Kiriakou writes: "With historically low oil prices and a massive deficit, and with Middle East watchers grumbling that the country is actually being run by the king's untested and inexperienced 30-year-old son, Muhammad bin Salman, the Saudis must get their act together soon or they risk further destabilizing the entire region. And if American diplomatic leadership was ever needed, it is now."
John Kiriakou. (photo: NBC)
Time to Tell the Saudis to Drink Their Oil
17 January 16
audi king Salman bin Abd al-Aziz has miscalculated badly since taking the throne, miring his country in an unwinnable civil war in Yemen, angering his own Shia Muslim minority by cracking down on dissent and executing one of its leaders, and breaking diplomatic relations with Iran. With historically low oil prices and a massive deficit, and with Middle East watchers grumbling that the country is actually being run by the king�s untested and inexperienced 30-year-old son, Muhammad bin Salman, the Saudis must get their act together soon or they risk further destabilizing the entire region. And if American diplomatic leadership was ever needed, it is now.
Muhammad bin Salman�s growing influence over the day-to-day running of defense and oil policy is even creating tension within the royal family. Just last month, several princes suggested to the British press that the king step down and take his son with him. The country�s policies since Salman assumed the throne have been impulsive, like severing diplomatic relations with Iran, and interventionist, like invading Yemen.
Salman�s miscalculations have called into question his ability to lead, and may presage a broader conflict, as the governments of Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates have had to commit troops to Yemen to relieve the burden on Saudi ground forces. This has had no effect on the fighting, however, as the Shia Muslim Houthi rebels have strengthened their positions in Yemen�s north while al-Qaeda continues to operate unfettered in the south. The Houthis even launched a SCUD missile near a Saudi airbase in October. A second missile was intercepted by the Saudi military.
Riyadh�s decision to execute 47 people on January 2, the largest mass execution in Saudi Arabia in 35 years, has further exacerbated an already shaky balance with Shias in the region. The execution of Nimr al-Nimr in particular, an outspoken critic of the king who rallied the Shia minority, has further inflamed tensions.
Relations with Iran are particularly bad. Immediately following Nimr�s execution, Iranians sacked and burned the Saudi embassy in Tehran. The Saudis responded by severing diplomatic relations with Iran. Bahrain, Kuwait, and Sudan followed, and the United Arab Emirates downgraded relations with Tehran. But the devolution of Saudi-Iranian relations was not just because of the execution. The Saudis initially strongly and publicly opposed the Iran nuclear accord and have financed fundamentalist Sunni groups in Syria fighting the Iran-backed Syrian government. Some of those groups are aligned with al-Qaeda there.
Meanwhile, the State Department has remained mute on Saudi policy, other than to congratulate the Saudis on assuming leadership, ironically, of the United Nations Human Rights Council. And this was after the Saudis sentenced a 17-year-old to death by crucifixion because he participated in anti-royal demonstrations, after a Saudi blogger was imprisoned for 10 years and given 1,000 lashes because he questioned the role of religion in the kingdom, and after the wife of a prominent dissident was arrested because she, well, was a dissident�s wife.
The Obama administration has not had a single foreign policy success in the Middle East over the past seven years besides the Iran nuclear deal. It cannot allow Saudi intransigence to interfere, especially in an election year. There is still time for the Saudi government to close Pandora�s Box. But the only way to achieve stability in the Middle East is for Washington to draw its own proverbial line in the sand. It must work with its allies in the region to convince the Saudis to end the Yemen debacle, respect its own citizens, and work with Iran. Otherwise, the future holds only war and economic disaster.
If the Saudis don�t want to play ball and make nice with their own people and their neighbors, Washington should reassess the relationship. Truth be told, Saudi Arabia is not a reliable friend. Questions about Saudi involvement in the September 11 attacks have never been answered. The Saudis oppose peace with Israel. They oppose peace with Iran. With oil prices as low as they are, and as alternative energies are finally being developed in the United States, maybe it�s time to tell the Saudis to drink their oil.
John Kiriakou is an associate fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies. He is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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**Is nowadays are real word? Ah that's one of the great mysteries of the universe....
"Nowadays" is NOT a 'real word'. Except for the fact that "usage" determines acceptable English, and this bastardization "Nowadays" has infiltrated Standard English from "somewheres" in the Ozarks.
I know that it probably *sounds* perfectly acceptable in Texas.
Could you BE any more snarky ? What is more trivial, the question, or someone wiling to take valuable time out of their day to lift a leg on the person asking the question ?
One contemptible addition some decades back was the inclusion of "DoctorWelbyish " (since removed) in the USA.
Thank you for your important and very interesting coverage.
Anyone else want to chip in right now?
There's only one thing I can think of that can do that: GENERAL STRIKE.
We've a long, long way to go to protect people in foreign lands from the continued war and war crime from the West and most importantly the USA.
Predator Drones murder on a continued basis in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia for certain. How many other places we do not know.
This alone is heavily indicative of what is to come.
But they can't hide forever from a better-informed world outside of the "approved" US Corporate State chowderhead media.
There is a lot more than just P'v't Manning's fate riding on this show trial.
It might just serve to plunge the US back into further isolation as experienced during the Dimwits/Chain-g ang reign of error and terror and shoot it down to the bottom of the world trust and popularity list, where it is currently at the lower-middle (source; BBC).
Gawd knows how Manning is bearing up during this prolonged lynching but his stoicism and perhaps resignation (or is he being drugged?) should be a spur to world support for his Nobel prize nomination. Sign on at http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=5459.
Stuff it all back down their hypocritical throats!
And I hope that they enjoy reading this on RSN's surveilled database.
"Ah fart in their general directions" (Monty Python's Holy Grail). I hope they get a chuckle at some of my daffy scribblings on RSN.
Abb-abb-abb-t-th-th-at's al ffolks: He-heh-heh!
Complicity to murder and genocide is on trial, and Manning refuses to be complicit. Do we, as human, also? We are the ones on trial, but you cannot call it one. Should we let them convict us without our knowledge?
Hierarchies have lead to garbage gathering police who are deputized to 'take it out,' the garbage which is provided in droves by the central media outlets as lies, or, as a paper-trade. They have to produce so much garbage to successfully alter the cultural landscape permanently, or tectonically, hollowing out under our feet instead of being hallow, or having any predisposition for that. Purposefully, they drive people from their evolutionary design to learn and to participate.
Learning leads to learning-to-lea rn (Bateson) where we would, then, know the 'container' relevant to the learned where both exist together as form, not word. "In the beginning, all was mush and without form," Denial allows proceeding upon no truth at all. This is usury.
We make up for missing truth when being instructed to be in a container that contains none, or, maybe is 50/50. Tricks are not epistemology, or real knowledge, in any event. One needs imagination. Learning, in reality, is not a trick. It would be an oxymoron. If there is any distinction to made, any leap for cognitive powers we could possess, for the power that makes it all just, this is another drama designed, solely, to make us shudder, and is not random.
"..A military spokesman said that the media operations center located half a mile away from the courtroom was "a privilege, not a right...."
It seems amazing to hear someone in the US military advise us that they grant privileges. And all while the US tax payers fund their entire lives from salaries and health care to retirement.
This is an indication of the power we have given to a group that is supposed to defend the USA. Now they tell us what our privileges are. And even more frightening will be the day that an American civilian is arrested by the military and indefinitely detained as allowed by the NDAA.
One more clear indicator of Eisenhower's warning about the "military-indus trial complex. It's all out of control!
Well, that's the US attitude to healthcare too and education, innit!? It's only for the elite and privileged.
There's a long way to go before this country joins the "civilized" world -if ever!
What's a "secure telephone"?
I agree that life goes on" (Oobladee-oobla dah!) but this country is becoming more and more like Spain's Franco era and Suharto's Indonesia I'm tired of repeating this), both supported and armed by the "land of the faux-free-to-sh op and the home of the cowed and surveilled".
It's the QUALITY of life we are looking at here and which is endangered!
Te US is becoming more and more like one of these Sci-fi box rooms where the walls keep sliding in on and constricting it's occupants, or the four-poster bed that lowers it canopy in the night to smother it's sleeping occupants.
Wake up and smell the shite -then fight!
The U.S. Army, as with other entities with the U.S. empire's power structure is ethically bankrupt. The more it protects an monetary empire's interests, the more chance for change.
There is also an NSA entity, PRISM, that is apparently being used to spy on the emails of who knows how many people, foreign and domestic.
The U.S. Constitution has been violated by the very status quo power brokers-and their supporters-who claim to support it. And it's nothing new.
progressives.
Is that the message?
Who do you think will win that 'discussion'?
Well, the IRS hasn't attacked anyone since Nixon ordered them to, and that was the liberals, the FBI, for all its' faults has a long horrendous record of attacking liberal groups and still does, although they occasionally go after obvious criminal right wing groups, the brunt of their actions still falls on liberal groups. And the ATF goes after the people committing gun crimes, which is nearly 100% conservative. So, in this case, they do go after conservatives mostly, but it isn't targeting conservatives per se, it's targeting subversives.
And the military isn't attacking liberals per se, they're attacking the first and fourth amendments.