SLL has published a number of its own and guest articles, most recently the previous two posts, on the despicable, duplicitous, repressive, terrorist-fomenting, and corrupt Saudi Arabian regime. The Wall Street Journal editorial board has set a new low, even by its own floor-scraping, limbo-bar standards. From an editorial, “Who Lost the Saudis?”, January 4, 2016, with SLL’s responses bolded:
That headline question may seem premature, but it’s worth asking if only to reduce the odds that the Saudis are lost as we enter the last perilous year of the Obama Presidency. Iran and Russia have an interest in toppling the House of Saud, and they may be calculating whether President would do anything to stop them….
The US gets one thing, and one thing only, from Saudi Arabia, and that’s oil. Is the WSJ trying to say that no other conceivable Saudi regime, including one backed by Iran and Russia, would sell oil to the US, the world’s biggest market? What will they do with it if they don’t, eat it? “Losing” the current regime wouldn’t dent Saudi oil sales, and even if it did, there’s plenty of oil in the glutted, $35-a-barrel market. Any replacement regime would not have to try too hard to be less repressive, despicable, duplicitous, and corrupt than the current one.
…Iran already has ample reason to want to topple the Saudis, who are its main antagonist in the Shiite vs. Sunni conflict that has swept the region amid America’s retreat. The two are fighting a proxy war in Yemen, after as Saudi-led coalition intervened to stop a takeover by Iran’s Houthi Allies.The Saudis are also the leading supporter of the non-Islamic State Sunnis who are fighting Syria’s ally Bashar Assad. Russia and Iran are allied with Assad.
So it’s America’s retreat, not its presence in the Middle East, that’s fanned the Shiite vs. Sunni conflict? Aiding Sunni Saddam Hussein in his war against Shiite Iran didn’t fan sectarian conflict? Deposing Hussein and installing a Shiite puppet government that “paid back” the Sunnis with persecution and discrimination didn’t fan sectarian conflict? Aiding Sunni insurgents in Syria, including al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, in their war on Alawite Shiite Bashar Assad’s duly elected government didn’t fan sectarian conflict? Turning a blind eye not just to Saudi, but Turkey’s, support for al Qaeda and the Islamic State didn’t fan sectarian conflict? (To imply that the Saudis are only supporting non-Islamic State Sunnis is ludicrous, and may be the most deviously contrafactual assertion in an editorial that is full of them.)
…The Saudis intervened in Bahrain in 2011 without telling the U.S….
The Saudis intervened in Bahrain to support a minority Sunni government that ruthlessly suppressed an uprising by the majority Shiites, the kind of uprising the US supported in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine when it wanted those regimes changed.
…The Saudis treat domestic dissenters harshly, but the Shiite cleric Nemer was no human-rights activist. Joseph Braude of the Foreign Policy Research Institute says that in the 1980s and 1990s Nemer was a leader in Hezbollah al-Hejaz, an armed group in Saudia Arabia’s eastern province….
The Journal’s editors’ argument doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Nemer wasn’t convincted of his alleged activities in the 1980s and 1990s, he was convicted and then executed because he criticized the government, which doesn’t exactly comport with the US’s Constitutional guarantees of civil liberties. For just how harshly Saudi Arabia treated the dissenters it executed New Year’s Day, see “Read the Powerful Saudi Arabia Article Censored by Al-Jazeera.” The Foreign Policy Research Institute is a neoconservative think tank, which the Journal fails to mention.
…The Saudis are often difficult allies…
No argument there.
…especially the support by rich Wahhabi Shieks for radical Islamist mosques and schools around the world….
And radical terrorism, like 9/11 and the Islamic State.
…But in a Middle East wracked by civil wars, political upheaval and Iranian imperialism, the Saudis are the best friend we have in the Arabian peninsula….
Why is it that when a myriad of nations are “interested” in the outcome in Syria, including the Saudis and the US, it is only the Iranians and Russians who are the “imperialists”? And who is more the imperialists: the nations on the side of the legimately elected leader or the nations trying to depose him? As for our “best” friends in the Arabian peninsula, the only competition is the Sunni Gulf states, who are basically miniature Saudi Arabias. The term “friend” is a weird euphemism for a country that has been playing the US like a fiddle for decades. (See SLL’s two-part piece, “With Friends Like These…” and “Who Needs Enemies?”.) This WSJ editorial is not even good enough for lining cat boxes; cats are more fastidious than that.
