Russia, China, Iran… and Saudi Arabia?

Ron Unz

Unz Review

On Friday geopolitical plates of tectonic scale may have visibly shifted as Iran and Saudi Arabia, two of the most important countries in the Middle East and erstwhile bitter adversaries, announced that they had reestablished diplomatic relations after a lengthy round of negotiations held with top Chinese officials in Beijing.

Back in 1945, President Franklin Roosevelt famously met on an American cruiser with Ibn Saud, and our important alliance with oil-rich Saudi Arabia came into being.

Though sometimes stressed during the 1973 Oil Embargo and in the aftermath of the 9/11 Attacks, the relationship remained our most important in the Arab World, being responsible for the rise of the Petrodollar and the maintenance of our own greenback as the world’s reserve currency. With America’s industrial base having been reduced to a mere shadow of its once global dominance and our country plagued by horrendous annual budget deficits and accumulated debt, much of our national prosperity and current standard of living probably today depends upon that maintaining that status.

Meanwhile, during the four decades since its 1979 Islamic Revolution, no country in the region has been a greater object of American hostility than Iran. As recently as January 2020, we assassinated Gen. Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s greatest military commander, who had been considered a likely presidential candidate in their 2021 elections.

There are obviously many long-term factors behind this apparent diplomatic revolution, notably including China’s economic rise and its position as the leading purchaser of Middle Eastern oil. Over a decade ago, I had described these powerful trends, which have now become obvious to the entire world.

However, I think that the colossal arrogance of our own country, and the extent to which we have increasingly abused and victimized our own allies and vassals over the years must surely have been a huge contributing factor. One problem with relying too heavily upon the power of your dishonest propaganda is that you may continue to believe in it yourself even after most of the intended targets of your deception have stopped doing so.

In late September, a series of massive underwater explosions severely damaged the Russian-German Nord Stream pipelines, perhaps Europe’s most important civilian energy infrastructure, a particularly devastating blow at a time when Europe was suffering its worst energy crisis in generations.

The enormous scale and extreme difficulty of these deep water demolitions led German investigators to quickly declare that a state actor had likely been responsible. Yet strangely enough, this huge event received minimal coverage in the American mainstream media. After briefly quoting anonymous government officials who absurdly suggested that the Russians had destroyed their own pipelines, our press immediately lost interest in the story, which soon disappeared with almost no follow-up or investigation. A gigantic environmental disaster seemed to draw negligible media interest from the legions of normally hair-trigger environmentalists.

The obvious reason for this strange lack of curiosity and the resulting blanket of silence was the likely identity of the perpetrators, which had grave political implications. Top American leaders had issued numerous public threats against those pipelines and seemed to rejoice in their successful destruction, so there seemed an overwhelming likelihood that our own country had played a central role in the illegal attacks, among the worst peacetime examples of industrial terrorism in world history. If enough Europeans began to suspect that their American allies had destroyed energy infrastructure so vital to Germany and the rest of the continent, our NATO alliance would be dealt a devastating blow and might be set on the road to dissolution.

One of America’s most powerful international weapons is its overwhelming control over the global news ecosystem, and a complete blanket of media silence was soon enforced, causing that huge event to quickly fade from public consciousness. When someone such as Prof. Jeffrey Sachs mentioned what had probably happened on Bloomberg TV, he was quickly yanked off the air.

Most ordinary Westerners live their lives trapped within the cocoon of our controlled media, and only a small minority of them may have recognized the magnitude of this historic event, with only a sliver blaming anyone other than the demonized Russian enemy.

But I doubt that this blindness applied to political leaders worldwide, who certainly understood what had probably happened. If America’s reckless and criminal government had wantonly destroyed the vital civilian infrastructure of its closest NATO allies, potentially crippling Europe’s economy, how could it ever be trusted to respect the lives and property of other countries? Surely the leadership of Saudi Arabia and many other important nations began asking themselves such questions.

Then a month ago, any remaining doubts vanished, as the exact details of America’s attack against Germany’s energy infrastructure were revealed in a bombshell expose by Seymour Hersh, who had spent a half-century as one of America’s most renowned investigative journalists.

Although Hersh’s story was totally boycotted by the mainstream press, within 24 hours over a million people had read it worldwide on Substack. His subsequent interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! was viewed over two million times on Youtube, with various other interviews adding many hundreds of thousands of additional views.

Hersh’s revelations prompted Russia to call a special session of the UN Security Council to discuss the pipeline attacks, and this drew important testimony from Prof. Sachs and former CIA Analyst Ray McGovern. These developments finally forced the Washington Post to grudgingly mention Hersh’s blockbuster weeks after it had first been published, finally breaking the mainstream media blockade.

With the ripples of Hersh’s reporting beginning to spread, the German government and its Chancellor Olaf Scholz faced a very difficult dilemma.

During late 2021, Scholz had been standing next to President Joseph Biden at a press conference when the latter publicly threatened to eliminate the pipelines, so German voters might reasonably suspect their own leader’s complicity after that threat was carried out. Attention had to be diverted in a different direction.

Last week, Scholz took a sudden, unscheduled trip to privately meet with Biden in DC, and a couple of days later stories suddenly appeared in the New York Times and Germany’s Die Zeit weekly blaming the pipeline attacks upon an unspecified group of pro-Ukraine activists. The articles cited anonymous government sources, with most of the details being both vague and risible.

Deploying a ton of powerful military explosives in deep water was obviously a very challenging covert operation, requiring highly-specialized diving equipment and skilled demolitions experts, but according to German sources it had been carried out by a handful of unknown activists on a rented sailboat, a total absurdity. The Times account was more vague if hardly more persuasive, pointing to mysterious Ukrainian activists as the culprits and only acknowledging the very detailed expose of Hersh, one of its former star reporters, in the 26th paragraph. The German claims of a sailboat-based attack was soon discussed in the Wall Street Journal, though the skeptical reporters emphasized how extremely difficult it would have been to carry out such a major undersea operation in such limited circumstances.

A German who blogs at the Moon of Alabama website had been heavily following the pipeline attacks from the beginning. He reasonably described these sudden anonymous media stories as merely constituting journalistic chaff, aimed at obscuring the very detailed account of the attack already provided by Hersh and perhaps diverting attention from some of the follow-up stories the Pulitzer Prize winner might plan to release.

The hosts of the Grayzone podcast showed photos of the sailboat allegedly used in the massive military attack and ridiculed the absurd cover-story that our government had concocted.

Indeed, when Hersh was informed what his former newspaper had published, he was stunned, saying that he couldn’t believe that they would have ever written anything so stupid.

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Via https://www.unz.com/runz/russia-china-iran-and-saudi-arabia/