Middle East Becomes Less Stable Due To Obama's Dawdling In Syria And Catastrophic Iran Nuclear Deal.

Saudi Prince Slams Obama on Iran

Wednesday, 18 Dec 2013 12:18 PM

By Fred Fleitz

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The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times ran important columns this week on recent statements by Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal in which he slammed U.S. Mideast policy, especially the recent talks on Iran’s nuclear program.

Prince Turki, a member of the Saudi royal family and brother to Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, has no formal position in the Saudi government but is believed to be an unofficial spokesman for the royal family and King Abdullah.

Prince Turki’s public and blunt criticism of the United States was unusual for a Saudi royal and indicates how serious the growing breach is between the Washington and Riyadh.



The prince gave several reasons for this. He lambasted U.S. Syria policy for failing to stop the violence, saying it bordered on “criminal negligence.” Prince Turki accused the Obama administration of indecision in its Mideast policy and said the U.S. has lost credibility with its allies in the region.

He also criticized President Obama for laying down red lines that “became pink as time grew and eventually ended up completely white.”

The prince’s harshest comments concerned U.S.-Iran policy. Prince Turki said the Saudis and other Gulf states were stunned by secret U.S.-Iran talks held earlier this year that set the stage for an interim agreement on Iran’s nuclear program negotiated at talks in Geneva.

He said that Saudi Arabia felt blindsided by the Geneva agreement and that it did not go far enough to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Turki declared at the World Policy Conference in Monaco on Dec. 15: “What was surprising was that the talks that were going forward were kept from us. How can you build trust when you keep secrets from what are supposed to be your closest allies?”

Prince Turki asked why Saudi Arabia does not have a seat at the table at the Geneva talks which include the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, China, France, Germany and Iran.

This is a fair point. The six party talks on North Korea’s nuclear program included all of North Korea’s neighbors. Given the security concerns posed by Iran to the Saudis and its Gulf state allies, it is hard to understand why the Saudis are not part of the Geneva talks.

It is also perplexing how the United States could back an agreement on the Iranian nuclear program that has sparked such strong criticism from both Saudi Arabia and Israel.

There also has been talk that the Saudis may decide to develop its own nuclear program in response to the Iranian nuclear effort, possibly by buying nuclear weapons from Pakistan.

Last month, London’s Sunday Times reported that Saudi Arabia has agreed with Israel, a former sworn enemy, to allow Israeli jets to overfly Saudi territory to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities and will assist an Israeli attack on Iran with drones and tanker planes.

These developments mark the unravelling of America’s crucial relationship with Saudi Arabia. Seeing no coherent Middle East strategy by the Obama administration, the Saudis are ignoring Washington and charting independent policies that are likely to increase instability in the region and further undermine American influence. They also could lead to an outbreak in hostilities and Saudi support for radical Islamist fighters in Syria.

With the Obama administration’s obsession with getting a deal with Iran on its nuclear program, U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia are likely to continue to deteriorate during  Obama’s presidency. I fear the damage may be so serious that it will take many years for a future U.S. administration to salvage.

Fred Fleitz served for 25 years with the CIA, the State Department, and the House Intelligence Committee staff. He is currently Chief Analyst with LIGNET.com, Newsmax Media’s global intelligence and forecasting service. 

 

© 2013 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

Is Netanyahu Right In Protesting The Geneva (Iran Nuke) Deal? We Believe That He Is The Only One That Is Right!

Netanyahu: Iran Will Not Get Nuclear Weapons

Chris Mitchell - CBN News,  November 25th, 2013

MOSCOW — Round three of the talks in Geneva between Iran and the permanent members of the Security Council, plus Germany, over Iran's nuclear program ended Thursday without a signed agreement. But the dialogue goes on between Iran and the international community.

“A lot of progress was made, but of course differences remain in our plan. Our hope is to narrow some of those differences,” said Michael Mann, spokesman for E.U. Foreign Policy chief Catherine Ashton.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a gathering of local Jewish leaders in Moscow Israel would not obligate itself to a bad deal, promising them Iran would not get nuclear weapons on his watch.

After a two-day visit in Moscow, Netanyahu still faces an uphill diplomatic battle to convince Russia and the rest of the international community not to sign an agreement with Iran.

“I think it's been a tremendously uphill battle,” Jerusalem Post diplomatic reporter Herb Keinon told CBN News. “First of all, you're going up publically against the U.S., your greatest ally, and then you have to push all these other countries who are generally following the U.S. except for Russia and China.”
 
Keinon says Netanyahu's efforts are making a difference.

“Netanyahu standing up on every rooftop and screaming this is a bad agreement I think it does have an impact on those sitting in the room with the Iranians,” he said.

While Iranians negotiated in that Geneva room, their Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei made some revealing statements.

Khamenei called Netanyahu “…the sinister mouth of the unclear rabid dog of the region in the Zionist regime.” He added, ”The Zionist regime is an imposed regime…and this regime will not endure.” 

Netanyahu told CBN News in an off-camera briefing that securing the future of the Jewish state is what moves him.

Keinon says Netanyahu feels called for such a time as this in Jewish history.

“He feels the weight of Jewish history. I think he feels responsibility for Jewish history,” Keinon said.

“You have a regime right now that is threatening to annihilate the State of Israel, and I think he feels very much a historical role of preventing that, come what may,” he continued. “If it means creating some tension with the U.S., then so be it. If it means standing up in the face of world opinion, so be it. If it means taking some bad New York Times editorials, so be it. That's why I'm here, that's my role. That's maybe my fate and that's what I'm going to do.”

Some compare Netanyahu to the Churchill of our time.

Geneva Agreement, Not What You Have Been Told. Of Course, Obama Would Not LIe!!

The Geneva Agreement: The Devil Is Not in the Details But in the Wider Picture

Dore Gold - National Review,  November 24th, 2013

It is easy to reduce any analysis of the Geneva agreement to the number of centrifuges Iran will still have and the levels of enrichment that are permitted. Just last month, Gary Samore, who worked the nonproliferation file during President Obama’s first term, was quoted in the New York Times saying that “ending production of 20-percent-enriched uranium is not sufficient to prevent breakout because Iran can produce nuclear weapons using low-enriched uranium and a large number of centrifuge machines.” Samore’s concern about the leap from low-enriched uranium to weapons-grade is even more justified given that Iran is now deploying fast centrifuges that operate at five times the speed of the centrifuges used by Iran in the past. 

But these important considerations are dwarfed by something far more fundamental. Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons is being made by a country with unquestionable hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East. As negotiators pose to have their pictures taken in Geneva, Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces are on the ground in Syria taking part in President Bashar Assad’s bloodbath against the Syrian people. They are not just training the Syrians, they are directly involved in the mass murder of innocent civilians. Their ambition is to make Syria into an Iranian satellite, placing them as a power in the Eastern Mediterranean. 

The head of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s think tank already characterized Syria this year as “the 35th district of Iran.” In speaking about the national-security strategy of Iran back in 1991, in the Iranian daily, Ressalat, Khamenei declared: “Where do we look in drawing up the National Security Strategy of the Islamic Republic of Iran? Do we look to preserve the integrity of our land, or do we look to its expansion . . . We must definitely look to its expansion.” In short, if Belgium were getting nuclear weapons, few would be concerned. But the Iranian case is entirely different.

The Iranian drive for hegemony is not just about rhetoric. In the last five years, Iranian weapons ships have been cruising in the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, fueling insurgencies in Yemen, the Gaza Strip, and Lebanon, as well. President Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq, who came out of the pro-Iranian al-Dawa movement, which conducted joint operations with Hezbollah in the 1980s, is also the defense minister and interior minister of Iraq. He is placing the powers he has amassed at the service of Iran. No wonder Saudi Arabia, which sees what is going on to its north in Iraq, to its east in Bahrain with a Shiite protest movement, and to its south with the Shiite revolt in Yemen, is so concerned. Thus Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia told Jeffrey Goldberg a few days ago that “the threat is from Persia, not from Israel.”

The big question then is not how Washington will handle the inevitable violations in this agreement, but how it will handle the next moves of Iranian expansionism. For as Iran approaches a nuclear threshold capacity, it is likely to become emboldened. Historically, since the days of President Wilson and Colonel House, when a hegemonic power rose on the European continent, the U.S. put in place a security structure to contest its drive for domination or to defeat it, if necessary. With Iran sensing that it has emerged victorious from this latest Geneva agreement, one can only hope that someone is thinking about contesting its actions against the West and against the allies of the United States. 

— Dore Gold is the president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and the author of the Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran Defies the West.