The Saudi Regime Is Losing... It Is Committing Suicide!

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Anyone following Saudi foreign policy might sense that the Saudis are afflicted with hysteria: they are losing their balance on both the regional and international stages, and turning states, peoples, and nations against them. They appear to be losing their senses and plunging into ill-considered adventures that end in sadistic acts serving no purpose beyond inflicting harm on others, destroying their structures, tearing apart their bonds, and scattering their unity.

They have besieged themselves with a nightmare called Iran; they have panicked, their nerves have collapsed, the fires of rancor and vengeance have blazed in their heads, and they have trembled with fear to the point of rivaling the Zionists in embracing terrorism and terrorists around the world. They are neither willing to ease its intensity nor capable of confronting it, and they behave like someone whom the hardships of life have overwhelmed until he chooses suicide.

With American incitement and encouragement, the Saudis ignited a ferocious war between Iraq and Iran under the pretext of protecting what was called the “eastern gateway” of the Arab homeland. The war inflicted immense devastation on both countries, reaped the lives of hundreds of thousands of their young men, and drained Arab financial resources, especially those of the Gulf states that financed the war on Iraq’s behalf. The war ended in the defeat of all its parties except the Americans and the Zionists.

America — together with the Zionists — aimed to kill the Iranian revolution in its cradle and to ward off the danger that its success might have entailed. And so Iran lost, because it had been looking toward a better tomorrow and toward improving the living conditions of the Iranian people, and pressing ahead on the path of development; the Arabs helped rein in its aspirations and forced it to spend its money on a war that brought nothing but harm.

Iraq likewise lost, because Iran remained steadfast and its political system did not collapse, while the Arab countries — foremost among them Saudi Arabia — lost because their financial treasuries were exhausted. America and the Zionists, meanwhile, reveled in the flood of Arab and Iranian blood and in the draining of their oil wealth.

The Saudis went on stoking Sunni-Shia sectarian strife as though they were the guardians of the Sunnis, even as they themselves had strayed far from God Almighty and had embraced a terrorist ideology and terrorist groups that were, and remain, among the worst offenders against the reputation of the Islamic religion.

Naturally, the Saudis accuse Iran of being the one stirring religious and sectarian strife in the region, but I have not found the Saudi claim to be honest — even though I am the author of the first book written anywhere in the world about the Iranian revolution, and I have tracked the reactions of states toward it. I have consistently found that the Arabs were hostile to the Iranian revolution from the very beginning, and that they took to using Sunni-Shia strife to mobilize Arab public opinion against Iran.

Iran was Shia before the Iranian revolution took place, and the Saudis and the Arabs bore it no hostility then, because its ruler at the time was one of the instruments of American policy in the Gulf and the Arab region. There were Iranians who used the rhetoric of sectarian strife, but they did not represent the Iranian state; the Arabs, by contrast, used the rhetoric of sectarian strife officially, as an expression of the orientation of Arab rulers themselves.

Some Arabs justified their hostility to Iran on the assumption that Iran was working to dominate the Arab homeland and steer it according to its own whims. This is a justification that lacks both reason and logic. America has dominated most Arab countries since 1945, and we have not heard the leaders of these American-ruled Arab countries defending Arab independence. It is clear that the issue has nothing to do with Arab independence and sovereignty, but rather with who gets to trample on Arab necks and control them.

The Saudis — together with a number of other Arab regimes — are fighting an Iran that exists largely within the realm of suspicion, yet they make no mention of the Western domination that the bitter Arab reality itself expresses. Arabs claim that Iranians now control four Arab capitals (Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, and Sanaa), a claim that requires a great deal of evidence and proof, not agitation and demagogic rhetoric.

If Tehran offered Beirut free weapons, and Beirut refused, or never announced accepting the offer, then how does Iran control Lebanon? And if Sanaa has been under Saudi attack for a long time, and it has never been proven that Iran supplied it with weapons, then where is the Iranian control? As for Iraq, it is preparing to liberate Mosul, and we do not see Iranian forces intervening there — we see Turkish forces instead.

Damascus, however, is another story. Saudi Arabia — together with most of the Gulf states — intervened in the internal Syrian conflict, inflamed sentiments, and fanned the flames further, pumping in enormous quantities of money and weapons to keep the fighting going and to inflict suffering on the Syrian Arab people. I do not believe Saudi Arabia ever imagined, even for a moment, that it would achieve victory in Syria — but its alternative to Bashar al-Assad’s survival was the burning of Syria and the displacement of its people.

Saudi Arabia — whose political system belongs to the dark ages of pre-Islamic ignorance — was not working to establish democracy in Syria; had it been, it would have begun with itself. The Saudi regime does not know the meaning of democracy and has no wish to learn it, and the Americans who dominate Saudi life are not working to establish democracy in Arab societies either. Their argument about defending the freedom of the Syrian people is not credible — it is nothing more than political propaganda.

Does Saudi Arabia truly care about the freedom of the Syrian people while showing no concern for the freedom of the Arab people on the Arabian Peninsula itself? And what of the freedoms of Arab peoples in the other Arab fiefdoms? Will Saudi Arabia ignite other wars in defense of Arab freedom? Will it direct its military capabilities toward Palestine to liberate the Palestinian people?

Saudi Arabia continually directs its blame at Bashar al-Assad’s regime, treating it as the party primarily responsible for the destruction of Syria and the loss of life there — but does this constitute justification for continuing to pump money, weapons, and fighters to opposition groups, and for fanning the flames of a war Saudi Arabia will never win?

Libya, too, is not spared the crimes of the House of Saud: they incited Western states against Muammar Gaddafi, summoned foreign forces to war, and used the Arab League to give the invaders a legal pretext for violating Arab territory. Saudi Arabia and other Arab states continue to pump money into Libya to sustain its destruction and ruin.

In Yemen, Saudi Arabia wreaks corruption, spreading destruction, killing, and bloodshed — among the ugliest instances being the recent crime committed by American-Saudi aircraft against a funeral hall. The Yemeni people are extremely poor and have always been searching for solid ground on which to stand, and Saudi Arabia found nothing easier than to open a war against a weak Arab country lacking in resources, backers, and supporters.

It is testing its weapons — on which it has spent lavish billions purchasing from Westerners, chiefly from the United States — on this defenseless people, while the world takes refuge in a dreadful silence, and the Arab League does not lift a finger, being, for the most part, among the conspirators itself.

Saudi Arabia also conspired to lower oil prices out of spite toward Iran and Russia. It wanted to impoverish these two states because they do not bow to America, but in the end it impoverished itself and the other oil-producing states allied with it. This benefited individual consumers who own cars and vehicles, but it inflicted major harm on many peoples whose governments rely on oil and gas exports.

Saudi Arabia also sometimes ventures into speculative adventures on world stock markets, losing a large portion of its wealth in the process; and instead of investing this wealth in Arab and African countries, it hands it over to those who buy its oil — returning its money to Western states through stock markets and arms purchases. Had Saudi Arabia used this money to develop the technical base of Arab countries, the Arabs could have developed their economic and military capacities and become independent of Western weaponry.

Saudi Arabia commits crimes against the Arabs, and against the peoples of the Arabian Peninsula in particular, and it continually breeds new enemies for itself. It is hostile to Arabs and Muslims alike, and cares about nothing but the satisfaction of America and Israel. Whoever is hostile to people is hostile to God, and whoever is hostile to God returns laden with His wrath and becomes a prisoner of unending failure. Saudi Arabia may imagine it has friends — outwardly, yes — but these are not loyal to the House of Saud; they are slaves of money, in search of what serves their own pockets and appetites.

The Saudis are committing suicide, and they do not appear to care. They may imagine they will win, and that they will subdue their critics and their enemies — but this is an illusion. The Saudis are losing on every front: they lost in Afghanistan, they are losing in Iraq and Syria, they were defeated by Hezbollah in 2006, and by Hamas in 2008/2009 and 2012.

They are also losing in Yemen, just as they lost the battle over the Iranian nuclear program, and failed to ignite sectarian strife in Lebanon and Iraq — and God Almighty’s grace will never be the lot of aggressors. Hysteria has afflicted the House of Saud since 1979; they devoted all their efforts to toppling the Iranian regime, imagining that the system in Iran was spontaneous, unruly, and devoid of capability and will. Perhaps they measured Iran according to their own political yardstick — and so they missed the mark entirely.

Source: Originally published in Al Jazeera on 2018-04-09. Translated from the original Arabic, “النظام السعودي يخسر.. إنه ينتحر!”.