Wednesday, January 08, 2014
The Saudi Bull in Arab China Shop
By Nicola Nasser*
Obsessed with the “Iran threat,” which leads to its
warmongering in Syria, Saudi Arabia is acting like a bull in a china shop,
wreaking regional havoc in an already Arab fragile political environment and
creating what George Joffe’ of Cambridge University’s
Centre of International Studies, on last December 30, called the “second Arab
cold war,” the first being the Saudi-led cold war with the Pan-Arab Egypt of Gamal
Abdul Nasser since the 1960s.
The kingdom
stands now almost isolated politically. Its “going it alone” in the Syrian
conflict has cornered Saudi Arabia into a self-inflicted foreign policy no-win
deadlock, to be at odds with three super powers, including its strategic U.S.
ally as well as Russia and China, in addition to regional heavy weights in
Iran, Iraq, Egypt and Algeria, all who advocate a political settlement of the
conflict.
Within the six-member
Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC), the kingdom
navigates no better.
It is at
loggerheads with Qatar
Saudi Arabia’s
hostility to the MB and its support of their removal from power in Egypt have
reflected negatively on the Saudi-Turkish relations as well and had
repercussions in Syria, leading to a restructuring of the insurgent political
and military competing leaders who claim the representation of the Syrian
people: Qatari and Turkish-supported leading figures and organizations were
replaced by Saudi loyalists and accordingly, for example, the “Free Syrian
Army” has simply disappeared to be replaced by the Islamic Front.
In the last
GCC summit meeting in Kuwait ,
the other five members of the GCC, Oman
Despite the
Saudi bailing out of the post-Morsi interim government in Cairo
with a few billions of US dollars, Egypt
doesn’t see eye to eye with Riyadh neither on Syria , where it joined the political solution
advocates, nor on relations with Russia ,
which Egypt is now reviving
to balance its US
According to Wall Street Journal online
on this January 5, the ensuing situation “is placing the White House in a
growing diplomatic quandary as its regional allies fall into competing camps.”
The fact that the United States has chosen diplomacy instead of
military confrontation with Tehran and Damascus has politically isolated the kingdom, which had
hedged its bets on a western military intervention led or blessed by the United States
However, instead of maneuvering wisely to
backtrack to steer in harmony with the US
In an op-ed
published by The New York Times on last December 19, Saudi Ambassador to the
UK, Prince Nawaf bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, said his country “will go it alone”
against Syria and Iran, because it “will not stand idly by” while the US
compromises Saudi Arabia’s security and “risk[s] the region’s
stability.”
However, “in spite of its great wealth,
the kingdom is not able to confront significant threats in its strategic
environment on its own,” former Iran Coordinator in Israel’s National
Security Council, Yoel Guzansky, wrote in Haaretz on last December 25, adding
that as regards the Saudi “deterrence of and protection from Iran,
… no other major power is currently interested in or capable of filling the
role played by the United States.”
As of late this summer, Saudi
Arabia had given $400 million in arms and other equipment to Syrian Salafi
Jihadists, the Wall Street Journal online reported on last December 29.
True, Saudi warmongering over Syria and Iran could abort the Geneva II
conference on Syria, scheduled to convene on this January 22 in Montreux,
Switzerland to wrap up a political settlement, but in
the end of the day the Saudi kingdom is more likely to end up the only loser in
the face of a regional and worldwide consensus on political settlement as the
only possible exit out of the Syrian conflict.
Logic dictates
that Iran should be in and Saudi Arabia out, but the Geneva II guest list
includes warmongering Saudi Arabia, but excludes Iran, which has been calling
from the start for a political solution. Such an arrangement warns of including
the only “spoiler-in-chief,” in the words of the Assistant
Professor of International Studies at Arcadia
University , Pennsylvania
The US and Russian top diplomats, John Kerry and Sergey Lavrov were scheduled during a meeting
ahead of Geneva II to decide on Iran’s participation, according to Martin Nesirky, spokesperson for UN Secretary
General Ban Ki-moon.
There is no way the kingdom
could succeed in Syria US and an influential member of the royal
family, Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud, admitted their failure when he told
CNBC on this January 7 that the United
States
Thanks to Saudis, Syrian
Conflict Spills over
The three-year
old conflict in Syria has somewhat been contained within its own borders,
but Saudi Arabia’s ongoing warmongering threatens to perpetuate the conflict
and, more importantly, to spill it over regionally without achieving the Saudi
proclaimed goal of changing the regime in Damascus at any cost.
The protracted Syrian conflict
is already spilling over into neighboring countries through the Saudi sectarian
agitation and incitement.
In the east, Iraqi officials
had already appealed to the Saudi and other GCC governments to stop their
intervention in Iraq
West of Syria, “Lebanon is paralyzed right now,” Gen. Michel Aoun, leader of the Free Patriotic Movement
(FPM), the second largest bloc in Lebanese parliament, told www.al-monitor.com
on last December 13. After a two-week power vacuum, a prime minister-designate
was nominated last April, but he has yet to form his government. His efforts
have reached a dead end. The country since then was administrated by a
caretaker government. No breakthrough seems imminent.
Meanwhile
the northern and eastern parts of the country have slipped out of the control
of the central government in Beirut
Deterred
by the military successes of the official Syrian Arab Army against them and
falling back on Lebanon, those “Jihadists” are retaliating with the escalation
of suicide bombings inside Lebanon, which are claiming more and more Lebanese
civilian lives of all sects.
In the
south in Jordan, where the kingdom succeeded for three years to keep balance
between its geopolitical links with Syria and its strategic alliance with the
US and Saudi Arabia, warnings against a mounting Saudi pressure to change course
have been voiced recently.
For
example, former premier and member of the upper house, Ma’arouf al-Bakhit, quoted
by www.ammonnews.net on last December
30, warned that the disparity between the US and Saudi approaches to solving
the Syrian conflict is pressuring Jordan, which is now facing the “challenge”
of the possibility that Saudi Arabia “might act to impose its vision on
Jordan,” indicating that “Syria no longer views Jordan as neutral” and accuses
the kingdom of “hosting a Saudi – Israeli operations room to run military
operations in Syria.” If Syria
decides to act on this accusation, al-Bakhit added, it is “possible” to “move
part of war” to “the interior of the kingdom’s territory.” Al-Bakhit should
have cited Lebanon and Iraq
Further
away, in Russia , the latest
terror attacks in Volgograd were interpreted as
an integral part of and attributed to the same terror network and mastermind in
the Middle East , thus alienating the emerging
Russian world polar. Russian media reports were implicating Saudi Arabia
Saudi Strategy
Fails in Syria
Since the
so-called “Arab Spring” sprang out in Tunisia three years ago, the Saudi-led GCC
monarchies succeeded in defending themselves against the tidal popular protests
by a preempting financial bailout (Oman, Bahrain) or by direct military
intervention (Bahrain) and by financial, political and indirect, but public
nonetheless, military intervention to hijack the burgeoning revolutions in the
“republics,” which have become more like china shops, either stateless or
failed states, breathlessly in a life or death fight against “Islamist” terror
organizations, which are armed and financed by none other than this same
Saudi-led petrodollar monarchies and sheikhdoms.
This Saudi-led
strategy is best manifested in Syria Saudi
Arabia
Its
warmongering in Syria is portraying the kingdom in public opinion as the
regional mastermind of violence and instability, vindicating American
accusations, fueled by Israeli incitement, in the aftermath of the terror
attacks in US on September 11, 2001 that the Saudi sectarian ideology is an
incubator nurturing violence and terror, despite the kingdom’s long war against
its own Islamist terrorists.
This sectarian
ideology is creating a sectarian clash across the Middle East between two
theocracies, the “Shiite” theocracy of Iran
and the Sunni theocracy of Saudi Arabia ,
thus blurring the real dividing line of the regional battle between the
US-protected Israeli occupation of Arab lands in Palestine ,
Syria and Lebanon and the self-proclaimed Iran – Syria Syria
Within this context it is
noteworthy that Saudi Arabia, the godfather of the “Arab peace initiative,”
postures as a peace maker against the Israeli occupying power, but insists on
military solution in Syria whose Golan Heights is occupied by Israel since
1967.
Ironically,
Saudi – Israeli crossroads seem to meet as the only regional relief for the
kingdom. This approach of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is creating a
fait accompli of a Saudi-Israeli marriage of convenience against Syria and Iran
* Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Bir
Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. nassernicola@ymail.com
