Brief Primer on the Arabian Peninsula and Iran

To understand the war in Yemen and Saudi Arabia requires at least some knowledge of the history of that region, knowledge that I doubt is shared by very many people. Thus I am writing this piece to help plug those holes. I'm not going to write a long volume. I'm going to skip over a lot. But I will try to cover the essential knowledge that you need to understand recent and current events. I have been studying and writing about this region since the early 1970s when I became active in supporting a revolutionary movement in Oman, and I spent a week in February 1979 in a country which no longer exists, the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, around its capital of Aden.

The Arabian Peninsula is on a separate geological plate which pushed up against Europe and Asia. You can read more about it and its four regions, the Hijaz, the Najd, the Hadhramaut, and Eastern Arabia at this link wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabian_Peninsula  Suffice it to say that the Najd is a central plateau which is fertile and used mainly for grazing herd animals. There are some very large deserts, the Nefud, which borders on the Syrian desert, and the Empty Quarter in the south. Between them is the Dahna. The Hijaz on the western edge next to the Red Sea and the southern edge is mountainous. The highest mountains are as high as the Sierra and Rocky Mountains are are in Yemen. Most of the rainfall on the peninsula falls in the Hijaz, and, for that reason, most of the population has always lived there. This is one of the ancient coffee growing areas, and one of Yemen's ports is Mocha. If you have heard of the queen of Sheba (Saba), she ruled over the mountains of Yemen. On the east, near the Gulf, there are oases and marshes.

We know that when the human species first left Africa many tens of thousands of years ago, our ancestors crossed what is now the Red Sea, perhaps on a land bridge to the north, and spread in all directions. The Arabian Peninsula was probably one of the early places where they settled. The Hijaz played a very important role in the beginnings of Islam. Mecca and Medina are there, for example. In the time of the prophet Mohamed, his people were, in his view, very licentious with heavy drinking and polygamy. His movement reacted against those practices and eventually prevailed based on the book of his teachings, the Koran. Mohamed acknowledged that he borrowed a lot from Judaism and Christianity and taught his followers to respect the people of the book, as he called them. The origin of the Sunni/Shi'a split was also in the Hijaz. When Mohamed died, there was a dispute over who would become the new religious leader. The Shi'a followed Mohamed's nephew and son-in-law, Ali, who was the governor of Yemen. The Sunni chose other leaders. Yemen has always been predomimnantly Shi'a since then. Islam and the Arabic language spread mainly through conquest into north Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. Islam, but not Arabic, spread into Turkey. The same happened in Persia, now Iran, which is almost entirely Shi'a. Islam grew into a political as well as a religious system with a Caliphate ruled from Turkey. That became the Ottoman empire. The Ottoman empire, which was Sunni, controlled most of the Arabian Peninsula until the end of World War I with some important exceptions. The British colonized southern Yemen in 1728 and build a huge seaport and naval base in Aden. With Singapore and Gibraltar, it was one of their main bases. Of course, Islam spread into Europe as well, notably in Spain, Albania, and part of Bulgaria.

During World I, the British signed two treaties. One was public, the Hussein-McMahon treaty, by which Britain promised independence to the Arabs if they fought with them against Germany. The other was the secret Sykes-Picot treaty in which Britain and France decided to divide up the Arab countries according to where each of them had built railroad lines. When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, they found the Sykes-Picot treaty in the Czar's archives and published it. At first, the British and French denied it. After World War I, Britain took Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq while France took Lebanon and Syria. Starting in 1918 and until 1935, ibn Saud conquered what became Saudi Arabia and became its king. He was ruthless and slaughtered many men and took their women and herd animals. He also took the town of Najran at the foot on the mountains from Yemen. When he took Mecca, the traditional rulers, the Hashemites, were driven out and Britain gave them Jordan and Iraq as kingdoms.

The northern part of Yemen was ruled by a very backward Imam. Southern Yemen remained a British colony. To the east of Yemen along the coast is Oman. Oman had a huge shipping empire which reached down to Zanzibar and across the Indian Ocean. It was ruled by a sultan and divided between his two sons in 1854, one in what is now Oman and one in Zanzibar. British steamships eventually displayed Omani shipping. On the Gulf coast, there were numerous fairly democratic settlements which made their living by diving for pearls and by piracy. These settlements grew into Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and six smaller emirates. The British wanted to stop the piracy and used its military force to impose treaties. Those were called truces, and the six emirates were known as the Trucial States. In exchange for stopping piracy, the British promised to maintain those in rule at the time. The six emirates later merged into the United Arab Emirates. In Kuwait, as in Saudi Arabia and Iran, tremendous oil fields were discovered. Much later oil was also discovered in Oman and Yemen. The British controlled Iran and formed the Anglo-Iranian Petroleum Company to exploit its oil. The British government owned the company, and the profits went into the British treasury. The British were not interested in Saudi oil, and an American named William D'Arcy arrived in the 1930s and arranged deals between ibn Saud and three American oil companies. Another American oil company later got the franchise in Kuwait. The traditional ibn Saud had modest needs and was paid about $1 million a year to support his port.

During World War II, the Germans blockaded oil exports from the Gulf. The US government wanted to subsidize ibn Saud until oil revenues could resume, but they were too embarrassed to fund a monarch directly. So, they gave the money to Britain which gave it to him. Meanwhile, the British deposed the Shah in Iran because he was pro-German, and a democratic government emerged in Iran. In 1953, the progressive but not communist prime minister Mohamed Mossadegh was elected, and he nationalized Iran's oil. Britain did not have the military strength to prevent that so the British asked Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to help overthrow Mossadegh. Dulles' brother Allen, who was CIA director sent Kermit Roosevelt (grandson of Theodore) to Iran to organize a coup. Roosevelt hired thugs to riot against Mossadegh and cultivated ties with the Iranian military. His first attempt failed, and he was told to give up. He ignored those orders and made a second attempt, which succeeded. In place of the formerly democratic government, he installed the son of the Shah who had been deposed. He ruled with a very heavy hand until he was overthrown in 1979.

Also in 1953, ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia, died. His successor, one of his sons, decided to follow Mossadegh's example and announced that he was going to nationalize Saudi oil. Under pressure from the US government, his family had him deposed and installed a new king. In 1957, Omanis launched a revolution against the sultan on a mountain in the north of the country. Initially, those rebels had Saudi support because there was oil on the Saudi-Omani border. But in 1958, the King of Iraq was overthrown and replaced by a secular Ba'athist government. About a decade later, Saddam Hussein seized control of Iraq. The Saudis no longer wanted to support an anti-royalist movement in Oman, and that rebellion collapsed in 1959. In 1962, Yemeni military officers deposed the Imam and declared a republic. The Saudis gave support to the Imam's descendants, and Egyptian president Nasser supported the new republic. The Saud family was so unpopular in their own country that some Saudi air force pilots defected and flew their planes to Cairo. Indeed, the Sauds did not trust their own army and had to form another force to defend the royal family. A civil war was fought in northern Yemen until 1967 when Israel destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground. Meanwhile, in the south of Yemen, former oil workers and the Yemeni army revolted against the British and forced them to withdraw in 1967. At this point, the British had built a huge oil refinery in Aden in response to Mossadegh. Just as the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen got its independence, Israel closed the Suez Canal which cut into Yemeni port revenue and the British reneged on a $50 million grant they had pledged to give. The PDRY declared itself a socialist country and had strong ties to the USSR and China.

Another more leftist revolution started in southern Oman's mountains adjacent to south Yemen. The Shah of Iran sent troops to help the sultan defeat them.

In February 1979, the Shah was overthrown, and the Islamic Republic was declared. The two Yemens engaged in armed border conflicts but, eventually, they merged into one republic. The Saudis continued to interfere and dominate Yemen.

That is the background to the present conflict. Iran plays a very minor role in Yemen, and that is used by the Saudis as a pretext for their brutal attempt to reimpose their control over Yemen. There is no Iranian threat in the region, though Iran also has ties to Syria and to Hezbolleh, which is the Shi'a party in Lebanon. Yemenis are fighting against Saudi control, and the Saudis are bombing them to death with no regard for the massive human suffering this is causing. The US government has been aiding the Saudis with weapons, intelligence, and other forms of support and ignoring the reign of terror the Saudis have imposed on Yemen.

The Anti-Semitic Nature of Attempts to Outlaw BDS and Criticism of Israel in the USA

As a Jew, I have written on this subject before, but after watching the four-part Al Jazeera film on the pro-Israel lobby in the USA, censored under pressure by AIPAC because it exposes their abhorrent methods and objectives, I feel a need to go much deeper. Many Jews, and I am one, have never supported political Zionism or the claim that Israel is a "state of the Jewish people" and, therefore, our state just as many people of European descent never accepted slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation in the USA or apartheid in South Africa. I have blogged elsewhere (and Israeli history professor Shlomo Sand has published an entire book) on the easily disproven myth that there is such an entity as "The Jewish People." Jews are composed of many disparate groups, often with little in common. As a Jew, I lay claim to an absolute right to oppose political Zionism, which is a blatant form of anti-Semitism because it totally incorporates the position of European anti-Semites that Jews do not belong in the countries where they were born. Zionism is thus fundamentally anti-Jewish, and Israel is equally anti-Jewish because political Zionism is the root ideology of Israel. For any one to pass a law making it illegal to question the right of Israel to exist or to oppose Israeli apartheid is to try to deny me (and others) the right to fight back against this pernicious attack on us as Jews, especially when it comes from other Jews. All the same arguments affirm our right to speak out for Palestinian human, civil, and democratic rights in all of historic Palestine. And they affirm our right to participate in and promote the non-violent BDS movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism. I call out those behind these ridiculous attempts to redefine anti-Semitism to include criticism of political Zionism, Israel or our assertion that the right of any state to exist is conditional on its behavior, especially toward those it rules. Apartheid states have no right to exist. Therefore, I say unequivocally that AIPAC is anti-Semitic. The Canary Project is anti-Semitic. The many other organizations with the mission of spreading pro-Israel propaganda in the USA and of smearing activists for Palestinian rights are all anti-Semitic. They are the real hate groups, just as the Israeli government and army are the real terrorists. It is past time to set things right side up, and to stand for what is right.

Humans and Gods

I listened to an interview with Reza Aslan, his new book is entitled God a human history, on KPFA radio in Berkeley. I heard so many assertions that I consider to be unfounded that I was amazed that the interviewer, Brian Edwards-Tiechert didn't challenge them. Aslan argues, ineffectively in my opinion, that humans have an innate belief in a separation between the material and the spiritual, the body and the mind (brain) and thus an innate need to create gods. I am reminded of two books by Sigmund Freud on this subject. In the first book, The Future of an Illusion, Freud presents his hypothesis (one I share) that all forms of faith/religion are mental illnesses, neuroses or psychoses. The distinction is that belief in an illusion (something which cannot be proved) is a source of neurosis, whereas belief in a delusion (something which can be proved to be false) is a source of psychosis. In that book, Freud presents these ideas with elegant logic, and unlike some of his clinical work (interpretation of dreams, alleged female fantasy of parental rape), his ideas on faith and religion hold up well in my opinion.

In the second book, Civilization and Its Discontents, Dr. Freud discusses the many social problems, such as wars, which these mistaken beliefs can cause. However, I want to focus on the introduction. Freud says that friends of his said to him that they could appreciate his ideas in the first book, but what about the "oceanic feeling" that there is something greater than us in the universe. Freud's response was that he feels no such oceanic feeling and therefore it must be something which is planted in the human brain by society. That is where I think Aslan drops the ball, in my opinion. Are there false beliefs which go back far into human history? Of course there are. Many humans believed that the earth is flat and that the sun revolves around the earth. Indeed, you could be severely punished by the medieval Roman Catholic church if you questioned those views. We now know that both ideas are false and can be proven to be false.

Is the universe much more complex than we can perceive? Of course, it is. We see and hear, for example, in a fairly narrow range of frequencies. Other species have wider ranges of frequencies which they can perceive. We have invented devices to perceive way beyond the frequencies we can directly perceive. Add to that the strange architecture of our brains and their mechanisms of cognition and storage of information (for example, we use the same mechanisms to store and retrieve information, and we often overwrite older information). We also have half a dozen processes that operate in our brains and negotiate the thoughts which make up our consciousness. It is a miracle, of sorts, that we have learned and achieved as much as we have with such poorly constructed mental faculties. None of that, however, in any way means that there has to be a nonmaterial part of the universe, for which, by definition, there can be no evidence whatsoever. I reject the notion that there is a spiritual component of the universe precisely for that reason.

Aslan also makes other strange claims. He says that fundamentalism is only about a century old. Galileo would have questioned that, as would the many victims of the inquisition. So would the victims of the Crusades. He says that the predominance of nonreligious beliefs among millennials is a new phenomenon. Has he never heard that many of the founders of the USA were deists, which is precisely a belief in a supreme being without the trappings of religion. Of course, it is also possible that some of them were atheists since Deism was often used as a protective cover by atheists. Openly asserting atheism could be very dangerous to one's personal safety.

Modern cognitive research has revealed a number of innate capabilities in our brains. We are born with a fully formed visual cortex with the ability to interpret the photons that fall on our retinas. We are born with the ability to learn language; Noam Chomsky did pioneering work on that. We are not a blank slate. But the development of our brains is also profoundly influenced by our experiences. Through experience we form neural pathways. I would like to see any evidence which proves that the tendency to form irrational beliefs (faith, religion, flat earth) is innate in our human brains. Arslan speculates that such a tendency evolved either because of a direct advantage or because it is linked to another train which does give us an advantage, but he asserts that the tendency is there in every human. On that, I give the same answer as Freud. I was not born with that tendency and do not have that tendency. Therefore, it is much more likely something introduced socially, i.e., by the interaction with other humans. The tendency of religious social groups to demand belief and to punish disbelief
would have played no small role in propagating and maintaining nonrational beliefs.

In conclusion, I think what most offends me about Arslan is that he tries to lay a scientific basis for something which is precisely non-scientific. He uses the language of science but not the tools of scientific inquiry. Faith and religion have unquestionably played large roles in human history and society. They should, therefore, be studied, but they should not be elevated into something which they are not.

Who Is the Worst US President So Far?

I can hardly think of anything for which we can be grateful to Donald Trump; however, he has resolved the debate about who has been the worst US president in his own favor. I am not a historian, though I do know a lot about the histories of the Middle East, Africa, and other places. So, I tend to be better able to evaluate presidents I have seen in action while I have been alive. To be sure there were villainous 19th century presidents. Consider, for example, Andrew Jackson who led the genocide against Native Americans and set the stage for later US war crimes throughout the world. In the 20th century, consider the devout racism of Woodrow Wilson. Still, in looking for the lowest points, prior to Trump I saw Ronald Reagan as the worst president ever. He led a major downhill change in direction by the US government aided by his confusion of cinema with reality. Bill Clinton did awful things, but he should be viewed as an implementer of Reagan's terrible ideas. In the same way, Barack Obama continued many of the worst policies of George W. Bush, who was pretty awful but not nearly so awful as Reagan. Still, we have to thank Trump because the debate now is about who is the second worst president in US history.

On Inaccurate Language and Sloppy Thinking

Two of the most bitter debates underway in mid-2017 are over Syria and over the campaign against Russia. Many charges are thrown around loosely and without evidence. I'll give two examples. You are not an apologist for the Syrian government simply because your provide evidence that that government has been falsely accused of using chemical weapons. The Syrian government is a very repressive government, though it has a long secular history in a region which is far from secular. The enemies of the Syrian government include both an internal democratic opposition as well as foreign powers and salafist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS. The latter are doing most of the fighting against the Syrian government with aid from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, and Turkey. Seymour Hersh has written extensively on attempts by Turkey and Western intelligence agencies to pin fake charges on the Syrian government that it has used chemical weapons in the current war. Hersh's normal US outlets, such as the New Yorker, have declined to publish his work. To argue that Hersh is right is not to be an apologist for the Syrian government, which has enough documented crimes in its record without these bogus charges. Those charges are intended only to "justify" direct attacks by Western governments on the Syrian government and the campaign to remove it. They do not address what is really going on in Syria, and they will not lead to a just end to the conflict in Syria.

By the same token, the charges of Russian intervention into the 2016 US election are filling the news every day. It started with the charge that the Russian government was behind the release of DNC Emails proving their conspiracy against the Sanders candidacy to Wikileaks. There is still zero public evidence that this charge is true, and some convincing evidence that it is not true. Now, the charges are escalating, though it is very interesting that nobody has provided any evidence of information from Russia being used to discredit candidate Clinton in the actual election. There is no charge, for example, of Russian involvement concerning Clinton's private Email fiasco. I find it very sloppy thinking, therefore, to believe that anything that the Russian government may or may not have done had any significant effect on the election. It may very well be that members of Trump's inner circle has had traitorous and despicable relations with the Russian government, and they should be held to account for that if it can be proven. But none of that should be fuel for a new cold war against Russia. We all have minds, and we should be able to parse not only what is proven from what is not proven and what is important from what is not important. Three US intelligence agencies (not 17) say they are confident that the Russian government interfered in our election. A fourth, the NSA, says it thinks that is true but with lower confidence. If such interference involved releasing DNC Emails to Wikileaks (Wikileaks maintains that an insider leaked them), that was a service to the American electorate, but it seems far-fetched to believe that those released Emails swayed the election. How else might Russians have interfered? There is a charge that they hacked some of our famously insecure voting machines (strong Republican opposition has prevented us from having more security in voting), but no charge that they actually did anything to affect vote counts. As the famous commercial once asked, "Where's the beef?" What exactly is that the Russians, who also have real crimes to answer for, such as their totally unjustified annexation of Ukrainian Crimea and meddling on Ukraine's eastern border, what is it exactly that Russia did to influence our election? Meanwhile, the Trump regime's program to deregulate everything, from clean water to net neutrality, marches on. I understand the desire to stick charges of treason on Trump and his cronies, but there isn't likely enough substance to make those charges stick, even if every allegation were proven to be true. And if they do, we'll get Mike Pence, an ultraright Christian supremacist, who conceivably would be much more effective in pushing Trump's agenda than Trump himself. Progressives are often contemptuous of how Trump's supporters are being manipulated to support things that will hurt them. When will many progressives wake up to the manipulation which is doing the same to them?

On Voting

I turned 21 and thus became eligible to vote in November 1967. The first presidential election I could vote in was in 1968. I honestly don't recall how I voted that year. I had just begun graduate school in UC Berkeley, and I was very active in SDS and the issues of the day. In 1972, I voted for George McGovern, though I wrote a letter to the New York Guardian explaining why I was opposed to endorsing McGovern (it's in my FBI file). In 1976, I voted for Jimmy Carter who started out sounding and acting progressive, but by 1979, it was clear that he had shifted sharply to the right, especially about Israel. He was the last Democratic presidential candidate that I voted for. In ensuing elections, I voted for candidates like Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader, and Jill Stein. I voted for Peace and Freedom candidates and later for Green candidates.

My approach to voting is strongly influenced by some important writings by Lenin, in which he said that the main function of elections in capitalist countries is to assess the political consciousness of the working class. If they vote for their class enemies, as most do in the USA, they are politically backward. If they have their own parties and their own candidates and vote for them, they are more conscious. Still, there is no expectation that elections can challenge the fundamental inequities built into capitalist society. The best we can hope for are some temporary reforms.

For these reasons, I always vote and encourage others to vote for candidates we can support, candidates who reflect our views and represent them. I do sometimes vote for Democratic candidates. I voted for Ron Dellums and his successor, Barbara Lee, though I did not vote for her in 2014 when she voted for more arms for Israel while the Israelis were again committing genocide in Gaza. I also strongly opposed her vote in 2008 for the financial bailout, but I probably will vote for her again in 2016. I never voted for Dianne Feinstein, though I did vote for Barbara Boxer and will likely vote for Kamila Harris this year. I make those decisions based on what I know of the candidates and their records. In presidential elections, I see the failure to desert the Democratic Party when it puts forth unacceptable candidates and platforms as an impediment to building a genuine movement to challenge the self-destructive system that runs the USA and the world. Every four years, fear mongers denounce me for not voting against the Republican menace. In their hysteria, they paint my Green vote as being a vote for the Republican candidate, which is a strange form of mathematics that no mathematician could parse. I see their argument basically saying that because millions of Americans are too politically backward to vote for their interests outside of the Democratic Party, therefore I must join my backward friends in voting for the Democratic candidate.

To me, that is totally illogical. It makes no sense. I refuse to be manipulated into voting from fear, into voting for a candidate I despise to stop one I am told to despise more. In my view, this approach to politics makes the USA the most politically backward country in the world, and I refuse to join my well-meaning friends in wallowing in that backwardness.

Attempts to Muzzle BDS Are Essentially Fascist in Nature

I doubt that most people understand the pernicious nature of the Israeli-instigated assault on the BDS movement. It is certainly legitimate for people to disagree on whether boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel is something they support, but the actions of New York Governor Cuomo (with other states threatening to follow) and, perhaps, language in the Democratic Party platform, are explicitly fascist in nature because they try to control what people think and how we exercise our democratic rights. I am not exaggerating. If you have any concern for civil and democratic rights, you need to investigate these dangerous trends and take a stand. Supporters of Israel are unable to defend the apartheid state with rational arguments so they are resorting to very heavy-handed and openly fascist tactics to suppress dissent. That cannot be tolerated.