Saudi bid to Iran, admission of defeat

Saturday, 17 May 2014

Saudi bid to Iran, admission of defeat

By Finian Cunningham

Wed May 14, 2014 7:39PM GMT

It sounds as if the House of Saud is finally admitting to defeat in its regional proxy terror wars.

This week the Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al Faisal bin Abdulaziz made an apparently surprise announcement indicating that the oil-rich Arab kingdom wanted to improve relations with Iran.

Western media reports suggested that the Saudi rulers are sending a friendly overture to Iran. 'Saudi Arabia moves to ease regional tensions with Iran,' read a headline in the London-based Financial Times.

For decades, the Wahhabi House of Saud, with its extreme Takfiri religious beliefs and its repressive monarchial system, has viewed Shia Iran as its archenemy, ever since the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

Saudi Arabia, for example, bankrolled the US-backed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to launch a gratuitous war against Iran between 1980-1988, with the objective of destroying the Iranian Revolution. That war resulted in more than one million total deaths.

The Saudi rulers are always accusing Iran of fomenting secret plots to destabilize the autocratic kingdom or its Persian Gulf Arab allies. They claim with absolutely no proof that an Iranian hand is stirring unrest in Bahrain, Yemen and in the oil-rich Eastern Provinces of the kingdom itself.

Now, it seems, a new era of conciliation is suddenly upon us, with the Saudi foreign minister this week sending an invitation to his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif, saying that he is welcome "any time he chooses" to visit the capital, Riyadh.

"Iran is a neighbor, we have relations with them, and we will negotiate with them," Al Faisal told reporters.

This is a marked shift in Saudi attitude. At the end of last year, following the landmark interim nuclear agreement between Iran and the P5+1 group of six world powers, the Iranian foreign minister's proposal to visit Saudi Arabia as part of a Persian Gulf tour of neighboring states was reportedly snubbed then by the House of Saud.

The Saudi rulers were fuming at the success for Iranian diplomacy and the prospect of a breakthrough in the nuclear deadlock, which would normalize Iran's international relations and greatly enhance the country's regional prowess.

So, what has changed? It seems most likely that the failure of the Saudi-backed covert war of terror in Syria has prompted this sharp reassessment of attitude in Riyadh.

This week sees the beginning of the end of the Western and Saudi-backed regime change operation in Syria. That foreign-backed covert terror war has been running for more than three years with an estimated death toll of 150,000. The Saudi rulers have spent billions of dollars funding Takfiri extremist groups in a bid to topple the government of Bashar Assad, a close ally of Iran.

But this week, the main base of the militants - Homs Old City in Central Syria - was finally retaken by government forces, and thousands of residents were able to return to reclaim their homes and other property. There were bittersweet scenes as droves of civilians returned to war-strewn homes.

Homs, which was cloyingly mislabeled in the Western misinformation news media as the "cradle" of the so-called revolution, is now the graveyard for the foreign-sponsored covert terror war.

With this crucial logistical loss of Homs to the mercenary groups, the Syrian Arab Army is now gaining further momentum to retake other last remaining areas held by the foreign-backed militants around the northern city of Aleppo and in Idlib Province.

Moreover, Syrian citizens are rallying in massive numbers to support incumbent President Assad, ahead of the country's elections on June 3. Assad is expected to win another third term in office.

There is thus an unequivocal sense that Syria is slowly but surely emerging from the foreign-backed nightmare that the country was plunged into back in March 2011.

The scenes of victorious recovery for the Syrian nation dispel the Western propaganda myths of a "democratic uprising". The retaking of Homs, under a deal brokered by Russia and Iran last week, also spells the abject failure of the Saudi plot to destroy Syria, along with their other Western, Turk and Israeli terror sponsors.

That's why the Saudi minister sounded this week like he was trying to negotiate the terms of surrender with Iran, without actually uttering the word "surrender" of course.

"We will negotiate with them [Iran]," said Al Faisal, as if the mere act of diplomatic talking was a major concession to the enemy.

"We will talk with them in the hope that if there are any differences, they will be settled to the satisfaction of both countries," added the senior House of Saud figure.

In other words, the Saudi rulers are not approaching Iran out of any genuine conciliatory motive. They are desperately trying to limit the damage stemming from their proxy terror wars that they have fueled in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon. And they want Iran to somehow help them smooth this process of damage limitation.

"Our hope is that Iran becomes a part of the effort to make the region as safe as possible," Al Faisal said.

The audacity of this statement is the implication that Iran is the country that has instigated violence and conflict, when it is the Saudis who have unleashed murderous mayhem across the region targeting Shia, Sunni, Alawites, Armenians, Christians and any other people who have courageously stood in the way of Takiri totalitarianism. And now the Saudis want Iran to "make the region as safe as possible".

The House of Saud needs to realize this: those who are defeated are in no position to dictate terms. And especially when the defeated ones are guilty of vast crimes against humanity.

FC/MHB

Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Originally from Belfast, Ireland, he is now located in East Africa as a freelance journalist, where he is writing a book on Bahrain and the Arab Spring, based on eyewitness experience working in the Persian Gulf as an editor of a business magazine and subsequently as a freelance news correspondent. The author was deported from Bahrain in June 2011 because of his critical journalism in which he highlighted systematic human rights violations by regime forces. He is now a columnist on international politics for Press TV and the Strategic Culture Foundation.More articles by Finian Cunningham