"For the Saudis, the Lebanese and Palestinians are ‘throw away’ people. All this nonsense about Arab solidarity is merely a circus act to shore up the legitimacy of the kleptocrats in the Gulf."
...Here we are at peak oil. Petro dollars are flowing by the tens of billions into Gulf coffers. And Saudi Arabia drops its last fig leaf and demonstrates to one and all that it has struck an alliance of convenience with Israel and given the IDF a green light to ravage Lebanon and Gaza.
On the face of it, it doesn’t make much sense. The one Arab country that has the leverage to shelter the region from American financed Israeli brutality decides to publicly turn on its own people. To make partial amends, King Abdallah has offered to compensate the Lebanese for some of the damage inflicted by the Israeli war machine. Unfortunately, for all their wealth, the Saudis have yet to perfect a way to bring back the dead or reattach missing Lebanese limbs.
It’s never easy to determine what goes on behind the shuttered curtains at the House of Saud. We may never know the precise nature of the secret Saudi agreements with the United States and Israel. In this case, the Saudis probably signed on to fight a proxy war with Iran – which is seen as the sponsor of Hezbollah.
The Saudis are experts at proxy wars – having supported and financed Saddam’s war against Iran – a conflict that lasted eight long years and cost a million lives on both sides. They joined forces with the Americans to finance the Afghan proxy war against the Soviets – a conflict that gave birth to the likes of Bin Laden. They participated with gusto in the systematic decimation of the secular Arab national movement. It’s no secret that the Saudi monarchy was elated at the outcome of the six-day war – hoping it would bring down Nasser’s regime. And the Kingdom’s role in the first and second Gulf war is a matter of public record.
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