Abbott & Costello

b. traven

There’s an old comedy routine by Abbott and Costello.  Abbott tells Costello, “Who’s on first.” (It’s a baseball routine.) Costello, not getting that the player’s surname is “Who,” keeps demanding: “No, I want to know who’s on first?”  It goes downhill from there as the two comedians talk past one another, each exasperating the other.

Well, now the brilliant minds behind Obama’s “‘I don’t know’ is on third” national security team are at it again. They never seem to learn “Who’s on first.”

Saudi Arabia again is on first and calling the shots for American foreign intervention. Obama sure hopped fast into the Saudi narrative to get involved in the Yemen civil war and blame it all on Iran at the crucial point in the talks to reach a peaceful Iranian nuclear development settlement. We’ll see by Tuesday whether the Saudi’s and Israel’s Bibi have been able to torpedo that peaceful agreement.

But let’s go back to see if we can suss out who’s on first in Yemen. This ballgame will make heads spin because we have Sunni Saudi Arabia’s beheading Wahabi regime a key player in Iraq’s ISIS origins, behavior, and probably financing in Syria-Iraq. The Saudis have had the United States bombing Sunni ISIS for them for over six months now with no demonstrable result. ISIS still controls close to half of both countries.

So now we have Saudi Arabia suddenly ready to bomb Yemeni Shia Houthi rebels, who have beheaded no one, that we know of, and lo and behold they are being really supported by our old friend Ali Abdullah Saleh, the former president of Yemen. Now you must know that Saleh was our man and the Saudi’s in Yemen until his dictatorial ways were protested by the Yemeni people and he fled to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Of course the Saudis hosted the peace conference and saw to it that another of their and our proxies was put in as President. He too must not be too popular with the Yemeni people since he let the US continue with our unpopular drone murder program.

In the three days that the Saudi’s valiant air force has been in action they have destroyed part of Saana, the capital city and killed dozens of Yemeni civilians. Meanwhile, the Houthi forces continue to move on the key port of Aden.  In other words, the Saudi bombing has accomplished nothing except the death of innocents.

Iran has said they “support the effort” of the Houthis but no evidence exists of this being anything more than cheerleading. Yet the Arab League, always on the side of our CIA, continues to imply that the “support” is lethal. A compliant U.S. media tacitly accepts this as reality and passes it along as “news.”

In the name of waging a war against terror, we now have a Middle East totally engulfed in war and chaos after fourteen years of U.S. involvement.  Terror there is, war there is, signs of peace there are not. Despite spending a trillion dollars in the Middle East on wars and foreign aid, there is absolutely no learning curve demonstrated by U.S. political and military leaders.

It’s time to stop throwing good money after bad, America.  It’s time to get out of the Middle East.  Unless we want to be stuck in an Abbott and Costello comedy routine in which we are perpetually the butt of the joke.