The Heelers Diaries

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Wednesday, September 18, 2019

the saudi enigma

The Iranian government has for more than a decade sought to bring hot war to the Arabian peninsula.
The motivations are mixed.
Pure spite explains a lot of it.
Look.
Oil rich Saudi Arabia has delivered a comparatively peaceful, prosperous and free life to its citizens.
The similarly oil rich Iran has, since the Mullahs took over in 1979, delivered impoverishment, pariah status, dictatorship, and a permanent enmity with the rest of the world to its starving people.
So yes there is significant spite in what the Iranian government did this week in launching unprovoked bomb attacks on Saudi, forcing the instant shut down of half of its oil production facilities in one day of sneak attacks.
Pure spite, envy, jealousy, is enough to explain the attacks.
But there is more.
The Iranian government is no longer confident that it can rule its own people through fear indefinitely.
In this sense, the Mullahs need another war.
To distract the people and to remotivate them.
But there's still more.
The government of Iran has long coveted Saudi Arabia as real estate.
Saudi has things the Iranian government wants.
Saudi Arabia is at the centre of Islamic history and culture.
Saudi Arabia is home to the two of the holiest cities of Islam, Medina and Mecca.
As the Iranian government sees it, who owns Saudi Arabia owns Islam.
There is also the prime motivating factor that up until recently, Saudi Arabia possessed fully 50 percent of the world's known oil reserves.
Getting your hands on that little caboodle just might help pay a few bills for any would be empire builder.
Iran in certain periods has itself possessed up to ten percent of known world oil reserves which should still have been enough for any barely competent government to deliver a good life to its people.
Iran's wealth has been squandered by the Mullahs' economic mismanagement, their constant engagement and advocacy in international terrorism, their permanent warfare against various neighbours, their genocidal ambitions against Israel, their perpetual self indulgently infantile enmity towards free countries such as America and Britain, and their maintenance of proxy armies such as Hezbollah in South Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
The hubris of Iran's ruling pseudo elite gives us the sole reason Iran is poor and despised by her neighbours.
By contrast, the honorable stewardship and integrity of the Saudi Royal Family gives us the reason Saudi Arabia is wealthy, stable and at peace.
From the Iranian Mullahs point of view, all that stands between the government of Iran and the subversion or outright conquest of Saudi Arabia is the rulership of Saudi by the Saudi Royal Family.
If they're gone the Mullahs believe that Iran will be the dominant power in Arabia and thereby in the Muslim World generally.
The Saudi Royal Family is one of the world's two most famous monarchies, the other being the British Royal Family.
The Saudi Royal Family has been in a leadership role on the Arabian peninsula since the 1700s and is much more hands on in the running of their country than the Brit Royals. The Saudi Royal Family established the modern Saudi Arabian State in the early 1930s.
During the modern period, the Saudi Royal Family has steered their country through the Second World War, through the Russian Communist attempt to take over the world in the Cold War, and through the current period wherein Al Qaeda, Isis and the Muslim Brotherhood are attempting to hijack Islam itself through a Jihad War against the human race.
Saudi Arabia has also remained comparatively peaceful, stable and prosperous in spite of repeated attempts by Iran's government to foment hot war on the Arabian peninsula in the past decade through terrorism generally, through the instigation of unrest from 2011 to 2014 in Bahrain, and through civil war in Yemen from 2015 to the present.
It was Yemen's Houthi tribe who provided the fig leaf of plausible deniability for this week's Iranian attack on Saudi Arabia.
They fooled no one.
It remains in recognising the Saudi's cultural, economic and diplomatic achievements to note that a massive oil reserve does not necessarily bring about positive outcomes. A massive oil discovery in Venezuela in South America during the past two decades means that Venezuela has recently become custodian of 50 percent of the World's known oil reserves, a title formerly held by Saudi Arabia.
What has this limitless oil wealth meant for Venezuela?
In a few short years of Command Control Communism, pockmarked by alliances with Putin's Russia. and with the Chinese Communist Party, the Venezuelans have entirely impoverished their country.
So clearly it is possible to have half the world's oil wealth (as in Venezuela) or 10 percent of it (as in Iran) and through mismanagement, incompetence, adventurism, psychoticism and perpetual war mongering, to render your country utterly desolate.
Compare those countries with Saudi Arabia.
Then compare other countries in the region.
All across North Africa, there has been unrest, civil war, terrorism, impoverishing affiliations to Russia and China, and or direct communist dictatorship for half a century.
The Middle East is little better.
Syria has just had another bout of civil war with Iran participating to uphold its vassal, the Assad government.
Lebanon has been mired in adventurist wars, civil wars, terrorism and foreign occupation with Iran again participating in all these blood soaked games through its proxy army Hezbollah in South Lebanon and through its vassal Syria when Lebanon was under direct Syrian occupation up to 2005.
Even Turkey has for decades been engaged in permanent civil war with its Kurdish minority. Some analysts believe that Turkey's Islamist President Erdogan covets Saudi Arabia as much as the Iranians do. It's a rough neighbourhood.
Iran's nearest contiguous neighbour Iraq has also been engaged in constant adventurist wars for fifty years, first under the original Soviet client despot Saddam Hussein who fought Iran itself for eight years in the 1980s killing a million people, and then invaded Kuwait to try and balance his books, killing hundreds of thousands more. After the removal of Saddam Hussein at the behest of the American President George Bush in 2004, Iraq continued to experience upheavals through a sea of domestic terrorism with the Iranians, terrified a free democracy was emerging courtesy of George Bush on their borders, actively participating in seeking to sabotage the American liberation of that country. There was further mayhem for Iraq when an appeasement minded American President Barack Obama became discouraged by Iran's sabotage of nascent Iraqi democracy and withdrew all American troops overnight. Thus was left clear the way for a new invasion of Iraq out of Syrian territory by an Al Qaeda, Isis, Muslim Brotherhood army which unleashed a storm of blood letting and torture across the plains of Nineveh unsurpassed since the time of Genghis Khan.
On Iran's far border Pakistan has had three wars with India and counting.
Afghanistan before American liberation was the basket case that brought us Nine Eleven.
Yes.
This is the neighbourhood.
Amid all this I would contend that the Saudi Royal Family and their people have made the Arabian peninsula a comparative oasis of peace, prosperity, independence and partnership with the rest of the world.
Legitimate critiques notwithstanding, we should recognise the genuine achievements of Saudi Arabia and its Royal Family.

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