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My Enemy’s Enemy by Melanie Phillips
Saudi Arabia is supposedly our ally against al Qaeda. While it may well be the case that it has been useful to us in providing intelligence and so forth, it is also the intellectual and religious fount of al Qaeda. Having created this monster, Saudi then found to its dismay that it turned into its own most bitter attacker. So Saudi fights al Qaeda terrorism inside its own borders, but sees no reason to cease funding and promoting jihad against the rest of the world. Now Saudi sees an even bigger threat to itself from Iran. On the ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ principle, the US is taking advantage of that to try to use Saudi as leverage against Iran. The US also seems to think that ‘solving’ the Israel Arab impasse will help defeat Islamist terror (which is, of course, precisely the wrong way round); or maybe President Bush is merely desperate to leave as his legacy a peace deal between Israel and the Arabs (dream on). Whatever. Either way, there is now a US/Saudi love-in going on. So the US has just given it a whopping $11 billion arms deal, and Saudi has graciously indicated that it may attend the Middle East peace conference the US is organising for the autumn which will consider, we are told, a revival of the Saudi Middle East ‘peace plan’. People are hailing the prospect of Saudi sitting down with Israel as a breakthrough. It should be seen instead as the US forcing Israel to embrace a scorpion. The so-called ‘peace plan’ by Saudi — which has never recognised Israel and which forbids Jews to enter its own territory — requires Israel to return to the 1967 border, which is in fact the 1949 armistice line otherwise known as the ‘Auschwitz border’ because it would leave Israel undefended against genocide. Which is, of course, the intention. The other arm of the Saudi pincer of peace is the demand for the return of the so-called Palestinian ‘refugees’ (they are as much refugees as I am a refugee from Poland from whose harsh and anti-Jewish environment my grandparents fled in the early years of the last century) which is tantamount to the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. Which is, of course, the intention. It is obvious that Saudi Arabia is making only rhetorical and deeply dishonest gestures to convey the impression that it is a serious player in the ‘peace process’. The Jerusalem Post has pointed out what Saudi Arabia could do if it was really serious about peace with Israel: … the Saudis and other Arab states can take serious steps to dismantle the monster they created and continue to feed: the Arab-Israeli conflict. Attending a conference would be nice, but it is substance that matters. The key substantive things they can do is to stop their diplomatic warfare against Israel, drop their illegal trade boycotts, combat the rampant anti-Semitism in their countries, and start openly breaking it to the Palestinians that their ‘right of return’ can only be to a future state of Palestine, not to Israel. Of course Saudi won’t do this. Indeed, the idea that Saudi is anything other than the enemy of civilisation is ludicrous. Power Line quotes Dore Gold, head of the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, who points out that based on Israel’s 2003 intelligence assessment, 50 to 70 percent of Hamas’s budget derives from Saudi Arabia. Gold also told YNet: Several years ago, Israel received reports of the interrogation of al-Qaeda captives who admitted that their organization had penetrated the Saudi Arabian air force, and that it was planning to take control of several Saudi F-15s based at Tabuk in north Western Saudi Arabia, near Eilat, and fly the fighter planes into sky scrapers in Tel Aviv, Gold said. ‘From the pattern of past al-Qaeda attacks in Saudi Arabia, many western observers have concluded that elements of the Saudi national guard colluded with the attackers. Which only further substantiates Western concern that al-Qaeda has penetrated different branches of Saudi Armed forces.’ Saudi also turns out to be heavily involved in Iraq — and guess what, not on our side. A few days ago the New York Times, no less, reported that the US is angry at Saudi Arabia’s counterproductive role in the Iraq war Counterproductive? You can say that again. They say that beyond regarding Mr. Maliki as an Iranian agent, the Saudis have offered financial support to Sunni groups in Iraq. Of an estimated 60 to 80 foreign fighters who enter Iraq each month, American military and intelligence officials say that nearly half are coming from Saudi Arabia and that the Saudis have not done enough to stem the flow… The American officials in Iraq also say that the majority of suicide bombers in Iraq are from Saudi Arabia and that about 40 percent of all foreign fighters are Saudi. Officials said that while most of the foreign fighters came to Iraq to become suicide bombers, others arrived as bomb makers, snipers, logisticians and financiers. American military and intelligence officials have been critical of Saudi efforts to stanch the flow of fighters into Iraq, although they stress that the Saudi government does not endorse the idea of fighters from Saudi Arabia going to Iraq. On the contrary, they said, Saudi Arabia is concerned that these young men could acquire insurgency training in Iraq and then return home to carry out attacks in Saudi Arabia — similar to the Saudis who turned against their homeland after fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The Bush administration’s relationship with Saudi Arabia has deteriorated steadily since the United States invasion of Iraq, culminating in April when, bitingly, King Abdullah, during a speech before Arab heads of state in Riyadh, condemned the American invasion of Iraq as ‘an illegal foreign occupation.’ A month before that, King Abdullah effectively torpedoed a high-profile meeting between Israelis and Palestinians, planned by Ms. Rice, by brokering a power-sharing agreement between the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and the militant Islamist group Hamas that did not require Hamas to recognize Israel. While that agreement eventually fell apart, the Bush administration, on both occasions, was caught off guard and became infuriated. But Saudi officials have not been too happy with President Bush, either, and the plummeting of America’s image in the Muslim world has led King Abdullah to strive to set a more independent course. The administration ‘thinks the Saudis are no longer behaving the role of the good vassal,’ said Steve Clemons, senior fellow and director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. The Saudis, in turn, ‘see weakness, they see a void, and they’re going to fill the void and call their own shots.’ So angry is the US with what Saudi has been doing to destabilise the region and back Israel into a corner that it is rewarding Saudi with an $11 billion deal — and inviting it to discuss Israel’s future existence. Madness.
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