SAUDI AMERICA

To most Muslims, the recent Wikileaks bombshell has been this piece, as reported in the UK Guardian: “King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was recorded as having ‘frequently exhorted the US to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear weapons programme’, said the paper, which was among the few media outlets that have been […]

To most Muslims, the recent Wikileaks bombshell has been this piece, as reported in the UK Guardian: “King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was recorded as having ‘frequently exhorted the US to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear weapons programme’, said the paper, which was among the few media outlets that have been given access to the over 250,000 diplomatic cables by Wikileaks.
“‘He told Americans to cut off the head of the snake,’ the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Adel al-Jubeir said, according to a report on Abdullah’s meeting with the US general David Petraeus in April 2008. King Abdullah warned the Americans that if Iran developed nuclear weapons ‘everyone in the region would do the same, including Saudi Arabia’. The documents also describe how other Arab allies of the US have secretly agitated for military action against Tehran.
I just returned from Hajj, so I should be enamoured of Saudi Arabia. And indeed I have been, as indicated on this page. I have been all praises for the Saudi government for resolving many of the seemingly intractable problems bedevilling the annual pilgrimage, such as the Stoning of the Devil event which used to be very dangerous. I was also all praises for the effort of the Saudi government for a job well done by introducing, however late in the day, the sleek new railway project at the holy places. On this page last year, I also praised the Saudi government’s concession for new projects such the Jabal Omar, adjacent to the Haram in Makkah.
However, the Saudis still don’t seem to get it right in the world of politics. They have conveniently forgotten how they earned themselves the anger and fury of most of the Muslim world several times in the past for their seeming subservience to the United States, which rightly earned them the sobriquet Saudi America. Muslim fury at the Saudis happened during the First Gulf War of 1991 over Kuwait (which, humorously, led to a famous Kano supermarket, Fahad Stores having to change its name to Sahad Stores when it was boycotted by shoppers). The Saudis were again to be hated during the Second Gulf War, the invasion of Iraq by America in 2003, culminating in the execution of deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein on, of all days, a Sallah Day, December 30, 2006!
Many Muslims are still bristling with anger towards the Saudis principally because of the wrong footing of its politics. Granted, the Saudi ruling house is fighting a game of survival, especially against the so-called Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. But with an audience of 1.6 billion people (the Muslim World population today) looking up them, they should not, and ought not to, have been caught out on a wrong footing diplomatically. And sadly also, most of the enmity directed against Shi’a Iran is not theological, but ethnic.
Without mincing words, sentences or paragraphs, Israel is the Number One enemy of the Muslim World, except for the Arab leaders who prefer to bury their heads in the Arabian sands whenever the matter of Israel comes up. They do nothing to help the Palestinians, except to send them alms when what they really need are arms. If happenings in Gaza, the West Bank and South Lebanon are anything to go by, Israel is the most imperialist country on earth. Yet for Arab leaders, even a mention of Israel by an Imam in a sermon is seen as an abomination, lest America be angered.
The Islamic Republic of Iran, a so-called Shia-Theocracy in Western discourse, may be an ethnic and ideological ‘enemy’ of the Saudis and other Arabs, but for the Saudi King and his lieutenants to sink so low as to call on America to attack Iran is the most callous and un-Islamic act any Muslim country can do.
“Diplomacy”, according to Wikipedia, “is the art and practice of conducting negotiations between representatives of groups or states…It is closely linked to espionage or gathering of intelligence. Embassies are bases for both diplomats and spies, and some diplomats are essentially openly acknowledged spies. For instance, the job of military attachés includes learning as much as possible about the military of the nation to which they are assigned.”
Information between embassies and their home countries used to be carried in what is known as a ‘diplomatic pouch’, described by Wiki “as an envelope, parcel, shipping container or any other kind of receptacle used by diplomatic missions. As long as it is externally marked to show its status, the bag has diplomatic immunity from search or seizure….It is often escorted by a diplomatic courier, who is similarly immune from arrest and detention…”
Today, Wikileaks has broken into this ‘diplomatic pouch’, an act which, though dangerous, shows hypocrisy has no hiding place. Writing on The Independent of UK on Tuesday November 30, 2010, that fair commentator of Middle Eastern Affairs, Robert Fisk, had this to say:
“It’s not that US diplomats don’t understand the Middle East; it’s just that they’ve lost all sight of injustice. Vast amounts of diplomatic literature prove that the mainstay of Washington’s Middle East policy is alignment with Israel, that its principal aim is to encourage the Arabs to join the American-Israeli alliance against Iran, that the compass point of US policy over years and years is the need to tame/bully/crush/oppress/ ultimately destroy the power of Iran.
“There is virtually no talk (so far, at least) of illegal Jewish colonial settlements on the West Bank, of Israeli ‘outposts’, of extremist Israeli ‘settlers’ whose homes now smallpox the occupied Palestinian West Bank – of the vast illegal system of land theft which lies at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian war. And incredibly, all kinds of worthy US diplomats grovel and kneel before Israel’s demands – many of them apparently fervent supporters of Israel – as Mossad bosses and Israel military intelligence agents read their wish-list to their benefactors.”
It is time Saudi America, and all Arab leaders for that matter, wake up to the fact that Israel is the Number One Enemy, followed by America. Iran may be a distant last.