NUKES: IRAN NOW, SAUDI ARABIA TOMORROW?
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/576980/201106301900/Nukes-Iran-Now-Saudi-Tomorrow.htm
Mideast: A key Saudi royal warns NATO that a nuclear-armed Iran means Saudi Arabia must attain weapons of mass destruction too. The United States and/or Israel could have prevented this unfolding disaster.
A nuclear arms race begins among Islamic regimes in the Middle East. Our elected leaders and the hyper-educated, lavishly paid diplomats we send abroad are guilty of many years of inexcusable complacency in regard to the ongoing nuclearization of Islamofascist Iran.
But the man on the street who only occasionally watches the news or reads the newspaper knows it’s as big and as frightening a development as the rise of a fascist dictator. And so does the Saudi royal family.
Prince Turki al-Faisal, who was both Saudi Arabia’s director of intelligence operations and the kingdom’s ambassador to the U.S., warned NATO in June that a nuclear-armed Iran would “compel” his government “to pursue policies which could lead to untold and possibly dramatic consequences.”
For anyone who didn’t catch his drift, Britain’s Guardian newspaper quoted “a senior official in Riyadh who is close to the prince” and who was happy to translate his diplo-speak into straight talk:
“If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, that will be unacceptable to us and we will have to follow suit.”
Courtesy of WikiLeaks, secret memos from Mideast U.S. embassies revealed last fall that Saudi’s King Abdullah “frequently exhorted the U.S. to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear weapons program.” The Saudi ambassador to the U.S. in April 2008 reportedly repeated the king’s plea that America “cut off the head of the snake” in a meeting with Gen. David Petraeus.
And last summer, the London Times reported that Saudi Arabia has conducted tests to stand down its air defenses so that Israeli bombers could fly over on a mission to destroy Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
All the targets in Iran are at the outer range of Israel’s bombers, even with in-flight refueling; using Saudi airspace would significantly reduce travel time, and the prospects of success, for such a mission.
But Israel would also need at least passive support from the Obama administration, which isn’t in the cards. As former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton told Human Events last year, the “administration does not manifestly understand” that “an Israeli attack against the Iranian nuclear program would be … supported by the Arab states in the Persian Gulf region … who don’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons any more than the Israelis do.”
A nuclear Saudi Arabia could jettison its royal family and go radical as fast as Egypt got rid of the U.S.-allied Mubarak regime earlier this year; the Saudi population almost certainly would do so if a one-man, one-vote free election took place today. Do we really want to wait until then to deal with a Mideast nuclear arms race?
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