Iran Has Yet To Play Its Strongest Card

 

Tanker escorted by Iranian patrol boat in the Strait of Hormuz (Picture: insurancejournal.com)

A few days days ago the container ship MSC Aries was boarded in the Strait of Hormuz by Iranian forces and forced to anchor off the coast of Iran. The incident  was overshadowed by the Iranian drone and missile attacks on Israel and was hardly mentioned by mainstream media. However as far as the western nations are concerned this incident is potentially far more significant.

If the hijacking of Aries is the first act by the Iranians  in challenging freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz as part of their wider campaign against Israel (and allies) then this means an oil crisis for Europe as far more oil, from Saudi Arabia's main ports, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Iraq and Kuwait passes through that narrow waterway than any other shipping route in the world. To make matters worse the navy forces if the USA and NATO are currently occupied in keeping the Bab-el-Mandeb strait open for shipping at the southern end of the Red Sea, as attacks by Houthi rebels based in Yemen are proving more disruptive than anybody expected.

Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz and traditionally disrupts marine traffic at the first hint on any crisis, but as the current crisis is more serious than any we have seen for years the Ayatollahs who rule the authoritarian theocracy have a greater incentive to disrupt or even halt movement of shipping through the waterway. 

Since the Houthis began their drone attacks on shipping in the Southern Red Sea last October, the the Strait of Hormuz has been relatively quiet, suggesting which may mean the Iranians’  are focusing their attention on effort was going into helping the Houthis in Yemen or simply that the Red Sea situation has led to reduced volumes of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

 So the question now is whether or not this new incident was a one-off attack in response to the Israeli strike on the Iranian “consulate” in Syria or the start of a concerted campaign to disrupt shipping in the Strait which, if Iran chooses to play it, will be the trump card that decides the outcome of this game. 

Iran has never had a better opportunity to damage the west economically, escalate the conflict of the Islamic world with Israel and strengthem its own ties with China and Russia. If the Ayatollahs choose to play this ace, international naval resources would be spread even more thinly than they already are, with the situations in The Black Sea and the South China Sea showing no signs of easing and the west's dependence on internet technologies demanding that in a time of global unrest more resources are devoted to policing the underwater cables that carry international traffic and supporting industrial, financial and commercial activity. Iranians are not stupid, they know this. Hopefully, the hijacking of the MV aries was a one-off, not a new front in what is rapidly developing into World War Three.

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Full Spectrum Dominance? Full Spectrum Failure.

posted by Ed Butt, 3 April 2023

As it becomes more obvious every day that the war in Ukraine is only being prolonged at the behest of Washington DC, because while Russia cannot lose the war because of its territorial advantage, superior numbers, superior weapons and its immunity to the west's main weapon, economic sanctions, the USA cannot afford to lose because its credibility as leader of the 'free world, already damaged after its crew ups in Libya and Iraq and its failures in Afghanistan and Syria, will slump to zero.

But while misreporting and propaganda masks the true situation in Ukraine from taxpayers in Europe & the USA, Russia, with support from China, India, Iran, Saudi Arabia and a host of third world nations, is winning the real war, the battle to replace the US Dollar as global reserve currency. As things stand the American dream of global hegemony or as American military types prefer to say, Full Spectrum Dominance, look to be dead.

In a article in todays Counterpunch, Roger McKenzie, a reporter for the Morning Star, and the general secretary of Liberation, one of the oldest UK human rights organizations, writes a commentary on the United States policy since 1997, now known as “Full Spectrum Dominance (FSD).”

According to McKenzie, the United States behaves the way that it does on the international stage in order to safeguard the profits of monopoly capital, which carries politicians in Washington around in its pockets like loose change.

FSD means that the United States also will not tolerate others, such as China, muscling in on potential new markets (although China seems to be muscling in on Africa and South East Asia quite easily while Joe Biden's administration obsesses over Trump and transgender issues,) or swaying people away from its sphere of influence, and according to McKenzie, “China is seen as the biggest threat to the profits of the companies that currently decide pretty much what we will eat and even when we can eat it.”

“Enforcement of [FSD] has included everything from the funding of opposition forces in sovereign nation (color revolutions like the one in 2014 that put the current Ukrainian neo - nazi regime in power,), the removal or even assassination of political leaders who refuse to toe the line, economic sanctions, and military intervention.”

Everyone should read the article, but I do have a bone to pick the author, and with Counterpunch. 

The Simple Reason Why the U.S. Wants ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ of the Earth - CounterPunch.org

McKenzie makes no mention of Russia, the US proxy war in Ukraine, or the history of the US/NATO encirclement of Russia. IN fact there is no mention NATO at all. How can someone write an article about FSD without mentioning NATO and the Russian struggle against the US policy of Full Spectrum Dominance? NATO is an integral part of the mechanism that enforces FSD. It appears that McKenzie and Counterpunch both have a problem discussing the elephant in the room: Russia has drawn a line at US/NATO placing US/NATO nukes on Russia’s western border with Ukraine as a part of the US policy of FSD.

McKenzie correctly points out that: “Anyone who expects the Chinese to simply sit back and take the provocations dealt out by the two-faced Americans is living in cloud cuckoo land.” OK, but does that not also apply to Russia as well. 

According to McKenzie, “The answers to full spectrum dominance is full spectrum resistance and organizing. It is necessary to gear our efforts away from piecemeal change and toward revolutionary transformation. This will mean bringing together unions, climate activism, equality organizing, and a range of other social and economic movements in a serious change away from liberal posturing.”

All, well and good, but when this strategy was successfully used during the Vietnam conflict, the movement did not turn its back on the victims of US foreign policy then, and we should not do it today in Ukraine. Both the Ukrainian and the Russian people are the victims of US (FSD) policy. There is equivalency to the present struggle: The ARNV and the AFU (the US proxy army in Vietnam and Ukraine), the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam and the pro-Russian, anti-Nazi resistance fighters of the Donbass, and the People’s Liberation Army of Vietnam (UAV) and Russia the real target of the Ukrainian conflict.

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India Takes A Leading Role In De-Dollarization

 

19 March 2023

Reuters reported last Wednesday that “India’s Oil Deals With Russia Dent Decades-Old Dollar Dominance”, which highlighted the growing tendency of those and many other nations using national or or third-party currencies to settle cross border trades thus sidelining the US$ which has dominated international trade since the 1970s. 

The dollar was adopted as the primary reserve currency for international trade in 1945, and the petrodollar was established became the medium for oil trades as a result of an agreement in 1971 between the USA and Saudi Arabia.

The growing use of national or third part currencies is something significant that everyone involved i  international trade or finance should pay attention to. We reported in our currency wars feature soon after Russia’s (ahem,) special military operation began that the West’s sanctions, imposed with the aim of destroying the Russian economy, “could erode the dollar’s dominance”. Naturally we were written off as crazy conspiracy theorists for holding such an opinion but ...

Lo and behold, that’s precisely what happened, with India of all countries accelerating de-dollarization through its non-dollar-denominated energy deals with Russia. 

Since India decided that supporting US / EU sanctions was not in its best interests, Russia has become India’s largest supplier of oil and over the past year has provided a whopping 35% of that country’s needs. India is also the world’s third-largest oil importer and fifth-largest economy. having recently overtaken the UK to occupy that spot. Their new energy ties, and particularly the growing de-dollarization dimension of their deals thus must have effects all around the world.

This refusal to support sanctions or openly demonstrate support for Ukraine does not signify any anti-American sentiment on India’s part since everything is purely motivated by the pursuit of that country’s objective national interests. Delhi had no choice but to distance itself from dollar-denominated energy trades  with Moscow due to Washington’s illegal sanctions on nations that trade with Russia. Its leaders were not going to plunge the world’s most populous country into an economic crisis just to please the Dementia Joe and his whacko administration by eschewing the import of discounted oil from Russia or sacrificing the revenue earned from its exports to Russia.

By defying American pressure upon it to unilaterally concede on those aforementioned objective national interests, India’s economy ended up growing at twice the pace of China’s, which contributed to catapulting that country to the forefront of the  global systemic transition to multipolarity. India is now well placed to establish itself as the de facto leader the Global Global South in helping fellow developing countries balance between U.S. hegemony  and the  Sino-Russo Entente. However, in spite of claims made by Dementia Joe, Boris Johnson when he was Prme Minister, Emmanuel Macron and leaders of other NATO / EU member states that the world was closing ranks around Ukraine, emboldened by the stances of Russia and China (which has its own little contretemps with the Biden administration over Taiwan, while the EU's 27 member states, the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Japan and New Zealand (for what its worth), are supporting Zelensky's futile war, the rest of the world seems happy with a 'business as usual' relationship with Russia.

Had India complied with the US’ illegal sanctions, then the New York Times wouldn’t have recently admitted that their sanctions failed as the West’s efforts to “isolate” Russia politically also had. It was largely due to India's truly independent grand strategy that this latest phase of the New Cold War didn’t end in the collapse of Russia's economy and the restoration of unipolarity, which would have been detrimental to India and every other developing country’s interests while you could have safely bet your life savings that the Americans would have taken advantage of the loss of Russian oil and gas exports to EU member states to well and truly shaft the major European economies.

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The Dominance Of The U.S. Dollar Is Fading Right Before Our Eyes

 

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance via Zero Hedge  
18 March 2022

It was just a couple of weeks ago that I wrote an article arguing that the economic sanctions we have cast upon in Russia, due to its invasion of Ukraine, likely mark the beginning of a period where China and Russia would bifurcate the global monetary system, leading them to eventually challenge the U.S. dollar’s reserve status. 

Now, Saudi Arabia is joining the fray, further threatening to tip the balance of the global monetary scales that have kept the U.S. dollar afloat for decades.

The fact that predictions of a “new economy” and “new monetary system” only exist on fringe blogs like mine and haven’t gone mainstream given the current economic situation with Russia (even amidst our abuses of printing the dollar over the last several decades) is baffling to me.

As I noted to Andy Schectman in a recent podcast, our quality of life in the United States and our nation’s entire economy is an elephant balancing, on one leg, on the toothpick of the U.S. dollar’s reserve status.

Our quality of life relies solely in our unique ability to import the goods and services that we use and need on a daily basis, while exporting US dollars. We’ve been able to print trillions of U.S. dollars into existence over the last couple of years - monetary policy that is anything but sound, regardless of whether or not your currency has global reserve status – because of the luxuries afforded to us by the dollar’s global reserve status.

But this reserve status, and the $30 trillion in debt we have accrued and convinced ourselves we will never have to pay, quickly go from being long-term liabilities that we can theoretically ignore to current liabilities that we must address if the dollar is ever legitimately challenged.

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Challenging the dollar’s reserve status would be an obvious and immediate catalyst that would flip everything we think we know about economics in our country on its head. Our monetary policy blind spots, that we have been willfully ignoring for decades, would instantly become leverage for the rest of the world.

The stage appears to remain set for this to happen. Globally, if you are an enemy of the United States, the situation hasn’t looked better to challenge the U.S. dollar, maybe ever, than it does now:

• We have run up a mountain of debt and grossly expanded our money supply in an extremely short period of time

• We are the most reliant we have ever been on other countries to import goods and services

• We have a presidential administration that (1) doesn’t understand basic economics and (2) is limiting our nation’s ability to produce commodities, which act as a foundation for a country’s inherent wealth

• We are about to enter into a economic recession

• Inflation is setting records and is already bankrupting the middle and lower class of our nation, before even considering a potential challenge to the dollar

And while a week or two ago I was only worried about China and Russia, now that the world has been forced to pick economic sides, other nations are throwing their respective hats in the ring, too.

Saudi Arabia, which is a nation of major consequence economically due to its significant oil and gas reserves, has reportedly embraced the idea of accepting Yuan instead of dollars for Chinese oil sales.

Not unlike Russia and China’s plans to de-dollarize, that date back nearly a decade, the Saudis have been considering this idea for six years already. And not unlike Russia and China’s new economic tie-up, the catalyst for speeding up the process has been U.S. foreign policy:

Saudi Arabia is in active talks with Beijing to price some of its oil sales to China in yuan, people familiar with the matter said, a move that would dent the U.S. dollar’s dominance of the global petroleum market and mark another shift by the world’s top crude exporter toward Asia.

The talks with China over yuan-priced oil contracts have been off and on for six years but have accelerated this year as the Saudis have grown increasingly unhappy with decades-old U.S. security commitments to defend the kingdom, the people said.

The consideration by Saudi Arabia is consequential.

It shows that other nations, when forced to choose sides between the U.S. and its foes, don’t feel obligated to commit to the U.S. dollar, further undermining the world’s perception about the dollar’s strength.

Not unlike Russia, Saudi Arabia is a country that, regardless of how much its currency may “devalue” versus a fiat basket of currencies, is still backed by finite resources.

This gives the country and its currency intrinsic strength. Russia seems to understand this. In fact, just this morning, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, likely alluding to this fact, said that economic sanctions against Russia make the country “stronger”.

Saudi Arabia is now another serious name on the list of contenders who have the currency bite to back up the economic rhetoric bark of challenging the dollar.

As The Wall Street Journal notes, the Saudis have “traded oil exclusively in dollars since 1974, in a deal with the Nixon administration that included security guarantees for the kingdom.”

The U.S. dollar’s ties to oil have been crucial in helping prop up the currency’s demand globally. These ties have also helped drum up the psychological buy-in necessary for the world to collectively accept that “the next guy” is going to want their U.S. dollars.

But given the alliance between Russia and China – and the newfound alliance between Saudi Arabia and China - it looks as though that confidence game might be coming to an end right before our very eyes.

In other words, the dollar could be fading from the global picture like Marty McFly’s brother from that family photo in Back to the Future.

We may not notice it right away…

…but eventually it’ll be clear.

Far be it for me too be a harbinger of too many uncomfortable predictions at once, but, as I wrote last year, I also strongly believe that China will eventually back its forthcoming digital currency with gold to further strengthen its economic and monetary posture globally.

The contrast between a forthcoming divided global economy would be stark: nations like China and Russia seem genuinely interested in the idea of sound money backed by commodities, while the United States seems preoccupied with jargon filled academic circle jerks trying to convince ourselves that debt is money that “we owe to ourselves”, to quote Paul Krugman, and that money literally grows on trees.

If given the choice between the two ideologies, where do you think the world is going to wind up?

I’m not sure we’re ready to embrace the answer here in the United States, but we better get ready to.

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Yemen's brutal civil war slips into its fourth year

Last month Yemen's civil war slipped into its fourth year. It's a war without obvious good or bad guys: Security Council investigators have documented violations of international humanitarian law by all sides. UN human rights officials nonetheless claim that the "leading cause" of civilian casualties are airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition, which backs Yemen's President Hadi against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels and allied supporters of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh. The coalition's air operations may not be any more indiscriminate or lacking in precaution than Houthi artillery and missile attacks, but are certainly more powerful and widespread.

What is Britain's involvement in a war the UK government itself calls the world's largest humanitarian crisis? Limited, if ministers are to be believed.

Throughout the Yemen conflict, Saudi Arabia has remained by far Britain's leading arms export customer. Half of all UK exports of weapons and military equipment from 2013 to 2017 went to the Kingdom (up from 28% in 2007-11). Most were for the Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF), 151 of whose 324 combat aircraft are British-supplied, along with weapons, ground systems, parts and spares.

Faced with inevitable legal and political criticism, the UK government insists that it isn't responsible for - and cannot even necessarily know - how UK-supplied weapons are used after they have been shipped. Last July the High Court agreed (though activists are now applying to appeal that decision).

The reality of the UK's relationship with the Saudi military challenges this 'flog and forget' theory of arms control. Under a sequence of formal agreements between the UK and Saudi governments since 1973, the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) and its contractors supply not only military 'hardware', but also human 'software'. Around 7000 individuals - private employees, British civil servants and seconded Royal Air Force personnel - are present in Saudi Arabia to advise, train, service and manage British-supplied combat aircraft and other military equipment.

Ministers have nonetheless assured Parliament that these support staff are strictly hands-off: "there is no British involvement in the coalition in targeting or weaponizing aircraft to undertake missions [in Yemen]". Likewise they insist that neither UK military personnel nor contractor personnel "are involved in the loading of weapons for operational sorties, nor are they involved in the planning of operational sorties".

Documents and testimonies we've gathered paint a more complicated picture. Over the past eighteen months, with the support of the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, Katherine Templar and I have sought to map these British and British-employed personnel in Saudi Arabia, trying to understand their work and their experiences. Though their existence is hardly a secret, their precise numbers and functions have long remained obscure. The UK-Saudi agreements that govern their work are classified 'UK Confidential/RSAF Secret' and are closed from public release until 2027. Even UK ministers say they "do not have full visibility of the prime contractor's manpower footprint in Saudi Arabia, the detail of which forms part of the commercial arrangements underpinning the delivery of much of the contracted support and is therefore sensitive."

We've interviewed technicians, managers and officials from every level of this UK-Saudi 'footprint', backed up by individuals' written CVs and formal job descriptions. If they are no longer physically loading bombs, as ministers insist, they're still required to do almost everything else. A mix of UK company employees and seconded RAF personnel have continued to be responsible for maintaining the weapons systems of all Saudi Tornado IDS fighter-bombers, a backbone of the Yemen air war. They also work as aircraft armourers and weapons supervisors for the UK-supplied Typhoon fighters deployed at the main operating bases for Saudi Yemen operations, and provide deeper-level maintenance for Yemen-deployed combat aircraft.

These roles are underpinned by UK military commitments to Saudi Arabia that have never been disclosed to public or parliament. Our report discloses one of them, from a UK-Saudi agreement named 'Al Yamamah', which details how the UK will supply and support Saudi Arabia's Tornado fighter-bombers. MOD officials have confirmed that this secret 1986 agreement continues in force "as long as the programme lasts", despite more recent accords. (When in 2006 the UK's Guardian newspaper obtained an earlier, less detailed agreement which had been released "by mistake" to the National Archives at Kew, the MOD removed the files overnight, and claimed their release "severely dented [Saudi] confidence in the [UK's] ability to protect sensitive information").

A similar inadvertent indiscretion seems to have been repeated: though the files containing the 'Al Yamamah' agreement remain withheld from public view, a bundle of unrelated Downing Street files, recently placed unnoticed in the National Archives, contains key extracts of the agreement.

As these papers show, the agreement requires that "United Kingdom civilian and military personnel will remain available in Saudi Arabia for preparation, including arming and support, of the [Tornado fighter-bomber] aircraft during an armed conflict" in which Saudi Arabia is involved, though these personnel may not "participate" in the conflict directly. The clause makes no reference to the authorisation or lawfulness of such a conflict.

British diplomats were concerned about the implications of this commitment from the start, lobbying within Whitehall during negotiations for the clause to be removed. "At worst", the Foreign Office's Middle East Department wrote to the MOD's defence sales division, "this [clause] could expose HMG to accusations that they were involved in an undercover role in any number of types of unlawful military adventures; at best, it might threaten to compromise British neutrality in armed conflicts between third States." Papers elsewhere in the National Archives show that the commitment was removed from a draft version of the agreement circulated within Whitehall six weeks before signature. It nonetheless seems to have been re-inserted into the final agreement at the last minute.

It's difficult for the UK government to argue that it cannot know much about how its arms supplies are used, when it is helping the Saudi armed forces to use them. Our research doesn't judge the rights or wrongs of the war in Yemen. But Britain's day-to-day involvement with these weapons systems gives it a duty of precaution to help prevent civilian harm from those weapons. The government also has a duty of care for the thousands of British citizens at work in Saudi Arabia in quasi-military roles, fulfilling UK MOD contracts but as employees of private companies, without some of the legal and physical protections of military personnel or public servants. Most of the individuals we spoke to described their time in Saudi Arabia as amongst the most professionally and financially rewarding experiences of their lives. But we also spoke with whistle-blowers left unprotected under Saudi Labour Law, and even deprived of their British passports while working (a practice which seems now to have ended). We met contractors who described occasional physical jeopardy, from Scud missiles to unexploded ordnance. And we interviewed technicians anxious about the legal ramifications of their work within a foreign military machine at war.

Leaked Documents reveal UK gov't secretly supports Saudi military action against Yemen

Yemenis defiant amid the destruction (Source: www.knownterrorists.com)

Last month the war in Yemen slipped, unremarked by mainstream media, unnoticed by the oh-so-politically-correct talking heads on television, into its fourth year.If the war was simply a falling out between Yemen's Sunni Muslim government supported by Saudi Arabia and the Shia Muslim Houthi rebels, supported by Iran, there would be s strong case for non intervention, given that western interventions elsewhere in the middle east have only tended to make things worse.

Unfortunately there being no FUKUS axis (France, UK, USA,) forces on the ground in Yemen does not mean the western powers are not involved. While Yemen is being pounded on a daily basis by bombs dropped by Saudi warplanes armed with missiles and weapons supplied by the three FUKUS axis powers, Iran's support of the rebels is of a lower level. After three years of Saudi air attacks the rebels are still fighting, but the suffering inflicted on Yemeni civilians is not far from genocidal.

The country has a huge humanitarian crisis with many people now suffering from malnutrition, disruption of water supplies has led to disease epidemics because there is only contaminated water to drink and with many hospitals and medical centres having been deliberately targeted by Saudi airstrikes there is a chronic shortage of medicines.

Mainstream media likes to present wars as being fought between the good guys in white hats and bad guys in black hats:Things are rarely that simple, and certainly not in this case. The Saudi Arabian government is an absolute monarchy that takes as its legal codex the medieval Sharia Law prescribed by the founders of Islam, the fundamentalist Wahhabi Muslim sect of the ruling Saud family exerts great power and the nation's enormous wealth and vast oil reserves grant it immunity from United Nations censure. The nation is also known to have funded Muslim fundamentalist terrorist organisations in the Middle East.

Western leaders say the Saudis are the white hats because of their money and oil and because, when it suits them, they cooperate with NATO, the EU and the USA.
Iran is a theocracy run by Shia religious leaders. It too is under Sharia Law, in much of the nation women and girls are treated as property and punishments are harsh for what can seem to people in the developed nations, relitavely trivial offences. In western media Iran is represented by black hats. In both nations women can be publicly stoned or flogged for disobeying their husbands or fathers and the penalty for adultery is public beheading. Iran too is know to have supported terrorist organisations.

Both sides wear dark grey hats then. But what of the war, is anything being done to mediate between the two sides?

UN Security Council investigators have documented violations of international humanitarian law by all sides with human rights officials claiming the "leading cause" of civilian casualties are airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition, (Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates,) which backs Yemen's President Hadi against the rebels, supporters of the more moderate and secular regime of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh. Houthi artillery and missile attacks in reponse are morally no different but are delivered with vastly inferior technology and less destructive weapons. The rebel strikes are also less numerous, Iran does not want an all out war with Saudi Arabia and probably cannot match what the Saudis are spending on armaments.

The British involvement in a war the UK government has called the world's largest humanitarian crisis is somewhat greater than government ministers are prepared to admit according to leaked documents.

Throughout the Yemen conflict and long before, Saudi Arabia has been by far the biggest customer of Britain's armaments and military technology industry. Half of all UK exports of weapons and military equipment from 2013 to 2017 went to the Arab kingdom. Most sales were for the Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF), 151 of whose 324 combat aircraft are British-supplied, along with weapons, radar and other ground systems, parts and spares.

Faced with legal and political criticism, the UK government denies any responsibility for - and claims it cannot necessarily control or even know - how UK-supplied weapons are used by overseas buyers, Last July the High Court agreed with that view (though activists are now applying to appeal that decision).

The recent revelations about the UK's relationship with the Saudi military challenges this 'flog and forget' theory of arms trade. Under a sequence of binding agreements between the two nations, the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) and its contractors supply not only military 'hardware', but also software and "liveware'' in the form of expert military personnel to train and advise customers armed forces. Around 7000 people - civilian employees, British civil servants and seconded Royal Air Force personnel - are present in Saudi Arabia to advise, train, service and manage British-supplied combat aircraft and other military equipment.

The government has repeatedly assured Parliament that these personnel are strictly hands-off: "there is no British involvement in targeting or weaponizing aircraft to undertake missions in Yemen" one of the leaked documents says. They also insist that neither UK military nor civilian personnel "are involved in the loading of weapons for operational sorties, nor are they involved in the planning of operational sorties".

Over the past eighteen months, investigative reporters working with the support of the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, have sought to map these British and British-employed personnel in Saudi Arabia, trying to understand their work and their experiences. The precise numbers and functions have remained obscure, even in liberal, democratic Britain people who reveal such details tend to disappear or become victims of 'bizarre gardening accidents' and such . The UK-Saudi agreements that govern their work are classified 'UK Confidential/RSAF Secret' and are closed from public release until 2027. Even UK ministers say they "do not have full visibility of the prime contractor's manpower footprint in Saudi Arabia.

As these agreements show, the umbrella contract between UK and the Saudis requires that "United Kingdom civilian and military personnel will remain available in Saudi Arabia for preparation, including arming and support, of the [Tornado fighter-bomber] aircraft during an armed conflict" in which Saudi Arabia is involved, though these personnel may not "participate" in the conflict directly. The clause makes no reference to the authorisation by parliament or lawfulness of such a conflict.
British diplomats have always been concerned about the implications of this commitment, and have lobbied both Conservative and Labour governments for the clause to be removed.

"At worst", the Foreign Office's Middle East Department warned the MoD , "this clause could expose HMG (Her Majesty's Government) to accusations that they were involved in an undercover role in unlawful military adventures; at best, it might threaten to compromise British neutrality in armed conflicts between third States." Papers elsewhere in the National Archives show that the commitment was removed from a draft version of the agreement circulated within Whitehall six weeks before signature. It nonetheless seems to have been re-inserted into the final agreement at some stage, thus bypassing they scrutiny of elected representatives.

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