For years now, conventional wisdom has been that when Iran gains access to nuclear weapons, Israel will be in the gravest danger. With the latest Wikileaks document dump, that conventional wisdom may prove as useful as conventional weapons in a nuclear world.
While Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been threatening to wipe Israel off the map and denying the holocaust, Saudi King Abdullah was aggressively lobbying the United States to strike Iran while exhorting Americans to “cut off the head of the snake” according to leaked documents.
Why would Saudi Arabia want to prevent Iran from attacking Israel? The answer is that it doesn’t. It wants to prevent Iran from attacking Saudi Arabia. The rarely discussed reality is that Iran may just loathe the House of Saud for its historically cozy oil dealings with the west and its treatment of Shiite Muslims more than it hates Israel. In their eyes, Saudi Arabia is committing national apostasy and in Islam, being an apostate is worse than being an infidel or non-believer.
Another piece to the Islamic jigsaw puzzle involves Turkey, which has been aligning with Iran in recent years. The Wikileaks cables show American diplomats’ high level of concern over Turkey’s trend toward Islamist rule and even the neo-Ottoman visions of its Foreign Minister. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan heads the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) which advocates Islamist governance. Turkey is also ground zero for the Ottoman Empire, an Islamic Caliphate that was disbanded in 1924, after World War I.
The Muslim Brotherhood was formed in 1928 and filled the vacuum, pledging to one day re-establish the Ottoman Empire. One year earlier, its members revolted against the Saudi regime for being in bed with western nations; that revolt was put down and the Brotherhood was founded in Egypt one year later.
As for Turkish hatred for the House of Saud, the Ottoman Turks once ruled Saudi Arabia as well but were ousted with the help of Great Britain’s T.E. Lawrence – the inspiration for the film ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ – in WWI. The Turks, like the Clintons, have long memories and have not forgotten.
Conventional wisdom says that these leaked documents are extremely harmful to the United States but if Saudi Arabia is threatened by Iran’s nuclear weapons, so too is their oil supply. Consequently, so are American interests. Had these realities been communicated by mainstream media sources years ago, perhaps it would have provided sufficient political capital in the fight for energy independence in the United States.
In Walid Shoebat’s book, God’s War on Terror – published in 2008 and researched for years prior – he amazingly predicts that Iran will one day attack Saudi Arabia, which would be utterly destroyed in an all-out nuclear assault. He has also been warning of the return of the Turkish Ottoman Empire for several years.
The leaked cables indicate he may be onto something.
Ben Barrack is a talk show host on KTEM 1400 in Texas and maintains a website at www.benbarrack.com