Tonight – November, 28, 2017. “After ISIS – The Middle East: A Regional Realignment:” The Failure of U.S.-Imposed Military Solutions and of 72 Years of Misguided Middle East Policy

Yemen’s cholera crisis – a result of the Saudi war against the country, conducted with U.S. weapons and support of the Trump Administration

Listen tonight:

• KGNU, Boulder, Colorado – Hemispheres, Middle East Dialogues. November 29, 2017. 1390 AM, 88.5 FM, streaming at http://www.kgnu.org.  6-7 PM Mountain States Time. 
• with Ibrahim Kazerooni and Rob Prince.

In 2006 as Israel’s abortive but destructive invasion of Lebanon proceeded to run into more and more effective resistance, then U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, traveled to Israel, the aggressor in the war and pontificated about how with Israeli assistance, that the U.S. was creating “a new Middle East” – a post Sykes-Picot political realignment. Then she went off to Thailand, played the piano while U.S. made and armed jets dropped cluster and phosphorus bombs on Lebanese civilian targets. On the ground the Israeli military ran into stiff and well-organized resistance from Hezbollah units in what is referred to as “asymmetrical warfare.”

True that now eleven years later, major geo-political re-alignments are taking place…Don’t know if it can be called “a new Middle East” – but after more than a decade of wars which either the U.S. either conducted, orchestrated (Libya, Syria) encouraged (2006 Israeli Lebanon invasion,  Saudi cruel war against Yemen – which it is losing) – the region is not the same. The defeat – and that is the proper, un-exaggerated term – of the U.S. led effort to overthrow the Assad government in Syria – marks a dramatic shift in the regional balance of forces. How far, to what end?

That is what we’ll be discussing tonight on KGNU – Hemispheres, Middle East Dialogues hosted by Jim Nelson, now in its eighth year.