded as a reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism. At a White House meeting between the CIA's Director of Plans, Frank Wisner, and Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, in September of 1957, Eisenhower advised the agency, “We should do everything possible to stress the 'holy war' aspect."

Syria: Another Pipeline War

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Following several counter coups in the newly destabilized country, the Syrian people again tried democracy in 1955, re-electing al-Kuwaiti and his Ba'ath Party. Al-Kuwaiti was still a Cold War neutralist but, stung by American involvement in his ouster, he now leaned toward the Soviet camp. That posture caused Dulles to declare that “Syria is ripe for a coup" and send his two coup wizards, Kim Roosevelt and Rocky Stone to Damascus.

Two years earlier, Roosevelt and Stone had orchestrated a coup in Iran against the democratically elected President Mohammed Mosaddegh after Mosaddegh tried to renegotiate the terms of Iran's lopsided contracts with the oil giant BP. Mosaddegh was the first elected leader in Iran's 4,000 year history, and a popular champion for democracy across the developing world. Mosaddegh expelled all British diplomats after uncovering a coup attempt by UK intelligence officers working in cahoots with BP.

Mosaddegh, however, made the fatal mistake of resisting his advisors' pleas to also expel the CIA, which they correctly suspected, and was complicit in the British plot. Mosaddegh idealized the U.S. as a role model for Iran's new democracy and incapable of such perfidies. Despite Dulles' needling, President Truman had forbidden the CIA from actively joining the British caper to topple Mosaddegh.

When Eisenhower took office in January 1953, he immediately unleashed Dulles. After ousting Mosaddegh in “Operation Ajax," Stone and Roosevelt installed Shah Reza Pahlavi, who favored U.S. oil companies, but whose two decades of CIA sponsored savagery toward his own people from the Peacock throne would finally ignite the 1979 Islamic revolution that has bedeviled our foreign policy for 35 years.

Flush from his Operation Ajax “success" in Iran, Stone arrived in Damascus in April 1956 with $3 million in Syrian pounds to arm and incite Islamic militants and to bribe Syrian military officers and politicians to overthrow al-Kuwaiti's democratically elected secularist regime. Working with the Muslim Brotherhood, Stone schemed to assassinate Syria's Chief of Intelligence, its Chief of the General Staff and the Chief of the Communist Party and to engineer “national conspiracies and various strong arm" provocations in Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan that could be blamed on the Syrian Ba'athists.

The CIA's plan was to destabilize the Syrian government, and create a pretext for an invasion by Iraq and Jordan, whose governments were already under CIA control. Roosevelt forecasted that the CIA's newly installed puppet government would “rely first upon repressive measures and arbitrary exercise of power."

But all that CIA money failed to corrupt the Syrian military officers. The soldiers reported the CIA's bribery attempts to the Ba'athist regime. In response, the Syrian army invaded the American Embassy taking Stone prisoner. Following harsh interrogation, Stone made a televised confession to his roles in the Iranian coup and the CIA's aborted attempt to overthrow Syria's legitimate government.

The Syrian's ejected Stone and two U.S. Embassy staffers—the first time any American State Department diplomat was barred from an Arab country. The Eisenhower White House hollowly dismissed Stone's confession as “fabrications and slanders," a denial swallowed whole by the American press, led by the New York Times and believed by the American people, who shared Mosaddegh's idealistic view of their government.

Syria purged all politicians sympathetic to the U.S. and executed them for treason. In retaliation, the U.S. moved the Sixth Fleet to the Mediterranean, threatened war and goaded Turkey to invade Syria. The Turks assembled 50,000 troops on Syria's borders and only backed down in the face of unified opposition from the Arab League whose leaders were furious at the U.S. intervention.

Even after its expulsion, the CIA continued its secret efforts to topple Syria's democratically elected Ba'athist government. The CIA plotted with Britain's MI6 to form a “Free Syria Committee" and armed the Muslim Brotherhood to assassinate three Syrian government officials, who had helped expose “the American plot." (Matthew Jones in The 'Preferred Plan': The Anglo-American Working Group Report on Covert Action in Syria, 1957). The CIA's mischief pushed Syria even further away from the U.S. and into prolonged alliances with Russia and Egypt.

Following the second Syrian coup attempt, anti-American riots rocked the Mid-East from Lebanon to Algeria. Among the reverberations was the July 14, 1958 coup, led by the new wave of anti-American Army officers who overthrew Iraq's pro-American monarch, Nuri al-Said. The coup leaders published secret government documents, exposing Nuri al-Said as a highly paid CIA puppet. In response to American treachery, the new Iraqi government invited Soviet diplomats and economic advisers to Iraq and turned its back on the West.

Journalists in Syria today are regularly threatened and harassed when they attempt to uncover the government's decades-long repression— which is a far cry from those scribes who have reported on the glamorous lifestyle and open accessibility of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and his family in recent years. And therein lies the impact of government-affiliated public relations — with the help of high-priced PR advisers who had worked in the Clinton, Bush and Thatcher administrations, Assad and his family have sought to portray themselves in the Western media as accessible, progressive and even glamorous, the NY Times reports.

Preferential treatment of world leaders in the media is nothing new, but the Assads have been especially determined to burnish their image — and have hired experts to do so. Lifestyle magazines and online outlets have published feel-good features about Assad and his wife Asma, often focusing on their glamorous lives. For example, in March of 2011 — just as Assad and his security forces initiated a brutal crackdown on political opponents that has led to the death of an estimated 10,000 Syrians — Vogue magazine ran a flattering profile of the first lady, describing her as walking "a determined swath cut through space with a flash of red soles," a reference to her Christian Louboutin heels. The Assad family paid the DC-based PR firm Brown Lloyd James $5,000 a month to act as a liaison between Vogue and the first lady, according to the firm. The Assads were in many ways ripe for celebrity treatment by the news media — the president, a trained ophthalmologist, received part of his education in Britain, where he met his wife, a Briton of Syrian descent who grew up in London and worked as an investment banker in New York. The campaign to make the ruling family the face of a more Westernized and open Syria began in 2006, when Mrs. Assad approached the PR firm Bell Pottinger in London. Tim Bell, a co-founder of the firm and a former media adviser to Margaret Thatcher, said Mrs. Assad contacted the firm after several first ladies, including Laura Bush, began to hold annual meetings and conferences. "She wanted to be a part of that club," Bell told the Times.

Having alienated Iraq and Syria, Kim Roosevelt fled the Mid-East to work as an executive for the oil industry that he had served so well during his public service career. Roosevelt's replacement, as CIA Station Chief, James Critchfield attempted a failed assassination plot against the new Iraqi president using a toxic handkerchief. Five years later the CIA finally succeeded in deposing the Iraqi president and installing the Ba'ath Party to power in Iraq.

A charismatic young murderer named Saddam Hussein was one of the distinguished leaders of the CIA's Ba'athists team. The Ba'ath Party's Interior Minister, Said Aburish, who took office alongside Saddam Hussein, would later say, “We came to power on a CIA train." Aburish recounted that the CIA supplied Saddam and his cronies a “murder list" ...CIA supplied Hussein with billions of dollars in training, Special Forces support, and weapons and battlefield intelligence knowing that he was using poisonous mustard and nerve gas and biological weapons—including anthrax obtained from the U.S. government—in his war against Iran.

Reagan and his CIA Director, Bill Casey, regarded Saddam as a potential friend to the U.S. oil industry and a sturdy barrier against the spread of Iran's Islamic Revolution. Their emissary, Donald Rumsfeld, presented Saddam with a pair of pearl-handled revolvers and a menu of chemical/biological and conventional weapons on a 1983 trip to Bagdad. At the same time, the CIA was illegally supplying Saddam's enemy—Iran—with thousands of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to fight Iraq, a crime made famous during the Iran Contra scandal. Jihadists from both sides later turned many of those CIA supplied weapons against the American people.

Even as America contemplates yet another violent Mid-East intervention, most Americans are unaware of the many ways that “blowback" from previous CIA blunders has helped craft the current crisis. The reverberations from decades of CIA shenanigans continue to echo across the Mid-East today in national capitals and from mosques to madras schools over the wrecked landscape of democracy and moderate Islam that the CIA helped obliterate.

In July 1956, less than two months after the CIA's failed Syrian Coup, my uncle,Senator John F. Kennedy, infuriated the Eisenhower White House, the leaders of both political parties and our European allies with a milestone speech endorsing the right of self-governance in the Arab world and an end to America's imperialist meddling in Arab countries. Throughout my lifetime, and particularly during my frequent travels to the Mid-East, countless Arabs have fondly recalled that speech to me as the clearest statement of the idealism they expected from the U.S. Kennedy's speech was a call for recommitting America to the high values our country had championed in the Atlantic Charter, the formal pledge that all the former European colonies would have the right to self-determination following World War II. FDR had strong-armed Churchill and the other allied leaders to sign the Atlantic Charter in 1941 as a precondition for U.S. support in the European war against fascism.

Thanks in large part to Allan Dulles and the CIA, whose foreign policy intrigues were often directly at odds with the stated policies of our nation, the idealistic path outlined in the Atlantic Charter was the road not taken. In 1957, my grandfather, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, sat on a secret committee charged with investigating CIA's clandestine mischief in the Mid-East. The so called “Bruce Lovett Report," to which he was a signatory, described CIA coup plots in Jordan, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Egypt, all common knowledge on the Arab street, but virtually unknown to the American people who believed, at face value, their government's denials.

The report blamed the CIA for the rampant anti-Americanism that was then mysteriously taking root “in the many countries in the world today." The Bruce Lovett Report pointed out that such interventions were antithetical to American values and had compromised America's international leadership and moral authority without the knowledge of the American people. The report points out that the CIA never considered how we would treat such interventions if some foreign government engineered them in our country. This is the bloody history that modern interventionists like George W. Bush, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio miss when they recite their narcissistic trope that Mid-East nationalists “hate us for our freedoms."

The Syrian and Iranian coups soiled America's reputation across the Mid-East and ploughed the fields of Islamic Jihadism which we have, ironically, purposefully nurtured. A parade of Iranian and Syrian dictators, including Bashar al-Assad and his father, have invoked the history of the CIA's bloody coups as a pretext for their authoritarian rule, repressive tactics and their need for a strong Russian alliance. These stories are therefore well known to the people of Syria and Iran who naturally interpret talk of U.S. intervention in the context of that history.

While the compliant American press parrots the narrative that our military support for the Syrian insurgency is purely humanitarian, many Syrians see the present crisis as just another proxy war over pipelines and geopolitics. Before rushing deeper into the conflagration, it would be wise for us to consider the abundant facts supporting that perspective.

A Pipeline War

In their view, our war against Bashar Assad did not begin with the peaceful civil protests of the Arab Spring in 2011. Instead it began in 2000 when Qatar proposed to construct a $10 billion, 1,500km pipeline through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey.

Note the purple line which traces the proposed Qatar-Turkey natural gas pipeline and note that all of the countries highlighted in red are part of a new coalition hastily put together after Turkey finally (in exchange for NATO's acquiescence on Erdogan's politically-motivated war with the PKK) agreed to allow the US to fly combat missions against ISIS targets from Incirlik. Now note which country along the purple line is not highlighted in red. That's because Bashar al-Assad didn't support the pipeline and now we're seeing what happens when you're a Mid-East strongman and you decide not to support something the US and Saudi Arabia want to get done.)

Qatar shares with Iran, the South Pars/North Dome gas field, the world's richest natural gas repository. The international trade embargo, until recently, prohibited Iran from selling gas abroad and ensured that Qatar's gas could only reach European markets if it is liquefied and shipped by sea, a route that restricts volume and dramatically raises costs.

The proposed pipeline would have linked Qatar directly to European energy markets via distribution terminals in Turkey which would pocket rich transit fees. The Qatar/Turkey pipeline would have given the Sunni Kingdoms of the Persian Gulf decisive domination of world natural gas markets and strengthen Qatar, America's closest ally in the Arab world. Qatar hosts two massive American military bases and the U.S. Central Command's Mid-East headquarters.

The EU, which gets 30 percent of its gas from Russia, was equally hungry for the pipeline which would have given its members cheap energy and relief from Vladimir Putin's stifling economic and political leverage. Turkey, Russia's second largest gas customer, was particularly anxious to end its reliance on its ancient rival and to position itself as the lucrative transect hub for Asian fuels to EU markets. The Qatari pipeline would have benefited Saudi Arabia's conservative Sunni Monarchy by giving them a foothold in Shia dominated Syria.

The Saudi's geopolitical goal is to contain the economic and political power of the Kingdom's principal rival, Iran, a Shiite state, and close ally of Bashar Assad. The Saudi monarchy viewed the U.S. sponsored Shia takeover in Iraq as a demotion to its regional power and was already engaged in a proxy war against Tehran in Yemen, highlighted by the Saudi genocide against the Iranian backed Houthi tribe.

Of course, the Russians, who sell 70 percent of their gas exports to Europe, viewed the Qatar/Turkey pipeline as an existential threat. In Putin's view, the Qatar pipeline is a NATO plot to change the status quo, deprive Russia of its only foothold in the Middle East, strangle the Russian economy and end Russian leverage in the European energy market. In 2009, Assad announced that he would refuse to sign the agreement to allow the pipeline to run through Syria “to protect the interests of our Russian ally."

Assad further enraged the Gulf's Sunni monarchs by endorsing a Russian approved “Islamic pipeline" running from Iran's side of the gas field through Syria and to the ports of Lebanon. The Islamic pipeline would make Shia Iran instead of Sunni Qatar, the principal supplier to the European energy market and dramatically increase Tehran's influence in the Mid-East and the world. Israel also was understandably determined to derail the Islamic pipeline which would enrich Iran and Syria and presumably strengthen their proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas.

Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link. In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria.

Bashar Assad's family is Alawite, a Muslim sect widely perceived as aligned with the Shia camp. “Bashar Assad was never supposed to be president," says journalist Sy Hersh. “His father brought him back from medical school in London when his elder brother, the heir apparent, was killed in a car crash."

Before the war started, according to Hersh, Assad was moving to liberalize the country—“They had internet and newspapers and ATM machines and Assad wanted to move toward the west. After 9/11, he gave thousands of invaluable files to the CIA on Jihadist radicals, who he considered a mutual enemy."

Assad's regime was deliberately secular and Syria was impressively diverse. The Syrian government and military, for example, were 80 percent Sunni. Assad maintained peace among his diverse peoples by a strong disciplined army loyal to the Assad family, an allegiance secured by a nationally esteemed and highly paid officer corps, a coldly efficient intelligence apparatus and a penchant for brutality which, prior to the war, was rather moderate compared to other Mideast leaders, including our current allies.

According to Hersh, “He certainly wasn't beheading people every Wednesday like the Saudis do in Mecca." Another veteran journalist, Bob Parry, echoes that assessment. “No one in the region has clean hands but in the realms of torture, mass killings, civil liberties and supporting terrorism, Assad is much better than the Saudis."

No one believed that the regime was vulnerable to the anarchy that had riven Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Tunisia. By the spring of 2011, there were small, peaceful demonstrations in Damascus against repression by Assad's regime. These were mainly the effluvia of the Arab Spring which spread virally across the Arab League states the previous summer. However, Huffington Post UK reported that in Syria the protests were, at least in part, orchestrated by the CIA. WikiLeaks cables indicate that the CIA was already on the ground in Syria.

But the Sunni Kingdoms wanted a much deeper involvement from America. On Sept. 4, 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry told a congressional hearing that the Sunni kingdoms had offered to foot the bill for a US. invasion of Syria to oust Bashar al-Assad. “In fact, some of them have said that if the United States is prepared to go do the whole thing, the way we've done it previously in other places [Iraq], they'll carry the cost," he stated. Kerry reiterated the offer to Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL27): “With respect to Arab countries offering to bear the costs of [an American invasion] to topple Assad, the answer is profoundly Yes, they have. The offer is on the table."

Despite pressure from Republicans, Barrack Obama balked at hiring out young Americans to die as mercenaries for a pipeline conglomerate. Obama wisely ignored Republican clamoring to put ground troops in Syria or to funnel more funding to “moderate insurgents." But by late 2011, Republican pressure and our Sunni allies had pushed the American government into the fray.

In 2011, the U.S. joined France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and England to form the “Friends of Syria Coalition," which formally demanded the removal of Assad. The CIA provided $6 million to Barada, a British T.V. channel, to produce pieces entreating Assad's ouster. Saudi intelligence documents, published by WikiLeaks, show that by 2012, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia were arming, training and funding radical Jihadist Sunni fighters from Syria, Iraq and elsewhere to overthrow the Assad's Shia allied regime. Qatar, which had the most to gain, invested $3 billion in building the insurgency and invited the Pentagon to train insurgents at U.S. bases in Qatar. U.S. personnel also provided logistical support and intelligence to the rebels on the ground. The Times of London reported on Sept. 14, 2012, that the CIA also armed Jihadists with anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles and other weapons from Libyan armories that the agency smuggled by ratlines to Syria via Turkey. According to an April 2014 article by Seymour Hersh, the CIA weapons ratlines were financed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The idea of fomenting a Sunni-Shia civil war to weaken the Syrian and Iranian regimes so as to maintain control of the region's petro-chemical supplies was not a novel notion in the Pentagon's lexicon. A damning 2008 Pentagon funded Rand report proposed a precise blueprint for what was about to happen. That report observes that control of the Persian Gulf oil and gas deposits will remain, for the U.S., “a strategic priority" that “will interact strongly with that of prosecuting the long war."

Rand recommends using “covert action, information operations, unconventional warfare" to enforce a “divide and rule" strategy. “The United States and its local allies could use the nationalist jihadists to launch a proxy campaign" and “U.S. leaders could also choose to capitalize on the sustained Shia-Sunni conflict trajectory by taking the side of the conservative Sunni regimes against Shiite empowerment movements in the Muslim world ... possibly supporting authoritative Sunni governments against a continuingly hostile Iran."

WikiLeaks cables from as early as 2006 show the U.S. State Department, at the urging of the Israeli government, proposing to partner with Turkey, Qatar and Egypt to foment Sunni civil war in Syria to weaken Iran. The stated purpose, according to the secret cable, was to incite Assad into a brutal crackdown of Syria's Sunni population.

As predicted, Assad's overreaction to the foreign made crisis—dropping barrel bombs onto Sunni strongholds and killing civilians—polarized Syria's Shia/Sunni divide and allowed U.S. policymakers to sell Americans the idea that the pipeline struggle was a humanitarian war. When Sunni soldiers of the Syrian Army began defecting in 2013, the Western Coalition armed the “Free Syrian Army" to further destabilize Syria. The press portrait of the Free Syria Army as cohesive battalions of Syrian moderates was delusional. The dissolved units regrouped in hundreds of independent militias most of whom were commanded by or allied with Jihadi militants who were the most committed and effective fighters. By then, the Sunni armies of Al Qaeda Iraq (AQI) were crossing the border from Iraq into Syria and joining forces with the battalions of deserters from the Free Syria Army, many of them trained and armed by the U.S.

Despite the prevailing media portrait of a moderate Arab uprising against the tyrant Assad, U.S. Intelligence planners knew from the outset that their pipeline proxies were radical jihadists who would probably carve themselves a brand new Islamic caliphate from the Sunni regions of Syria and Iraq. Two years before ISIS throat cutters stepped on the world stage, a seven-page Aug. 12, 2012 study by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), obtained by the right wing group Judicial Watch, warned that thanks to the ongoing support by U.S./Sunni Coalition for radical Sunni Jihadists, “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI (now ISIS), are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria."

Using U.S. and Gulf State funding, these groups had turned the peaceful protests against Bashar Assad toward “a clear sectarian (Shiite vs Sunni) direction." The paper notes that the conflict had become a sectarian civil war supported by Sunni “religious and political powers." The report paints the Syrian conflict as a global war for control of the region's resources with “the west, Gulf countries and Turkey supporting [Assad's] opposition, while Russia, China and Iran support the regime."

The Pentagon authors of the seven-page report appear to endorse the predicted advent of the ISIS caliphate:

“If the situation continues unravelling, there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasakah and Deir ez-Zor) and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want in order to isolate the Syrian regime." The Pentagon report warns that this new principality could move across the Iraqi border to Mosul and Ramadi and “declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria."

Of course, this is precisely what has happened. Not coincidentally, the regions of Syria occupied by ISIS exactly encompass the proposed route of the Qatari pipeline.

But then in 2014, our Sunni proxies horrified the American people by severing heads and driving a million refugees toward Europe. “Strategies based upon the idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend can be kind of blinding," says Tim Clemente, who chaired the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force between 2004 and 2008 and served as liaison in Iraq between the FBI, the Iraqi National Police and the U.S. Military. “We made the same mistake when we trained the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan. The moment the Russians left, our supposed friends started smashing antiquities, enslaving women, severing body parts and shooting at us."

When ISIS' “Jihadi John" began murdering prisoners on TV, the White House pivoted, talking less about deposing Assad and more about regional stability. The Obama Administration began putting daylight between itself and the insurgency we had funded. The White House pointed accusing fingers at our allies. On Oct. 3, 2014, Vice President Joe Biden told students at the John F. Kennedy, Jr. forum at the Institute of Politics at Harvard that “Our allies in the region are our biggest problem in Syria." He explained that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were “so determined to take down Assad" that they had launched a “proxy Sunni-Shia war" funneling “hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons to Jihadists of the al-Nusra front and al-Qaeda"—the two groups that merged in 2014 to form ISIS.

Biden seemed angered that our trusted “friends" could not be trusted to follow the American agenda. “ISI[S] is a direct outgrowth of al-Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion," declared Obama, disassociating himself from the Sunni rebellion, “which is an example of unintended consequences which is why we should generally aim before we shoot." As if to demonstrate their contempt for America's new found restraint, our putative allies, the Turks responded to the U.S. rebukes by shooting down a plane belonging to our other putative ally, the Russians—probably to spoil a potential deal between Russia and the U.S. that would leave Assad in power.

Across the Mid-East, Arab leaders routinely accuse the U.S. of having created ISIS. To most Americans immersed in U.S. media perspective, such accusations seem insane. However, to many Arabs, the evidence of U.S. involvement is so abundant that they conclude that our role in fostering ISIS must have been deliberate. On Sept. 22, 2014, according to the New York Times, Iraqi leader, Shiite Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, told Baghdad demonstrators that “the CIA created ISIS." Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister, Bahaa Al-Araji, echoed al-Sadr's accusation. “We know who made Daesh," Iraq's Treasury Secretary, Haidar al-Assadi, told the Digital News Aggregate, “The Islamic State is a clear creation of the United States, and the United States is trying to intervene again using the excuse of the Islamic State."

In fact, many of the ISIS fighters and their commanders are ideological and organizational successors to the Jihadists that the CIA has been nurturing for 30 years. The CIA began arming and training the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan in 1979 to fight the Soviets. Following the Soviet withdrawal, the CIA's Afghan Mujahedeen became the Taliban while its foreign fighters, including Osama bin Laden, formed Al-Qaeda. In 2004, then British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that Al-Qaeda took its name—meaning “database" in Arabic—from the voluminous CIA database of Jihadists—Mujahedeen foreign fighters and arms smugglers trained and equipped by the CIA during the Afghan conflict.

Prior to the American invasion, there was no Al-Qaeda in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Bush destroyed Saddam's secularist government and his viceroy, Paul Bremer, in a monumental act of mismanagement, effectively created the Sunni Army, now named ISIS. Bremer elevated the Shiites to power and banned Saddam's ruling Ba'ath Party laying off some 700,000, mostly Sunni, government and party officials from ministers to school teachers. He then disbanded the 380,000 man army, which was 80 percent Sunni.

Bremer's actions stripped a million of Iraq's Sunnis of rank, property, wealth and power; leaving a desperate underclass of angry, educated, capable, trained and heavily armed Sunnis with little left to lose. General Petraeus' decision to import dirty war tactics, including torture and death squads, from the CIA's El Salvador conflict in order to shock and awe the Sunni resistance, instead ignited a shockingly bloody spiral of sectarian violence that devolved quickly into escalating atrocities topped finally by the Sunni Army signature head cutting. The Sunni insurgency named itself Al-Qaeda Iraq (AQI).

Tim Clemente told me that the incomprehensible difference between the Iraq and Syria conflicts are the millions of military aged men who are fleeing the battlefield for Europe rather than staying to fight for their communities. “You have this formidable fighting force and they are all running away. I don't understand how you can have millions of military aged men running away from the battlefield. In Iraq, the bravery was heartbreaking—I had friends who refused to leave the country even though they knew they would die. They'd just tell you it's my country, I need to stay and fight," Clemente said.

The obvious explanation is that the nation's moderates are fleeing a war that is not their war. They simply want to escape being crushed between the anvil of Assad's Russian backed tyranny and the vicious Jihadi Sunni hammer that we had a hand in wielding in a global battle over competing pipelines. You can't blame the Syrian people for not widely embracing a blueprint for their nation minted in either Washington or Moscow. The super powers have left no options for an idealistic future that moderate Syrians might consider fighting for. And no one wants to die for a pipeline.

What is the answer? If our objective is long-term peace in the Mid-East, self-government by the Arab nations and national security at home, we must undertake any new intervention in the region with an eye on history and an intense desire to learn its lessons. Only when we Americans understand the historical and political context of this conflict will we apply appropriate scrutiny to the decisions of our leaders.

It's the only paradigm that explains why the GOP on Capitol Hill and the Obama administration are still fixated on regime change rather than regional stability, why the Obama administration can find no Syrian moderates to fight the war, why ISIS blew up a Russian passenger plane, why the Saudi's just executed a powerful Shia cleric only to have their embassy burned in Tehran, why Russia is bombing non-ISIS fighters and why Turkey went out of its way to down a Russian jet. The million refugees now flooding into Europe are refugees of a pipeline war and CIA blundering.

Clemente compares ISIS to Colombia's FARC—a drug cartel with a revolutionary ideology to inspire its foot soldiers.“You have to think of ISIS as an oil cartel," Clemente said. “In the end, money is the governing rationale. The religious ideology is a tool that inspires its soldiers to give their lives for an oil cartel."

Once we strip this conflict of its humanitarian patina and recognize the Syrian conflict as an oil war, our foreign policy strategy becomes clear. Instead, our first priority should be the one no one ever mentions—we need to kick our Mid-East oil jones, an increasingly feasible objective, as the U.S. becomes more energy independent. Next, we need to dramatically reduce our military profile in the Middle East and let the Arabs run Arabia. Other than humanitarian assistance and guaranteeing the security of Israel's borders, the U.S. has no legitimate role in this conflict. While the facts prove that we played a role in creating the crisis, history shows that we have little power to resolve it.

As we contemplate history, it's breathtaking to consider the astonishing consistency with which virtually every violent intervention in the Middle East since World War II by our country has resulted in miserable failure. The long list of CIA and military adventures has each cost us dearly in national treasure, in liberty at home, in our moral authority abroad and in our national security. Without any memorable exception, every violent intervention has resulted in a catastrophic blowback far more costly to our country than any problems the authors meddling intended to solve. Our mischief has neither improved life in the Middle East nor has it made America safer.

A 1997 U.S. Department of Defense report found that “the data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement abroad and an increase in terrorist attacks against the U.S." Let's face it, what we call the “war on terror" is really just another oil war. We've squandered $6 trillion on three wars abroad and on constructing a national security warfare state at home since oilman Cheney declared the “Long War" in 2001. The only winners have been the military contractors and oil companies who have pocketed historic profits. We have compromised our values, butchered our own youth, killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, subverted our idealism and squandered our national treasures in fruitless and costly adventures abroad. In the process, we have turned America, once the world's beacon of freedom, into a national security surveillance state and an international moral pariah.

America's founding fathers warned Americans against standing armies, foreign entanglements and, in John Adams' words, “going abroad in search of monsters to destroy." Those wise men understood that imperialism abroad is incompatible with democracy and civil rights at home. They wanted America to be a “city on a hill"—a model of democracy for the rest of the world.

The Atlantic Charter echoed their seminal American ideal that each nation should have the right to self-determination. Over the past seven decades, the Dulles brothers, the Cheney Gang, the neocons and their ilk have hijacked that fundamental principle of American idealism and deployed our military and intelligence apparatus to serve the mercantile interests of large corporations and particularly, the petroleum companies and military contractors who have literally made a killing from these conflicts. It's time for Americans to turn America away from this new imperialism and back to the path of idealism and democracy. We should let the Arabs govern Arabia and turn our energies to the great endeavor of nation building at home. We need to begin this process, not by invading Syria, but by ending our ruinous addiction to oil.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/06/what-the-hell-is-happening-with-qatar.html

http://www.ecowatch.com/syria-another-pipeline-war-1882180532.html?

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Syria: Another Pipeline War

The fossil fuel industry's business model is to externalize its costs by clawing in obscene subsidies and tax deductions—causing grave environmental costs, including toxic pollution and global warming. Among the other unassessed prices of the world's addiction to oil are social chaos, war, terror, the refugee crisis overseas, and the loss of democracy and civil rights abroad and at home.

To understand this dynamic, we need to look at history from the Syrians' perspective and particularly the seeds of the current conflict. Long before our 2003 occupation of Iraq triggered the Sunni uprising that has now morphed into the Islamic State, the CIA had nurtured violent Jihadism as a Cold War weapon and freighted U.S./Syrian relationships with toxic baggage.

During the 1950's, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers rebuffed Soviet treaty proposals to leave the Middle East a cold war neutral zoneand let Arabs rule Arabia. Instead, they mounted a clandestine war against Arab Nationalism—which CIA Director Allan Dulles equated with communism—particularly when Arab self-rule threatened oil concessions. They pumped secret American military aid to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon favoring puppets with conservative Jihadist ideologies which they regarded as a reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism. At a White House meeting between the CIA's Director of Plans, Frank Wisner, and Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, in September of 1957, Eisenhower advised the agency, “We should do everything possible to stress the 'holy war' aspect."

The CIA began its active meddling in Syria in 1949—barely a year after the agency's creation. Syrian patriots had declared war on the Nazis, expelled their Vichy French colonial rulers and crafted a fragile secularist democracy based on the American model. But in March of 1949, Syria's democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Kuwaiti, hesitated to approve the Trans Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria. In his book, Legacy of Ashes, CIA historian Tim Weiner recounts that in retaliation, the CIA engineered a coup, replacing al-Kuwaiti, a convicted swindler named Husni al-Za'im. Al-Za'im barely had time to dissolve parliament and approve the American pipeline before his countrymen deposed him, 14 weeks into his regime.

Following several counter coups in the newly destabilized country, the Syrian people again tried democracy in 1955, re-electing al-Kuwaiti and his Ba'ath Party. Al-Kuwaiti was still a Cold War neutralist but, stung by American involvement in his ouster, he now leaned toward the Soviet camp. That posture caused Dulles to declare that “Syria is ripe for a coup" and send histwo coup wizards, Kim Rooseveltand Rocky Stone to Damascus.

Two years earlier,Roosevelt and Stone had orchestrated a coup in Iran against the democratically elected President Mohammed Mosaddeghafter Mosaddegh tried to renegotiate the terms of Iran's lopsided contracts with the oil giant, BP. Mosaddegh was the first elected leader in Iran's 4,000 year history, and a popular champion for democracy across the developing world. Mosaddegh expelled all British diplomats after uncovering a coup attempt by UK intelligence officers working in cahoots with BP.

Flush from his Operation Ajax “success" in Iran, Stone arrived in Damascus in April 1956 with $3 million in Syrian pounds to arm and incite Islamic militants and to bribe Syrian military officers and politicians to overthrow al-Kuwaiti's democratically elected secularist regime.Working with the Muslim Brotherhood, Stone schemed to assassinate Syria's Chief of Intelligence, its Chief of the General Staff and the Chief of the Communist Partyand to engineer “national conspiracies and various strong arm" provocations in Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan that could be blamed on the Syrian Ba'athists.

The CIA's plan was to destabilize the Syrian government, and create a pretext for an invasion by Iraq and Jordan, whose governments were already under CIA control.Roosevelt forecasted that the CIA's newly installed puppet government would “rely first upon repressive measures and arbitrary exercise of power."

Even after its expulsion, the CIA continued its secret efforts to topple Syria's democratically elected Ba'athist government. The CIA plotted with Britain's MI6 to form a “Free Syria Committee" and armed the Muslim Brotherhood to assassinate three Syrian government officials, who had helped expose “the American plot." (Matthew Jones in The 'Preferred Plan': The Anglo-American Working Group Report on Covert Action in Syria, 1957). The CIA's mischief pushed Syria even further away from the U.S. and into prolonged alliances with Russia and Egypt.

A charismatic young murderer named Saddam Hussein was one of the distinguished leaders of the CIA's Ba'athists team. The Ba'ath Party's Interior Minister, Said Aburish, who took office alongside Saddam Hussein, would later say, “We came to power on a CIA train." Aburish recounted that the CIA supplied Saddam and his cronies a “murder list" of people who “had to be eliminated immediately in order to ensure success."

Critchfield later acknowledged that the CIA had, in essence, “created Saddam Hussein." During the Reagan years, the CIA supplied Hussein with billions of dollars in training, Special Forces support, and weapons and battlefield intelligenceknowing that he was using poisonous mustard and nerve gas and biological weapons—including anthrax obtained from the U.S. government—in his war against Iran.

Reagan and his CIA Director, Bill Casey, regarded Saddam as a potential friend to the U.S. oil industry and a sturdy barrier against the spread of Iran's Islamic Revolution. Their emissary, DonaldRumsfeld, presented Saddam with a pair of pearl-handled revolvers and a menu of chemical/biological and conventional weapons on a 1983 trip to Bagdad. At the same time, the CIA was illegally supplying Saddam's enemy—Iran—with thousands of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to fight Iraq, a crime made famous during the Iran Contra scandal. Jihadists from both sides later turned many of those CIA supplied weapons against the American people.

In July 1956, less than two months after the CIA's failed Syrian Coup, my uncle, Senator John F. Kennedy, infuriated the Eisenhower White House, the leaders of both political parties and our European allies with a milestone speech endorsing the right of self-governance in the Arab world and an end to America's imperialist meddling in Arab countries. Throughout my lifetime, and particularly during my frequent travels to the Mid-East, countless Arabs have fondly recalled that speech to me as the clearest statement of the idealism they expected from the U.S.

Kennedy's speech was a call for recommitting America to the high values our country had championed in the Atlantic Charter, the formal pledge that all the former European colonies would have the right to self-determination following World War II. FDR had strong-armed Churchill and the other allied leaders to sign the Atlantic Charter in 1941 as a precondition for U.S. support in the European war against fascism.

Thanks in large part to Allan Dulles and the CIA, whose foreign policy intrigues were often directly at odds with the stated policies of our nation, the idealistic path outlined in the Atlantic Charter was the road not taken. In 1957, my grandfather, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, sat on a secret committee charged with investigating CIA's clandestine mischief in the Mid-East. The so called “Bruce Lovett Report," to which he was a signatory, described CIA coup plots in Jordan, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Egypt, all common knowledge on the Arab street, but virtually unknown to the American people who believed, at face value, their government's denials.

A Pipeline War

The Saudi's geopolitical goal is to contain the economic and political power of the Kingdom's principal rival, Iran, a Shiite state, and close ally of Bashar Assad.The Saudi monarchy viewed the U.S. sponsored Shia takeover in Iraq as a demotion to its regional power and was already engaged in a proxy war against Tehran in Yemen, highlighted by the Saudi genocide against the Iranian backed Houthi tribe.

Of course, the Russians, who sell 70 percent of their gas exports to Europe, viewed the Qatar/Turkey pipeline as an existential threat. In Putin's view, the Qatar pipeline is a NATO plot to change the status quo, deprive Russia of its only foothold in the Middle East, strangle the Russian economy and end Russian leverage in the European energy market. In 2009, Assad announced that he would refuse to sign the agreement to allow the pipeline to run through Syria “to protect the interests of our Russian ally."

Bashar Assad's family is Alawite, a Muslim sect widely perceived as aligned with the Shia camp. “Bashar Assad was never supposed to be president," says journalist Sy Hersh. “His father brought him back from medical school in London when his elder brother, the heir apparent, was killed in a car crash."

Before the war started, according to Hersh, Assad was moving to liberalize the country—“They had internet and newspapers and ATM machines and Assad wanted to move toward the west. After 9/11, he gave thousands of invaluable files to the CIA on Jihadist radicals, who he considered a mutual enemy."

No one believed that the regime was vulnerable to the anarchy that had riven Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Tunisia. By the spring of 2011, there were small, peaceful demonstrations in Damascus against repression by Assad's regime. These were mainly the effluvia of the Arab Spring which spread virally across the Arab League states the previous summer. However, Huffington Post UK reported that in Syria the protests were, at least in part, orchestrated by the CIA. WikiLeaks cables indicate that the CIA was already on the ground in Syria.

But the Sunni Kingdoms wanted a much deeper involvement from America. On Sept. 4, 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry told a congressional hearing that the Sunni kingdoms had offered to foot the bill for a US. invasion of Syria to oust Bashar al-Assad. “In fact, some of them have said that if the United States is prepared to go do the whole thing, the way we've done it previously in other places [Iraq], they'll carry the cost," he stated. Kerry reiterated the offer to Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL27): “With respect to Arab countries offering to bear the costs of [an American invasion] to topple Assad, the answer is profoundly Yes, they have. The offer is on the table."

As predicted, Assad's overreaction to the foreign made crisis—dropping barrel bombs onto Sunni strongholds and killing civilians—polarized Syria's Shia/Sunni divide and allowed U.S. policymakers to sell Americans the idea that the pipeline struggle was a humanitarian war. When Sunni soldiers of the Syrian Army began defecting in 2013, the Western Coalition armed the “Free Syrian Army"to further destabilize Syria. The press portrait of the Free Syria Army as cohesive battalions of Syrian moderates was delusional. The dissolved units regrouped in hundreds of independent militias most of whom were commanded by or allied with Jihadi militants who were the most committed and effective fighters. By then, the Sunni armies of Al Qaeda Iraq (AQI) were crossing the border from Iraq into Syria and joining forces with the battalions of deserters from the Free Syria Army, many of them trained and armed by the U.S.

The Pentagon authors of the seven-page report appear to endorse the predicted advent of the ISIS caliphate:

“If the situation continues unravelling, there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasakah and Deir ez-Zor) and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want in order to isolate the Syrian regime." The Pentagon report warns that this new principality could move across the Iraqi border to Mosul and Ramadi and “declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria."

Of course, this is precisely what has happened. Not coincidentally, the regions of Syria occupied by ISIS exactly encompass the proposed route of the Qatari pipeline.

But then in 2014, our Sunni proxies horrified the American people by severing heads and driving a million refugees toward Europe.“Strategies based upon the idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend can be kind of blinding,"says Tim Clemente, who chaired the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force between 2004 and 2008 and served as liaison in Iraq between the FBI, the Iraqi National Police and the U.S. Military. “We made the same mistake when we trained the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan. The moment the Russians left, our supposed friends started smashing antiquities, enslaving women, severing body parts and shooting at us."

Bremer's actions stripped a million of Iraq's Sunnis of rank, property, wealth and power; leaving a desperate underclass of angry, educated, capable, trained and heavily armed Sunnis with little left to lose. General Petraeus' decision to import dirty war tactics, including torture and death squads, from the CIA's El Salvador conflict in order to shock and awe the Sunni resistance, instead ignited a shockingly bloody spiral of sectarian violence that devolved quickly into escalating atrocitiestopped finally by the Sunni Army signature head cutting. The Sunni insurgency named itself Al-Qaeda Iraq (AQI).

Beginning in 2011, our allies funded the invasion by AQI fighters into Syria. In June 2014 having entered Syria, AQI changed its name to ISIS. According to the New Yorker, “ISIS is run by a council of former Iraqi Generals ... many are members of Saddam Hussein's secular Ba'ath Party, who converted to radical Islam in American prisons." The $500 million in U.S. military aid that Obama did send to Syria almost certainly ended up benefiting these militant Jihadists. On Sept. 16, 2015, incredulous senators from the Armed Services Committee listened to U.S. General Lloyd Austin, Commander of the U.S. Central Command, explain that the Pentagon had spent $500 million to train and arm “moderate" insurgents in Syria and had only “four or five reliable moderate fighters" to show instead of the promised 5,000. The remainder apparently deserted or defected to ISIS. Tim Clemente told me that the incomprehensible difference between the Iraq and Syria conflicts are the millions of military aged men who are fleeing the battlefield for Europe rather than staying to fight for their communities. “You have this formidable fighting force and they are all running away. I don't understand how you can have millions of military aged men running away from the battlefield. In Iraq, the bravery was heartbreaking—I had friends who refused to leave the country even though they knew they would die. They'd just tell you it's my country, I need to stay and fight," Clemente said.

What is the answer? If our objective is long-term peace in the Mid-East, self-government by the Arab nations and national security at home, we must undertake any new intervention in the region with an eye on history and an intense desire to learn its lessons. Only when we Americans understand the historical and political context of this conflict will we apply appropriate scrutiny to the decisions of our leaders.

Using the same imagery and language that supported our 2003 war against Saddam Hussein, our political leaders led Americans to believe that our Syrian intervention is an idealistic war against tyranny, terrorism and religious fanaticism. We tend to dismiss, as mere cynicism, the views of those Arabs who see the current crisis as a rerun of the same old plots about pipelines and geopolitics. But, if we are to have an effective foreign policy, we must recognize the Syrian conflict is a war over control of resources indistinguishable from the myriad clandestine and undeclared oil wars we have been fighting in the Mid-East for 65 years. And only when we see this conflict as a proxy war over a pipeline do events become comprehensible. It's the only paradigm that explains why the GOP on Capitol Hill and the Obama administration are still fixated on regime change rather than regional stability, why the Obama administration can find no Syrian moderates to fight the war, why ISIS blew up a Russian passenger plane, why the Saudi's just executed a powerful Shia cleric only to have their embassy burned in Tehran, why Russia is bombing non-ISIS fighters and why Turkey went out of its way to down a Russian jet. The million refugees now flooding into Europe are refugees of a pipeline war and CIA blundering.

Clemente compares ISIS to Colombia's FARC—a drug cartel with a revolutionary ideology to inspire its foot soldiers. “You have to think of ISIS as an oil cartel," Clemente said. “In the end, money is the governing rationale. The religious ideology is a tool that inspires its soldiers to give their lives for an oil cartel."

A 1997 U.S. Department of Defense report found that “the data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement abroad and an increase in terrorist attacks against the U.S." Let's face it, what we call the “war on terror" is really just another oil war. We've squandered $6 trillion on three wars abroad and on constructing a national security warfare state at home since oilman Cheney declared the “Long War" in 2001. The only winners have been the military contractors and oil companies who have pocketed historic profits. We have compromised our values, butchered our own youth, killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, subverted our idealism and squandered our national treasures in fruitless and costly adventures abroad. In the process, we have turned America, once the world's beacon of freedom, into a national security surveillance state and an international moral pariah.

The Atlantic Charter echoed their seminal American ideal that each nation should have the right to self-determination.Over the past seven decades, the Dulles brothers, the Cheney Gang, the neocons and their ilk have hijacked that fundamental principle of American idealism and deployed our military and intelligence apparatus to serve the mercantile interests of large corporationsand particularly, the petroleum companies and military contractors who have literally made a killing from these conflicts. It's time for Americans to turn America away from this new imperialism and back to the path of idealism and democracy. We should let the Arabs govern Arabia and turn our energies to the great endeavor of nation building at home. We need to begin this process, not by invading Syria, but by ending our ruinous addiction to oil.