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Wednesday 9 July 2008

Our enemy's enemy isn't our friend

Melanie Phillips has a superb post on the idiocy of using Saudi Arabia as an ally against Iran:

Saudi Arabia is supposedly our ally against al Qaeda. While it may well be the case they that it has been useful to us in providing intelligence and so forth, it is also the intellectual and religious fount of al Qaeda. Having created this monster, Saudi then found to its dismay that it turned into its own most bitter attacker. So Saudi fights al Qaeda terrorism inside its own borders, but sees no reason to cease funding and promoting jihad against the rest of the world.

Now Saudi sees an even bigger threat to itself from Iran. On the ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ principle, the US is taking advantage of that to try to use Saudi as leverage against Iran. The US also seems to think that ‘solving’ the Israel Arab impasse will help defeat Islamist terror (which is, of course, precisely the wrong way round); or maybe President Bush is merely desperate to leave as his legacy a peace deal between Israel and the Arabs (dream on). Whatever. Either way, there is now a US/Saudi love-in going on. So the US has just given it a whopping $11 billion arms deal, and Saudi has graciously indicated that it may attend the Middle East peace conference the US is organising for the autumn which will consider, we are told, a revival of the Saudi Middle East ‘peace plan’.

People are hailing the prospect of Saudi sitting down with Israel as a breakthrough. It should be seen instead as the US forcing Israel to embrace a scorpion. The so-called ‘peace plan’ by Saudi — which has never recognised Israel and which forbids Jews to enter its own territory — requires Israel to return to the 1967 border, which is in fact the 1949 armistice line otherwise known as the ‘Auschwitz border’ because it would leave Israel undefended against genocide. Which is, of course, the intention.

The other arm of the Saudi pincer of peace is the demand for the return of the so-called Palestinian ‘refugees’ (they are as much refugees as I am a refugee from Poland from where my grandparents fled the pogroms in the early years of the last century) which is tantamount to the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. Which is, of course, the intention.

It is obvious that Saudi Arabia is making only rhetorical and deeply dishonest gestures to convey the impression that it is a serious player in the ‘peace process’.

Do read the rest of her post, on the uses to which the Saudis put their money.

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