Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label "gulf states"
"Now the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are over, almost all British troops are back home and the Americans are even about to do a peace deal with the Taliban, surely there’s nothing left to drive recruitment to the cause. That argument is fundamentally flawed. British involvement on the ground is minimal, yes, but consider the huge shift in the last decade to remote warfare, the use of strike aircraft, armed drones, special forces and surrogates rather than tens of thousands of boots on the ground. Operations like these are scarcely reported in the mass media and you have to go to more specialised sources to understand what is happening. Oxford Research Group’s  Remote Warfare Programme  is one of the very few groups analysing this change, with  Airwars  and  Every Casualty  reporting on the consequences.  From late 2014 through to the present – though the first three years were the most significant – a classic and largely unreported remote war, l...
Post a Comment
Read more
"Reasons include the United States' interest in maintaining lucrative arms deals with the Gulf states – primarily Saudi Arabia – and the fact that many U.S. politicians support bombing Iran (as demanded by the  right-wing Israeli leadership)." Middle East nightmare – made in Washington
Post a Comment
Read more
"By 2003, the Libyan government had entered into relations with the International Monetary Fund, privatizing a number of state-owned enterprises. In 2004, Libya opened up 15 new offshore and onshore blocs to drilling. Campbell also chronicles the burrowing actions of the “Western-educated bureaucrats [who] worked to bring Libya into the fold of ‘market reforms,’ and the deepening commercial relations with British capital.”  In 2007, British Petroleum inked a deal with the Libyan Investment Corporation for the exploration of 54,000 square kilometers of the Ghadames and Sirt basins. It also signed training agreements for Libyan professionals, helping create a base for neoliberalism within the government. By 2011, 2800 Libyan professionals were studying in the United Kingdom, learning “Western values” of destatization and thus the removal of the possibility for production and power to be responsive to the demands of the people.  Libya under Qadhaffi was mercurial, but against ...
Post a Comment
Read more