the enemy of my enemy

In determining what nations are good guys and what nations are bad guys I believe the rubric Beagles uses is what nations are doing to help out US.  In that case there are no good guys in the mideast.  Well there's Israel, Israel is our buddy, well they ought to be with all the stuff we give them, but it goes beyond that, there are a lot more Jews in the US than Arabs, and they are more like us than the Arabs, and they do have a better functioning democracy.  I think Beagles is incorrect in thinking that they have not been in the news lately, I have been reading plenty, but I have to admit that in these days of the orange colossus strutting about all other news is squeezed to the depths of the media.

When the Houthis came storming out of the hills of Yemen to start that piece of trouble the media hastened to explain who they were.  I remember one tv guy asking a guy on the ground what are their politics, and the guy on the ground answered, "Well their slogan is 'Death to America and Israel.'", and then he continued, "But then that's the slogan of everybody in this part of the word."

But they don't like each other all that much either and there are different players with different aims and the enemy of my enemy is my friend forms a lot of the alliances, but the corollary of the enemy of my enemy, is that he is only my friend until my other enemy becomes less threatening and then he becomes my enemy.  The alliances keep shifting.

The American mindset to find the good guys and back them does not apply here.  What we do is choose some guys (Iraq) and back them with all kinds of dough and arms, and they'll do what we want as long as we are giving them money and have a gun at their back, but once we are no longer there we discover to our horror that they no longer love us.


The thing that those Drill Baby Drill exhorters (backed  by big oil money) conveniently don't  mention is that the oil they drill does not belong to the US, they sell it to the highest bidder.  If China is willing to pay more they get it all and the Texaco on the corner gets none.  If the Saudis take their oil off the market, the worldwide price of oil rises and it  will cost us much more even if there is an oil well on US soil right down the block.