“The U.S. Defense Department plans to sell Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates $10.8 billion in advanced weaponry, including air-launched cruise missiles and precision munitions. Notice yesterday of the planned sales of advanced weapons made by Boeing Co. (BA) and Raytheon Co. (RTN) sends a message of support from the Obama administration to two close allies in the Middle East as the U.S. and five other nations are engaged in talks to curb Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program. The Saudi regime has pressed the U.S. to maintain tough economic sanctions on Iran……………….”

Given the charged sectarian situation in the region, this Saudi Israeli alliance can be translated for now in terms of interfaith relations. The Saudi princes always publicize and pay for, for propaganda purposes, that they favor interfaith dialog, although they always hold these dialogs in Europe, exclude Jews and others from them, and they never allow people of other faiths to practice their religion in their Wahhabi kingdom. You can go to prison for setting up a Christmas Tree in your living room (imagine what a Menorah will get you over there).

This Wahhabi-Zionist axis can be truly called an Interfaith Axis. Adding France and possibly other Western countries, so can we call it a Wahhabi-Jewish-Christian axis? Yes we can, for the sake of making a point.
Its immediate goal seems to be to maintain the Western economic blockade against the people of Iran. Inevitably, its longer term goal is to provoke a destructive war against Iran which, given the current sectarian terrorist provocations in the region, will most likely become a Western-Zionist-Wahhabi war on all Shi’as of the Middle East.  Al-Qaeda, being a Wahhabi creation and an enemy of everyone and everything Shi’a, will join this axis and the war: actually it already has joined both.
The Wahhabis will not be doing the fighting, they are not good at that: they do the urging and the provoking and maybe the paying. The Wahhabis will be essentially pimping for war, for a new Western-Israeli war against another Muslim country.
Cheers
mhg

The talk and white noise about the Iranian nuclear issue seems to focus on such factors and clichés as “security”, “existential threat”, “Persian Gulf stability”. I said it “seems”. There is another factor that is huge, probably bigger and more legitimate than the excuse of security. I am not talking about the well-known strategic factors like the desire of Israel and Saudi Arabia to be the top powers east of the Mediterranean (well, maybe not Saudi Arabia, which is not really a military power by any measure, except maybe around places like Bahrain and Qatar).
The other issue that is not talked about so often is economics, as in petroleum, as in oil, as in even gas. The Western blockade of Iran and her oil has been a bonanza for the princes and potentates. As Iranian exports were reduced and the cost of delivery to consumers increased (insurance, etc), Saudi Arabia has become even more important for the oil market. It is a repeat of what happened during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s when exports of both warring countries were reduced and the other regional countries benefited. It is like the old depression-era idea of “beggar thy neighbor”, but with a Wahhabi twist.
That is the nightmare that worries the absolute tribal princes. Iranian oil fields have not been growing fast in the past years for obvious reasons. Whenever the blockade is lifted, Iranian oil will start making up for the big reduction and stagnation in output in the past three decades. Then there is the Iranian natural gas, possibly the largest reserves in the world. All that, coupled with the rapid recovery of Iraqi oil production, will reduce the importance of Saudi oil and weaken crude prices. It will also reduce the political leverage (call it blackmail power) the princes have over the industrial countries.
That is the gorilla in the palaces of Riyadh and Taif that is not talked about much openly in the royal media. I posted on this in the past, including in the post titled “Will Iraq Revise the Gulf Oil Equation?” , and a post titled Petroleum Chat: from Tehran through Baghdad to Riyadh and Caracas.

Cheers
mhg

“But there’s an intriguing upside: The Israeli-Saudi mutual dislike of the Iran nuclear deal, and their de facto alliance against it, may weirdly prove one of the “silver linings” of this negotiation. Indeed, if the Israelis become a protector and defender of the Sunni Muslim countries, that could have lasting security benefits for Israel and might even open the way for progress on the Palestinian issue — without the usual American mediation…………………”

David Ignatius is, almost certainly again, repeating a common mistake of Western media and pundits. They all seem to believe, or want to believe, that the controlled Saudi media and those of a couple of Gulf countries and the Hariri clan in Lebanon represent all Arab opinion. A self-satisfying oversimplification of the Muslim and Arab worlds. He apparently buys the idea that Saudi regime opinion, as expressed in media owned by Saudi princes (Alarabiya, Asharq Alawsat, Al-Hayat) reflects broader Arab opinion. Not so.
Just ask the man and woman in the street all across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and not just the Gulf states or some neighborhoods of Beirut and Tripoli. Most Arabs (Sunni, Shi’a, or Vegan) do not have the same opinion of the Iranian nuclear program as the Saudi princes and their Wahhabi loyalists and the Wahhabi quasi-liberals of the Persian Gulf region.
So, if some 250 million in the MENA region have a different opinion, how can Israel become “protector” of all Sunnis (he means Sunni Arabs)? How about Israel becoming protector of only Wahhabis and Salafis and Wahhabi quasi-liberals among Gulf Arabs?

Cheers
mhg

My cynical Saudi source reports that the princes are not totally displeased with the reaction to their decision to reject a seat on the UN Security Council. Even if they don’t take the seat that they had campaigned so hard to get. They are already campaigning for that seat to go to Jordan, she claims. That way the Saudis can still speechify and vote but through the mouth of the Jordanian ambassador who will get the blame for whatever ‘stuff’ comes out of his mouth. All for a substantial fee, of course. Too bad the Jordanian ambassador, being who he is, has no sense of humor to help him appreciate the situation.
She reports that the princes have developed an appetite for more brinkmanship. The senior princes feel they need to send a stronger message to let Uncle Sam know they are displeased. Thus she report that the next man to be named Crown Prince (after Salman) will shock the world, and please the rival princes, by announcing publicly that he rejects the position of Crown Prince until the UN starts doing its job of liberating Syria from Al Assad and handing it over to the tribal Salafi forces established by Saudi Arabia for that purpose. She claims the princes will also demand that the UN give Hezbollah and its local supporters, all 2-3 million of them, an ultimatum to depart Lebanon and hand it over to Saad Hariri who will govern it from Paris and Riyadh alternately.
She tells me to wait, there is more: that will not be all. Their next target after that will be their old and current target: Iraq…………..

Cheers
mhg

       
“UNESCO has suspended the voting rights of the United States and Israel, two years after both countries stopped paying dues to the U.N.’s cultural arm in protest over its granting full membership to the Palestinians. The U.S. decision to cancel its funding in October 2011 was blamed on U.S. laws that prohibit funding to any U.N. agency that implies recognition of the Palestinians’ demands for their own state. Israel also pulled its funding, objecting to what it called unilateral attempts by the Palestinians to gain recognition of statehood…………….”

Ref. my Saturday posting on Saudi Arabia.
I pointed to my Saudi source that her government is not unique in that respect, in getting upset and walking out screaming when it doesn’t get its way. I suggested the Al Saud may have learned this from Western governments in recent years. I reminded her of past threats to stop funding the UN and the decision to stop funding UNESCO if it upsets Israel and hence AIPAC, which it apparently did when it granted the Palestinians member status. I especially reminded her of the UNESCO episode and how the Obama administration now regrets losing its vote and influence in that organization after withdrawing funding (which they now realize means Israel losing its influence as Susan Rice hinted).

I also reminded her of Western media and thinkers and pundits complaining that sometime the international organizations seem to take into account the rest of the world, all 5-6 billion of it, more than the Western governments that represent about 600 million. I reminded her of the famous French pop-philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy who said earlier this year that a “bunch of gangsters control the UN Security Council”, that was when China and Russia and others refused to vote for military action in Syria. She agreed with me that it is likely the princes have learned a lesson from that on how to have an international tantrum when they don’t get their way.

I forgot to tell her that the Obama administration withdrew its funding of UNESCO in 2011, only about one year before the 2012 general elections (elections in the USA not in Israel). At that time, it seemed like a good idea, electorally if not from a principled point of view.

Cheers
mhg

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