Here is an excerpt from George P. Shultz’s book, Learning from Experience, due this fall from Hoover Institution Press.
“They will be more effective if they are mostly Arab boots. The challenge is to develop a force in the region that, in coordination with us, can be impactful. An unusual potential coalition is possible: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel, plus Iraqi Kurds and others with help from traditional European allies”
There is no such force and never will be!
Fact is Saudi and UAE don’t trust their own people with weapons – Saudis even prefer to hire South American mercenaries to fight for them in Yemen. Saudi kings most fear their own army and instead depend upon a smaller National Guard with tribal loyalty to the king to keep their own people down.
Egypt’s army is infiltrated with Islamists and fully, fully occupied in escalating fighting with them inside Egypt. And the Kurds, they’re not fighting for America, rather their interest is in expanding territory for a new homeland.
Common Arab soldiers would just see a mission as joining the “imperialists” (Americans in Iraq and Syria) to attack another Muslim nation – Americans are seen as doing the dirty work for Arab dictators to keep them in power. “Traditional European allies” means France and England. Other Europeans opposed intervention and won’t send their troops to kill Arabs – they fear it would create more terrorists. Israel is of course the enemy of all of them – Shultz imagines that America will invite Israelis into Syria to occupy and kill Arabs?
Schulz thinking shows the willful ignorance of so many interventionists and neoconservatives. We constantly hear this reasoning to justify America’s endless wars in the Muslim world.
Jon Basil Utley is publisher of The American Conservative. This originally appeared on RichardCYoung.com and is reprinted with the author’s permission.
You tube Iran and the West Part 2/3: The Pariah Sate. Go to 1:40 of the video and you will see the pure evil of Schultz when he states his opinion on Iraq’s use of Chemical weapons on Iran. He simply condones Iraq’s actions.
The Saudi pilot I met at Sheppard AFB Texas back in 79, comes to mind. Dude didn’t act like an officer, or at least like the Air Training Command officers at least. Shorten the anecdote, at the time Texas was still doing “Drive Friendly, the Texas Way” which was a monster waste of funds, but hilarious. I was going back to the base on a Sunday summer afternoon, walking from Wichita Falls. All these Friendly Texas drivers were hassling me, and I wasn’t hitchhiking, just walking. The pilot gave me a ride. I didn’t realize he was even an officer until we got to the gate, I started to pull out my ID but the SPs at the gate just saluted the car and let us through. Found out later, not only did the Saudi king not trust just anybody with his expensive jets, his FAMILY were the ones who got trusted. The pilot wasn’t just an officer, bad enough in my book, but a prince.
Which brings out the next point. Not really. But usually despotic kings don’t even trust their families. However, empires have a history of trusting them. Like the Romans and Herod the Great and then his son. Didn’t work out for them, not in the long run. Despotic satrap Kings don’t have the love and support of their peasants. They rebel. Often. Shultz is a dreamer. The plan never worked well before, look up satrapy and most of the most entries are going to be historic, as in, they ain’t working today. When will they ever learn?