[Somehow, the Saudis have managed to work some form of primitive desert magic over us, effectively blinding us to what they have been doing, mostly in our name (CIA), obscuring the fact of their centrality in the realm of “Islamist” terror. It is no coincidence that 15 of the 19 names which have been forever wedded to the 911 events were Saudis. Using their dominance over other Muslim nations like Pakistan and Turkey, the Saudis have drawn together the force known as “al-Qaeda,” and dozens of other terrorist outfits that have been hiding behind constantly changing Arabic-sounding names, to exact revenge primarily upon the “unbelievers” and secondly upon “the infidels.” The Pakistanis grew the Wahabbi virus right there upon their own soil, while the Turks toned down their rhetoric just a bit, so that they could export their “Wahabbi lite” extremist beliefs into the former Soviet Union and into other equally receptive Muslim nations, like Indonesia.
Around the world, we are doing the will of the Saudi royal family. We are their enforcers, in the sense of “mob enforcers,” as we push the world around in the name of “fighting terrorism,” when it is the Saudis (and the others which they hold influence over) who are the authors of all global “Islamic terrorism.” By making the Saudis partners in exporting CIA policy (to skirt the laws against arming terrorists), we have allowed US policy towards Muslims to become focused through this Wahabbi lens. We have helped the Saudis export their terrorist beliefs to the entire Muslim world, so that their militant beliefs stood alongside True Islam, and understanding true believers. We have helped them to infect millions with the false belief that The Living God has commissioned them with a duty to kill “non-believers,” as defined by them. The world media reports this killing spree of the non-believers as acts of “terrorism,” committed by shadowy, unknown terrorists and nameless sponsors of that terror. They call it “Al-Qaeda,” as if it really was that anonymous entity killing Muslims and the occasional Westerner around the world. Sectarian ethnic killing is going on around the world under the protective umbrella of the US and NATO militaries. The sad truth is, we are fighting the “war on terror” to extend Saudi power around the world and to create for them a “seat at the table” of “civilized” nations. We are helping the tribal barbarians to use their enormous wealth to purchase respectability from the world.]
Ramifications of Saudi Duplicity
By Ali Alyami
Coerced into living under the yoke of a monarchical tyranny since the formation of the Saudi state in 1932, many Saudis have been cowed into accepting this system of oppression as their divine fate, eradit Allah. Prior to WikiLeaks’ shocking publication of classified diplomatic cables between American diplomats in Saudi Arabia and their handlers in the State Department, the Saudi people may not have realized the full extent of their ruling family’s sinister nature. Via these documents the Saudi people learned that their “beloved” King Abdullah and his nephew Foreign Minister Saud Al-Faisal were covertly engaged in duplicitous schemes that would inexorably result in heavy loss of life and crippling damage to their oil facilities in eastern Saudi Arabia which provide the bulk of the country’s revenues. These dangerous Saudi schemes would also eventuate in far-reaching consequences.
The published WikiLeaks’ documents quoted King Abdullah pressuring President Obama to invade Iran and “cut off the head of the snake.” The dispatches also quoted Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud Al-Faisal, arguing for what would amount to US and other NATO forces invading Lebanon: “The U.S. and NATO would need to provide transport and logistical support, as well as naval and air cover,” ostensibly to help a coordinated Arab ground invasion of Lebanon to crush Hezbollah. The Saudi monarchs know that such Saudi-instigated attacks by the US, most likely from Saudi territory, would result in the killing of many fellow Arabs and Muslims and would generate punishing retaliation by Iran and its supporters against the Saudi people and their oil rich Eastern Province, located within the range of Iranian guns. The stark revelations by WikiLeaks exposed the Saudi monarchy for what it is, a regime that will not hesitate to sacrifice its citizens’ lives and livelihood to maintain its autocratic rule at home and influence abroad.
For the autocratic Saudi monarchy, maintaining control at home is inseparable from cultivating its influence abroad. The monarchy utilizes its exclusive domination over the nation’s oil wealth and over Muslims’ holy shrines as well as employing its extreme Wahhabi ideology to subdue Saudi citizens. As an extension of its domestic policies, the Saudi monarchy exports its lethal ideology, finances religious infrastructure projects and extremist groups for the purpose of establishing pro-Saudi Muslim regimes and communities which the monarchs use to influence decision-making in other countries and to extract favorable policies from Muslim and non-Muslim governments throughout the world.
While American Administrations, main stream media, some think tanks and prominent institutions of higher learning publicly hail Saudi monarchs as partners in the “War on Terror,” privately they concede that the Saudi government actively supports and encourages terrorism worldwide. What has been concealed from the Saudi and American peoples was publicly revealed in the released WikiLeaks documents. The documents quoted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton complaining about the Saudi regime’s unwillingness to cut off support for terrorism; “It has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority…donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” While cutting off financial support for extremist and terrorist groups is a priority for the US and the West, continuing it is a major element of the Saudi regime’s overall policy of global religious imperialism.
In addition to spreading its extreme brand of Sunni Islam worldwide, the Saudi monarchy seeks to eliminate Iran as a potential rival for leadership in the Muslim world. Furthermore, the Saudi rulers fear the possibility of rapprochement between the West and Iran which would drastically undermine the crumbling Saudi influence in the Gulf region. By pressuring the US and NATO to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and to invade Lebanon to neutralize Hezbollah, the Saudi monarchy hopes to eliminate its current remaining rivals in the region. As implied in King Abdullah’s phrase ‘cut off the head of the snake,’ an attack on Iran will not stop at taking out its nuclear facilities as publicly advocated, but would have to destroy Iran’s military and disrupt its political infrastructure if Iran’s threats to the Saudi monarchy and to other Arab Gulf regimes are to be removed. The Saudi monarchy knows that such an undertaking by the US and NATO will come at a high cost domestically, regionally and globally, but for the Saudi royals no price is too high to pay for their survival and regional dominance, including the lives of their populace.
The reason no one seems eager to embrace the warmongering Saudi schemes, including Israel which the Iranian leadership has vowed to “wipe from the surface of the earth”, is because the consequences of attacking Iran and Lebanon would be widespread and devastating. The would-be executors of the Saudi wishes realize that it would entail tremendous loss of lives and destruction of property in Iran, Saudi Arabia, other Gulf States and Lebanon. Regardless of how hard Iran and Hezbollah are hit initially, Iran’s proximity to the Saudi oil facilities and a large portion of the Saudi population makes it seem inevitable that the Iranians will retaliate against Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States from which attacks might be launched. In the unlikely event that the Iranians are unable to retaliate, their sympathizers (marginalized Arab Shi’a) who reside in Eastern Saudi Arabia and in other Gulf countries, would be expected to rise in support of Iran against their oppressive Sunni rulers. In such an event, the autocratic Sunni rulers of the Gulf States would use this opportunity to crush their vocal Shi’a minorities whom they consider threats to their exclusionary Sunni rule.
Likewise, if Hezbollah is attacked by a Saudi-instigated Arab force, the former would likely seek revenge on its Lebanese Sunni and Christian fellow citizens. Even though the Saudi royals employ the widely appealing rhetoric of crushing Hezbollah, an objective shared by many Arab and non-Arab states, the Saudi monarchy’s true intent is to ensure Sunni Muslim supremacy in Lebanon along the lines of Saudi-Wahhabi doctrine. Given Lebanon’s bloody history of civil strife, retaliation by Hezbollah on Sunni Muslims and Christians could lead to a prolonged Lebanese civil war that would guarantee interventions by Syria and Israel to protect their conflicting interests in Lebanon. Many Christians around the world would also pressure their governments to rescue their fellow Christians in Lebanon.
Given these likely scenarios, the regional and global consequences of the duplicitous ensnaring Saudi schemes exposed by the WikiLeaks’ documents would be more than the current fragile international political and economic environment can absorb.
Attacking Iran and Lebanon as the Saudi monarchy advocates will indubitably interrupt production, refining and shipping of oil from the Persian Gulf region to oil consuming nations worldwide. This would likely create global political, economic and psychological disorder that would make the 1973 Arab oil embargo look benign and would negatively impact national and international economies which are struggling to emerge from the recent protracted global financial downturn. In addition to global economic disorder, increased tension within Muslim communities and between Muslims and non-Muslims worldwide would quickly boil over. Strife between the already antagonistic Sunni and Shi’a Muslims would intensify and spread to other communities regardless of beliefs.
Moreover, Saudi instigated military campaigns against Iran and Lebanon by the West would drastically increase extremism, terrorism and anti-Americanism in Arab and Muslim countries and communities. Even though the Saudi royals and other Arab regimes are pressuring the West to rid them of what they consider their mortal Persian Shi’a enemies, these regimes will use their controlled media, mosques, clerics, Arab American intellectuals, Muslim groups in the West, selected American universities and Western recipients of their largess to depict the West as modern day Crusaders intent on destroying Islam and Muslims.
Given the probable consequences discussed here, the only beneficiaries of the Saudi schemes as exposed in WikiLeaks would be the Saudi ruling family and other totalitarian Arab regimes. It appears that the Machiavellian Saudi strategy is designed to prove that the West is an aggressive villain determined to destroy Arabs and Muslims.
In the past, the Saudi ruling family successfully linked Western interest to the monarchs’ survival and dominance in Arab and Muslim countries despite the Saudi regime’s draconian domestic polices and its ideological threats to Western democracies. The Saudi monarchs achieved their objective by making sure that the only alternative to their rule at home would be the extremists and terrorists they helped create and by ensuring that their external political and military rivals, such as Nasser of Egypt and Saddam of Iraq, are removed from the regional landscape.
By urging the US and other NATO forces to invade Iran and Lebanon regardless of consequences the Saudi rulers aim to maintain the status quo which is being relentlessly punctured by events some of which they myopically created. In recent years, geopolitical shifts and the rise of formidable power players around the Gulf area, the region and globally are slowly eroding the Saudi royals’ domination over OPEC, the financing of extremist groups and projects and undermining the Saudi monarchs’ invented indispensability to the West. The rise of Iran to regional and global prominence, the creation of Hezbollah and Hamas, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the imbalance of power in OPEC and the global search for new sources of energy continue to diminish the usefulness of the Saudi monarchy to the West. In addition, Western democracies have wrenchingly discovered that a royal Saudi autocracy empowered and protected by the West has proved more harmful than useful as exemplified by the 9/11 attacks on the US, the spread of Saudi-Wahhabi doctrine and the financing of extremists and terrorists worldwide as described by Secretary Clinton in the WikiLeaks documents.
The US and other Western democracies are faced with one of their most grim challenges ever: a choice between protecting our individual liberties and democratic values or continuing to rely on the flow of oil and cash from an erratic, tyrannical system whose policies and practices promote destruction of democratic institutions and replace them with a totalitarian Islamic system.
ThereAreNoSunglasses 