Exposed: The US-Saudi Libya deal

[singularity2045]

 By Pepe Escobar

You invade Bahrain. We take out Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. This, in short, is the essence of a deal struck between the Barack Obama administration and the House of Saud. Two diplomatic sources at the United Nations independently confirmed that Washington, via Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, gave the go-ahead for Saudi Arabia to

Comments

[ladyanneboleyn]

Side-eying this article so hard because of sentences like this:
The otherwise excellent al-Jazeera journalists could have politely asked the emir whether he would send his Mirages to protect the people of Palestine from Israel, or his neighbors in Bahrain from Saudi Arabia.

So much of the criticism of the intervention seems to be "How dare the United States attempt one humanitarian intervention without changing its entire foreign policy to attempt them all! It's better for the US to stay out than to conduct a viable humanitarian mission through political deals and ignore politically unviable humanitarian situations."

Just no.

There are good arguments to be made against the intervention but "WHY NOT BAHRAIN??" is not one of them. Comparisons like the one above are just erroneous. Of course the US should also put pressure on Bahrain to democratize and on Israel to withdraw from Palestine, but those situations have to be handled with care. A sudden reversal of US policy toward Saudi Arabia or Israel would be bad, and calling for intervention to protect civilians in those places would be even worse, and I honestly can't believe that's the argument so many people are making. I'm the first to critique cynical US policy in the Middle East, and I hope the Libyan intervention is the beginning of a transition to a more values-based foreign policy, but that change can't happen overnight.