The Cat Has Rabies (satire)

Meeting with President Bush in 2001, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, an ally of Saddam Hussein at the time, offered to mediate a resolution between the United States and Iraq. There is an Arab proverb, the New York Times reported the Yemeni president as saying. If you put a cat into a cage, it can turn into a lion. Mr. Bush responded that he had no intention of reconciling, a senior administration official said.

"This cat has rabies," Mr. Bush said, referring to Mr. Hussein, and then added with a bluntness that was said by officials in the room to have shocked Mr. Saleh, "The only way to cure the cat is to cut off its head."

My opinion is the cat was given rabies in the form of military aid by America and earlier the UK. This is a pattern of UK and later American involvement in the Middle East that is tied to oil.

Indeed, Big Oil in the hands of the West and dominated by America is thus a threat to the Middle East and Muslim nations in Africa, according to Al Qaeda. Hence the ISIS' takeover of oil assets in Syria. This also explains the rebels in Libya, their takeover of oil assets in three ports, and the North Korean oil tanker.

NATO's limited role in the Libyan Civil War in 2011 and the failure of the US State Department to secure its embassy in Benghazi a year later are directly related to the current troubles in Libya today. Libya itself is slowly breaking up with not only ethnic tension arising from the Berber community of western Libya but also among Arab tribal clans based on the three classical provinces of ancient Libya: Tripolitania in the west, Cyrenaica in the east and Fezzan in the south.

With rebels holding wells in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, the situation has deteriorated due to political infighting due to the machinations of the Muslim Brotherhood. Due to decades of the Qaddafi regime playing tribes against each other, and bribing a tribe to achieve political dominance here and there, the Libyan people are extremely weary of dictatorships. Their peaceful demonstrations in Tripoli had only turned violent due to militants' presence in the protests earlier last month.

Meanwhile, the military aid given to Israel by America to ensure its survival has resulted in criticism in the Middle East by Muslim nations and is a direct cause of the rise of pan-Arab nationalism and later pan-Muslim nationalism within the region and other hotspots both in Africa, South Asian and Southeast Asia.

Both the Afghanistan and Iraq situation only led to the rise of the al Qaeda armn ISIS to be established in Iraq, only to be exported to Syria after Arab Spring went horribly wrong there. In the case of Syria, the corruption of the Assad regime is well known, especially its exploitation of the Lebanese Civil War in the 1970s and invasion of part of south Lebanon by Israel. Indeed, Syria impoverished Lebanon during that time until it left in 2005.

Thus Assad may consider himself the savior of the Levant, yet he is only the protector of corruption and extortion. It would be interesting to see how Lebanon deals with the many Syrians who automatically became Lebanese citizens between 1980 and 2000, seeing as their citizenship was illegal due to Syrian dominance of northern Lebanon.

Back in Yemen, the "rehabilitation" of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula consists of using the militia to rout out Sunni militancy in south Yemen that favors pan-Arabian nationalism over the republican ideals of the central hegemony in Sana'a. Yemeni government uses oil dollars to bribe tribal clans in northern Yemen. In this way, the Shi'a north is placated to moderate militancy while the Sunni south is forced to accept al Qaeda ideology (pan-Muslim nationalism) at gunpoint.

Here is what the difference between pan-Arab nationalism and pan-Muslim nation is: the former is a united Arab organization that is nominally Muslim but promotes a secular government (think of the failed UAR of Egypt and Syria) while the latter is a worldwide caliphate which considers the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan to be a dupe of America, promoting Sharia law based on tribal customs rather than on the Quran.

Given that Al Qaeda has submitted authority to the Taliban, and that the Taliban originate in Pakistan, it is interesting to note that Yemen is the hotbed of al Qaeda militants due to the drone attacks there. For it is they who aid the ISIS forces in Iraq and in Syria, along with militants from the Maghreb and elsewhere in the world.

Ah, the karma of Cold War politics in Afghanistan is biting us in the ass!