By Jim W. Dean, Managing Editor on January 18, 2016
by Jim W. Dean, … with New
Eastern Outlook, Moscow
“One man can tell the truth convincingly, but it takes
the entire apparatus of the state to peddle a lie, and propagate that lie to
new generations.” – Gandhi
The Saudis thought the Yemen war would be victory via
their Puff the Magic Dragon air power
[ Editor’s note: When I began reading about the Saudi Arabian
attempts to conduct diplomatic warfare on Iran, it made me think of the Puff
the Magic Dragon children’s book series right away… all talk and no bite,
unless paid proxies are doing it like their Western allies, or more recently
their Al-Qaeda and ISIL palace guard.
No, I am not saying that SA controls all the factions,
just those that it pays; and it has used them against Syria in a major way,
inflicting huge pain and suffering for which it did not have to pay a
corresponding military price in return… so far. As I cover below, the
Saudis prefer to have others do its fighting for them, those that it cannot buy
off.
Corporate media tried to hype the possibility of
conflict between the two, something we now feel was coordinated to make a long
play on bumping up oil prices, due to the fear of war and export disruptions.
But that was a dream with the glut of oil.
The economic kibosh that Saudi Arabia has intended to
inflict on Iran to cripple it has boomeranged in a way I am sure was never
expected. Oil prices have gone way down, Iran is not only still standing, but
given up most of its nuclear program and about to get major investment funding
with the sanctions starting to be removed this weekend.
Iran’s oil and gas production will be expanding
despite the glut
Keeping Iran’s oil off the market for many years
helped in boosting the price over a $100 a barrel, and huge sums were extracted
from everyone on the planet. Now the low prices are a godsend to all the
budgets wherever energy is a critical cost, like the airlines, trucking and
governments everywhere with large fleets of vehicles.
Terrorism in Africa has been let loose because the
continent is floating on an ocean of oil, which powerful entities would prefer
to never see come online.
Market share is what the oil wars are about now… who
gets to sell what they have and be able to diversify their economies to be
competitive in other fields.
The US feared this of Russia, and hence the replay of
the New Cold War we have been seeing… sanctions, credit restrictions, attempted
isolation and a new arms race. Gosh, who does that always benefit? And by that,
I do not mean what countries, but what class of people? It’s the international
criminal cabal – news of which Gordon let out of the box at the Syrian
Counter-terrorism conference in December of 2014, where three of us got
poisoned… JD ]
_________
– First published January
15, 2016 –
The young Prince Salman, and Defense Minister
The verbal war between Saudi Arabia and Iran heated up
this week, but it had shades of the WWII Sitzkreig, or the Phony War… where
both France and Germany lightly sparred with each other for the first six
months.
King Salman’s son, the crown prince and defense
minister, let the air out of the war hype tires in his interview with the
Economist:
“It is something that we do not foresee at all, and
whoever is pushing towards that is somebody who is not in their right mind… a
war between Saudi Arabia and Iran is the beginning of a major catastrophe in
the region … For sure we will not allow any such thing.”
The Prince is correct. Saudi Arabia does not want to
get into a war with Iran for several obvious reasons. The first is that it has
a long history of using proxy forces to do its war work. This culminated in
opening a new northern front terror war in Syria with Qatar, in an attempt to
collapse Assad by attacking Syria on multiple flanks to make a dispersed Syrian
army easier to defeat. The US and Israelis were totally on board with the plan,
and we know now, Turkey was, also.
Many had hoped the verbal war would push up oil
prices, but the short sellers with uncovered positions lost their behinds.
Ironically, both Iran and Saudi Arabia would have loved a $10 jump in oil
prices, as they both need it. But an oil glut with crashing stock markets in
the US and China pulled prices down even more.
The Saudis have tons of equipment, but little ability
to use it all in combined operations
Despite the KSA having huge stockpiles of weapons, it has preferred not to use them in
a major conflict. Yemen was the first mini-combat debut for the Saudis, and it
is turning into their Afghanistan, despite the blockade that has the Houthis
fighting with one arm tied behind their backs.
US air and naval power are supposed to defend the
King’s realm, with the huge forward deployment of military equipment and
infrastructure to host incoming US combat divisions.
This defense marriage was sealed many years ago with
the Saudis giving a pledge to always sell its oil in US dollars in return for
the US military umbrella. Today the Saudi Royal family is a major shareholder
in the US military industrial complex, where its oil profits found a welcome
home, and a hedge fund.
This created a constant demand for US currency in
international trade, which some say boosted its value 25% for many decades and
contributed to America paying for most of the Western portion of the Cold War.
But today, the Royal Family would much prefer the US
take care of Iran, and was sorely disappointed the Iran nuclear threat hoax did
not trigger the preemptive strike it had wished for, although that could have
been a horrible mixed blessing, as I would have guaranteed Prince Mohammed bin
Salman the major catastrophe he mentioned above.
The Saudis have lost their cherished Iranian Islamic
state bogeyman, which brought the US to the region to use Iraq in a proxy war
against Iran in the 1980s with over a million casualties where both sides were
assigned cannon fodder roles; the Iranians and Kurds had the role of guinea pig
for the chemical weapons field testing conducted on them during that time. The
Saudis watched all that from a safe distance, but their fingerprints were on
the deed.
The Iraqis have not forgotten, and former Prime
Minister Nouri al-Maliki was prompted by Sheikh al-Nimr’s execution to pose:
“As we condemn this disgusting terrorist act and these
detestable sectarian practices, we reaffirm that the crime of executing Sheikh
al-Nimr will topple the Saudi regime, just as the crime of executing the martyr
al-Sadr toppled the Saddam regime.”
Sheikh al-Nimra
The Royal Family knows the Iranian nation will never forget their role in trying to crush
their revolution, and rightly fear a day of reckoning. But while the Iranians
do not forget their past, they do not live in it as the Saudis seem to. They
plan to move forward to catch up for lost time when the Shah’s and America’s
boot was on their necks.
They are throwing their doors open to foreign
investors to give them a piece of the action in Iran’s future so they will
resist pressure from the war party to destroy it again. Iran has been very
clear.
Anyone who wants a war just has to attack Iran and
they will have it, and this stance underpins their short term and midterm focus
to defend their airspace and to have an effective retaliation deterrent against
countries that have a first strike policy, like the US.
The Saudis continue to live in a fantasy world,
playing the religious war card by creating a Sunni coalition on paper, but
forgetting to inform all those who had been “selected” as members. It became a
laughing stock as the press reports rolled out from the surprised, shanghaied
and reluctant fellow Muslim countries.
One would have thought that the Saudis had learned
their lesson when neither the Pakistanis nor Egypt wanted to attend their Yemen
war party, and where only some token contributions were made by other
countries. No one really viewed Yemen as a believable
threat.
The Yeminis have been fighting forever, and have
nowhere to retreat
Even the breaking off of relations with Iran made the Saudis look weak, as almost no one in
their coalition followed suit. While the Saudis wield financial influence in
the region, they are a leader of no one outside the smaller Gulf State
countries.
Little Oman quickly stepped in to pick up the trade
lost by the UAE’s downgrading its diplomatic mission, and it looks like it will
get a gas pipeline, which could eventually extend…yes…to Yemen.
The bottom line here was that someone thought this
Saudi dust up to isolate Iran might trigger political pressure to hold off on
the final sanctions removal. That looks extremely unlikely with all that has
been invested by both sides in its success.
The Saudis also wanted to go into the Syrian talks in
Geneva on January 25 without growing publicity over its well-known record of
supporting terrorism in Syria and Iraq. It has been successful at pushing the
Syrian news out of the 24-hour headlines, but at what price for itself? The
Arab League voted 22 to 1 (Lebanon) to support Saudi Arabia, but nobody cares
what the Arab League thinks as their votes are bought by the Saudis, and the
Iranians do not bid.
I did some Press TV news shows on this topic over the
weekend where I pointed out that the Iranians had to take the gloves off and
start calling the Saudis out for the terrorism sponsors that they are. Foreign
Minister Zarif and I must have been channeling the same idea. In a Sunday New
York Times op-ed, he wrote that Riyadh’s “active sponsorship of violent
extremism is a global threat… from the horrors of September 11 to the shooting
in San Bernardino and other episodes of extremist carnage in between”.
This going after ISIL without going after all of its
supporters leaves that network in place. Even if ISIL continues to get hammered
by the Syrian-Russian-Iranian coalition, the final victory will be dragged out
longer because the ISIL losses can be replaced and eventually retreat to new
staging bases to rise again.
The ISIL supporters deserve to die along side the
jihadis or we will never be
free from their scourge. Zarif has taken the lead, so let’s add some country
and entity names to his list. Bring on the scorched-earth program and let’s get
it over with.
Jim W. Dean, managing editor for Veterans Today, producer/host of
Heritage TV Atlanta, specially for the online magazine “New
Eastern Outlook”.
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