An eerie quiet hangs over Ras Al Khaimah’s industrial port. Usually a thriving maritime hub of the United Arab Emirates, now ships stand docked and silent. Not far out along the hazy horizon, a backlog of hundreds of tankers have lined up in recent days, halted along a waterway flooded with danger.
Any vessel heading past Ras Al Khaimah out to the Arabian Sea must traverse the world’s most treacherous strip of water for shipping today: the strait of Hormuz. Just over 20 nautical miles from Ras Al Khaimah, two oil tankers heading for the strait were attacked by Iranian missiles this week, one catching fire.
It is one of the many consequences facing Gulf states as they are pulled deeper into a war that they did not start and had diplomatically tried to prevent.
For decades, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Oman have allowed US military bases, infrastructure or access on their soil, and have been among the largest buyers of American weapons and technology. In return, the US has stood as the Gulf’s closest and most significant military partner and protector.
But now, Gulf states have growing concerns over the relationship, analysts say, after Donald Trump was seen to wilfully torpedo peaceful diplomatic negotiations in favour of starting a war in the Middle East.
Fuck the Americans involved in this war,nobody asked them to join the army and they’re aware who and why they are fighting for
Joining the US military is just signing up to murder brown people at the direction of the oil industry and war profiteers. Been the way for at least half a century.
“I was a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism”.
-Smedley Butler, 1935
That’s not very class conscious of you.
why
why don’t the rich join the army
because plenty of fascists are dying to kill for the empire like good dogs.
In a society where higher education is paywalled, I can’t look down on people who use the military to get pass the paywall.
Then again, these are the same trolls killing migrants for trying to pursue a better life.
You would if they killed your daughter while she was at school
Fuck em. They can read, they know what this leadership is.
What if they signed up before the current regime came to power?
When Dick Cheney was making the world safe for Halliburton? Yeah, there’s no comfort there.
This goes way before the “current” regime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes
You think the US military was out there distributing flowers before Trump came along? They’re all scum.
If you want to debate foreign policy, great. But “othering” and dehumanizing an entire group of people isn’t a serious argument. It’s the Russia/GOP playbook.
And the fact this is so heavily upvoted says more about the state of lemmy than it does about the people you’ve never met, yet seemingly hate so much.
The fuck you want me to debate? There’s no room for debating the morality of US foreign policy (which is 99% evil), which should be clear to anyone not willfully ignorant. Therefore, there’s only one non-scum course of action to take, and that is to get the hell out. Their ongoing cooperation with the US war machine makes them scum.
I never dehumanized US soldiers; I simply called them scum, for the same reason most people would agree WWII Wehrmacht soldiers were scum.
Do I need to have met Hitler to hate him? What about Netanyahu? Maybe Putin is actually a good person under all the death and destruction?
Only possible valid defense.
I’ll cut a tiny bit of slack to the 9/11 sign-ups, it was harder to fact-check the various lies coming from the feds.
Not only that but if it wasnt for the US military then Russia would control Ukraine and would be advancing into Europe.
Or China would have already invaded Taiwan.
Or North Korea would control South Korea.
The problem here isn’t the US military. It’s the leadership.
But the foreign bots brigading lemmy want the US military weaker so those nations can advance their geopolitical goals.
Ah yes, tell us more about the USA soldiers fighting in Ukraine. Oh wait, there are none. Not a soldier, not a plane, not a ship. Well, not anything manned by any 'murican, but lots of USA arms sold to them, as well as lots of European arms.
The current war against Iran can give China a golden opportunity to invade, since USA can get bogged down significantly in the Middle East again. Go USA!
Not to mention that Taiwan is strategically important to a lot of other countries due to its “silicon shield”, being the single largest manufacturer of processors in the world. For a number of years now, an invasion could trigger an actual global conflict, even if, for all intents and purposes, such invasion came as another step in a “civil war”.
Nah, they may have a larger standing army and can definitely destroy Seoul within minutes due to the capital being less than 40km away from the DMZ, but they know that, without big help on their side, they can’t actually “win”. I doubt China would help them, since South Korea is an important market for them.
Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Nicaragua, Colombia, Philippines, Iran and other countries would like a word with the “leadership”.
Oh no, why would people dislike the evil empire that has done a lot of evil and see it crumble? Clearly it must be bots working for the other countries!
That’s a leadership problem just like I said.
Every country has a military.
What exactly did the US military do to prevent Russia from progressing their invasion in Ukraine? If anything, this administration has done anything possible to allow Russia to progress, which despite their effort, they don’t seem to be able to on a larger scale.
Supply weapons, labor and funding and got European nations to do the same. This was before Trump became president.
You’re aware that this was not the military, but the USA as a country? The military does not get to decide how to spend money, or where to deliver weapons.
The existence of the US military is a prerequisite for the development and manufacturing of those weapons. The US military trained Ukrainians on weapons use and tactics and shared intel. Some even became contractors to join the fight.
Other than that it sounds like you agree with me that this is a leadership problem.
It is 100% a leadership problem, I am just not agreeing on the “US military helped Ukraine fight off Russia” part, because the US military was not involved in any of this conflict, beside some training they probably provided for the tanks the US delivered.
To avoid the accusation of “joining the war” soldiers have become legal citizens of Ukraine to help fight. Not only US soldiers but soldiers from other European nations as well.
The same thing has been done in Russia using Chinese, North Korean and Brazilian citizens just to name a few.
But the US military has definitely been sharing intel with Ukraine. Ukraine doesn’t have the ability to spot their targets deep inside of Russia alone.