Connecting the Saudi Arabia – Israel – Iran dots
The Saudis may hate Israel, but they loathe Ahmadinejad. The last thing they want is Iran with a Shiite bomb. (Who knows, they may even entertain some of the darker fantasies we have speculated about in the past.) We turn to Rod Dreher’s discussion with Abdullah Zainal Alireza, the Saudi minister of state:
On Iran, he said that the US cannot allow Iran to get the Bomb. Well, I asked, what if it happens anyway? He repeated, firmly, that it must not be allowed to happen. Period. The end.
Here’s what Spengler had to say about those comments:
This declaration to a prominent US journalist should be assigned high significance. As I observed earlier this year, “Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have the most to lose from a nuclear-equipped Iran. No one can predict when the Saudi kingdom might become unstable, but whenever it does, Iran will stand ready to support its Shi’ite co-religionists, who make up a majority in the kingdom’s oil-producing east.”
And finally, here’s how Al Jazeera reported Saudi Arabia’s commentary on Israel and Hezbollah:
Saudi Arabia has blamed “elements” inside Lebanon for the violence with Israel, in unusually frank language directed at Hezbollah and its Iranian backers. “A distinction must be made between legitimate resistance and uncalculated adventures undertaken by elements inside [Lebanon] and those behind them without recourse to the legal authorities and consulting and co-ordinating with Arab nations,” a statement carried by the official news agency SPA said.
“These elements should bear the responsibility for their irresponsible actions and they alone should end the crisis they have created.” Israel struck Beirut airport and military airbases and blockaded Lebanese ports on Thursday, intensifying reprisals that have killed 55 civilians in Lebanon since Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers a day earlier.
“They [the elements] are exposing Arab nations and their gains to grave dangers without these nations having a say in the matter,” said the statement, which reiterated Saudi support for Palestinian and Lebanese resistance against Israeli occupation. The statement did not make clear what it meant by the gains of Arab nations.
The Arab-versus-Persian, Sunni-versus-Shiite, animus could not be any clearer, at least in our opinion. We have previously discussed several paths an escalation of this Israel-Lebanon conflict might take, up to and including Iran. We view Saudi Arabia’s blaming Hezbollah as perhaps signifying a number of things. One of them is what appears perhaps to be a green light for Israel to take out Iran’s nuclear capabilities if it decides to. (HT: LGF. See also a related piece by James Lewis at the American Thinker.)
UPDATE
Mark Steyn makes certain related points on how the power has been shifting away from the Arab states and the “Great Men” to teenagers backed by hard-core Iranian Islamists:
[N]one of these Great Men meeting with other Great Men gets us anywhere. Some of the Great Men can’t speak for their peoples (Mubarak) or their legislatures (Abbas). And a lot of the Great Men can’t even speak for themselves: From the late Yasser Arafat to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, they say one thing in meetings with Western emissaries and something entirely different to their compatriots. And some of the Great Men we send to negotiate aren’t all that great: the wretched Mohammed El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Authority, is, in fact, a patsy for the nuclear mullahs. To reprise one of my all-time favorite Iranian negotiating positions, let’s recall the perfect distillation of what Great Man diplomacy boils down to in the Middle East, as reported in the New York Times exactly a year ago:
“Iran will resume uranium enrichment if the European Union does not recognize its right to do so, two Iranian nuclear negotiators said in an interview published Thursday.”
If we don’t let Iran go nuclear, they’ll go nuclear. Negotiate that, Chuck Hagel.
The forces at play in the Middle East are beyond the Geopolitical Friars’ Club. The median age in Gaza is 15.8 years old. How likely is it that any of those bespoke Palestinian “moderates” who’ve been permanent fixtures on CNN and BBC Middle East discussion panels for 30 years have any meaningful sway over a population of unemployed uneducated teenage boys raised by a death cult? Israel withdrew from Gaza and, instead of getting on with a prototypical Palestinian state, Hamas turned the territory into an Islamist camp. Israel withdrew from Lebanon entirely in 2000, yet Hezbollah is now lobbing rockets at Haifa.
Why? Because in both cases these territories are now in effect Iran’s land borders with the Zionist Entity. They’re “occupied territories” but it’s not the Jews doing the occupying. So you’ve got a choice between talking with proxies or going to the source: Tehran. And, as the unending talks with the EU have demonstrated, the ayatollahs use negotiations with the civilized world as comedy relief. They don’t get Larry King’s salutes to Red Buttons and Don Knotts on Iranian TV, so entering into talks with the French foreign minister is as near to big-time laughs as the mullahs get.
One of the interesting features of the present escalation is the circumspection of Israel’s Arab neighbors. Once upon a time, it would have been Egypt and Jordan threatening the Zionist usurpers. But these countries have been, militarily, a big flop against the Zionist Entity since King Hussein fired Sir John Glubb as head of the Arab Legion. So after ’73 they put their money on terrorism, and schoolgirl suicide bombers — the kind of “popular resistance” that buys you better publicity in the salons of the West. And one result of that has been to deliver Palestinian pseudo-”nationalism” away from Arab influence and into hard-core Iranian Islamist hands. It’s Iran that wants war, not Egypt or Jordan…
And it is emerging, therefore, that the Egyptians, the Jordanians, and the Saudis, dislike the new Iranian “occupiers” even more than they do the Israelis.