Pigs on the taxiway, balls in the air

If my metrics are correct it seems people are reading this again, so thanks to all of you. There are periods when there doesn't seem to be much worth commenting on (again, at least) but things are shifting like a landslide at the strategic level. This definitely follows on my theme of the last few posts:

The two high-level US official visits to Riyadh in six days attest to the fierce discord between Saudi King Abdullah and the administration - not just over Iran and its nuclear activity but the entire gamut of US Middle East policy.

When he met the defense secretary, the king took Gates charged that the White House ignored Saudi intelligence evidence passed to the CIA that Tehran and Hizballah were actively fomenting the unrest in Bahrain with a view to igniting parallel disturbances in the eastern Saudi oil regions among the two million Shiites living there. Abdullah complained bluntly that no matter what evidence is put before President Obama, he refuses to budge from his course of engagement with regard to Iran.

The king declared angrily that the lax American attitude toward Islamic Republic's nuclear aspirations places the very existence of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf nations in peril.
Washington had twisted Saudi arms to refrain from challenging the Bushehr nuclear plant when preparations for its activation were completed last year, despite its harmful potential for the region.

For everyone who thought that Obama would herald a new era in US-world relations, well they were right yet very, very wrong about how. As always these Debka stories have caveats, but this makes too much sense to be made up. When you're afraid of offending anyone you piss off everyone, which is exactly what Obama's excuse for a foreign policy is doing.

Samuel Huntington knew this but Obama and his "progressive" clique in the White House don't: Islam is not a bloc. There are major fault lines, both religious and ethnic all through the umma and the biggest and most dangerous one runs right through the Persian Gulf. In any even. the job of the President of the United States of America is to safeguard American interests. A nuclear armed Iran is only in the interests of Iran and very much contrary to pretty much everyone else's. Without nukes Iran can't do any more damage to the US and allies than it already does, so preventing their acquisition should be Job One for the US or it's various Gulf allies.

The time to hit Bushehr seemed to have passed some time ago, but I argue that now is a better time than ever and here are some of the reasons why:

1. Iranian people are rebelling, and destabilizing the Mullahs is the only way to help them;


2. Syria is off-balance and won't be able to back Iran up in any meaningful way. The IDF could easily cripple their already iffy armed forces if need be;


3. I'm sure you could talk the Saudis into paying for the operations required to do the job as long as they cripple Iran's nuke program and armed forces, and


4. It would be a good way of sticking a small stick in the spokes of China.

The last point is in the widest angle of geopolitics, but the circles overlap all over the place. Relations between the US and China are pretty nearly a zero-sum game and the US has been getting a lot more of the zeroes for years now.

There are a lot of balls in the air right now, but I don't even know for sure who plans on catching them; my money would be on the whole middle east (at least) descending into a muddle of historic proportions. That sets me up to talk some more about Western energy policy so you might see that next.