By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Exile in Happy Valley
America loves its monsters. We love to make em and we love to blow em up. For all our high talk of freedom and democracy, we are a superpower with a long and storied history of building up and breaking down authoritarian lunatics in Third World countries. Some of histories vilest dictators, from Pinochet to Suharto, were built with made-in-America stamped on their right foot like a goddamn GI Joe. Back in the good old days we would spend decades showering one of these psychopaths in praises and weapons and then use the bloody exploits we financed to justify going to war with the same bastard. We used Noriega down in Panama to launder our filthy Iran-Contra dollars and then invaded his banana republic in the name of the War on Drugs. We armed Saddam to the fucking teeth with weapons of mass destruction so he could wipe out whole villages of Kurds and Iranians and then used the receipts to justify three decades of rape and pillage in Iraq. And don’t even get me started on our cross continental love affair with Mr. Bin Laden….
Those certainly were the good old days. The all or nothing days, as Frank Miller would say. America still loves its scary monsters and super creeps but now we need them more than ever to fight our forever wars for us. With an American populace increasingly weary of direct conflicts and a national debt soaring higher than eagles dare, American might has become increasingly dependent on proxy warfare. Long story short, we actually need the fucking scum we arm now. We need Nazis to bash babushkas on the Russian border of Ukraine. We need blood drinking Wahhabi lunatics to chop off heads in every other country in the Muslim world. And we need sadistic strongmen to micromanage the madness indefinitely while we try to figure out what the fuck we’re doing anymore.
For decades this meant Saudi Arabia. The House of Saud has long been a reliable source of self-fellating pseudo-monarchs ready and willing to ship psychos to all corners of the globe. It was a win-win. We got to spread violent chaos and destabilization to any nation who wouldn’t take our money and behave, and the Saudis got to spread their own perverted bastardization of Islam to more kids who couldn’t afford shoes. Mohamed Bin Salman aka MBS seemed like the perfect monster to bring this vile tradition into the 21st Century and for a minute he was. The western media swooned over his swarthy date-rape charms and his empty promises of social reform while he helped us turn Syria, Libya, and Yemen into blood belching bungholes from hell. But then the little cunt got cocky. He began breaking the script and behaving like us, a dusty little superpower in his own right. He went bonkers blockading Qatar and kidnaping Lebanon’s prime minister before really crossing the line and hacking up a Washington friendly journalist named Jamal Khashoggi over a slight. Even worse, he began losing control of the war in Yemen, getting his ass kicked by Houthi rebels and falling out with the UAE.
