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Saudi Arabia is the most dangerous nation in the Middle East. Yes, I know Iran is going to have nuclear weapons soon. But the small group of corrupt, backward racists that runs the Kingdom has the oil weapon, they have it today, and they are using it effectively.

The first use of it was against Israel in 1973, when Saudi-dominated OPEC established an oil embargo against the US and other countries that were supporting Israel. Although the US promised to force Israel back to the 1967 boundaries if the Arabs would even pretend to make some kind of peace agreement, as usual the Arabs shot themselves in the foot with their intransigence, and the weapon did not achieve the desired result.

One of the nice things about the oil weapon is that you can use it for defense or conquest without sending your own sons to die in war. So, for example, when former American client Saddam Hussein threatened Saudi Arabia in 1991, the United States suppressed Saddam with only token participation by Saudi armed forces.

Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest oil exporter, and the price of oil has lately been tending toward astronomical values, near $100/bbl. (the median world price since 1970 is about $27 in 2006 dollars and was as low as $14 in 1998). The excess cash is used for a lot of things, like buying SUVs that women are not allowed to drive and promoting a very aggressive form of Sunni Islam around the world.

But it’s also used to buy influence, particularly in the US. And the Saudis have been spectacularly successful at this. Daniel Pipes explains one of the ways this happens:

A hint of the problem comes from none other than Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States. The Washinton Post reports that he boasted of his success at cultivating powerful Americans: “If the reputation . . . builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office, you’d be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office”… [my emphasis]

Ex-Washington hands paid handsomely by the kingdom include such figures as Spiro T. Agnew, Jimmy Carter, Clark Clifford, John B. Connally and William E. Simon. A Washington Post account lists other former officials, including George H.W. Bush, who have found the Saudi connection “lucrative.” It also quotes a Saudi source saying that the Saudis have contributed to every presidential library in recent decades.

Many ex-U.S. ambassadors to Riyadh have received substantial sums of money since John C. West set the gold standard by funding his personal foundation with a $500,000 donation from a single Saudi prince, plus more from other Saudis, soon after he left the kingdom in 1981. — Pipes, “What Riyadh buys [in Washington]“

There’s no reason to think that they do not buy similar influence in other nations. So even though Saudi Arabia is not a massive military power, they are expert at using leverage to get what they want. This is the invisible application of the oil weapon, day in and day out.

So the important question is: what do they want?

One thing they want is dominance of the region and leadership of the Muslim world. And in this they have one big rival, the non-Arab, Shiite nation of Iran (the US has already taken care of Saddam for them). They are very concerned about the possibility of an Iranian-dominated Iraq, and have opposed US withdrawal of troops for that reason. There is also evidence that they are supporting Sunni insurgents there, who are fighting both the Shiites and the US.

One thread of the struggle with Iran is taking place in the Palestinian arena, where the Saudis are trying to wean Hamas away from Iran, its current patron (Hamas, a fundamentalist Sunni Arab group is ideologically much closer to the Wahhabist Saudis than the Iranians).

The Saudi strategy is to try to bring about a rapprochement between Hamas and Fatah, and create a unitary Palestinian Authority which they — and not Iran and the US, respectively — will control.

I’ve argued before that the US policy of trying to solve the conflict by forcing a settlement between Israel and the present Fatah-dominated PA cannot be succesful for several reasons: 1) it’s impossible to ignore the 40% of Palestinians who live in Gaza, 2) it’s impossible to ignore Hamas, 3) the Palestinian people have been so well ‘educated’ that they will not accept any solution that leaves Israel a Jewish state, and 4) the Fatah elite have zero popular support and cannot control their own terrorist factions. Nevertheless, the US talks as though such an agreement can be reached by pressuring Israel, and that it will bring about a peaceful two-state solution.

I suggest that the only way to understand this policy is to see that it is not intended to produce a peaceful Palestinian state alongside Israel (which neither Fatah nor Hamas wants anyway). Rather, the goal is to appease Saudi Arabia by getting Israel out of the territories — and thus finally fulfilling Kissinger’s 1974 promise — and by creating a Palestinian entity that will incorporate or be dominated by Hamas, and that will be a Saudi satellite.

This is one third of the American diplomatic offensive to save our butts in Iraq, almost precisely as laid out by the Iraq Study Group (co-chaired by Saudi attorney James A. Baker).

There are three major sources of support for the various insurgencies in Iraq: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Syria.

• We are giving the Saudis the ‘solution’ to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that they want;
• We are giving the Iranians a pass on nuclear weapons (the NIE);
• With Syria we struck out. But that’s another story.

It looks like this policy is at least partly working. The level of violence in Iraq is down. But remember that the Saudis do not want us completely out of Iraq as long as there is a possibility of a Shiite/Iranian takeover.

As you watch the situation develop, keep this in mind: the Saudis almost always get what they want.

Technorati Tags: Saudi Arabia

The Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) describe their activities as “reducing violence by getting in the way”.

I am all for reducing violence. But the CPT have a history of getting in the way of people, if they happen to be Israelis, defending themselves.

The point of view is perfectly illustrated by this fragment of an email written by a CPT member named Jan Benvie:

On 28 December, 2007, two armed, off-duty Israeli soldiers and two Palestinian gunmen killed each other… The Israelis were from the settlement of Kiryat Arba, near Hebron, the Palestinians from Hebron.

Both communities have their narratives of why their young men are dead. Their narratives are similar, although I doubt either would agree with me, such is their enmity towards each other.

Part of the narrative goes like this: both believe the other wants to kill them and steal their land; neither thinks the other wants peace…

I think of the bereaved families in both Kiryat Arba and Hebron. As a mother, I feel particularly for the parents mourning their dead sons. [my emphasis]

Now a few facts, independent of ‘narratives’: three Israelis were walking down a road. A car carrying Palestinians drove by and sprayed them with bullets. Because the Israelis were off-duty soldiers walking in a dangerous place, they were armed and fired back. Two Israelis and one, possibly two, Palestinians died.

The thrust of Ms. Benvie’s email is that there is a symmetry here: both sides hate the other, both sides commit violence, both sides have grieving parents.

But this incident (which I wrote about in “The 35… and two more” ) is a perfect example of the asymmetry of the conflict.

Apologists for the Palestinians will say that the Israeli settlers had initiated the violence by living on ‘Palestinian land’. But even if you ignore the history of the Jewish presence in and around Hebron, and even if you think that the penalty for a Jew living on ‘Arab land’ should be death, the terrorists did not know who they were shooting. There is no doubt in my mind that any Israeli hiking on that road would have been shot.

If the victims had been unarmed, the only difference would have been that none of the terrorists would have been hurt. In that case, would Benvie still blame the Israelis equally? For what?

The CPT distribute a brochure entitled “No way to the Inn” which includes the line “If the Christmas story were to happen today, Mary and Joseph would have a hard time getting to Bethlehem”, because of the security fence.

The brochure suggests building a little wall around a nativity scene, and then calling the local media to explain why you are doing it. It compares the Jews of today to the Romans of Herod’s time, and talks about the hardships faced by Palestinians living near the barrier.

But nowhere does it mention that the barrier is being built in order to stop Palestinian terrorists from attacking and killing Israelis. The CPT ‘gets in the way’ of self-defense, but doesn’t seem to do much to get in the way of terrorism (although one CPT member did offer to ride the no. 18 bus in Jerusalem after it had been bombed twice in two weeks).

Technorati Tags: CPT, Christian Peacemaker Teams

I haven’t written anything about Benazir Bhutto’s murder because I wasn’t ready to deal with it. I wasn’t ready to face the fact that, in the Middle East, murder is the option of choice to achieve political ends, and death is more important than life. If so, is there hope for anything except war, poverty, and death?

The Profession of Death
By Barry Rubin

Much will be said about Benazir Bhutto’s assassination; little will be understood about what it truly means. I’m not speaking here about Pakistan, of course, as important as is that country. But rather the lesson–as if we need any more–for that broad Middle East which begins in Pakistan and ends on the Atlantic Ocean coast.

This is a true story. Back in 1946, an American diplomat asked an Iranian editor why his newspaper angrily criticized the United States but never the Soviet Union. The Iranian said that it was obvious. “The Russians,” he said, “they kill people.”

A dozen years earlier, in 1933, the Iraqi official Sami Shawkat, gave a talk which became one of the most famous texts of Arab nationalism. “There is something more important than money and learning for preserving the honor of a nation and for keeping humiliation at bay,” he stated. “That is strength….Strength, as I use the word here, means to excel in the Profession of Death.”

What, you might ask, was Shawkat’s own profession? He was director-general of Iraq’s ministry of education. This was how young people were to be taught and directed; this is where Saddam Hussein came from. Seventy-five years later the subsequent history of Iraq and the rest of the Arab world show just how well Shawkat did his job.

September 11 in the United States; the Bali bombing for Australia; the tube bombing for Britain; the commuter train bombing for Spain, these were all merely byproducts of this pathology. The pathology in question is not Western policy toward the Middle East but rather Middle Eastern policy toward the Middle East.

Ever since I read Shawkat’s words as a student, the phrase, “Profession of Death,” which gave his article its title, struck me as a pun. On one hand, the word “profession” meant “career.”

To be a killer–note well that Shawkat was not talking specifically about soldiers, those who fight, but rather those who murder–was the highest calling of all. It was more important than being a teacher, who forms character; more important than a businessperson, who enriches his country; more important than a doctor who preserves the life of fellow citizens. Destruction was a higher calling than construction. And for sure in the Arabic-speaking world what has been reaped is what has been sowed.

But also the word “profession” here reminds me of “to profess,” “to preach.” What is of greatest value is for an educator to preach and glorify death. What kind of ideology, what kind of society, what kind of values, does such a priority produce? Look and see.

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