Блиски исток

Predsjednik FBiH Marinko Čavara kazao je danas novinarima u Sarajevu, 12. dan otkako je prijavio nadležnim institucijama sumnjive događaje na autoputu Kakanj - Zenica 5. jula, da ne očekuje spektakularne rezultate istrage, ali da sumnja "na nešto" i da o tome ne može govoriti. Kazao je da je došao do informacija da je u proteklom periodu sistemski praćen i nezakonito prisluškivan.

Bliski Istok (sh. sinonimi: „Prednji Istok” ili „Srednji Istok”) je zapadnjački geopolitički naziv za područja sjeveroistočne Afrike i jugozapadne Azije čije su granice slabo definirane. Preuzet je iz francuskog oblika Proche-Orient kojim su se početkom 19. vijeka označavala područja pod osmanlijskom vlašću (uključujući Balkan) odnosno koji je bio antonimom Dalekom Istoku, dok naziv „Srednji Istok” potječe iz engleskog oblika Middle East kojim se na prijelazu u 20. vijek podrazumijevalo područje između Osmanskog Carstva i Britanske Indije (okvirno Iranska visoravan, Mezopotamija i Arabija). Nakon raspada kolonijalnih carstava u 20. vijeku dva su pojma redefinirana stapanjem u jedno geografsko područje iz kojeg je isključen Balkan, a „Bliski” i „Srednji Istok” počinju se koristiti kao sinonimi u svim jezicima pa tako i u srpskohrvatskom, dok je engleski specifičan po tome da je oblik „Srednji” zadržao primarno značenje.

https://sh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliski_Istok

Radagast wrote:Zezam malo Patjeta na konto ovoga:

Bliski Istok (sh. sinonimi: „Prednji Istok” ili „Srednji Istok”) je zapadnjački geopolitički naziv za područja sjeveroistočne Afrike i jugozapadne Azije čije su granice slabo definirane. Preuzet je iz francuskog oblika Proche-Orient kojim su se početkom 19. vijeka označavala područja pod osmanlijskom vlašću (uključujući Balkan) odnosno koji je bio antonimom Dalekom Istoku, dok naziv „Srednji Istok” potječe iz engleskog oblika Middle East kojim se na prijelazu u 20. vijek podrazumijevalo područje između Osmanskog Carstva i Britanske Indije (okvirno Iranska visoravan, Mezopotamija i Arabija). Nakon raspada kolonijalnih carstava u 20. vijeku dva su pojma redefinirana stapanjem u jedno geografsko područje iz kojeg je isključen Balkan, a „Bliski” i „Srednji Istok” počinju se koristiti kao sinonimi u svim jezicima pa tako i u srpskohrvatskom, dok je engleski specifičan po tome da je oblik „Srednji” zadržao primarno značenje.

https://sh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliski_Istok

Ali necu vise, posto je generalno u pravu.

Iran Dominates in Iraq After U.S. ‘Handed the Country Over’

By TIM ARANGO
JULY 15, 2017



BAGHDAD — Walk into almost any market in Iraq and the shelves are filled with goods from Iran — milk, yogurt, chicken. Turn on the television and channel after channel broadcasts programs sympathetic to Iran.

A new building goes up? It is likely that the cement and bricks came from Iran. And when bored young Iraqi men take pills to get high, the illicit drugs are likely to have been smuggled across the porous Iranian border.

And that’s not even the half of it.

Across the country, Iranian-sponsored militias are hard at work establishing a corridor to move men and guns to proxy forces in Syria and Lebanon. And in the halls of power in Baghdad, even the most senior Iraqi cabinet officials have been blessed, or bounced out, by Iran’s leadership.

When the United States invaded Iraq 14 years ago to topple Saddam Hussein, it saw Iraq as a potential cornerstone of a democratic and Western-facing Middle East, and vast amounts of blood and treasure — about 4,500 American lives lost, more than $1 trillion spent — were poured into the cause.

From Day 1, Iran saw something else: a chance to make a client state of Iraq, a former enemy against which it fought a war in the 1980s so brutal, with chemical weapons and trench warfare, that historians look to World War I for analogies. If it succeeded, Iraq would never again pose a threat, and it could serve as a jumping-off point to spread Iranian influence around the region.

In that contest, Iran won, and the United States lost.
...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/15/world/middleeast/iran-iraq-iranian-power.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

I Warned About Iran and the Media Ignored Me
Because it was Obama's war to lose.

By Peter Van Buren • July 18, 2017

The New York Times is featuring a piece stating that Iran is the big winner of the U.S.-Iraq wars that have run from 1991 to the present.

So what does ‘winning in Iraq’ look like, asks the Times? Something like this:

A Shia-dominated government is in Baghdad, beholden to Tehran for its security post-ISIS. Shia thug militias, an anti-Sunni and Kurd force in waiting, are fully integrated into the otherwise-failed national Iraqi military. There are robust and growing economic ties between the two nations. An Iraqi security structure will never threaten Iran again. A corridor between Iran and Syria will allow arms and fighters to flow westward in support of greater Iranian geopolitical aims in the Middle East. And after one trillion in U.S. taxpayer dollars spent, and 4,500 Americans killed in hopes of making Iraq the cornerstone of a Western-facing Middle East, Washington’s influence in Iraq is limited.

It seems the Times is surprised by the conclusion; it’s “news” for some, apparently. The newspaper ran the story on its hometown-edition front page.

But it wasn’t news to me. I tried writing basically the same story in 2010 as a formal reporting cable for the State Department. Nobody wanted to hear it.

At the time I was assigned to Iraq as an American diplomat, with some 20 years of field experience, embedded at a rural forward-operating base. All the things that took until 2017 to become obvious to the Times were available to anyone on the ground back then with the eyes to see.

The problem was what I wrote could never get cleared past my boss, and was never allowed to be sent to Washington. The Obama administration’s message was that America had won in Mesopotamia, and that we would be withdrawing to focus our national efforts on Afghanistan. “Everything that American troops have done in Iraq—all the fighting, all the dying, the bleeding and the building and the training and the partnering, all of it has landed to this moment of success,” said President Obama. “We’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self reliant Iraq.”

So it was off-message—I was off-message—and thus needed to be ignored. The area where I was assigned in Iraq had a heavy Iranian presence, both special forces working with Iraqi Shia militias to help kill Americans, and Iranian traders and businessmen selling agricultural products. (The Iranian watermelons were among the best I’ve ever eaten.) Busloads of Iranian tourists were everywhere. Most were religious pilgrims, visiting special Shia sites, including mosques that had been converted by Saddam into Sunni places of worship that had been restored to their original Shia status, often with Iranian money, following America’s “victory.”

In fact, somewhere in Iran are a tourist’s photos of me and his family, posing together in the area outside Salman Pak. He begged me for the souvenir photo op, never having met an American before, telling me about the small local hotel he hoped to finance for Iranian pilgrims in the future. I’d sure like a copy of the picture if he somehow reads this.

Even after my boss deep-sixed my reporting in 2010, I still thought there was something to this Iranian thing. So I spoke to the designated “Iran Watcher” at the American Embassy in Baghdad. Her job was to monitor and report on Iran-related news out of Iraq, albeit from well inside the air-conditioned Green Zone, without ever speaking to an Iranian or worrying that her convoy might be blown up by an Iranian Special Forces IED.

I told her about the watermelons, those delicious Iranian fruits that were flooding the markets in the boonies where I lived. The melons were putting enormous pressure on Iraqi farmers, whose fruit was neither as tasty nor as government subsidized. The State Department Iran Watcher was quick to point out that I must be wrong about the Iranian fruit, because she had only yesterday been in a meeting with the Iraqi agricultural minister, who explained that the Iraqi government’s efforts to seal the border had been wholly successful; she’d seen a translated report! Things went downhill from there, and the embassy offered only canned peaches in syrup at lunch. The fruit tasted like the can, and there was a joke about the truth being too bitter to swallow that I was too tired to make.

A year later, in 2011, I was back in Washington. I set down the same broad ideas about Iran being victorious in layperson’s terms—and was turned down for an oped by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others. One editor said “So you’re telling Barack Obama he’s wrong? That the surge failed, the war wasn’t won, all those dead Americans were for nothing and Iran came out on top? Seriously?” I was made to feel like I was wearing a skirt in an NFL locker room.

The best I could do with this knowledge—that in yet another way the war had been for nothing—was to settle for being treated as a kind of novelty, a guest blogger at Foreign Policy. Here’s the article I wrote there, scooping the Times by six years.

As for the U.S. government, I’m still not sure they’ve gotten the story on Iraq.

Saudijski princ Saud bin Abdulaziz bin Musaed bin Saud bin Adbulaziz uhapšen je nakon što su objavljeni video snimci na kojima se navodno vidi kako muči jednu, a upire pušku u drugu osobu. Kralj Salman naredio je da se princ uhapsi i ispita u srijedu, dan nakon što su kratki video snimci objavljeni na Youtubeu i dijeljeni putem Twittera, na kojima se vidi kako udara više mušakaraca koji su krvavi i jednu ženu, prenosi AP. Na video klipu, koji je pregledan više od 760.000 puta, vidi se 18 flaša viskija Johnny Walker Red Label na stolu i svežanj novca.

The language in 2016-2017 Saudi textbooks that calls for killing people who engage in adultery, anal sex, apostasy, or certain supposed acts of sorcery are not the only passages that encourage violence against those who act in a manner inconsistent with the state’s vision of Islam.

A 2016-2017 Saudi textbook on monotheism for the twelfth grade teaches that there are four kinds of infidels. The first three of them include envoys who have diplomatic immunity, peoples who have a non-aggression pact with the Muslim world, and dhimmis, a term for non-Muslims forced to pay a special tax that is commonly associated with second-class status. According to this book, the remainder of infidels, who comprise the fourth class, are defined as “combatants,” whom it says Allah has commanded must be fought until they submit to Islam or agree to become dhimmis.

That book also calls for “fighting the infidels and the polytheists” except under a handful of extenuating circumstances. Those include: (1) if such non-Muslims have not been given a chance yet to convert to Islam or become dhimmis, (2) if Muslims are not strong enough to win such a fight, (3) if the ruler does not support it, or (4) if such non-Muslims have a non-aggression pact with the Muslim world.

According to a February 2017 Wall Street Journal article, a current eighth-grade Saudi textbook on Islamic law instructed readers to support people who are waging jihad, including by arming them. The passage was translated by the Journal as follows: “the mujahideen who are doing good deeds for the sake of Allah … should be given transportation, weapons, food and anything else they may need to continue their jihad.”

http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2017/07/analysis-saudi-arabias-troubling-educational-curriculum.php

Kako javlja BBC, u zgradi Ambasade Izraela u Amanu, glavnom gradu Jordana, došlo je do pucnjave. Strani mediji javljaju da ima poginulih i povrijeđenih. Jedan neimenovani zvaničnik jordanskih snaga sigurnosti saopćio je da je u zgradi izraelske ambasade u Amanu došlo do pucnjave iz vatrenog oružja. BBC izvještava da je poginula najmanje jedna osoba. .
Pročitajte više na: http://avaz.ba/globus/svijet/284616/napadnuta-ambasada-izraela-ima-poginulih-i-povrijedenih

The ultra-conservative Wahhabi doctrines currently propagated by Riyadh are “not normal” for the country, and only developed as a domestic reaction to the Iranian revolution, the prince said. Leaders in the KSA since Tehran’s 1979 political shake-up “didn’t know how to deal with” a new Islamic Republic in the neighborhood, he added.

Iraqi Kurdish leader to step down over fallout from independence poll
President of autonomous region Masoud Barzani informs parliament as disputed territory is lost to Baghdad forces

Masoud Barzani is to step down as Kurdish president after the contentious independence referendum he called backfired spectacularly, with the Kurds of northern Iraq stripped of a third of their territory and facing continuing attacks by Baghdad.
The veteran Kurdish leader told a parliamentary sitting in Erbil on Sunday that he would not re-contest the presidency and asked for his powers to be dispersed. His decision comes six weeks after the poll, which returned a 93% yes vote but immediately prompted recriminations from neighbouring states and a rival political bloc.
The move had been expected following the ballot, which rather than strengthen the Kurdish hold on northern Iraq has left it splintered, with officials scrambling to avert the imminent loss of their last remaining revenue streams – border crossings to Syria and Turkey through which the region’s oil is exported.

Barzani: Zašto Vašington želi da kazni Kurdistan?

unconfirmed news: all private flights and VIP departures in #KSA are suspended temporarily

Under the new law, anyone who refers to the king or to the crown prince directly or indirectly in terms that challenge religion or justice will be sentenced to between five and 10 years in jail.

http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/saudi-arabia/saudi-arabia-to-announce-new-anti-terror-law-1.2118592