What struck me in their report is how unhappy the Middle East is. The only Middle Eastern country in the top twenty is Kuwait (for the first time in this cycle). Kuwait has oil wealth and is a compact country with lots of social interaction. The high score may reflect Kuwait’s lively labor movement. That sort of movement isn’t allowed in the other Gulf States. The United Arab Emirates came in at 22, and Saudi Arabia at 28.

These countries are all very wealthy and their people are very social and connected to clans and other group identities, including religious congregations.

But everyone else in the Middle East is way down the list.

As usual, Gallup found that the very happiest countries were Scandinavian lands shaped by social democratic policies. It turns out that a government safety net of the sort the Republican Party wants to get rid of actually is key to making people happy.

Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden take the top four spots. Israel, which also has a Labor socialist founding framework, is fifth. The Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland and Luxembourg fill out the top nine.

The Gallup researchers believe that a few major considerations affect well-being or happiness. They note, “Social interactions of all kinds … add to happiness, in addition to their effects flowing through increases in social support and reductions in loneliness.” My brief experience of being in Australia suggests to me that they are indeed very social and likely not very lonely on the whole. Positive emotions also equate to well-being and are much more important in determining it than negative emotions. The positive emotions include joy, gratitude, serenity, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and altruism, among others.

Benevolence, doing good to others, also adds to well-being. Interestingly, the Gallup researchers find that benevolence increased in COVID and its aftermath across the board.

They also factor in GDP per capita, that is, how poor or wealthy people are.

Gallup Video: “2024 World Happiness Report; Gallup CEO Jon Clifton”

Bahrain comes in at 62, which shows that oil wealth isn’t everything. It is deeply divided between a Sunni elite and a Shiite majority population, and that sectarian tension likely explains why it isn’t as happy as Kuwait. Kuwait is between a sixth and a third Shiite and also has a Sunni elite, but the Shiites are relatively well treated and the Emir depends on them to offset the power of Sunni fundamentalists. So it isn’t just sectarian difference that affects happiness but the way in which the rulers deal with it.

Libya, which is more or less a failed state after the people rose up to overthrow dictator Moammar Gaddafi, nevertheless comes in at 66. There is some oil wealth when the militias allow its export, and despite the east-west political divide, people are able to live full lives in cities like Benghazi and Tripoli. Maybe the overhang of getting rid of a hated dictator is still a source of happiness for them.

Algeria, a dictatorship and oil state, is 85. The petroleum wealth is not as great as in the Gulf by any means, and is monopolized by the country’s elite.

Iraq, an oil state, is 92. Like Bahrain, it suffers from ethnic and sectarian divides. It is something of a failed state after the American overthrow of its government.

Iran, another oil state, is 100. Its petroleum sales are interfered with by the US except with regard to China, so its income is much more limited than other Gulf oil states. The government is dictatorial and young people seem impatient with its attempt to regiment their lives, as witnessed in the recent anti-veiling protests.

The State of Palestine is 103, which is actually not bad given that they are deeply unhappy with being occupied by Israel. This ranking certainly plummeted after the current Israeli total war on Gaza began.

Morocco is 107. It is relatively poor, in fact poorer than some countries that rank themselves much lower on the happiness scale.

Tunisia is one of the wealthier countries in Africa and much better off than Morocco, but it comes in at 115. In the past few years all the democratic gains made during and after the Arab Spring have been reversed by horrid dictator Qais Saied. People seem to be pretty unhappy at now living in a seedy police state.

Jordan is both poor and undemocratic, and is ranked 125.

Egypt is desperately poor and its government since 2014 has been a military junta in business suits that brooks not the slightest dissent. It is 127. The hopes of the Arab Spring are now ashes.

Yemen is 133. One of the poorest countries in the world, it suffered from being attacked by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates from 2015 until 2021. So it is war torn and poverty-stricken.

Lebanon ranks almost at the bottom at 142. Its economy is better than Yemen’s but its government is hopelessly corrupt and its negligence caused the country’s major port to be blown up, plunging the country into economic crisis. It is wracked by sectarianism. If hope is a major positive emotion that leads to feelings of happiness, it is in short supply there.

Some countries are too much of a basket case to be included, like Syria, where I expect people are pretty miserable after the civil war. Likewise Sudan, which is now in civil strife and where hundreds of thousands may starve.

Poverty, dictatorship, disappointment in political setbacks, and sectarianism all seem to play a part in making the Middle East miserable. The role of the United States in supporting the dictatorships in Egypt and elsewhere, or in supporting wars, has been sinister and certainly has added significantly to the misery. For no group in the region is this more true than for the Palestinians.

Sot al-Iraq, an independent Baghdad daily, reported that the US counter-strike on Qaim on the border of Iraq and Syria killed two civilians and wounded 5 other people.

Although US military analysts and spokesmen will say that the US air strikes are aimed at degrading the militia’s capabilities and at deterring it from future such attacks, it isn’t very likely that either goal will be achieved in this way. Bombing guerrilla groups from 30,000 feet is as close to a futile military tactic as you can get. It is not as though these light, mobile forces were likely sitting around in their known bases and hideouts, oblivious that the US was coming for them.

In any case, the Party of God Brigades already announced that it was pausing its attacks on US forces after the Jordan operation killed three US servicemen. It makes you wonder whether they had been expecting the US to shoot down their drone and were appalled that it got through and killed servicemen. The Saudi owned, London-based daily, al-Sharq al-Awsat alleges that the militia was pressured afterwards by Iran and by Shiite political parties in the Iraqi parliament to suspend their anti-American attacks.

Iraq’s president, Abdul Latif Rashid, and the prime minister Muhammad Shia al-Sudani, warned against Iraq becoming an arena of regional conflict.

Although Friday’s air strikes on the Party of God Brigades’ known facilities are unlikely to spiral into a general war, you never know about these things. People don’t usually start out trying to have a war– they often fall into it.

MSNBC Video: “‘More airstrikes and Tomahawk missiles’: How U.S. may continue targeting Iran-backed militia groups”

President Joe Biden could easily avoid the necessity of bombing Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and the good Lord knows how many other countries in the region. He just has to do three things to make US troop secure in the region.

1. He could cut Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu off from resupply of armaments and ammunition, forcing a ceasefire in Gaza. Whatever is going on there, it isn’t primarily a war on Hamas. It is a total war on Gaza civilians, hundreds of whom are likely dying of hunger daily, on top of the innocent civilians killed by air strikes and sniping. No one can understand Biden’s single-minded dedication to the killing of 27,000 Palestinians, 70% of them women and children.

2. Biden could just pull the US troops out of Syria. It is crazy that they are still there. They only total 900, spread across three small forward operating bases. The Syrian government doesn’t want them there and given the defeat of ISIL (ISIS, Daesh), their presence is no longer required for self-defense. Their presence is by now illegal in international law. They are also exposed to danger, being so few. Bring them home.

3. Biden could also withdraw the 2500 US troops from Iraq. The Iraqi parliament voted against their continued presence in January 2020, so they are there illegally, as well. They are also exposed and vulnerable.

Presto change-o, the extreme tensions and crisis that threaten to draw the US into a wider war would likely evaporate.

Or, Biden could go on the mule-headed and amoral way he is going. It is starting to cast a dark cloud over his presidential campaign. Yesterday his swing through Michigan did not include an appearance in Dearborn, which has a significant Arab and Muslim population. They are an important swing vote in the state. The Biden people tried to set up a meeting, but were rebuffed.

Ceasefire.

The Party of God Brigades were founded by Abu Mehdi al-Muhandis. The organization is not related to the Hezbollah in Lebanon, though the two have a collegial relationship. Al-Muhandis was assassinated by President Donald Trump on January 3, 2020 along with the Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani. Ever since, the Brigades have sought to force out of Iraq the remaining 2500 US troops there and to force out of Syria the remaining 900 US troops stationed in that country. US troops were put into those two countries by the Obama administration during the fight against the ISIL (ISIS, Daesh) terrorist organization, 2014-2018. In those years, the US was often de facto allied with Shiite militias such as the PGB and with their sponsor, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. In 2018, Trump destroyed the Iran nuclear deal of 2015 and placed a “maximum pressure” economic siege on the Iranian economy. That and his assassination of Soleimani and al-Muhandis set Iran and its allies, the Shiite militias of the Middle East, on an increasingly belligerent footing.

The Party of God Brigades and other Iraqi Shiite militias have launched around 150 attacks on bases housing US troops since the Gaza conflict broke out on October 7.

Al-Zaman [The Times of Baghdad] printed the communique it received from the God’s Party Brigades:

In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

“Leave is given to those who fight because they were wronged — surely God is able to help them .” [Qur’an 22:39].

Continuing our path of resisting the American occupation forces in Iraq and the region, and in response to the massacres of the Zionist entity against our people in Gaza, at dawn today, Sunday 1/28/2024, the fighters of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq attacked four enemy bases with unmanned aerial vehicles — three of them in Syria and they are Al-Shaddadi, al-Rukban and al-Tanf bases, and the fourth inside our occupied Palestinian lands, and it is the US Marines’ Zafulun Facility. The Islamic Resistance affirms that it will continue to destroy enemy compounds.

“Victory is only from God. God is Almighty, All-Wise.” [Qur’an 8:10].

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq
Sunday 16 Rajab 1445

God knows what Zafulun is, but apparently it is their term for the place that Tower 22 stands. It is interesting that the group views the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan as part of occupied Palestine. Palestine and the Transjordan were conquered by the British army during World War I and Britain subsequently ruled the West Bank and the rest of Palestine as a League of Nations Mandate, while giving charge of the Transjordan to the family of the Sharif Hussain, the Naqib or leading noble of Mecca, who claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad and his clan, the Banu Hashem. Hussain and his sons had supported the British against the Ottomans during WW I because the British lied to them and promised them an independent Arab state after the war. In any case, this Shiite militia appears to view the Hashemite Dynasty (King Abdullah II is a descendant of Sharif Hussain) as illegitimate.

In return, the highly capable and effective Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate, or GID, is even as we speak making plans to help track down and kill the PGB cadres behind this attack on Jordanian soil. Jordan will also have some harsh words for Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ Al Sudani, who came to power with the support of the Shiite militias and is thought to be close to them.

Aljazeera English Video: “Three US service members killed in drone attack on US post in Jordan near Syria”

The Ma`refa site says that al-Muhandis was born in 1954 or 1955 in Basra, originally named Jamal Jaafar Muhammad Ali Al Ibrahim. He married an Iranian woman. In 1973 he was in Baghdad, where he entered the Technological University in the Engineering School, being graduated with an engineering degree in 1977. While working as an engineer he did further degrees in political science. He also took off some time to study at a Shiite seminary in Basra that was part of the establishment of Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim, the clerical leader of Iraq’s Shiites in the 1960s.

Right from the time he was in high school in the early 1970s, he joined the Da`wa Party. Some say that Da`wa, or “the Call,” was founded in 1958 to compete with the Communists and Baathists, who were appealing to Shiite youths. Baathism is a mixture of socialism and Arab nationalism with a strong secularist cast, and it instituted an authoritarian Stalinist-style one-party state in Iraq from 1968. The Da`wa party, in contrast, theorized a Shiite state as a believers’ paradise in opposition to the Communists’ workers paradise. Its leaders made room for consultative government.

In 1979, the Islamic Revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran began radicalizing Iraqi Shiites. Saddam Hussein came to power in an internal Baath Party putsch in 1979. In 1980 he outlawed the Da`wa Party, executed its clerical leader Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, and made belonging to it a capital crime. For the past twenty years the post-Baath government has been finding mass graves in the Shiite south of Iraq, where the Baath secret police shot down suspected Da`wa members.

Al-Muhandis, his nom de guerre, which means “the engineer,” was forced to flee to Kuwait. There, he was part of a Da`wa cell that turned radical and committed acts of terrorism against the US and French embassies, given the hostility of those countries to the Islamic Republic. He then appears to have gone to Iran, where he left the Da`wa Party for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), an even more radical organization founded by Iraqi expatriates in Tehran in 1982 at the suggestion of Khomeini. Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, the son of Muhsin al-Hakim, became the head of it in 1984. Thousands of Iraqi Shiites defected to Iran during the 1980s, and SCIRI organized them. Those who remained loyal to the Da`wa Party, who mostly rejected Khomeini’s vision of a clerically ruled Muslim state, tended to make their way to London instead. The Supreme Council developed a paramilitary branch, the Badr Corps, which was trained and funded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, and which carried out operations against Baath installations in Iraq. Al-Muhandis Joined the Badr Corps and rose to become one of its commanders.

The independent Shiite site al-Khanadeq in Lebanon says that the Party of God Brigades was founded by al-Muhandis in 2003 when the US, as I wrote about, invaded Iraq, with the aim of forcing the occupiers back out. He appears to have broken with the Badr Corps at that point and formed his own militia, primarily out of armed groups based in the Shiite holy city of Karbala (the Ali Akbar Brigades, the Karbala Brigades and the Abu al-Fadl Abbas Brigades). By 2007, they had begun jointly calling themselves the Party of God Brigades. They mounted some attacks on US bases. I also wrote about the role of the Shiite militias in that era

The organization became prominent in 2014 when Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called on Iraqi young men to rise up to defend the country from ISIL, which had taken Mosul, at a time when the Iraqi Army built by the Bush administration had collapsed. The Party of God Brigades and other Shiite militias armed themselves and went to fight, with training and support from the iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and Gen. Soleimani, against ISIL in Amerli and later in Tikrit and Fallujah. They helped ensure that ISIL was defeated. The militias developed political parties which got a fair-sized bloc of seats in parliament. In 2018 parliament recognized the Shiite militias or “Popular Mobilization Forces” as a formal part of the Iraqi military — a sort of national guard.

After 2018, when ISIL was rolled up, the US kept several thousand troops in Iraq for mop-up operations and to continue to train the new Iraqi army.

Israel is accused of committing covert ops against Iraqi Shiite militias inside Iraq, blowing up a weapons depot in 2019.

In Syria, the government of Bashar al-Assad initially faced a rebellion by civil society groups in 2011, but attacked the demonstrators militarily and turned the struggle into a civil war. It took on sectarian tones, since most rebels were Sunnis, while the elite of the government were Alawi Shiites. Lebanon’s Hezbollah came in on the side of Damascus, as did the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. The Party of God Brigades came up from Iraq along with some other Shiite militias. With help from the Russian air force, the Shiite militias defeated the Sunni rebels and drove their remnant into the far north Idlib province.

In the east of Syria, the US enlisted the YPG Syrian Kurdish militia as ground troops to defeat ISIL in Raqqa and Deir al-Zor provinces, with US air support. The US put in a small number of its own troops, embedded with the YPG. After ISIL was defeated, the US maintained a small military presence in Syria’s southeast. Again, they aimed to mop up ISIL and prevent it from reconstituting itself, and to lend continued support to the YPG in these largely Arab provinces. It is alleged that they also attempt to block Iranian activities, including shipments of weapons to Lebanon’s Hezbollah, on behalf of Israel. Further, they may be helping the Kurds siphon off oil from fields in the southeast, denying the petroleum wealth to Damascus. If this latter charge is true, it is a war crime.

On January 3, 2020, Trump blew away al-Muhandis and Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport. Soleimani had just come on a civilian airliner with a diplomatic passport to negotiate better relations with Saudi Arabia via the good offices of then Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul Mahdi.

The Party of God Brigades went to war with the US troops in the country, subjecting the Iraqi bases that housed them to rocket and drone strikes. The Iraqi parliament demanded that Abdul Mahdi find a way to kick US troops out of Iraq (he never did).

Since October 7, the Party of God Brigades’ secretary-general, Ahmad al-Hamidawi, has branded the US an equal partner in the Israeli war on Gaza and it and other Shiite militias have launched dozens of attacks on US bases. None had resulted in a fatality until Sunday.

In a historical irony, one of the reasons some Neocons around George W Bush wanted to invade Iraq was to stop it from being a danger to Israel. Over two decades later, the PGB hit a school in Eilat with a drone, and the US, having destroyed the secular Baath Party, is at war with political Shiism in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Maybe the problem is US policy in the region, and maybe no number of wars and conquests are going to reshape the Middle East in ways really favorable to that policy?

The decision was a recognition that the Baath government of Bashar al-Assad had won the civil war, albeit with help from Iran, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite militias, and the Russian Aerospace Forces. Although al-Assad has a great deal of blood on his hands, so do many Arab League member governments, so squeamishness about a poor human rights situation was never the issue here.

The London-based Al-`Arab reports that the move was led by Saudi Arabia and garnered support from Egypt, Iraq and Jordan. Although this newspaper says that the decision was made possible by a softening of the US position against Syria, I don’t see any evidence of it. Rather, I would say this initiative was undertaken in defiance of Washington.

This newspaper is right to underline, however, that this development is one result of the March 10 agreement in Beijing by Saudi Arabia and Iran to restore diplomatic relations and turn down the level of tension between the two. Iran’s backing for al-Assad and Riyadh’s for the Salafi “Army of Islam” had helped polarize the region. Now, Saudi Arabia is seeking its own, new, relationship with Damascus and no longer insists that it break with Iran. It is no accident that pro-Iran Iraq was one of the brokers of this deal.

Al-Assad’s fragile victory has left the country a basket case, a situation exacerbated by Turkish military intervention both against Syria’s Kurds and in favor of its remaining fundamentalist forces (in Idlib Province).

The foreign ministers who readmitted Syria spoke specifically of wanting to forestall any threats to Syria’s national sovereignty.

They also spoke of an Arab League role in resolving the Syrian crisis, which has left the country split into three zones: The majority of the country, ruled by al-Assad; the Kurdish northeast, which is currently autonomous; and Idlib Province, where rebels of a fundamentalist cast have gathered as refugees (among hundreds of thousands of displaced noncombatants who perhaps are not so ideological despite having taken a stand against al-Assad).

The United States protested the move and rejected it. Washington has imposed strict Caesar Act sanctions on Syria, which critics maintain are interfering with rebuilding the country and harming ordinary people more than they do the government.

The decision will be formally ratified at the full Arab League summit in Riyadh at the end of May, which a Syrian delegation is expected to attend.

Algeria had stood by al-Assad all through the Civil War. Among states that broke off relations, the move to rehabilitate al-Assad was begun by the United Arab Emirates, led by Mohammad Bin Zayed, who restored diplomatic relations and opened an embassy in Damascus in 2018. Tunisia, under dictator Qais Saied, recently followed suit. Saudi Arabia is said to be on the verge of restoring diplomatic ties with Syria, as well.

Sunday’s decision had been opposed by Qatar, Kuwait and Morocco. They, however, were too few to block the League’s decision. Morocco has no love for the Syrian rebels, who gradually turned to forms of Muslim fundamentalism, some close to al-Qaeda but most rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood. Morocco does, however, entertain deep suspicions of Syria’s ally, Iran, and as a conservative Muslim monarchy does not think well of Baathist socialism. Kuwait and Qatar both supported the 2011 youth revolt and went on supporting the rebels once the revolution turned into a Civil War. Both countries are concerned about the fate of the four million people bottled up in Idlib Province, who had supported the overthrow of the government. Qatar says it will decline to restore diplomatic relations with Damascus until some key issues are resolved. This is likely a reference to the fate of the Qatar-backed groups in Idlib.

At the time of Damascus’ suspension, the Arab Spring governments were influential. Egypt, Tunisia and Libya all had interim governments after youth street protests had overthrown their dictators, and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh was just three months from stepping down in favor of a national referendum on his vice president becoming president. These new governments sided with Syria’s protesters. There was an odd conjunction of these Arab Spring transitional states and some of the Gulf monarchies, which deeply disliked al-Assad’s strong alliance with Iran and his government’s intolerance of Sunni fundamentalism. Thus, Saudi Arabia wanted al-Assad gone as much as Tunisia or Egypt did.

Now, the Arab Spring is a dim memory. Dictatorships have returned in the countries that saw youth revolts. Al-Assad and his corrupt, genocidal government is not going away. Henry Kissinger said that diplomacy is a game that is played with the pieces on the board. Now it transpires that the Arab League states, too, are Realists.

Although Schuster doesn’t dwell on these issues, heat waves also cause more frequent wildfires, a threat to countries like Lebanon, Israel, Syria and southern Turkiye that have some forest cover. Likewise, they hurt worker productivity in jobs performed outside, such as farming and urban construction work. They have the potential to hurt restaurants and retail shopping, too. I’ve lived in places that get up to 114 F. in the shade, and even 120 F., and you get very reluctant to leave home on those days. One couple in Qatar told me that they got the summer blues there, because of being cooped up in their apartment and not wanting to venture out to receive that unrelenting blast of hot air in their faces.

Farmers in Jordan’s Ghawr Valley are having to delay planting until September because of the withering temperatures that now hit in August. This delay, however, gives them a shorter growing season, since it still turns cool in December. Jordan is at a relatively high elevation and can get snow in winter. The inability to plant in the summer is hurting agricultural productivity and the farmers’ bottom line, reducing their income. Similar threats face the entire Levant, and will get many times worse in coming decades.

The climate emergency is also at least partially to blame for the extensive decline of agriculture in the environs of Iraq’s southern riverine port of Basra.

The climate crisis is not striking everywhere in the world with the same intensity. Warming is proceeding twice as rapidly in the Middle East as the global average.

A recent informal UNICEF poll (not a weighted sample) found that 44% of the young people in the Middle East are so concerned about the climate emergency that they are seriously considering not having children. Some 31% of respondents from the Middle East said that climate change had had such a severe impact on them already that they have less food to eat now than in the past. Some 34% of Middle Easterners said that their family income had been reduced by climate change. And 35% said it was harder now to get clean water.

A huge 70% of young people responding to the online poll in the Middle East said that they were considering moving to another country because of climate change.

Although the UNICEF poll is not scientific, its over-all results track with similar polls (global, not just in the Middle East) of youth conducted by respected journals such as The Lancet.

(The Conversation) – More than 2 billion people live in “water stressed” countries. These are territories where more than 25% of the available freshwater resources are withdrawn for human use each year.

Desalination – the process of removing salt from seawater – is increasingly being used to tackle water scarcity worldwide. Roughly 16,000 desalination plants now produce 35 trillion litres of freshwater annually. And Jordan, a country located north of the Red Sea, is planning a major desalination plant on the Gulf of Aqaba that will increase its desalination capacity from 4 billion to 350 billion litres each year.

But desalination tends to be energy intensive and produces saline wastewater called brine. On its return to the sea, brine can damage marine ecosystems. Research suggests that desalination may be making some water bodies, including the Red Sea, the Arabian Gulf and the Mediterranean, saltier.

We analysed whether current and future desalination plans present a threat to salinity levels in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba. For both water bodies, the increase in salinity will likely be undetectable and less than natural seasonal variations, in which case it would not harm marine life.

An important marine habitat

The Red Sea is connected to the Indian Ocean at its southern end via a narrow and shallow strait. The Gulf of Aqaba branches off its northern end and is connected to the Indian Ocean only through the Red Sea.

Neither water body has a freshwater inflow, so salinity levels are determined by evaporation and the inward and outward flow of water from the Indian Ocean. Water entering the Red Sea flows north where it evaporates and cools, raising its salinity and density. At the head of the Red Sea, this more saline water sinks and flows southwards as a deeper water layer back to the Indian Ocean.

Between where water enters the Red Sea and where salinity peaks at the northern end of the Gulf of Aqaba, salinity rises naturally by 10% from roughly 36.8 to 40.6 practical salinity units (psu). One psu is equivalent to 1g of salt dissolved in 1000g of water. Marine life in the region has adapted to the natural salinity level of their location.

Several Unesco Natural Heritage Sites are located in the northern Red Sea, including Sanganeb and Dungonab Bay and Mukkawar Island Marine National Parks. The national parks are home to coral reefs, seagrass beds, mudflats, mangroves and beaches. These habitats hold significant scientific and conservation value as they support a diverse range of marine species, including the endangered dugong.

Most marine species can tolerate minor variations in salinity, but they cannot withstand significant and sustained change. Research reveals that rates of photosynthesis and respiration in Stylophora pistillata, a species of Red Sea coral, falls by as much as 50% when salinity levels are raised from 38 psu to 40 psu. Most colonies of this coral will die if salinity is kept at this level for a sustained period.

Making the sea even saltier

Our research used scenario analysis. This is where a number of plausible future scenarios are modelled and their consequences explored.

The most extreme scenario we developed involved high population growth, rapid economic development and falling desalination costs in the Middle East. Nearly 10 trillion litres of water could be desalinated on the Red Sea coast by 2050 and over 2.5 trillion litres along the Gulf of Aqaba in this case.

A less extreme scenario assumed limited population growth and restrained household water consumption. Nearly 2 trillion litres of water could be desalinated by the Red Sea and over 560 billion litres by the Gulf of Aqaba by 2050.

For both scenarios, salinity in the Red Sea increased by less than 0.1%. This increase would be less than the natural seasonal variation in salinity levels and would likely be undetectable.

The Gulf of Aqaba, however, is smaller and more isolated from the Indian Ocean. Salinity in the north of the Gulf therefore varies naturally between 40.2 psu and 40.75 psu. We found that the high growth scenario could increase salinity at the head of the Gulf by 0.5%, from approximately 40.6 psu to 40.8 psu. But even this increase is close to the maximum increase in salinity caused by natural variability.

The medium growth scenario would instead produce a change less than natural seasonal variation and would again be undetectable.

Tackling water scarcity in the Middle East

Our research suggests that, if carefully managed, rising rates of desalination may not harm the region’s marine ecosystems. This is particularly important as a considerable growth in desalination is likely to occur in the Middle East

Saudi Arabia plan to construct an entire new city in the country’s north west, called Neom, to accommodate 9 million people and water intensive sectors like agriculture by 2045. The city will depend on water desalinated from the Red Sea and Gulf of Aqaba.

NEOM | What is THE LINE?

Beyond the vicinity of each desalination plant, increased rates of desalination are unlikely to affect broader salinity levels in the region. But good plant design and strict environmental regulations will remain critical to avoid environmental harm.

Plant outfalls, through which brine is channelled towards the sea, must ensure rapid dilution by dispersing brine into the Red Sea’s deeper water layer. Ocean currents can then carry the brine out to the Indian Ocean, where it will be further diluted.

Desalination will continue to grow worldwide. If carefully implemented it can be a crucial tool to tackle water scarcity without damaging fragile marine ecosystems.

Jonathan Chenoweth, Senior Lecturer of Environment and Sustainability, University of Surrey and Raya A. Al-Masri, Researcher in Resources Governance and Sustainability, University of Surrey

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Facebook treats online campaigns as “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” if they seek “to mislead people about who they are and what they are doing while relying on fake accounts”. Accounts, groups and pages “directly involved” in this activity are removed when Facebook detects them.

Orchestrated misuse of social media is very common in the Middle East – often for political or sectarian purposes – though according to the Stanford Internet Observatory this is the first time an “inauthentic” network operating in Jordan has been publicly dismantled.

Suspicious activity spiked in April, coinciding with a rift inside Jordan’s royal family. King Abdullah’s half-brother, Prince Hamza, was placed under house arrest after being accused of plotting to destabilise the country and 18 others were arrested on suspicion of involvement in the alleged plot.

The Jordanian authorities banned local news outlets and social media users from discussing the affair but the ban was accompanied by a flurry of social media activity supporting the king and the military.

A 20-page report from the Stanford Internet Observatory gives details of the campaign which included Twitter, TikTok and Instagram as well as Facebook. A widely-shared video also contained a recording from the Clubhouse audio-chat platform discussing Prince Hamza, and accused foreigners and Jordanians outside the country of using Clubhouse to foment unrest.

The Stanford report identifies several fake personas posting in support of the king and the Jordanian armed forces, and it says videos were shared mainly through two Facebook pages, “Heroes of the Arab Army” and “My Heart Loves the Army”.

These pages merged popular support for the army with support for the monarchy, and particularly the king, the report says. “Although both pages were created in 2015, they seem to have been repurposed to include a wider range of political content in 2020 and early 2021, which coincided with a rise in protests in multiple cities across the country.”

Facebook post showing King Abdullah hugging a child. “Your people love you and your throne,” it said.

Videos circulated online implied that King Abdullah cares more than Prince Hamzah about Palestine and Jerusalem. One of the Jordanian king’s official roles is as “guardian” of the Muslim and Christian religious sites in East Jerusalem, and Arabic hashtags such as “Alquds_in_exchange_for_the_throne” attacked Prince Hamza by claiming he was willing to abandon control over the sites in order to replace Abdullah as king.

“This theme was featured multiple times in different videos … at times juxtaposed against King Abdullah’s determination to protect Jerusalem at all costs,” the report says. According to Facebook, the campaign was also backed with $26,500 spent on advertising.

The Stanford researchers see these efforts as an attempt by the state in the midst of a royal crisis “to control external narratives with its own set of narratives that promote nationalism and support for the king and push conspiracy theories about external interference.” But they add: “It is unclear whether local citizens believe these claims.”

Overall, the campaign doesn’t appear to have secured much engagement from the Jordanian public. Altogether, Facebook removed 89 accounts, plus 35 individual pages, three groups, and 16 Instagram accounts. The Stanford report notes that while the most popular of the deleted pages had 317,068 followers, 14 of them had no followers at all. The largest of the deleted groups had a mere 213 followers and most of the Instagram accounts contained one post or none. The fake personas also had few followers.

“The network was novel in its use of TikTok sockpuppet accounts,” the report says, “though it appears to have made little effort to create original TikTok content or build an audience on the platform.”

Via Al-Bab.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence.

When the Jordanian royal family gathered on April 11 to celebrate 100 years since the kingdom’s foundation, it was a picture of dynastic unity. Alongside King Abdullah was his half-brother, the former crown prince Hamzah bin al-Hussein, who had only days ago been placed under house arrest, following what was reported in the world’s press as a “coup attempt”. The king gave interviews assuring the outside world that all was well and that the former heir to the Jordanian throne had offered him his loyalty.

In no other area of the world do royal families dominate politics as much as in the Middle East. Six of the states on the Arabian peninsula are monarchies, as are Jordan and Morocco. Royals not only rule in these states, but in most cases members of the royal family dominate positions of influence in government and business sectors.

This prevalence of absolute monarchies in the Middle East has puzzled scholars for decades. Many somewhat arrogantly assumed that these modes of governance would die out as the states modernised and “inevitably” followed the western model, becoming republics or embracing the constitutional monarchy model. Yet the monarchies have proved to be rather resilient.

During the seismic regional upheaval of the Arab Spring from 2010 onwards, a number of republics were convulsed by revolution. But, while several monarchies endured significant protests, none fell – and few really looked in mortal peril.

How do the monarchies hold on?

Investigating the roots of this resilience has engendered a burst of scholarship. Some scholars have argued that monarchies were culturally or otherwise locally attuned and fit simply into prevalent tribal heritages. Others suggested that monarchies are more effective at controlling opposition or that they oppress their way to relative stability.

But such explanations struggle to contend with the region’s history. Any sense of a special predilection in the Middle East for monarchy is undercut by the reality that many monarchies have fallen in the past century or so, as in Egypt, Tunisia, Iraq, North Yemen, South Arabia, Libya and Iran.

A more compelling explanation is likely to lie elsewhere. For the Gulf monarchies, it is difficult to get away from the transformative impact of gargantuan levels of hydrocarbon resources.

Wealth alone is far from a panacea – just ask citizens in Iraq, Iran, or Venezuela. But the careful and effective distribution of wealth has surely been a critical factor engendering comparative stability in the monarchies. Not only that, but all monarchies occupy important geostrategic locations. As such, they arguably benefit from the support of influential external states in maintaining the status quo – including the US in the case of the Gulf monarchies and Jordan, and France in the case of Morocco.

The kings and emirs of these states are not elected, and criticising them or their position is usually a bright red line that citizens do not cross. Still, neither are they despots, and they rule with often a surprising degree of support from a range of constituencies.

Indeed, most royal elites created systems to place themselves at the apex of wealth or favour redistribution schemes that are baked into the state’s political economy. This means they have created strong and sometimes diverse groups of individuals and structures in society who continue to be dependent on the status quo from which they benefit.

These benefits vary from country to country. Monarchs in the Gulf have long overseen some of the world’s most generous welfare state systems, as well as low rates of taxation, sometimes explicit promises of jobs in the government sector, and a litany of subsidies. Similarly, in Jordan it has long been argued that elites used government handouts and patronage to boost support in key tribal constituencies.

Storing up problems

This system has worked for decades, but is coming under increasing pressure. Indeed, arguably the central problem that the monarchies face, albeit to varying degrees, is that their economies are classed as rentier economies. This means that, in reality, a comparatively small percentage of the populations are involved with making the majority of the state’s income, which tends to come from extractive industries (oil, gas, minerals) or international support.

The obvious issues here are that these resources are finite and subject to wildly shifting demand and prices. The influence of, for example, hydrocarbons on local economies is so pervasive that it tends to inhibit the emergence of an autonomous, functioning economy. Overall, this means that the state’s GDP lurches around according to factors well beyond the control of the state, which has long played havoc with governments striving to set a sustainable, clear, long-term budget.

Diversifying these economies away from a reliance on these kinds of basic sources of income has been a goal for generations. The results show that states fail to meaningfully diversify unless they are forced to – and even when the wells run practically dry, they switch, like Bahrain, to relying on other monarchies for financial support.

The recent elite spat and mini crisis in Jordan is arguably rooted in precisely these kinds of economic concerns. But, if recent reports are to be believed, the family squabble has been resolved, order has been restored and – for the time being at least – the status quo appears to have survived.

David B Roberts, Associate Professor, School of Security Studies, King’s College London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

NATO: “Q
NATO Secretary General with the King of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan🇯🇴, 05 MAY 2021”

Political scientist John Mearsheimer wrote a book on the tragedy of great power politics. While that subject is indeed shockingly depressing, imagine the tragedy of small power politics.

Poor King Abdullah II of Jordan was forced to host Trump’s vice president Mike Pence, the world’s biggest Christian Zionist, who positively exulted about turning all of Jerusalem over to Israel’s far right government headed by Binyamin Netanyahu.

Jordan is in charge of the major Muslim shrine complex on the Temple Mount, the al-Aqsa, and is a major diplomatic player in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations toward a final status settlement of the position of Jerusalem. (Jerusalem was never awarded to Israel by any international body, and it has it only by conquest, which is prohibited by the 1945 UN charter). East Jerusalem is heavily Palestinian and hasn’t had a Jewish majority since the Romans kicked the Jews out of the city in 136 AD.

Abdullah went on about US support for Jordan over decades (the US had seen the small kingdom as an anti-Communist, anti-Arab Nationalist asset during the Cold War, and then as a useful ally in the War on Terrorism since 2001. Jordanians generally despise Muslim extremism as much as they do Marxism, being mostly good burghers).

He said he had been encouraged by Trump’s announcement that he would try to make the deal of the century between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But then he was disappointed by the lack of follow-through and then by the unilateral awarding of Jerusalem to Israel, when instead the final status of Jerusalem should have come out of negotiations among the relevant parties.

Abdullah’s subdued, sullen complaint masked fierce rage in Amman’s palace, as well as severe anxiety about what Trump’s policies will mean for Jordan’s own stability and for that of the world. The ignoramus blowhard Queens building contractor Trump and the mendacious Midwestern Christian Zionist tobacco lobbyist Pence could end up costing Abdullah II his head, and could end up provoking a new generation of terrorism.

Jordan has 6.6 million citizens and 9.5 million residents (i.e. a third of the resident population are guest workers or refugees– over a million Syrians, 600,000 Egyptians, a similar number of stateless Palestinians, and the rest Iraqis, Yemenis, Libyans, etc.) Over half of the citizen population is of Palestinian heritage, who typically have strong views of the ongoing Israeli colonization project in the Palestinian West Bank.

Jordan, in short, is a cauldron of the flotsam of imperial projects, from the British surrender of the Mandate of Palestine to the Zionist lobby and the subsequent displacement of the majority of the Palestinian population as refugees to neighboring countries, to the American wars and occupations in Iraq, the Russo-Iranian enabling of the al-Assad regime in Syria and all its ethnic cleansing, the Saudi misadventure in Yemen, the fecklessness of NATO in Libya, the economic mismanagement of the Egyptian economy.

It is a little astonishing that this small fractured place, with a citizen population the size of Mike Pence’s Indiana and a total resident population roughly the size of Michigan, manages to hold together. It has few economic resources on the surface. There is however a massive black economy. And although the Jordanian government might not recognize it, the refugees have brought in tremendous wealth–though of course large numbers of them have lost everything and receive little in the way of international aid.

Jordan’s political framework is the Hashemite monarchy and its somewhat opaque police state, both backed to the hilt over decades by the United States and since the 1990s, Israel.

The state is popular to the extent that it can provide security to its people and a framework within which this nation of refugees can improve their lives and navigate among the dangers all around them– an arrogant and expansionist Israeli rogue state, a seedy Stalinist police state in Syria, an erratic and increasingly hegemonic Saudi monarchy, and a grasping and profoundly ignorant United States, Inc.

What Abdullah II is afraid of is that his American alliance, always unpopular among much of the population, and the peace treaty with Israel concluded by his predecessor in the 1990s, will tag him, finally, as a traitor to Islam and to the Arab nation–as it becomes increasingly clear that Washington and Tel Aviv intend completely to crush Arab and Muslim aspirations for a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem and to do to the al-Aqsa mosque what they have done to the shrine of Abraham at Hebron.

Looking into Pence’s cold, calculating imperialist eyes, Abdullah saw a guillotine with his name on it.

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Related video:

Al Jazeera English: “?? Jordan’s king tells Pence US ?? must ‘rebuild trust'”