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"Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe -- because, in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty."

George Bush the Younger said that. And one can see: The West wasn't lacking nice words or intelligent insights. What was missing, though, were the right policies -- and, much worse, a belief in our own values.

There aren't many places in the world where Western moral double standards are as glaring as in the Middle East. In the ears of the 1.5 million Palestinians enclosed in the Gaza Strip, Western words like freedom and democracy must sound about as credible as Brezhnev's praise of freedom and socialism to the ears of an occupied Poland.

Indeed, the West's closest allies are the jailors of the Palestinian people. No other countries have received as much foreign aid from the United States as Israel and Egypt. Most of the money benefits the military -- but the US defense industry profits handsomely as well. The Egyptian air force F16 fighter jets thundering over the heads of protesters on Cairo's Tahrir Square originate from the USA, as do the M60 tanks used by the Israelis to patrol Gaza.

Whether it is helping to maintain Israel's security, providing free passage through the Suez Canal or ensuring the containment of radical Islam, the former Mubarak regime certainly provided the West with valuable services over the years. And those are, of course, all legitimate interests. The problem is that the West and Israel have used illegitimate means to pursue them. Support for a regime that ruled for 30 years under emergency laws, defrauding one election after another without even blinking, one that relied on a police force notorious for torture and persecution, was illegitimate.

As Bush correctly stated, "(I)n the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty."

Indeed, the era of peace which can be bought is over. In the developments in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Yemen, we could in fact be seeing the awakening of a new era in the Arab world. Perhaps the Arab world is now casting off the yoke of Western-back autocracies just as Eastern Europe rid themselves of Soviet rule 20 years ago. This time, however, the West isn't on the side of the heralds of freedom -- instead they are the allies of the oppressors. It wasn't even two years ago that the German foreign minister praised Mubarak's regime for its "many years of political continuity" and called it an "anchor of stability in the region."

How will the West heal this wound of destroyed credibility? It is certainly not going to happen today. The winds of change turned into a storm some time ago, but not even that has been enough to drive the center of power in Washington to muster clear words on the situation. The US Secretary of State murmured something about an "orderly transition," but the man the world is looking to is keeping silent. US President Barack Obama, it would seem, can think of nothing to say about the urge for freedom of millions of young men in the Maghreb region who are being held hostage by history and the web of Western imperial interests.

Youth in the Gaza Strip penned perhaps the most poignant rebuke of Western Middle East policies, regardless whether they are formulated in Washington, Paris, London or Berlin. "We want to be free. We want to be able to lead normal lives. We want peace. Are we asking for too much?"

But these youth can't even turn to the West for an answer to their question. It has already shrugged off responsibility.

The risky consequences of this failure are obvious. Militant Islam's greatest ally has always been the West's hypocrisy. Again and again, the West has denied its own values in the Middle East, giving autocracy precedence over democracy. But sometimes people can be strongly influenced by the very things they are fighting against. Autocracy in the Arab regimes is meant to be a bulwark against Islamism?

Now democracy is threatening to become an ally of Islamism. After all, Hamas emerged triumphant in free elections in the Gaza Strip in 2006. The Muslim Brotherhood has now pledged to support a secular Egypt, but how long will that promise hold if the Islamist group comes to power?

By the way, during this week there is an Iranian - Thai Cultural Week which might be interesting for persons staying in Bangkok.

For more info, please see h e r e.

Very well stated HornyHacker!
A lot of wisdom for a 23 years old guy. ;)

After having been observing and studying US foreign policy especially since 1998 when I worked in (former) Yugoslavia, I have come to the conclusion that US foreign policy generally does not solve world problems or stand for good values (freedom, democracy, human rights, welfare, etc.) but that it is the reason for a lot of problems. This nation needs conflicts, they are an important part of its self-understanding and economic interests.

As we are talking about Iran. It is very interesting having a look on the history of this great country after 1945, when democracy was brought down there by the US and the Brits in favour of a control of Iran's local oil reserves.

To Michael2015:
My grandfather who fought in two world wars told me once:
"The only thing at which the Americans are good is bombing."

The more asymmetric a "war" becomes the more helpless they are.

Quite a nice link here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States

What about Ron Paul?

Dohm, I tend to believe that Obama will make it again in November 2012.
Why? Well, there is obviously a majority of US Americans which is not open for this well known republican propaganda any more. No regulation of "critical" markets, and the thesis that low taxation of high incomes creates jobs and enforces investments has been proved not being effective and -- even worse -- are the source of the latest big problems. Then see the US Republican candidates' debate in Florida which quickly devolved into a horror show of absurdities on Thursday night as candidates argued about immigration and moon colonies. There was nothing about economy and jobs which could be named an approach for a solution of big problems. Mitt Romney was branded the winner, but the real losers were the viewers, the truth and politics in general.

Finally Obama makes an issue out of an evident problem: The topic of social justice. For what do the Republican candidates stand? For social justice or for the classical interests of lobbyists?

I am an interested observer of this US two party system making your democracy. Concerning the Republican presidential candidates my impression is as follows:

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich scored a surprising victory over Mitt Romney in South Carolina on Saturday. But that is bad news for the Republican Party, some European editorialists say. Gingrich, they argue, is deeply flawed, and he is exposing Romney's problems as well.

For US Republicans, it all comes down to who has the best chance of beating President Barack Obama in a general election contest. And until Saturday, it seemed that most had resigned themselves to the belief that Mitt Romney, the decidedly uninspiring multi-millionaire former head of private equity firm Bain Capital, would win out over the decidedly immodest, once-disgraced former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

But in South Carolina, the playing field tilted in Gingrich's favor after Republican voters there handed him a decisive victory in the state's primary. Gingrich ended up with 40 percent of the vote to Romney's 28 percent. Neither Rick Santorum nor Ron Paul could keep up.

The result seems already to have ushered in a new, more combative phase in the campaign. Gingrich has relished in his demands that Romney, finally, make his tax returns public -- which the Romney campaign has finally decided to do, even going so far as to admit it had been a mistake to wait so long. And Romney's campaign has responded by demanding more information about the ethics investigation into Gingrich when he was Speaker of the House in the 1990s.

Romney has also charged that Gingrich, who did some consulting for the government-backed mortgage bank Freddie Mac, was a peddler of influence and a "failed leader." Gingrich, meanwhile, has sought to tap into the strong vein of knee-jerk anti-centrism by saying that Romney's record as the centrist governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007 indicates that he is little more than a liberal in conservative clothing.

Either way, the Saturday result means that Republicans will now have to steel themselves for what could end up being a long, drawn-out battle similar to that endured by the Democrats in 2008 when Obama edged out Hilary Clinton. Editorialists wonder whether Gingrich might be easier to defeat for Obama than Romney.

Conservative daily (German) Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:

"If the primary in South Carolina indeed carries the weight that people say it does, then the result from Saturday is a defeat for the Republican party leadership. It wasn't their favorite, Mitt Romney, who won in the socially conservative state, rather the former speaker of the House of Representatives and Clinton opponent Newt Gingrich.... The campaign is now likely to become a tough, ideological battle. And Obama will see his chances of re-election increase."

"Even if Romney is able to come back, the first primary in the South has shown that the former governor of Massachusetts is not a celebrated hero with the full backing of an enthusiastic party. The conservative, populist grassroots, which seeks confrontation with Washington and a fight with Obama, cannot warm to Romney. The Republicans are split. Should the party choose Gingrich -- compared to whom John McCain looks like a well-behaved moderate and George W. Bush looks like a centrist -- America's future looks murky."

Four decades after the 1973 oil shock, Iran and the West are once again embracing oil as a weapon. Tehran is threatening to block the Strait of Hormuz, while the industrialized countries are considering a boycott of Iranian oil. But both sides will suffer if such tactics are used.

Surprisingly enough, supertankers don't burn very well. Although the crude oil they transport is highly flammable, there is not enough oxygen in their tanks to create an explosive mixture.

On average, 14 of these giant tankers pass through the Strait of Hormuz, located between Iran and Oman, every day. If Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad actually ordered his forces to fire missiles at one of these tankers, quite a bit of firepower would be needed to set off a Hollywood-style inferno.

But the verbal attacks from Tehran are more than sufficient to set the global markets ablaze.

Last week, prices climbed significantly above the $100-a-barrel mark once again, despite all gloomy economic forecasts. And now the dispute over who controls the Persian Gulf, which has been triggered by Iran's nuclear policies, is a sign that further escalation is on the horizon.

For a full 10 days, from Christmas Eve until after the beginning of the new year, the Iranian navy held nautical maneuvers in an area traversed by the most important route in the international oil business. About a third of all the crude oil shipped worldwide passes through this bottleneck. Vice President Mohamed Reza Rahimi warned that if the West imposed further sanctions against Iranian oil exports, Tehran would not allow "a drop of oil" to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

But sanctions are precisely what the industrialized countries have in mind. On New Year's Eve, US President Barack Obama signed legislation that prohibits anyone who intends to do business with the United States in the future from having any dealings with Iran's central bank. The law is intended to prevent Tehran from making any oil-related transactions.

It became clear last week that when the foreign ministers of the European Union countries meet later in January, they could very well tighten the sanctions even further, so that the 27 member states will no longer buy a single barrel of oil from Iran. French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé assured that the negotiations over the sanctions are "on the right track."

Oil is being used as a weapon once again, but this time it isn't just one of the exporting nations which is using it -- the industrialized nations are also turning it into an instrument against Iran. A duel of the boycotters is taking shape, a new energy conflict between a supplier and its customers, waged with the tools that each side has at its disposal to exert pressure on the other. The only question is whether their instruments -- embargos and sanctions -- are in fact effective. What exactly can the oil weapon do?

Steffen Bukold, the author of a paper about the oil business, has noticed a remarkable paradox. According to Bukold, the public still perceives the embargo as the most important type of crisis. "But when you look at its actual effect on the oil market to date," says the expert, "it is the least important." History supports Bukold's claim.

The oil weapon was first used in the summer of 1967, shortly after the beginning of the Six-Day War. At the time, Arab oil ministers discussed ways to punish the West for Israel's air strikes on targets in Egypt. Without further ado, the Arab nations decided to stop selling oil to the United States and Britain.

But the embargo was relatively ineffective, because the Soviet Union immediately offered to fill the gap in supply. Besides, the loss of revenue was so painful for the Arabs that they lifted the embargo after just a few days. The first use of the oil weapon had failed.

The next operation happened seven years later, shortly after the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, but it too backfired. At the time, the OPEC cartel decided to almost double the list price of oil from $2.90 a barrel to $5.11. It also pledged to cut back production by 5 percent a month until Israel withdrew from the territories it had occupied in 1967.

The West's reaction bordered on hysteria. Consumers hoarded gasoline and heating oil.

Although the events may have been dramatic politically, from an economic standpoint the fears were completely exaggerated, because the market remained extremely well supplied. In the end, there was no real bottleneck. Only the fear was real.

In addition, OPEC's united front against the West soon crumbled. Algeria withdrew from the embargo early on, followed by Iraq. When a few producing countries pushed through another price increase to $11.65 on Dec. 23, 1973, Saudi Arabia, the cartel's most important member, distanced itself from the embargo. Once again, the oil weapon had proven to be rather ineffective.

Such lack of unity within OPEC is still not unusual today. At the large conference table in the windowless conference hall of the organization's Vienna headquarters, representatives from Iran, Iraq and Kuwait -- countries that have been at war against each other in recent decades -- sit next to each other in alphabetical order.

There has been a divide within OPEC since its founding in 1960: between moderate countries like Saudi Arabia, which hold immense reserves and plan for the long term, and hardliners like Algeria, Libya and Iran, which take a confrontational approach without considering the consequences.

The agitators studiously ignore a simple mechanism: The price shock they trigger weighs heavily on companies in buyer countries, slowing growth as a result. This reduces the demand for energy and, as a result, the price of oil. Ultimately, the belligerent producers only harm themselves.

Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Saudi Arabia's legendary former oil minister, often warned his fellow cartel members against overstepping the mark. In November 1973, Yamani said that OPEC's goal should not be to "cripple and destroy" the economies of Western countries.

Yamani knew that every oil price shock would trigger a fatal impulse: As oil becomes more expensive, industrialized countries start looking for alternatives. Carmakers develop more fuel-efficient vehicles and builders add more insulation to new construction.

The demand for oil from the OPEC countries declined substantially in the early 1980s, with their share of the global oil supply dropping from about 50 percent in 1973 to 30 percent in 1985. The West expanded its own drilling projects in the North Sea, Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. The world was faced with an oil glut, and prices dropped below $10 a barrel at times. Western oil companies are still searching for additional reserves today. About 40 percent of new petroleum reserves worldwide are discovered in the deep ocean.

In this way, every drastic increase in the price of oil already holds the seed of its imminent decline. Put differently, the oil weapon is ultimately directed against those who hold it in their hands.

The Countries that Depend on Iranian Oil...

The oil weapon used by the consumer countries -- the imposition of sanctions on individual "rogue states" to bring them to reason -- has similar weaknesses.

The West has tried this six times in the last 20 years alone. Although it is probably too early to predict the outcome in the most recent cases, namely Syria and Iran, the examples of Iraq, Nigeria, Sudan and Libya demonstrate how difficult it is to enforce oil sanctions, and how easy it is to circumvent them.

They also achieve other consequences than the desired ones, usually having a much larger impact on ordinary people than on the ruling class, and often leading to hunger and hardship. And when, as in the case of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, a previously boycotted oil baron was brought down, it was not the oil weapon that sealed his fate.

Oil consumers, for their part, are not a homogeneous group by any means, as the planned sanctions against Iran show. For countries like South Korea and Japan, both of which buy about 10 percent of their crude oil from Iran, it is difficult to find a replacement at short notice. South Korea has agreements with Tehran that it cannot easily breach. And Japan, in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, needs significantly more oil to operate its power plants.

Turkey, which obtains 30 percent of its oil from Iran, doesn't want to alienate its neighbour. Last week, on the same day as Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu paid a visit to Tehran, an official with the Turkish energy ministry announced that Ankara would ask Washington to exempt it from the sanction rules.

India, a giant country that covers about 12 percent of its oil requirements with Iranian imports, maintains very close relations with Tehran. Finally, China has criticized Washington's sanction plans as presumptuous. Beijing, despite having recently reduced its dependence on Iranian oil considerably, has no intention of taking part in the boycott.

Spare Capacity...

Experts are deeply concerned over the fact that once again a classic Middle Eastern oil-producing country, in the form of Iran, is at the center of a sanction war. "More than 90 percent of growth in global oil production will be achieved in the Middle East and North Africa in the next 10 years," says Fatih Birol, chief economist of the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA).

The events of the Arab spring, despite the hopes they have engendered in ordinary people, are already putting pressure on the investment climate in the region today. Countries would rather invest their money in welfare programs than in expanding their oil industry. The political elites are more interested in their own needs than the requirements of the oil market, and the worse the security situation is, the more difficult it becomes to attract engineers and international experts to the region.

But even if bottlenecks do occur, the Gulf countries would have the capacity to make up for shortfalls, says Birol. "In particular Saudi Arabia, which I like to characterize as the central bank of the oil trade, has always behaved very responsibly in these types of situations." The IEA member states, he adds, also have strategic reserves that could be used in an emergency, even beyond the minimum stocks, equivalent to 90 days of net oil imports, that IEA members are required to have.

Nevertheless, economists doubt that the oil markets will function as well and as stably as consumers would like. They will likely be even more heavily influenced by geopolitical interests in the future, especially in the Middle East, and to the detriment of Europeans. In 2015, Europe will already have to import more oil than the United States.

Until now, Washington has felt responsible for stability in the Middle East. Birol expects that the region will be less important to the United States in the future than to Europe and China. "Europe will find itself at the forefront of the powers that are responsible for the security of the oil supply," he says.

Under these circumstances, it is questionable whether it makes sense for the Europeans to join an oil boycott. In any case, the oil weapon has proven to be an ineffective instrument in the past, for both producers and consumers. Both sides are always dependent on one another, with the producers needing the money and the consumers needing the fuel. This mutual dependence guarantees that economic realities will ultimately lead to compromise.

But before they can arrive at this insight, the opponents will have to make sacrifices. Citizens in the industrialized nations notice this at the gas pump, where they will pay a few cents more. And the people in the producing countries also notice it, albeit to a far greater extent -- because they will have nothing to eat.

Kitty, I am not sure, if we understand each other.
Farangs running bars etc., these small business pimps, are not important, at all. We both know it. These guys, often having the status of tourists, are nothing, - less than dust on the shoes of Thai persons running the business. Regularly these guys simply disappear, if they are stupid and make 'problems' for their Thai 'wives' or real business owners.

The so called 'independent escorts' are generally tolerated. Who cares of these discreetly working ladies up to now? Normally nobody!
But my point is as follows...
P4P has the stigma of being 'cheap'. Thailand must still be seen as a low salary country. Now i.e., how is it seen in the eyes of a police officer in Bangkok who has about 30,000 Baht per month or less for himself and his family, when a lady wants to have this for ten hours (and even gets it). The business is still illegal, but a dumb nut has no problems to post her 'insane' rates on her website. What is the sign sent out and what the effect on the market?
Furthermore can it be accepted that persons who have university degrees exercise under foreigners instead of working in professions they have learnt?
May be this discussion is a little bit weird, but I think more interesting than discussing favourite colours.;)

Kitty, you are a person who is educated and who obviously has profound opinions on many fields.
That is why I have a direct question for you.

If we have the situation, that more and more escorts have and frankly publish overnight rates which are equal or higher then an average monthly salary of a young dentist for ex., do think such a development will be tolerated? You know well, how persons think about the business...

Of course, opinions of other members are welcome, too.