Saudi Arabia: seeking security (catch all)

[davidbfpo]

This week Richard Barrett, ex-diplomat (UK & UN posts) and now with the Soufan Group, commented that trained Saudi military personnel are defecting to ISIS. He drew attention to the oddity in a February 2014 statement by the King that fighting abroad meant a five year prison sentence for citizens and seven and half years for those who serve in the military.

His estimate, based on visits to Saudi Arabia, was that 2,500-3,000 have gone to fight; with three hundred in rehab centres (maybe intercepted before leaving or returned).

In my background reading this week I found suggestions that the Saudi army were deploying to the northern border (maybe easier to defect then?).

Copied to here from the current thread on Iraq.

[carl]

I wonder how this all will turn out. I don’t mean from a standpoint of what the takfiri killers will do, they will keep going until stopped or dead; but what we will do.

It occurs to me that most if not all of our trouble, the world’s trouble, with the takfiri killers comes from one basic thing, Saudi money. Without Saudi money wahabiism would be a vile footnote and most all of its manifestations and things it influences would have to stand financially on their own, which they couldn’t do well since they aren’t as good at building economies as they are at mayhem.

It also occurs to me that Saudi money ultimately depends upon the forbearance and goodwill of the West. If oil had become useful in the 18th Century instead of the 20th, there would not be a Saudi Arabia. Some Western country, or countries, would have just annexed the place. We allow them to keep their country and sell us the oil that they cannot extract without our help because of our sense of fair play, self determination for indigenous people and all that. They in turn use a large part of that money to finance those who would destroy us and have for decades. Noble intentions on our part don’t seem to be working out so well.

Given that things with the takfiri killers aren’t slowing down but speeding up, can we allow this to go on? We can run ourselves ragged chasing individuals with murder on their minds for many years to come or we can do something about depriving the Saudis of their money and perhaps cut things off at the source. We will be forced into that I think.

The question then becomes how to do it. Robert Baer wrote a book about this (I stole his ideas) years ago and suggested that oddly enough the above circumstances plus the fact that most of the Saudi oil fields are in east and in Shia areas makes Iran a natural long term ally.

What do you guys think of all this in whole or in parts? I don’t see things going on like this for many more decades without us having to do something relatively radical.

[Red Rat]

Hard to get a good feel as to what is happening in Saudi Arabia, but patently the fissures are showing more and more there as well. Low level disorder in the Shi'a Eastern Provinces and a growing Salafists terrorism problem from the Northern Provinces.

The latest statement from the King is a sign of the times:

"Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah ordered all necessary measures to protect the Kingdom against potential "terrorist threats," a Royal Court statement said Thursday"

King Orders High Alert To Fight Terror

[AmericanPride]

The Saudi royal family has always played this balancing game between itself and the fundamentalist establishment. This alliance goes back hundreds of years. This is why the Saudis maintain the National Guard (which rivals the Army in size) under direct command of the King and independent of the Defense Ministry. KSA is an inherently unstable state and I would not be surprised if there is concern about the reliability of the armed forces to maintain the royal family's security in the event of a major fundamentalist offensive.

The question then becomes how to do it. Robert Baer wrote a book about this (I stole his ideas) years ago and suggested that oddly enough the above circumstances plus the fact that most of the Saudi oil fields are in east and in Shia areas makes Iran a natural long term ally.

I think this is one of the few times you and I are not in disagreement. Let's break out the champagne. We're already in cahoots with fundamentalist regime in Saudi Arabia and historically there's been no hesitation in supporting fundamentalist movements, so Iran seems like a good as an ally as any. It's also a larger, more stable, and more populous country than KSA - not to mention it's form of fundamentalism is more tame than Wahhabism. At some point in the near future it will be important for the US to make amends with Iran and develop an effective relationship - the instability in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan make that a necessity.

[davidbfpo]

A rare report spotted:http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...0FA04620140705

The KSA has a problem:

The kingdom .....said in May it had detained 62 suspected al Qaeda militants with links to radicals in Syria and Yemen who it said it believed were plotting attacks on government and foreign targets in the kingdom.