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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (103536)	10/31/2013 11:01:36 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 218083

End western deference to Saudi petrodollars By David Gardner There is no doubting Riyadh’s horror at the sudden prospect of US-Iranian detente In 1945 Franklin Roosevelt, on his way home from the Yalta summit with Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin, met King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud on a US warship midway up the Suez Canal. Having settled the disposition of postwar Europe, FDR laid a foundation stone of the postwar Middle East: the US would underwrite the security and integrity of the kingdom Ibn Saud had only recently united by the sword, and the Saudis would guarantee the free flow of oil westwards at reasonable prices. That deal now looks as though it may be falling apart. Saudi Arabia, ruled by Ibn Saud’s aged sons, is so exasperated by US behaviour in the Middle East that this month it took the unprecedented step of refusing to take the coveted temporary seat to which it had been elected on the UN Security Council. Things got worse after Reuters reported that Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi spy chief, warned of a shift away from the US in private remarks echoed by public ridicule heaped on US policy towards Syria by Prince Turki al-Faisal, for long the kingdom’s intelligence chief. As former Saudi ambassadors to Washington, both men are more than familiar with the vagaries of US policy making. They may or may not be channelling the sentiments of King Abdullah, the ailing Saudi monarch. But they did not come down with the last shower of rain. The Saudi message, turned up to unwonted volume for a ruling family that prizes discretion, is that Barack Obama’s administration is so unreliable and indecisive that the kingdom must start looking elsewhere for allies. But is this for real or just an unusual cri de coeur? There have been Saudi-US rifts before. The oil embargo and price shock after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war was one; the estrangement after September 11 2001, when 15 of the 19 hijackers who attacked the US were revealed to be Saudis, was another. But the relationship survived. The Saudis unquestionably have a point about US policy in the Middle East. The White House’s performance over Syria has been a bewildering mix of bungling and cynicism. Mr Obama’s reluctance to punish Bashar al-Assad for using nerve gas on civilians has undeniably revitalised the Damascus regime, demoralised mainstream Syrian rebels and given credibility to the poisonous narrative of jihadi extremists. The Obama administration has so far, moreover, been no less of a dishonest broker in the unequal negotiation between Israel and the Palestinians than most of its predecessors, notwithstanding secretary of state John Kerry’s efforts to rekindle a peace process. But is it Syria and Palestine that are really driving Saudi thinking? Or is it the House of Saud’s pathological fear of two other things: the chaotic change wrought by the upheavals of the Arab awakening, and the possibility of a US rapprochement with Iran, its rival for Gulf control? Once Mr Obama gave his blessing to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt in 2011, and began dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood, seen by the Saudis as a rival to their Wahhabi brand of Islam, the al-Saud came to regard this US president as a handmaiden of sedition. The absolute monarchy stifled any murmur of dissent, lavished tens of billions of dollars in subsidies on its citizens, and sent troops into Bahrain to quell an uprising by the majority Shia against the Sunni ruling family. With the army overthrow of the Brotherhood in Cairo this summer, Riyadh and its Gulf allies instantly pledged almost 10 times the annual US aid to Egypt. Yet there is no doubting the Saudi horror at the sudden prospect of US-Iranian detente. The Saudis happen to be on the right side on Syria, against a vile despot slaughtering his own people. But that is not because they want democracy for the Syrians. It is because they wish to undermine Iran by bringing down its Syrian allies, the Assads, and because the Wahhabi fanaticism underpinning the Saudi state at home and abroad abominates the Shia as heretics. The darkest side of the so-called Arab spring is the sectarian whirlwind it has loosed across the region. There is, of course, a conventional power struggle going on between (Shia) Iran and (Sunni) Saudi Arabia. But there is also a tidal wave of sectarian poison for which the Wahhabi clerical establishment in the kingdom is heavily responsible – as their school textbooks enjoining the faithful to spurn the infidel and combat the (Shia) idolater well attest. The Saudi royals’ frustration with Mr Obama is in part justified. But if they want to retreat into full-throated Wahhabism and pursue a reactionary and sectarian agenda turbocharged by petrodollars, then this is perhaps a good moment for the west to review this relationship. It has always been exceptionalist: the deal with the US actually started when Roosevelt made non-belligerent Saudi Arabia eligible for American aid under the wartime Lend Lease Act of 1943. But it is time it stopped being a relationship dripping with deference by the west and dollars by the Saudis, a spectacle of liberal democracies sucking up to an absolute monarchy governed by the precepts of medieval theologians.