Crescent International
Doha, Tuesday June 6, 2017
Barely two weeks ago, the Arabian rulers were rubbing noses against each other (their way of showing friendship!) on the occasion of their collective surrender to the new imperial warlord, Donald Trump. Now they are at each other’s throats.
Welcome to the theater of the absurd. Led by the Bani Saud, a number of Arabian regimes—such Saudi puppets as Bahrain, UAE, Egypt and the rump state in Libya plus the fugitive ex-president of Yemen Abd Rabou Mansour Hadi—cut off diplomatic relations with Qatar, the tiny but upstart state on the western shores of the Persian Gulf, on June 5.
What was Qatar’s sin? The Saudis accused it of supporting “terrorism”. It is not terrorism per se; after all Saudi Arabia is a terror factory. Almost every terrorist anywhere in the world has some links with the obscurantist Saudis.
Qatar’s real sin is that it has been supporting the Muslim Brotherhood that the Saudis, Egyptians and Emiratis have targeted.
Further, Qatar refused to sign the nonsensical ‘Riyadh Declaration’ that the Saudis put in front of Muslim rulers in Riyadh on May 22 to sign when Donald Trump was visiting. This so-called declaration was in fact an act of war against Islamic Iran.
In typical Saudi style, they said that the heads of State had ‘thoroughly debated’ it before they approved it. No such thing had happened. Many rulers were surprised to learn about the declaration from the media!
To drive home the point, the Saudi Defence Minister Muhammad bin Salman announced that he was expelling Qatar from the Saudi-led coalition against the people of Yemen. Qatar has played a minor role in the war on Yemen but the Saudis are not getting anywhere either, with or without Qatar.
For Qatar, it is not merely the diplomatic isolation but also the fact that it receives more than 80 percent of its food shipments via Saudi Arabia. These have now been blocked.
Iran meanwhile has announced that it is willing to help its neighbor and will send food shipments to the tiny state, home to Al Jazeera.
The spat between Saudi Arabia and Qatar has once again exposed the fickleness of Arabian rulers. The Saudi dominated Gulf Cooperation Council is now split virtually evenly: Saudi Arabia, the UAE and tiny Bahrain are on one side while Qatar, Oman and Kuwait (to a lesser extent) are on the other. The latter grouping is of course no match for the Saudis given their deep pockets but the spat shows how silly these potentates can be.
Their conduct is even worse than children in a school playground.
The Saudis are simply digging their own grave, and deeper.
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