Saudi Arabia & Israel vs. Iran
With the recent rise of concern in the West and Israel over Iran’s alleged nuclear program and Iran facing accusations of attempting to create highly-enriched uranium to produce weapons-grade plutonium and eventually nuclear warheads, a few reports with questionable accuracy were recently published with the claim of Israeli officials paying secret visits to high-ranking Saudi officials to discuss the possible “threats” of Iran’s nuclear program.
It wasn’t so long ago when Shahram Amiri had surfaced, raising more questions as to whether he was abducted or not, and whether Saudi Arabia was involved in his alleged abduction and smuggling to the U.S. and how this would explain the claims of Saudi Arabia working with U.S. and Israel against Iran.
The Times of London had quoted an unnamed U.S. defense source as saying that the Saudis have given their permission for the Israelis to pass over and they will look the other way.
“They have already done tests to make sure their own jets aren’t scrambled and no one gets shot down. This has all been done with the agreement of the U.S. State Department.”
The report further continued by quoting a Saudi government source saying:
“We all know this. We will let them [the Israelis] through and see nothing.”
Given Israel would conduct an air strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the four main targets would be uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz and Qom, a gas storage development at Isfahan and a heavy-water reactor at Arak. Further more, secondary targets may include a Russian-built light water reactor at Bushehr, which could also produce nuclear weapons when complete.
A pass could be done over Iraq to perform the air strike, but it would require consent from the U.S., whose troops are currently occupying the country and so far the Obama Administration has refused to allow it.
Prince Mohammed bin Nawaf, the Saudi envoy to the U.K. speaking to the London-based Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat, denied that report, saying such a move “would be against the policy adopted and followed by the Kingdom.” he reiterated the Saudi Arabia’s rejection of any violation of its territories or airspace, adding that it would be “illogical to allow the Israeli occupying force, with whom Saudi Arabia has no relations whatsoever, to use its land and airspace.” Later on this was followed by the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accusing Israel and the U.S. of attempting to sabotage the relationships between Saudi Arabia and Iran in his statement which he had said during a meeting with Saudi Arabia’s new ambassador to Tehran.
“Undoubtedly, the U.S. and the Zionist regime are the enemies of Iran and Saudi Arabia, so they are trying to create a gap between Tehran and Riyadh.”
Also declaring in his speech, the Iranian President said:
“If Iran and Saudi Arabia stand together, our enemies won’t dare continue with their aggressive behavior, with occupation and pressure on the Muslim world.”
However, a recent report from the WorldNetDaily news claimed Israeli Mossad chief Meir Dagan went on a secret visit to Saudi Arabia in recent weeks to discuss the threat of Iran, attributing the story to Arab sources. It also cites an Egyptian intelligence source saying that Saudi Arabia has been passing intelligence information to Israel related to Iran.
Given all this information, and whether it’s not certain if Saudi Arabia is indeed cooperating with the West in an attempt to halt Iran’s nuclear program in fears of it diminishing Saudi Arabia’s influence in the Middle East, this does not deny the fact that with the current sectarian tension between the Sunni and Shia sects, Saudi Arabia – and other Gulf states – share a certain degree of hostility with Iran, the UAE had already expressed it’s support of U.S. policy against Iran’s nuclear program, according to Youssef al-Otaiba, the UAE’s envoy to the U.S. who had reportedly said in a conference in Aspen,
“We cannot live with a nuclear Iran.”
The Sunni-Shiite struggle IS existent, the West is adding fuel to the fire, and whether or not Saudi Arabia is working with the West and Israel against Iran or not, and whether it would – along with other Gulf states – form an alliance with the West against Iran given war erupts, the possibility of Sunnis and Shiites getting along are quite slim, and this diminishes the possibility of the Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, ruled by the Sunni Al-Saud family and governed by Islamic Shari’ah Law to have a strong alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran, which adopts the Shiite sect and enforces a theocratic rule upon the state. And with Saudi Arabia’s past history of giving corridor to U.S. troops to pass through to Iraq during the Persian Gulf War in 1990 [Operation Desert Storm], this entire situation is just starting to look like Iraq 2.0 to me.
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Although I don’t trust Shia at all, and you may read further about this to figure out what I’m talking about, I still think we Sunnah should NOT allow Israel, the US or any whoever to strike Iran in anyway. I appreciate what you’re trying to do here, and I beg you to keep it up!
“The West is adding fuel to the fire…” Do you people even read the Iranian media or opposition/Green sites to understand what the regime in Tehran is saying? We Iranians have lived with a murderous regime that has SLAUGHTERED our people for 31 years, that does what it does to it’s own people. Do you think it has ANY sympathy for the rest of the Middle East whose Sunni base they call “dogs worse than Jews”? We Iranians want ALL of the Middle East to wake up and put the regressive behavior aside and start thinking that WE are a region that is being threatened by a group of MOBSTERS who claim to be Moslems but who really are archaic oriental despots who want ALL of us to submit to their rule. It’s their way or the high way. The sooner people in the Mid East who are not Iranian get that through their heads, the better. MAYBE then, there will be a chance where all of us can survive these tyrants!
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Banafsheh:
I understand what you’re trying to say about Iran’s regime being very oppressive, and about the possibility of Iran seeking Persian supremacy in the Middle East rather than liberating Palestine as they claim. I’m aware of that possibility myself and it always crosses my mind.
However, that’s not the issue I’m addressing here, Iran is a concern, you see it as a threat to the Middle East, I see Israel as a greater threat to the peace in the Middle East, so you can say if you’re obligated to make a choice and there’s no option C, you’d choose the lesser of two evils.
You have to understand that there’s only one rogue nuclear state in the Middle East, which also happens to be a fanatical state, and that state is not Iran… It’s Israel.
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first of all tell me why Arabs along with western countries are so worried about assuming that Iran can make nuclear weopons when they are sure that Israelis having them already.
Israel occupied arab lands in palestine and syria.,lebnan ,thanks to hezbollah that crushed Israelis and frorce them to flee from labnon.
and Iran is struggling any this world just to be independent from currupt and enemies of islam.
Khomeni revive islam thirty yeras back and that struggle still continue that can be seen in 2006 war with israel that agian made israelis and their master humiliated by hezbollah.
Shia sunni will be one force when america or israel attack iran.
musliams are different from their rulers always.
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This article is now available in Farsi here:
http://mideastyouth.com/fa/1389/05/saudi-arabia-israel-vs-iran/
Thanks to Ali Bambadi for the translation.
Thank you for sharing your interesting perspective with us brother Ahmad.
The Iranian regime’s throat is right between two sharp swords. If they decide, as the Gulf wants, to halt their uranium enrichment programs and dismantle their nuclear infrastructure, the Iranian regime will lose all legitimacy amongst the Iranian population which has rallied behind the nuclear nationalist movement. If the regime, going against Gulf interests, continues enriching uranium, Iran and the current regime will be completely ostracized by the international community. If you look at these two options (I understand there are middle options but I take the two extremes only to draw out the spectrum) and assess which of the two is better for the Iranian regime, the latter, or moving forward with the nuclear program is the more sensible choice.
Economic sanctions bring about two positive effects for totalitarian regimes such as the Iranian regime. The first is that economic sanctions usually centralize economic power in the hands of the regime. Instead of having necessary-for-life items sold on the open market where private merchants profit and to an extent control the supply, during economic sanctions the government always steps in and begins to nationalize essential-for-life markets such as food, water, medicine, energy etc. This adds to the power and legitimacy of the regime. The second effect is that, since economic sanctions are being imposed by foreign powers who are relatively unpopular amongst Iranians, Iranians will feel more and more defensive which will increase their level of patriotism and nationalism. If there were sectarian, political, economic rifts within the Iranian population before economic sanctions, these rifts will either temporarily fade or disappear in face of a broader foreign challenge.
I disagree with you that the issue is sunni/shiite although it looks that way from a general perspective. The issue, in my opinion has to do with control of oil supply. With Saudi Arabia, now acting as the residual supplier within OPEC, this position could easily be threatened by a more internationally acclaimed Iran. Iran’s path to international acclamation here is by being accepted as a nuclear power (think Pakistan). Saudi Arabia simply cannot afford to live with a powerful Iran that could eventually challenge its role as the sole residual supplier within OPEC.
The Gulf states should have realized that it is not in Iran’s interests to halt its nuclear program this by now but they are sticking to their pursuit of a nuclear-free Iran in order to try and avoid another regional conflict. However, should Iran continue to enrich its uranium, it is obvious that an attack, by anyone really, on Iran would play into the petroleum economic interests of the Gulf. It would ensure that Iran will not become an accepted member of the international community and therefore be able to ramp up oil production enough to threaten Saudi Arabia and an attack would almost surely also target mid-stream oil infrastructure which would hamper Iran’s capability of even sustaining their current level of development.
Although there is a chance that smart bombing runs may take place, I do not think that there is an imminent threat of attack on Iran. This is because sanctions on Iran, coupled with a Gulf that is more diplomatically aggressive with Iran, will be enough to quell fears of a successful Iranian nuclear program for the time being. Long term, these sanctions will not be lifted until a war has taken place between the the Gulf’s interests and the Iranian regime’s interests.
A side point: we should also be aware of the emerging power Iraq is going to have within OPEC. One less capable OPEC member (Iran) would be very helpful in maintaining the status quo within OPEC chambers.
You call Israel a rogue state, In all the Arab-israel wars since 1956 israel could well have used it’s nuclear weaponry agaInst her enemies, as israel has been a nuclear power for around 55 years, however even during her worst moments in the 1973 war they never resorted to using weapons of mass destruction on her enemies, iran on the other hand has threatened the complete annihilation of the Jewish State, a state which is a member of the UN. You have also forgotten the parallel issue of some 1,000,000 Jewish refugees from arab lands made stateless, homeless & centless, in the 1940s till the 1970s. They the jews of the arab world outnumbered the arab refugees of the British Mandate of Palestine in 1948, They almost outnumbered the arab refugees (who never wanted to be called palestinians til 1964 when yasser arafat thought it would be politically expedient to call them Palestinians so as to pander to the west to show them that Palestinians are really the true indigenous population of palestine from biblical times, what a good ‘Taqiyya’ story that makes especially to the ignorant people in the west.) by two to one, the real estate tat we owned was five times the size of the whole of |srael today. Around 75% of all the jews from the arab world not including the jews of Turkey and Iran comprise of over 50% of the entire jewish population of israel today. only a few thousand jews remain in the arab speaking world today. The few hundred that remained in the yemen had to flee for their lives as they were constantly harassed and in some instances murdered , as what happened to a jewish teacher in yemen who was threatened to convert to islam or die, he was shot to death by that lunatic. Remember before you blame Israel to what befell the arabs of palestine, it was the arabs who told the arab population of Palestine to leave so that the arab armies invading israel in 1948 could do so unhindered by the arab populace who were told the task of annihilating the fledgling newly declared state of israel woul only take a few weeks to conquer and that all the property of the dead or fleeing jews would be added to the arabs of palestine. today there are 1.3 million arabs who have Israeli nationality and are represented in the Knesset (parliament) which is more than i can say for the arab world who made the jews disappear, this is real ethnic cleansing.
Without Israel’s help Saudi-Arabia and all the Gulf states will be taken over by Iran.
So you all have lot’s to to look forward to in the near future.
better the Devil you know than the Much bigger devil you don’t, and in this case Iran.