Congress decides to go to war with US allies in the Middle East

Benny Avni:
Regarding Iran and its Mideast foes, Congress has come to a strange conclusion: The enemy of our enemy is actually . . . the bad guy. It’s true: Even as Iran’s Mideast aggression increasingly threatens US assets and interests, Congress is looking to tighten the noose around Tehran’s Sunni Arab rivals.

As President Trump huddled with his team Thursday, weighing a response to Iran’s downing of a US drone over international waters in the Gulf, over on Capitol Hill a bipartisan group of senators celebrated their success in nixing a White House plan to sell sophisticated arms to Saudi Arabia and other Mideast allies.

Iran’s attack on the US drone followed assaults on oil tankers in the Gulf. America has long vowed to protect navigation on the high seas, and disrupting it is widely considered an act of war.

Some blame the attacks on Trump’s pullout of the flawed Iran nuclear deal. Yet Iranian aggression started long before that. Indeed, it’s been escalating for decades, manifesting in Mideast wars in Syria, Yemen, Gaza and beyond. It’s waged with proxies. And it’s meant to export its Shiite revolutionary zeal throughout the Mideast and beyond.

Meanwhile, Trump, who doesn’t shy from trade wars or wars of words, is famously averse to military war. He’d sooner let Mideast allies do their own fighting in their own region — and even help them if it’s in our interest.

Congress doesn’t seem to agree. On Thursday, the Senate passed a bipartisan resolution to block a White House-planned, $8 billion sale of sophisticated arms to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan.
...
What Congress is doing is not in the strategic interests of the US.  The US has had worse allies than those in the Middle East.  We had no trouble shipping arms and food to the Soviet Union in World War II despite Stalin's mass murder of millions of his own people.  He was far worse than the Saudis and yet we were much more generous with him.  The Saudis are actually paying for the arms being used to resist Iranian aggression through its proxy forces in Yemen.  The Saudis are under actual attack by those proxy forces.  Iran is looking for a strategic foothold to surround the Saudis and get control not only of the straights where the current conflict with the US is taking place but to do likewise in the Red Sea.  What Congress is proposing is strategic nonsense.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more