Middle East Focus: Western Sanctions on Iran: What will Turkey do? Serial Back-Stabbers of the Gulf.................

Arabia Deserta

Western Sanctions on Iran: What will Turkey do? Serial Back-Stabbers of the Gulf.................

Rattlesnake Ridge

BFF

“Taner Yildiz, Turkey's energy minister, said this month that his country was not obliged to follow sanctions by the EU or the US against Iran. "For us, decisions taken outside the United Nations are not binding," Mr Yildiz said. Turkish oil imports from Iran would continue. As Iran supplies around a third of Turkish oil needs, a reduction of those imports could have dramatic consequences for Turkey's thriving economy. Last week, Turkey and Iran said they were aiming to raise their bilateral trade to $30 billion (Dh110bn) a year by 2015 - twice the volume of today. Much of today's trade is oil and gas from Iran to Turkey. But days after the pledge to double bilateral trade, news reports said Turkey had begun to explore the possibility to raise oil imports from Saudi Arabia in an effort to lower its dependency on Iran. The Turkish government has not commented on the reports. "Turkey says decisions by the US and the EU are not binding for itself, but ultimately Turkey will not side with Iran when it comes down to hard decisions," Mehmet Sahin, a Middle East specialist at Ankara's Gazi University, said yesterday. Sercan Dogan, an analyst at the Centre for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies (Orsam), an Ankara-based think tank, also argued that Turkey had little choice but to go along with western efforts to increase Iran's isolation…………….”

The Turks are unlikely to cut their huge trade with Iran and support a blockade that is not sanctioned by the United Nations. They have too much invested in relations with Iran, even with all their frictions with Iran about the Syrian uprising (Iran supports the Assad regime, while Turkey does not). They are much more independent then the Arab oligarchs. The sanctions are now effectively American-Israeli-Saudi. The Saudis are traveling all over the world, and receiving delegations at home, promising to make up for any blocked Iranian exports, essentially urging oil importing nations to agree with the Western sanctions. They are again helping tighten the noose around their neighbor’s neck.
The Saudis’ goal has nothing to do with the Iranian nuclear program. I certainly suspect that the Western sanctions have not much to do with the nuclear program either, anymore than the Iraq war, which I initially supported, had anything with weapons of mass destruction. The Saudis see a military attack on Iranian military installations and bases and infrastructure as their only ticket to hegemony over the Arab side of the Persian-American Gulf, over the GCC. (We all remember the Saudi king urging the USA to “cut off the head of the snake”- See Wikileaks).
Their best hope may be that the economic and financial siege will push the Iranian regime into the “Pearl Harbor option”, going stupid and striking out at Western warships clogging the Gulf waters or at oil tankers. They probably miscalculate that once the Iranians are cut down to size their problems with Iraq and Lebanon will be solved. Whether the Iranian regime is overthrown or not, almost certainly not likely by a foreign attack, they foresee a dawning of the age of al-Saud supremacy over the region.
It is an illusion of course: the only strategic factor the Saudis have is money from oil, and that may not even be enough to keep their own people quiet for long. It largely depends on the price of crude: with Iraqi oil increasing, what better way to keep crude prices high and the princes secure than destroy Iranian export capacity?

The princes have done it before, during the war of 1980-88, when both Iranian exports were limited and Iraqi exports were cut off. In that respect, the Saudis are very neighborly, always willing to side with outside powers who are willing to attack their rivals in the region.
They are serial back-stabbers of neighbors: they did it to Egypt under Nasser, they did it to Iran twice, and some argue they have done it to Iraq. They seem to be doing it again, the Wahhabi knife sharpened and poised at someone's back.
Cheers
mhg

m.h.ghuloum@gmail.com