#TheTimeOfMonsters pod welcomes Aamer, co-author of a recent article @ North South Notes on the crackdown against anti- #IranWar protests in #Bahrain and the broader climate of #stateRepression there and across the #GulfStates
https://www.thenation.com/podcast/activism/ttom-052426/
#Iran #warOnIran #MiddleEast #MiddleEastWar #GulfMonarchies
"We are squarely in the zone of all sorts of unintended consequences. Economic shocks could intensify the UAE’s drive to fuel war in African countries to secure raw materials for itself. There is a risk of a dramatic falling out between Gulf powers over how far they can underwrite US-Israeli ambitions to their own cost. And there is the threat of spillover from an unravelling in Iran on their doorsteps. What is afoot is a colossal haemorrhaging of much of the political and economic capital that the Gulf has been accumulating.
Yes, there will be global economic consequences – but these countries are not just energy providers. You don’t have to sympathise with their political arrangements to understand the basic fact that these are places with human populations that cannot just be reduced to a caricature of lucky custodians of energy supply, bribing the greedy and the gullible to their lands. “Always,” Edward Said wrote, “there lurks the assumption that although the western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend (or both) the majority of the world’s resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being.”
So much of the US’s and Israel’s approach to the Middle East has been based on this notion, that those who populate and govern it – even their allies – are not true human beings. Once the war ends, and Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu move on to their next calamity, what will emerge is a redrawn map of the region, with new resentments, competitions and security ramifications that the people who live there will have to deal with for generations to come."
Paria sans portefeuille
Miguel Afonso Caetano