A Word About What Cheney Was Doing In Saudi Arabia

[Jcrowley]

Saudi will intervene in Iraq if US withdraws-aide
29 Nov 2006 11:10:32 GMT
Source: Reuters

WASHINGTON, Nov 29 (Reuters) - Using money, weapons or its oil power, Saudi Arabia will intervene to prevent Iranian-backed Shi'ite militias from massacring Iraqi Sunni Muslims once the United States begins pulling out of Iraq, a security adviser to the Saudi government said on Wednesday. Nawaf Obaid, writing in The Washington Post, said the Saudi leadership was preparing to revise its Iraq policy to deal with the aftermath of a possible U.S. pullout, and is considering options including flooding the oil market to crash prices and thus limit Iran's ability to finance Shi'ite militias in Iraq.

<snip>

Obaid said Cheney's visit "underlines the pre-eminence of Saudi Arabia in the region and its importance to U.S. strategy in Iraq."


Obaid listed three options being considered by the Saudi government:

- providing "Sunni military leaders (primarily ex-Baathist members of the former Iraqi officer corps, who make up the backbone of the insurgency) with the same types of assistance", including funding and arms.

- establishing new Sunni brigades to combat the Iranian-backed militias;

- or the Saudi king "may decide to strangle Iranian funding of the militias through oil policy. If Saudi Arabia boosted production and cut the price of oil in half ... it would be devastating to Iran ... The result would be to limit Tehran's ability to continue funnelling hundreds of millions each year to Shi'ite militias in Iraq and elsewhere."

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N29311689.htm

[majorjohn]

1. Isn't that what Saudi did to Saddam?

Flood the oil market to crash prices, and I guess Kuwait did too.

[mike_c]

2. anything that undermines Iran's oil revenues will also undermine...

...the oil barons' revenues. This could get much worse, very fast. It is beginning to look more and more like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Powell have created the perfect shit-storm in the Middle East.

[majorjohn]

3. It began way way before that! n/t

[roamer65]

4. Good God. Look what this Bush bastard has done. Ugh.

[Gregorian]

5. And here I was thinking impeachment would solve our problems.

I have a feeling the mess we are facing is so deep that our hands are all tied.

I don't know what I'm talking about. I read that link twice already today. It just seems that they are a massive international gang of thugs that is much bigger than I ever realized.

Maybe the rapture wasn't such a bad idea. Does anyone here have god's cell number?

[majorjohn]

6. So in other words...

Saudis will be funding the AlQaeda or some similar groups to get rid of the Shiites.

[MADem]

13. No, not at all. They'll fund the old Ba'athist militias so the shi'a, who

make up the majority of the population in Iraq, but who are much poorer than the sunni, by and large, don't get any ideas about doing some serious 'ethnic cleansing' and engage in wholesale slaughter against the minority religious branch.

If Iran tries to mix it up in there, they'll crash the price of oil so Iran can pump all day and barely make enough money to pay their own damn bills, never mind fund an adventurous Army to go in to Iraq and assume control over a portion of the country.

THAT's what this is all about--nothing to do with al Qaeda at all. Given the cockup we've made of the place, it's about as good a plan as can be cobbled together. The thing that will make it all the better is if Egypt, Jordan, the UAE and assorted other players toss a brigade or two into the mix, just to let Iran know that ALL the neighbors are uninterested in seeing them get adventurous.

[williesgirl]

7. So get out now and let the Saudis do whatever.

[jwirr]

8. Do we really think that Jordan, Syria and Iran are going to sit by

quietly while another ME country makes a move. I think they are all waiting around for their share of the spoils.

[roamer65]

9. Don't forget Turkey.

Turkey isn't going to stand for an independent Kurdistan. A NATO member into the mix ought to be interesting.

[MADem]

17. Yes, they are. Where do you think Jordan gets its operating funds?

Who is King Abdullah RELATED TO? The Sauds are his RELATIVES, a bit distant, now, but that's his cash cow and his uncles running that show, more or less. And not only do the Saudis fund Abdullah big time, we do as well: http://www.jordanembassyus.org/new/aboutjordan/uj1.shtml He knows what side his bread is buttered on. As far as he's concerned, Iran can go fuck themselves.

Syria is in the same boat--Iran has given them some money to look the other way vis a vis Lebanon, but doesn't give them dough hand over fist in any reliable fashion. They do get PLENTY of help from the House of Saud, though. Also, Syria is predominantly Sunni, predominantly ARAB, and is a Ba'athist-run country--just like Iraq used to be when run by the Sunni Saddam crowd. So where do you think they are gonna come down when the rubber meets the road?

And those two countries are ARAB--and Arabs stick together, especially when smartass Persians with fancy ideas are trying to stick their beaks into Arab business. It isn't welcomed, not by ANY stretch.

Turkey's interest is as follows--they'd just as soon NOT have a hellhole war on their southern flank, inciting difficulty and their own Kurds in the eastern portion of their country. Also, Turkey is about 85% Sunni, so they've an interest in ensuring that their fellow Sunnis don't get slaughtered by a bunch of Persians or Iraqi shi'a funded by Iran. Stability is a plus, and however it can be accomplished will work for them. They've got to play it cute, because they share a border with Iran as well as Iraq and Syria. They just don't need the kind of shit a Persian attempt at hegemony in Iraq would bring down on them.

OTOH, they're shitting bricks because they know damned well that if Iraq splits apart (and partition grows more likely every day, absent an improbable Kumbayah moment amongst the factions), that could spell trouble downwind for themselves, as their Kurds will look south and want what Iraq's Kurds managed to achieve in the aftermath of this Mess-O-Potamia. So, they're no doubt mulling over how they will have to handle that business when it comes to the fore.

[Fovea]

10. The Saudis have promised to pump

wide open two or three times in the past couple years.
Did anyone notice anything?

[MADem]

11. From all the B roll I could see on the Ay-rab networks, there were two things he wasn't doing

1. Kissing his hosts

2. Holding their hands

That said, Obaid likely has it right on the money. There is, as I have said elsewhere, no way in fucking hell that the Arab world will permit the Iranians to gain hegemony over Iraq. Hell, they were quietly cheering the Israelis as they pounded the hell out of Hizb'Allah in Lebanon not too long ago.

Make no mistake, the lead dogs in the region who will make sure this does not happen, because they have the most dough and the best geostrategic position, are indeed the Saudis. You can bet some of that oil money will be used to entice other Arab nations to do at least some of the heavy lifting on their behalf, both to convey a sense of Arab solidarity against those nervy Persians, and so they don't have to break a nail themselves in the effort.

Make no mistake, they fucking HATE those snotty "know-it-all" Persians, who aver that they are so much more 'cultured' than the unwashed Arab-Bedouin slobs. It ain't just protection of the Iraqi Sunnis, though that is a hugely important aspect, it's also a way of pushing it in the face of those high-falutin', nose-looking-down Eye-rainians, so they don't get any fancy-pants ideas!!!

It makes the Hatfields and McCoys look like bosom buddies....

[majorjohn]

12. I'd say the Saudi Regime is more

Anti-Shia rather than Anti-Persian...

[MADem]

15. Well, the Persians are entirely shi'a, and I'd say they're more anti-Persian, myself

Arab shi'ites do exist. The keepers of the Holy Places think they are misguided twits, but the one thing they have going for them isn't their Muslim-ness (albeit what they regard as a cultish perversion of Muslim-ness) it's their ARAB-ness. The Keepers of the Holy Places also get irritated when those damned cultish Ayatullahs try to stick their beaks in about how the Holy Places and the Hajj should be managed. They don't take kindly to any "advice" by a bunch of heretics who aren't even Arab!

There has always been this Persian snottiness that the Arabs don't take kindly to, and they won't feel badly about sticking it to the Iranians if they try to pull any shit with ARAB Iraq.

The Persians look down their noses at the uncultured, ignorant 'Bedouins' who built nothing, did nothing, and are a bunch of fucking camel chasers and desert wanderers who have been recently and unfairly blessed with oil money (many do feel this way). The Persians don't groove on that Bedouin mystique that the Arabs think is so great...they look at their own engineering marvels, libraries, famous people in history, cultural heritage, and they lay claim to every cool thing that has happened in the region...even if they didn't do it, they say they did!

The two groups are divided by a different culture, and a different language. They are not of the same race. They don't share a fondness for one another, despite proximity. The Indo-European Persians are NOT Arabs, and they think they are somehow better or purer for NOT being Arab. There's no love lost between the two. The Iran-Iraq war, one of the longest wars in recent history, cost over a million lives, untold millions maimed, and went on for no good reason save the inherent dislike of the Arab by the Persian, and vice versa.

[Old and In the Way]

14. So let's recap the plus and minuses of the Bush ME Doctrine

+ 1 Already Defanged Henchman
+ 2 Rotten Son's of an Already Defanged Henchman

- 650,000 mostly innocent Iraqi's dead or maimed
- 3,000+ Dead American soldiers
- 30,000? severely injured American soldiers
- Our international Reputation
- $1,000,000,000,000.00 taxpayer dollars wasted
- A radicalized ME that will be destabilized for generations
- Price of oil continuing to increase, US dependence worse than ever
- 1 broken military machine

$5.00 worth of well placed bullets could have accomplished the (+).

I really don't see the cost benefit here. Certainly doesn't rise to the level of criminal indictment or imprachment. Not like he got a hummer in the White House.

[roamer65]

16. Cheney quote ala 1991

I stole this from another thread, but it more or less proves Deadeye Dick to be a flat out war profiteer.

"I think for us to get American military personnel involved in a civil war inside Iraq would literally be a quagmire. Once we got to Baghdad, what would we do? Who would we put in power? What kind of government would we have? Would it be a Sunni government, a Shia government, a Kurdish government? Would it be secular along the lines of the Ba’ath Party? Would it be fundamentalist Islamic? I do not think the United States wants to have U.S. military forces accept casualties and accept the responsibility of trying to govern Iraq. I think it makes no sense at all.”

April 7, 1991

May you rot in hell (if there is one) for all of your crimes, Cheney.