Now this is an ironic ‘Plan B’ (or C):
Here’s an “or else” scenario from Nawaf Obaid, an adviser to the Saudi government, that actually sounds promising — not a term that usually springs to my mind to describe Saudi scenarios. Contemplating what he would call an unwelcome American withdrawal from Iraq, Mr. Obaid writes that the Saudi government just might fill the breach out of “religious responsibility” to Iraq’s Sunni minority. Saudi Arabia, “the de facto leader of the world’s Sunni community,” Mr. Obaid writes, just might decide to support Iraq’s Sunni fighters, just as Iran has been supporting Iraq’s Shi’ite fighters, to avert a possible “full-blown ethnic cleansing.”
Imagine: Sunni Saudi Arabia vs. Shi’ite Iran — and nary an American soldier ordered to pull his PC punches in the crossfire. But there’s more. Mr. Obaid continues: King Abdullah might also “decide to strangle Iranian funding of the [Shi’ite] militias through oil policy. If Saudi Arabia boosted production and cut the price of oil in half, the kingdom could still finance its current spending. But it would be devastating to Iran, which is facing economic difficulties …The result would be to limit Tehran’s ability to continue funneling hundreds of millions each year to Shi’ite militias is Iraq and elsewhere.”
I like. If Saudi Arabia “strangled” Iran’s economy, that would also strangle Iran’s capacity to fund its nuclear blackmail program, not to mention Hezbollah and other murderous proxies. And what was that the Saudi adviser said about cutting the price of crude oil in half?
A Saudi-Iranian, Sunni-Shi’ite rift over Iraq sounds like a win-win situation for the United States, maybe even better than the Sino-Soviet rivalry of the Cold War. This time around, instead of nuclear weapons to build in the interim, we would have something even more liberating to work on — energy independence.
We can bet on it that the large majority of the ‘Muslim world’ will simply ignore the obvious – namely that what’s happening is a clash between Sunni and Shiite Muslims – and will continue to blame America for just about everything, but those who are actually willing to think for themselves might just come to the conclusion that – perhaps – many problems that exist in the ‘Muslim world’ are caused by the Muslims themselves.
The ‘plan’ described in the article I link to is absolutely fascinating: Wahabi Saudi Arabia against Shiite Iran. Two regional ‘superpowers’. Will this divide the Middle-East in two? What will this mean for the region? Saudi Arabia will, most likely, work more together with the US while Iran will look at China (and Russia) more. In other words, there will be two ‘cold wars’: Saudi Arabia – Iran and US – China.
One can wonder about how likely it is that this all will happen, but it does not seem completely impossible, perhaps it is even quite likely.
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