January 4, 2016
LOST? WE DISCARDED THEM:
Who Lost the Saudis? (WSJ, Jan. 3, 2016)
That headline question may seem premature, but it's worth asking if only to reduce the odds that the Saudis are lost as we enter the last perilous year of the Obama Presidency. Iran and Russia have an interest in toppling the House of Saud, and they may be calculating whether President Obama would do anything to stop them.
The WoT has two branches--the democratization of the Middle East, particularly the liberation of the Kurds and Shi'a from Sunni domination, and the crushing of Salafist ideology--which meet at the toppling of the Sa'ud regime.
MORE:
Why does Britain still cosy up to these butchers? MICHAEL BURLEIGH examines the impact of Saudi Arabia's decision to execute 47 prisoners including Shiite cleric (MICHAEL BURLEIGH, 1/03/15, THE DAILY MAIL)
The latest men executed were different from the minor drug traffickers, foreign servants who have killed an employer, or 'sorcerers' and 'witches' who make up the usual cast of victims.For sure, they included several Al Qaeda terrorists, among them bearded ideologue Fares al-Shuwail, and Adel al-Dhubaiti, who in 2004 murdered BBC cameraman Simon Cumbers and left reporter Frank Gardner for dead. Few will mourn either of them.But the Saudis took the opportunity to add in four individuals from the Shia sect of Islam - a minority in Saudi Arabia which is predominantly of the Sunni faith - including the prominent dissident cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.It is unclear, as yet, whether he was beheaded or shot, but his death has caused outrage among Shia Muslims from Lebanon via Iran and Iraq to Pakistan. And it risks setting a centuries' old feud between Sunni and Shia ablaze across the whole of the Middle East.In Iran's capital, Tehran, angry crowds have already set light to a Saudi embassy that only reopened a few weeks ago, and the regime's clerical and secular leaders have vowed to avenge Nimr's death.Ominously, Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iraq's Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and Lebanese Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrullah, have warned the House of Saud that it will pay 'a heavy price' for executing Nimr.The point is that Nimr was not a 'terrorist' as Saudi Arabia claims, but a cleric of considerable eminence and a peaceful dissident, who in the wake of the 2011 Arab Spring denounced the discrimination and persecution that his fellow Shia endure in the kingdom's oil rich Eastern Province.His execution is a deliberately provocative act clearly aimed at infuriating Iran and the entire Shia world. The animosity between Sunni and Shia goes back to the 7th century and concerns who should succeed the Prophet Mohammed - a blood relation (Shia) or anyone of sufficient distinction (Sunni).
Posted by Orrin Judd at January 4, 2016 1:03 PM