The Awakening Sunni Giant
Saudi Arabia is dead-serious about ending the Assad regime
Last Friday, King Abdullah cut short his summer vacation in Morocco and flew back to Riyadh not only to meet with his national security advisors but to coordinate a new strategy for winning the war in Syria, one that encompasses a unified regional bloc of Sunni-majority powers now ranged against Iran, Hezbollah, and the Assad regime. The Wahhabi kingdom has exhausted its patience with miscarried attempts to resolve the Syria crisis through diplomacy and it will not wait to see the coming battle in Aleppo play out before assuming control of the Syrian rebellion. State-backed regional efforts to bolster moderate Free Syrian Army elements will thus be joined with the fetid call to jihad emanating from clerical quarters in Cairo, Doha, Mecca, and beyond. The mullahs have only themselves to blame. “Nasrallah fucked up,” one well-connected Syrian source told me recently. “He awakened the Sunni giant. The Saudis took Hezbollah’s invasion of Qusayr personally.”
Although long in coming, and evidenced in the recent contretempsbetween Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, this grand realignment has been unmistakably solidified in the last week. A day after the Saudi king returned to Riyadh, Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi severed all diplomatic ties with Damascus and called for a no-fly zone in Syria, leaving no mystery as to reason behind this decision. “Hezbollah must leave Syria – these are serious words,” the Islamist president said. “There is no space or place for Hezbollah in Syria.”
...The Kingdom, other Gulf States allies have money and with the US leadership can be done easily, criminal Assad no money who is going to pay for criminal rampage...Iran money temporarily, who is going to lend him money no matter he is his way out one or another way!
Having thus determined that the Syria crisis was not in the U.S. “national interest,” the administration conveniently forgot about the national interests of its allies, all of whom lament the geopolitical vacuum left by a vanishing American presence and greatly fear the elements now rushing in to fill it. So instead, Washington palavers with Moscow about “Geneva II”, a conference set to resemble the last half hour of Rocky IV, as the war proceeds uninterrupted on the ground. Witness the buildup of Syrian Army soldiers and militants from Hezbollah and the Iranian-sponsored Popular Committees and the National Defense Forces in the Aleppo towns of Nubul and Zahra’a. Between 3,000 and 4,000 Hezbollah fighters, abetted by IRGC agents, are amassed in the province ready to try a repeat of their last victory in Qusayr.
Congratulations are in order. The United States has just earned a court-side seat to exactly the kind of transnational Sunni-Shiite confrontation it wished to avoid. Read more
Via Syrian Days of Rage
