Rattlesnake Ridge      

 
      BFF

“This summer a senior Saudi official told John Hannah, Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, that from the outset of the upheaval in Syria, the king has believed that regime change would be highly beneficial to Saudi interests: “The king knows that other than the collapse of the Islamic Republic itself, nothing would weaken Iran more than losing Syria.” This is today’s “great game” – losing Syria. And this is how it is played: set up a hurried transitional council as sole representative of the Syrian people, irrespective of whether it has any real legs inside Syria; feed in armed insurgents from neighbouring states; impose sanctions that will hurt the middle classes; mount a media campaign to denigrate any Syrian efforts at reform; try to instigate divisions within the army and the elite; and ultimately President Assad will fall – so its initiators insist……….. The radical armed elements being used in Syria as auxiliaries to depose Assad run counter to the prospect of any outcome emerging within the western paradigm. These groups may well have a bloody and very undemocratic agenda of their own………The origins of the “lose Assad” operation preceded the Arab awakening: they reach back to Israel’s failure in its 2006 war to seriously damage Hezbollah, and the post-conflict US assessment that it was Syria that represented Hezbollah’s achilles heel – as the vulnerable conduit linking Hezbollah to Iran. US officials speculated as to what might be done to block this vital corridor, but it was Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia………….”

Bandar Bin Sultan, Saudi Prince of thieves, is advising the West on how to topple the Ba’athist dictatorship in Damascus and almost certainly install a worse regime of Salafis and other fundamentalists. That may be fine with the al-Saud rulers in Riyadh: the Salafis are their fifth columnists, bought and paid for, from the Persian-American Gulf states to Egypt and North Africa. The West will almost certainly miss the Assad dictatorship, once the Islamists rule in Damascus. Imagine the Taliban wedged between Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel. It is especially the latter border that should give the West second thoughts.
(I trust there is no need for my regular readers to have me repeat the well-known story that BAE Systems had given bribes commissions of about GBP1 billion (US$ 2 billion) to Saudi Prince Bandar Bin Sultan for his role in a huge British-Saudi arms deal. Tony (Yo) Blair killed the British Serious Frauds Office (SFO) investigation of it because it threatened a new British deal to sell weapons systems and pay the princes yet more bribes commissions. That came to be known as the al-Yamama scandal, and it set Tony Blair on his path to multimillion contracts with Arab and other oil potentates after he left office).

Cheers
mhg


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