Middle East jubilant over Wall St woes

[mawilson 2,133]

The Wall Street crash has provoked undisguised gloating among the US’s enemies in

the Middle East who claim the global financial crisis is a further sign that the US has

lost its superpower status.

From Damascus to Tehran, a loose coalition of government officials and clerics view

the financial meltdown as the result of divine retribution and the Bush administration’s

costly foreign policy in the region, notably the invasion of Iraq.

Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, an influential hardline figure in Iran, has described the crisis

as a punishment.

“As Americans are happy to see problems in Iran we are happy to see the US economy

disturbed and problems extended to Europe,” he said recently. “They see the results of

their vicious acts and God is punishing them.”

A senior Syrian official said the fall-out showed “the US is no longer a superpower. It is

a big power.”

Hardliners are under the impression that the crisis will not directly affect their economies,

and assume that the apparent failure of liberal policies vindicates their view that the

state must continue to play a central role.

“This is a new chapter,” said the senior Syrian official who stressed the need for state

control of the central bank and support for farmers as well as minimum wages for workers.

“This will prove our vision of reforms is right. We have a social market economy.”

However, the assertion of state power in Syria is undermining those who, while not

supporting the US, are pressing for a transformation from a centrally planned economy

to a more liberal system.

Abdullah Dardari, deputy prime minister responsible for the economy, said the job of the

economic team in government would become more difficult.

Speaking to the Financial Times after he received a hostile reception from Syria’s rubber-

stamp parliament, he conceded: “It becomes even easier to say: ‘Look at those neo-liberal

policies and what they have done – and at the neo-liberal groups in Syria and what they

will do.’ ”

Even before the financial crisis, a popular view in the region held that the US was in

terminal decline. This followed the mismanaged occupation of Iraq, the failure to contain

Iran’s nuclear ambitions and to protect pro-western allies in Lebanon in the face of Hizbollah,

the militant Shia group.

The Wall Street crash has led to the questionable theory that the global turmoil stems from

the huge cost of financing the Iraq war rather than a collective regulatory failure to deal

with excessive risk-taking in the banking sector.

Mr Dardari said: “I don’t know the causality but war financing and the burden of the [uS]

public debt has played a role.”

Overall, the assumption in Syria and elsewhere in the region is that the Middle East is relatively

insulated from a US-led downturn.

But most stock markets in the Middle East have suffered heavily in recent weeks with the

exception of Iran, where the market, which has attracted little foreign investment, is up

20 per cent this year.

Even if banking systems in the isolated states like Iran and Syria have escaped the financial

turmoil, their economies will suffer from a recession in world markets.

Tehran is already reeling from the fall in oil prices. In Syria, the economy could be affected

by a drop in remittances from workers in Gulf Arab states and a decline in petrodollar investments.

Source

[alienlovechild 75]

I doubt Syria or Iran have much directly invested in the U.S. but they may not be true of oil producing states elsewhere in the region. Syria and Iran represent the rest of the Middle East so the title of the article is misleading.

Speaking to the Financial Times after he received a hostile reception from Syria’s rubber-

stamp parliament, he conceded: “It becomes even easier to say: ‘Look at those neo-liberal

policies and what they have done – and at the neo-liberal groups in Syria and what they

will do.’ ”

That kind of thing was said in Berlin, Rome, Tokyo and Moscow in the 1930s and 1940s. Syria is hardly the model state on economics.

Edited October 12, 2008 by alienlovechild

[mRx 16]

God is punishing them.

God plays the stock market?

[IAMX 3,055]

There's also several people jubilant about Wall Street, if you want to put it in the most simplistic terms -- those who put their money on the stock market crash, and those who, like me, think a stock market crash is what we need to get things back to normal. Just because the "middle east" thinks something is good doesn't mean it's inherently the inverse.

Edited October 12, 2008 by SRVT

[jundp 191]

Well, would America be jubilant over a similar crash affecting our "enemies"? Probably.

[Ken y Leidys 20]

I'm sure this is going to lessen the boastfulness of Hugo Chavez.