I am Not Sure how many Arabs Donald Trump has Dealt With

    People are people, many people say. There are type A personalities, who often times become leaders. Some of them are bullies, and lord it over others with some cruelty. History is replete with these folks. Name a decade or century and we can give you plenty. Every age. Our not excluded.

    There are likely a few hundred thugs and wolves down in the heart of Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, causing all kinds of mayhem and carnage. Raping, pillaging, murdering, stealing. It would be helpful if we had some names to latch on to in order to know how to approach, address, potentially deal with (if we cared enough, which we do not) the awful terrorists between Congo and Rwanda. But, they are not Muslim, which can lead us to care less. And no oil reserves, to boot.

    Back to the Arabs, speaking of oil.

    Before there was big oil from Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Nations, including Iraq and Iran, one of our earliest presidents used some force against some North African Arabs, the Barbary pirates. That was Thomas Jefferson. He was fighting for the open seas and free commerce, for a new nation that believes that business and free movement, or secure transport, were key our nation's hopes and successes.

    Free enterprise and commerce, while a large portion if the U.S. population was in forced servitude, and others like the American Indians were being forced out of their native lands. Some hypocrisy? Sure. TJ himself was a slave owner and loved a slave girl cum woman Sarah Cummins. Sad to say, we have to consider our first slave owners-- I mean founding fathers and presidents, as which ones were better human slave masters than others. Benevolent racists, is much of where we stand after all these years.

    Yeah. My professor at UCLA, an economics wiz, if you will, claimed that the Arab world was a slave society. I got to see and live among some Arabs, and I kind of see what he means. There are socio-economic classes that are fixed, you might say. There are Arabs, like Kuwaitis, in the 2020s that have house maids from the Philippines or Bangladesh, that some owners or bosses feel it all right to strike in violence. Yes, even now.

 

    Many of the Middle East are oil or petro-rich, but most are still struggling to get by. However, the oil wealthy nations have attracted many millions of poorer laborers who work in the desert lands, providing a huge portion of the hard, or menial, or hands on work.

    Our presidents in the United States went most the rest of the 1800s, our first century, without having to deal too much with the Arabs. In World War I under Woodrow Wilson we pushed more into Europe than what the British were doing in the Arab lands to fight back against the Ottomans of Asia Minor. Lawrence of Arabia. The Brits were quite a thing in the Middle East, plus the French.

    World War II brought in Ike and the troops to Morocco, then Algeria, and ultimately Tunisia. He left the British and the Australians and Indian or Nepalese Gurkhas to handle things in Libya and Egypt. And a bit of Sudan. The French and British Empires carved up the Near East and Levant a la Sikes-Picot. 

    We know.

    Truman watched the creation of the modern Israel in the remnants of the Hashemites, between the Syrians, Lebanese, now known as the Jordanians. Every U.S. president since has had to deal with the spectra and other phantoms, real and imagined, of the Arab Middle East. Oil became a giant elephant, or at least at least a gargantuan water ox that lumbered its way and pushed its economic throughout most of the entire earth, especially when organizing into OPEC with its chosen, gifted, fossil fuel enriched neighbors worldwide.

    Dwight D. Eisenhower had to deal with the Suez Canal crisis of the 1950s, which was a loggerhead with the British and French. A delicate balance, for sure. Worth further review and analysis, I would say. Egypt inserted itself into the global conversation and dialog. Along with Syria and the other neighbors of Israel. Saddam has not arrived in Iraq, yet.

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    Started a few days ago. Break.

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    Kennedy and Johnson, then Nixon took over in the succeeding years, concerned with pushing defenses into Turkey, keeping missiles out of Cuba, then the Communist threat in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. The Pan-Arab movement generated traction, and the Egyptians, Jordanians, and Syrians invaded the young but robust Israel in 1967, and again in 1973. Israel prevailed, as they are wont to do. But, the Arabs were marshalling their troops, discussing their unification and alliances, their common bonds. Which are not that great, much of the time, but can create a larger power when leveraged well. 

    Ford and Carter dealt with the OPEC gas (oil) embargos and severe fuel crises. This is not the America or capitalist world that we wish to live in. The Soviets and the Iranians changed things up for Arabs and Muslims by the end of Jimmy Carter's presidency. While he cut a deal of peace between Egypt and Israel, no small feat, but with extremist jihadi consequences. Anwar Sadat was brutally massacred in a national cavalcade.

    The Lebanese Civil War had been going on since the Ford administration, through the Carter years into Ronald Reagan. He implanted Marines into Beirut with other NATO powers as peace keepers, and suicide bombers left their mark, despite our superior naval and air power from the sea and above.

    Arabs are not to be trifled with. Lebanon and the Iranian shia sects felt like they defended their ground effectively. Despite the differences in languages and cultures, the Irani shia are still brethren with their cohorts across the Arab world. To include the Turks and the Pakistanis. Even the Albanians. Which goes into Yugoslavia of those days, more than a half dozen nations today in the 21st century.

    Arabs spread their money into all these places.

    Mostly based on oil and gas production. 

    Reagan handled the terrorist Gaddafi of Libya in the late 1980s. They had caused some havoc on planes and boats. Killing innocent passengers. Suicide bombings became a tool and tactic, at times very effective. Taking hostages also was an effective method to make waves against the super or superior powers, as the Ayatollah of Iran and its revolution proved, transitioning into the Reagan era. We funded Arabs like Osama in the war against the Reds in their central Asian border area.

    The intifada and Yassir Arafat arose in the late 1980s, as the Republicans pushed their vice president against weaker Democratic candidate.

    The first Bush then dealt with Saddam Hussein. This definitely opened up and amplified the United States presence in the Arab lands of the Middle East. Desert Shield and Desert Storm entrenched us not only in little oil rich Kuwait, but in the land of Mecca, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. That was the next domino to fall to Iraq had we not gotten involved.

    Algeria, a huge gas producer, had a bloody civil war in the early 1990s, but we stayed out of it. We did not stay out of Somalia, while not as Arab as the other Near East countries, certainly a land with Arab and Muslim affinities. We took it hard as Bush tried to assert some presence with the UN, but like the Pakistani blue helmets, our troops also faced terrible deaths at the hands of tribal warlords, perhaps more motivated by power than jihadi extreme ideologies.

    Clinton kept Hussein in check with the no-fly zone, and marched forward with Arafat of Palestine and whichever Israeli prime minister, the ill-fated Rabin killed by his own in 1995, and eventually Ehud Barak being refused by the Fatah leadership by the end of Bill's run of eight years. We had kept the troops in Kuwait and Saudi Arabi, being bombed at the Khobar Towers, and increasingly drawing the ire of our former proxy fighter Osama Bin Laden, who while exiled from his native Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, found safer havens in Sudan and eventually Afghanistan, a place run by mainly thuggish and oppressive Muslim Taliban leaders and warriors.

    Which brings us to the fateful September of 2001, when the younger Bush had acceded the throne of the White House. The Arabs were now more than ever a priority to the security and peace of the biggest power in the world, the United States of America.

    U.S. troops and its coalition allies filled into Afghanistan first, then Iraq and Kuwait (and perhaps five other Arab countries) next. This is the world in the 21st century post vicious and unforgettable acts committed by Arab extremists on American soil: we are implanted in the Middle East, and even though we left Afghanistan precipitously in 2021 and parts of Syria under Trump during his first term, we are still well placed across the width and breadth of the Arab Near East.

    While the fight and rebuild of Iraq was widely criticized, now after twenty years the country is relatively peaceful with democratic voting that occurs regularly. It is not perfect. Many mistakes were made there, huge ones by the United States and others. We received a lot of complaints and accusations legitimately.

    George W. Bush (41) lead to eight years of Barach Obama, then Donald J. Trump, and next Joseph Biden followed by Trump again. 

    He is currently proclaiming moves and actions with the Gaza Strip, concerning some two million survivors of the raids and bombings, and in my opinion inhumane treatment that has transpired there the last year and a half.

    He has some ideas, but as I stated in the title of this post, I am not sure how many Arabs the President has dealt with. His ideas and words influence people, but I am not sure how much his thoughts are pushing the actions and policies of our people and other global citizens towards a lasting peace.

    He claims to want the best peace for all, but I am left wondering.

    He, like Joe Biden, wanted to remove our troops from Afghanistan. This happened in a poor and ineffective way in 2021. I did not think that our air support had to or should have been removed. We needed to keep the former Afghan democratic government in power, under control over the Taliban.

    Both presidents allowed the policies and will do to this. Not Bush, not Obama, and not would-be president and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

    The Afghans are not Arabs, but they are close.

    Will the Palestinian let themselves be divested of their homeland?

    Not likely.

    Let's solve our domestic problems as we can, and even try to end the Ukraine war.

    Great. If we can bring further peace and prosperity to the Arabs of the Middle East, even more wonderful.

    I am questioning how effective the current president will be with these Arabs in the Arab lands.

   Will it be the same as others? Are they a different breed and culture, much more foreign than others in other regions and language groups. Of course, we cannot lump them all together. Jordan is not Iraq is not Qatar is not KSA nor Sudan.

    It is more complex than we can really fathom.

 

    In the end, we shall see how the present president does, how the dialogs and initiatives will go. All sides will learn. Hopefully for the best.

    We hope the best for all.

    Calling this thought post for now.

    Peace.