Tag Archives: Israel

Reaping the Whirlwind Part 2

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Yesterday I posted a blog that expressed my belief that the USA unintentionally created the war between Iran and Israel that threatens the whole of the Arabian/Persian Gulf (and indeed the whole world economy) by deposing a legally elected government, and installing a corrupt Shah and his cronies. This enabled the Ayatollahs to walk into Iran without any resistance. Today I want to reinforce that by proposing that the situation has been made much worse by America’s unconditional support for Israel.

In my book, THE GULF “Reaping the Whirlwind” one of the characters says that Israel, “is the spear carrier for the Yanks in the Middle East.” In other words American support for Israel was a calculated foreign policy move so that they could use the threat of unleashing a militarised Israel on any of the Gulf states that did not bow to the USA’s interests. Unfortunately, it now seems that the Americans are the spear carriers for the Israelis. They can now threaten their neighbours with unleashing American military might on them if they do not bow to Israel’s demands. And Netenyahu’s demands far exceed Trump’s original aims of ridding Iran of a nuclear threat.

When I worked in Saudi Arabia, my highly educated young graduates (with engineering degrees from American Universities) that I was mentoring, told me that the Israeli’s were not to be trusted. They wanted to own or control the whole of the Middle East. At the time I thought it ridiculous, but look at the current situation. The threat to annex the West Bank, the invasion (for the 4th time?) of Southern Lebanon, and their proposal for all out war on Iran.

THE GULF “Reaping the Whirlwind”, is a collection of linked short stories based on my 40 years experience of living and working in the Arabian/Persian Gulf. The stories are based on real events I have witnessed, or were told to me by expatriates who have lived there for a long time. As such, they give insights into the realities of the situation in this fascinating region that is the cradle of our civilisation.

My book is available in paperback at www,FeedaRead.com, of as an ebook on Amazon’s Kindle.

Reaping the Whirlwind 1

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Dazzled by the Imperial splendours of India – the jewel in The Crown – and distracted by Byzantine politics in Cairo, Baghdad, and Damascus, The Arabian/Persian Gulf became a neglected backwater of the British Empire that allowed the USA to develop the Saudi Arabian oilfields, and usurp British interests in Persia (Iran). The Americans deposed the democratically elected government of Mosedeq, and replaced him with the corrupt Shah and his cronies.

The situation became so bad that Ayatollah Khomenei was invited to fly in unopposed and to install a deeply religious regime. As the Iranians say, “We used to drink in public, and pray in private. Now we pray in public and drink in private.”

It was American greed for oil, their naivete, and their unconditional support for Israel that has created what they perceive as a threat to Western democracy. As Ray Horrocks, a character in my book THE GULF “Reaping the Whirlwind” says:

“The Yanks understand the problems, they don’t understand the people. The Iranians write backwards, read backwards, and think backwards.”

My book is a collection of linked short stories featuring the flotsam and jetsam of expatriate Westerners who wash up in the Arabian/Persian Gulf. It highlights, and gives insights to the clash of cultures that has led to the present conflict.

THE GULF “Reaping the Whirlwind” is available in paperback from http://www.ReadARead.com, or can be downloaded as a ebook from Amazon’s Kindle.

Tomorrow the World

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I have made my book of short stories THE GULF Reaping the Whirlwind a free download on Amazon’s Kindle for 5 days starting Monday 25th September.

I have done this because I believe that although first published in 2011 it has now become relevant again.

The book is a series of linked short stories supposedly written by a journalist featuring the ex-patriate human flotsam and jetsam that washup in the Arabian/Persian Gulf working in the oil industry.

The principle thread that runs through the stories is a critique of a soulless Western society that has forced these people to abandon their families in order to find employment and survive. But the underlying thread is the destructive effect that the discovery of huge deposits of strategic oil, and the consequent flow of billions of dollars of petro-dollars, has had on the region.

When I worked in Iran in the 70s my young Iranian trainees were keen to educate me about how the CIA engineered a coup to oust Mossadeq, the democratically elected Prime Minister, and install the corrupt Shah and his cronies, so that America could control Iranian oilfields.

And more recently, when I worked in Saudi Arabia, my young Saudi trainee engineers were keen to tell me that Israel, backed by the USA, were intent on taking over not just Gaza and the West Bank, but the whole of the Middle East and its oil wealth. And just look at recent events. Not just the appalling invasion of Gaza, but the bombing of Iran, Syria, Iraq, Qatar and Yemen.

I leave it to your judgement.

Plus ca change …………..

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.. . . plus c’est la meme chose.” ” the more things change . . . the more they stay the same.” Or as Karl Marx said, “History repeats itself . . . first time tragedy, second time farce.”

But while events in the Middle East are certainly a tragedy of epic proportions, with so many thousands of innocents being slaughtered without pity or compassion, it is certainly beyond farce. What to me is most sickening is the hypocrisy of the American government (President/State Department/CIA) who piously slap Israel’s wrists and threaten to withdraw their support, while continuing to provide the means to wage war.

In my mind they are the enablers of this conflict. They are using the Israeli’s as their spear carriers to enable them to promote a proxy war against Iran. And there are precedents in my 40 years experience working in the Arabian/Persian Gulf.

The very first story in my book THE GULF “Reaping the Whirlwind”, concerns events around the Buraimi Oasis in The Emirates.in the 1950s. At that time the Emirates were a British Protectorate, and Saudi Arabia lay within the American sphere of influence. ARAMCO, the Arabian American Oil Company, armed the Saudi Police and encouraged them to invade the Buraimi Oasis in order to move the border in their favour (and many years later that proved fruitful because a giant oilfield was discovered in the disputed territory). This whole crisis was later characterised as “A neat little war between the USA and The Limies.”

Perhaps more relevant was the Americans backing the Shah of Iran to overthrow a democratically elected government so that they could usurp British interests in oil rich Persia.

With the the overwhelming tragedy now unfolding in the Middle East my book is more relevant than ever. While not dealing directly with the Palestine/Israeli conflict, that is the background against which my stories of the expatriate experience of life in the oilfields of the Persian/Arabian oilfields are told. If nothing else they are authentic, based on events I witnessed myself, or were told to me by a reliable source.

I have no wish to profit from human misery, so I am offering my book as a 5 day free download on Amazon’s Kindle starting on Wednesday 23 October. I do this in the hope that many people will read it and gain some insight into the mentality that drives this atavistic Israeli/Palestinian conflict. As Uncle Tom says in my book:

“We understand the problem . . . we don’t understand the people.”

Or as another character, Ray says,

“They write backwards . . . they read backwards . . . and they think backwards.”

So much time spent looking in the rear view mirror and not the road ahead.

“Reaping the Whirlwind”

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Events move so fast these days that, until recently, I thought my book THE GULF, “Reaping the Whirlwind, published just ten years ago, had become history. It is a collection of character studies of typical Western expatriates, the flotsam and jetsam of modern living, washed up in the Arabian/ Persian Gulf for whatever reason.

But the background to those stories is the Arab/Israeli situation that, with recurring financial crises, the rise of China to a world power, and the resurgence of Russia under Putin, had been swept from the headlines. Now, with the horrific events unfolding in Gaza my book is relevant again.

Anybody who has ever worked in The Gulf will have been confronted with the atavistic Arab/Israeli conflict. Sometimes, if you are lucky, it will be a well-educated, well-travelled Arab, who will concede that it is a domestic dispute over land between cousins, but will insist that the Israeli Zionists will never be satisfied until they own all of the Holy Lands.  If you are unlucky, it will be an Islamic religious zealot who will reference his beliefs and his claims to The Holy Lands back 4,000 years to the prophet Ibrahim (Abraham), and his first-born son Ishmael.

To Western sensibilities this seems ridiculous, but as Uncle Tom (one of the insightful characters is my book) says,

 “The West understand the problems, they don’t understand the people.”

Or, as Ray (a more down-to-earth character in my book) says,

            “They read backwards, they write backwards, and they think backwards.”

            If you are interested in the back-story to the present horrific events in Gaza, first read John Keays insightful book, “Sowing the Wind”, that explains the policy errors or the past that have led to the present day tragedy in Gaza. Then read my book, THE GULF “Reaping the Whirlwind”, which can be downloaded from AMAZON’s Kindle app, or it can be reviewed and bought as a paperback from my UK publisher:

Feedaread.com

P.S. In spite of the serious tone of this blog, my book is not a polemic. It is a series of stories about ordinary people surviving in an extraordinary landscape – a world as it is, and not as we wish it was -, and it is a celebration of the resilience of the human spirit finding humour and hope, despite the slings and arrows of their outrageous lives.

The Sun Also Goeth Down

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The biblical phrase “The Sun also rises”, most famously used by Ernest Hemingway as the sub-title to his novel FIESTA, actually says “The suns also rises, and the sun also goeth down and hastens to the place where it arose”. This leads me to wonder if the developed World  weary of the Middle East and its intractable problems, is turning its attention to the Indo-Pacific region where every day in the Gregorian calendar has its beginning?

We see the urgency of dealing with the rise of China as an aggressive superpower, and the economic rise of India, and its problems with Pakistan that in some ways mirrors the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. It is atavistic, religious, tribal, nuclearized and about territory (West Bank/Kashmir)?

The tagline of my book THE GULF “Reaping the Whirlwind” starts with the sentence “It’s all about oil.” And certainly the rise of the Arabian/Persian Gulf from a sleepy tribal backwater of the British Empire to a region of sovereign states of international significance was driven by the thirst of the West for cheap oil, and the abrupt rise in crude oil prices from $5 to $25 per barrel in the 1970s.

Now, with the wide availability of shale oil and coal seam gas in the short term, and the projected dominance of electric motor cars in the medium term, the significance of secure and cheap crude oil supplies is becoming irrelevant. Will The Gulf once again become a sleepy backwater, not of the British Empire as it once was, but of American Imperialism?

“The sun also goeth down” is certainly true. . . but then the sun will also rise again, and by all that is normal to us, and most of what is manufactured for us, it will rise in The Far East.

If The West had so many problems with its cultural clash with a few million Arabs and Israelis, how are they going to deal with the problems of 1.5 Billion Chinese (and their spear carriers the North Koreans), a billion Indians and Pakistanis, s70 million Indonesian Muslims – not to mention Malays, Thais, Filipinos and assorted Polynesians, Melanesians and Micronesians – and 125 million Japanese?

I hope the US State Department and the UK Foreign Office is up to it (I actually know Dominic Raab the UK Foreign Secretary and he’s a very clever man). And I hope the EU can come up with a coherent foreign policy – some hope.

Except that I love life so much, I am almost glad I’m nearing the end of my life. But what about my grandkids and the World that they will inherit? Maybe they’ll get lucky. Global warming will make this planet uninhabitable, and technology will be so developed that they will be able to rock(et)-off to a better galaxy???

Times and technology are changing so rapidly that the conflicts I dramatized in my book THE GULF “Reaping the Whirlwind”, that was published just a few years ago, are beginning to look like scenes in a historical novel. At least it they are authentic and not based on reading unreliable historians rewriting history to favour the winners. I did live through those times and witness the events I used as the seeds of my stories. And I certainly did not favour the winners.

I lived and I worked with the ordinary working people (and I never once met an ordinary person) in Iran, Bahrain, Qatar, Dubai and Abu Dhabi – and for 10 years in Saudi Arabia.

You can review and buy my book, THE GULF “Reaping the Whirlwind” and its fictionalizations of real events in the Middle East in Kindle format at:

amazon.com

Or in paperback edition on my publisher’s website:

feedaread.com

Tomorrow the World?

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“See you in Jerusalem . . . tomorrow,” was a greeting by Zionists expressing their desire to see Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

 

            Now that they have all but achieved that ambition – hiding behind the swagger of Donald Trump, and the influence of his Israeli son-in-law Jared Kushner – what is next?

 

             When I worked in Saudi Arabia, even the moderate Western educated young graduates I mentored said that the Israelis would never be satisfied until they controlled the whole of the Middle East – and its oil. At the time I thought that was extreme. But now with Trump cancelling the nuclear treaty with Iran I have become a believer. 

 

In exactly the same way as the build up to the deposing of Saddam Hussein, they are setting up to depose the Ayatollahs. The lies and deception about Saddam’s WMD, and his “yellow cake” nuclear weapons program are being replicated by Netanyahu and Trump recycling old – and discredited – data about Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

 

           Saddam was the most credible threat to Israel’s hegemony in the Middle East – and so he was removed by Bush, with the shameful collaboration of Tony Bloody Liar. Now Iran – and specifically the Iran back Hezbollah – are the most credible threat to Israeli expansion and control. The last time Israel invaded South Lebanon they were soundly beaten back by Hezbollah – and Israel lost control of South Lebanon.

 

 What baffles me is that the US, and other Western governments, never mention Israel’s stockpile of 400 nuclear weapons, or its refusal to sign the Non-Proliferation Agreement. Does anybody doubt that Israel would start hurling these weapons at anybody and everybody if they were losing their battle?

 

While Israel has nuclear weapons I think it is permissible for Iran (or Saudi Arabia) to also have them. The situation is the same as Pakistan and India developing them to neutralize each other. It’s called a balance of power. 400 to nil is not a balance of power.

 

 Israel, backed by Trump, claiming Jerusalem as its capital to the exclusion of Christians and Muslims, is yet another act of aggression and destabilization. Israel has no interest in a stable situation. Only instability can be exploited under the guise of national security.

 

 It seems to me that successive Israeli governments (with the honorable exception of Iitzak Rabin) are intent on obliterating the Palestinians. They have no intention of allowing a 2 State solution.

 

In my book, THE GULF “Reaping the Whirlwind”, I have a character – Uncle Tom – who is murdered because of his support for a Christian home for orphaned Palestinian children. Like all my stories this is a fictionalization of a true story that concerns a Christian missionary/archaeology professor. He was murdered because it was rumoured he had found evidence that the Palestinians were in the Holy Land before the Jews.

 

 The inspiration for that story was from a brilliant book, ‘Palestinian Twilight’ by Edward Fox.

 

 You can review and buy my book, THE GULF “Reaping the Whirlwind” and its other fictionalizations of real events in the Middle East at:

 

 www.amazon.com

Or on my publisher’s website:

 

            http://www.feedaread.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And did those feet in ancient times . . .

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So begins the William Morris’ poem JERUSALEM, an anthem and an elegy to an ideal city that should be aspired to by all mankind. Jerusalem has never been seen as the capital of an exclusively Jewish State – except by Zionists.

Jerusalem is central to all the monotheistic religions – Judaeism, Christianity and Islam. It is the location of the Stations of the Cross – and the Dome of the Rock – in addition to the Wailing Wall. It needs to be under international control.

Trump’s support for Israel’s grab, and American pandering to the Jewish lobby, shows that the USA is entirely unsuitable as lead negotiators in Middle East Peace Process: a process that is an empty shell.

The UN needs to take control – and the UN headquarters needs to be removed from New York and re-located to the League of Nations site in Geneva. And if America threatens, as the biggest donor, to remove its funding, I am sure China and Russia will pick up the slack. The tectonic plates of geo-political economic power are shifting.

My young friends in the Arabian Gulf (graduates I mentored) always told me that the Israelis were not to be trusted. According to them the Israelis want to own the whole of the Middle East. I was sceptical. But if you look at Palestine it’s a sobering lesson. Israel now occupies 75% of the former Palestine, and controls 30% of the West Bank that is supposed to be reserved as the future Palestine – and they continue to build illegal settlements there, and in supposedly Palestinian controlled East Jerusalem.

There will never be peace in the Middle East until Israel is reined in – and the USA is unwilling/incapable of doing that.

My book THE GULF “Reaping the Whirlwind”, begins and ends with the plight of LAYLA, a young Palestinian woman converted to Christianity and trying to care for children who are always the innocent victims of conflicts caused by the greed and arrogance of zealots. And the protaganists in my short story collection, expats washed up in the Arabian/Persian Gulf, are veterans of politicians’ wars like Viet Nam, the battle for the BURAIMI Oasis, and the DHOFAR Campaign.

You can preview my book on Amazon’s Kindle Websites at:

www.amazon.com www.amazon.co.uk

and read the comprehensive 5 Star reviews it has received, and download it if you have a Kindle.

If you prefer a real book in your hands, you can preview my book, and order the paperback from my UK publisher:

www.feedaread.com

It’s not all about oil anymore

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The tagline to my book, THE GULF “Reaping the Whirlwind”, set in the context of the recent past of the Persian/Arabian Gulf, states:

“It’s all about oil . . . “

and I still believe that holds true for most of the 20th Century  Iran – and it was certainly true from 1936 when the Americans discovered vast reserves of cheap crude oil in Saudi Arabia.

But the Americans, having discovered vast reserves of shale oil and gas at home, are no longer dependent on Middle East crude oil. They have shifted their geo-political focus onto the Far East. Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and the Syrian civil war are disappearing from the headlines. And what about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict that drove most of the 20th Century chaos in the Middle East?

Flying under the rader, the Israelis have taken possession of more than 70 % of the former Palestine. Of the remaining 30% (the West Bank, supposedly set aside for the Palestinian State) the Israelis continue to build settlements in strategic locations, linked by settler only roads. Effectively they are now in control of the West Bank, and the two state solution is dead. How long will it be before they annex the West Bank – and then what next?

If you believe my Arab friends, the Israelis will never be satisfied until they control the whole of the Middle East. They will, under the pretext of national security, attempt to annex Jordan – the home of so many displaced Palestinians.

In the meantime I grieve for the characters I created to tell the turbulent story of the oil rich Middle East. The flotsam and jetsam that washed up in The Gulf for a variety of reasons. Archetypal expatriates. Ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, driven to the fringes of Western society trying to survive.

Poor old Uncle Tom, diabetic and obese and impotent. Unable to give his wife Hettie the child she wanted so desperately. His foster son Ray, the brave SAS trooper whose fiancee cheated on him while he was away fighting in the Dhofar campaign – a hidden politicians war.

And the equally brave Dudley, a young cavalry lieutenant leading desert patrols in the Trucial States, fighting tribesmen in the Battle for Buraimi Oasis – a proxy war between Britain and the USA.

And Captain Bob who, when he lost his command of a supertanker, lost his command – and submitted to the ferocious attacks of the shrew of his social climbing Glaswegian wife.

And my narrator Mick, a journalist of the old school, grubbing around in all the darkest corners exposing corruption and hypocrisy regardless of the personal cost. It cost him the love of his life – Leila – the lovely young Palestinian woman from the refugee camps trying to pass as a Lebanese flight attendant because she just wanted a husband, and a normal life.

And it almost cost him the friendship of his life-long friend Pete Moore, a talented geologist and succesful businessman who was too high-minded and naïve to withstand the blandishments of Natalya, a 19 year old Kosovan whore, and the threats of her brutal Albanian pimps.

All of this is fading into history as international attention shifts to the Far East, and the maniac who is running North Korea. Here in Australia, even that story takes second and third place to the debate about gay marriage – and the citizenship requirements of senators. Both subjects rank somewhere between 0 and 3 on a scale of 1 to 10. How low can we go?

THE GULF “Reaping the Whirlwind”, deals with the effect that fabulous oil wealth brought to the region after the quadrupling of crude oil prices in 1972. You can preview my book on Amazon’s Kindle Websites at:

www.amazon.com www.amazon.co.uk

and read the comprehensive 5 Star reviews it has received, and download it if you have a Kindle.

If you prefer a real book in your hands, you can preview my book, and order the paperback from my UK publisher:

www.feedaread.com

Writing is like living life twice

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Writing is a hard discipline that gives you headaches, sleepless nights – and a bad back. But a wonderful thing about writing is the threads that weave into stories unbidden – and only reveal themselves later.

My first book – THE GULF “Reaping the Whirlwind” – was written on weekends as short stories while living in an oilfield camp in Saudi Arabia and based on my 40 years experiences in the Arabian/Persian Gulf. There were 10 stories – two from each decade. But when YouWriteOn (the UK Arts Council initiative designed to encourage new writing) offered to publish a book for me, I realized I didn’t have a book – just a collection of stories. I had to weave those stories into a narrative.

I chose to do this through the eyes of a young and idealistic journalist sent out from the UK to cover the region. I topped and tailed the stories with a fictitious beginning and end for the fictitious journalist’s career. And when I had finished I realized that, subconsciously, the thread running through the book is a classic hero’s journey.

I have made several false starts on the sequel GULF II “The Beginning of Sorrows”, but recently, using a peripheral story from my first book set in aftermath of the war in Kosovo, I realize that this has set the tone for that book.

In the Kosovo excerpt a Serb policeman makes the point that UNMIK (United Nations Mission in Kosovo) and the O.S.C.E. (Organization for Security & Cooperation in Europe) are desperate to prove that they were not wrong to back the Albanians against the Serbs.

But in researching the story again I find that now, General Wesley Clarke, the Supreme Allied Commander NATO during the Kosovo War, believes that NATO intervened on the wrong side. And Carla del Ponte, the former special prosecutor of ICTY (the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) produced a book, THE HUNT, in 2008 that contained “serious and credible allegations” that the Albanians had transported 3-400 Serb prisoners from Kosovo, harvested their organs – and then killed them. These allegations were backed by The Council for Europe.

This is by no means the first time The West has blundered in and created chaos. Politicians understand the issues (maybe) – but they don’t understand the people. They don’t understand the tribalism, the depth of ethnic hatreds and the desire for revenge going back centuries that is rife in the Middle East and The Balkans. And so they blunder around and make things worse.

In the Middle East think Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration, and Britain’s neglect of its mandates in The Gulf, and the 5 fold increase in crude oil prices that funded the rise of fundamental Islam leading to the events of 9/11. And now Gulf II that destabilized the region and led to ISIS.

Read my book THE GULF “Reaping the Whirlwind”. Although it is a work of fiction, it is journalistic because the stories start from real events I witnessed – or were reported to me by reliable sources during my 40 years in The Gulf.

It is written from the points of view of those sources, archetypal expatriates who washed up in the the Arabian/Persian Gulf. They were victims of power-mad politicians’ proxy wars,(The Buraimi Oasis, the Dhofar Campaign, the Viet Nam War), greedy finance house excesses (IOS, BCCI, Lonrho, Lloyds of London etc.) – and in some cases just victims of Madame Bovary style Western wives, and out-of-control, drug-crazed teenage children.

You can preview my book on AMAZON’s Kindle Websites:

www.amazon.com

www.amazon.co.uk

and read the comprehensive 5 Star reviews it has received, and download it if you have a Kindle.

If you prefer a real book in your hands, you can preview my book, and order the paperback from my publisher:

www.feedaread.com