The Saud family’s position is dependent on two things: their control over the oil fields in the northeast of the country in an area in which a majority of the people are Shi’ites and their claim to be the protectors of the Muslim holy places. Adam Silverman explains how the Iranians are now attacking them on both of those fronts, rhetorically at least.
If this keeps up the Sauds are going to get the impression that the Iranians don’t like them.
The concluding sentences suggesting that an Ayatullah’s complaint about Mecca that is shared by ISIS makes for strange bed fellows seems quite overstated. Iran has supported al-Qaeda in the past (see 9-11 Commission report), but there is virtually no chance that Iran will have any sort of open working relationship.
This is the sentence: “As has been the case since the US initiated Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) by invading Iraq in 2003, the ongoing tumult in the Levant often produces very strange bedfellows even if it is only in the war of words.”
Maybe I’m over-reading the “bedfellows” part. But if bin Laden and Obama made a similar charge against George W. Bush, I wouldn’t call them bedfellows. Also, the idea that history in the Middle East began in 2003 is as beautiful as pink unicorns. Also, why the Levant?
Bedfellows is probably the wrong word. “Fellow travelers” might be a better choice.
PD- You can quibble about the term, but I think the idea is that we have found ourselves working with or alongside people that leave some of us a bit uncomfortable.
Steve
@dave, that’s better!?! It could be on the basis that traveling with someone is less intimate than bedding with them, but “fellow traveller” is such a pejorative. They are simply making a common complaint, perhaps seeking the support, or at least restraint, of similar audiences, but maybe not even the same audience.
@steve, I don’t he means the U.S. is in bed with anyone. He’s making the point that both the Sunni jihadists and the Iranian clerics are making the same complaint against the Sauds.
Well, it loses something when translated from the original Russian…