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.
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?