WikiLeaks Cables: Reading Between the Lines
THE GUARDIAN: One message, often buried, comes out loud and clear from the embassy cables: the US should choose its allies more carefully

President Obama with King Abdullah in Riyadh, during an official visit in 2009. The Obama administration has since concluded a $60bn arms deal with Saudi Arabia. The WikiLeaks US embassy cables have revealed that the king has urged the US to attack Iran. Photograph: The Guardian
Among the most arresting lines in the trove of diplomatic cables made public this week was one from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. "Cut off the head of the snake," he advised his American friends. Any herpetologist would agree that this is good advice in dealing with a threatening viper. But who is this snake? King Abdullah was referring to Iran, obliquely arguing for a military attack.

Yet, there was another tantalising detail in the trove of cables that suggests the larger threat comes from inside King Abdullah's own country. "Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like al-Qaida," the New York Times reported in its first article on the leaked documents.

That is a huge, though not unsurprising, revelation. It reflects how complex and sometimes self-defeating America's foreign alliances have become. Saudi Arabia is an intimate ally of the United States, yet Saudi money supports the world's most violently anti-American terror network.

This deeply troubling contradiction has its roots in Saudi history and tradition. The regime's survival is based on a deal with the Wahhabi clerics who dominate religious practice in Saudi Arabia – and whose austere brand of Islam is among the world's most reactionary. Clerics agree to support the regime, ignoring both its alliance with infidel America and the notoriously unIslamic lifestyles of its thousands of princes. In exchange, the regime gives these clerics billions of dollars, much of which they use to run mosques and religious schools across the Islamic world. More than a few of these mosques and schools, often run by Saudi clerics or others they have trained, are incubators of terror, where generations of lost boys learn to chant the Qur'an and hate America.

The deal is, as former CIA director James Woolsey once described it, "for the Wahhabis to be given all of the money in the world they could ever remotely dream of needing or wanting to spread their sect's beliefs, and for them to leave the House of Saud alone." Read on and comment >>> Stephen Kinzer | Wednesday, December 01, 2010

An Unlikely Alliance
THE GUARDIAN: Islamists and the radical left have little in common apart from a hatred of the west and western capitalism

What do the far left and Islamists have in common? Not a lot, you may say, but you would be wrong. Despite being ideologically at the extremes of the political spectrum, they in fact share one worrying trait.

The old rule that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" seems to be shaping the relationship between the hard left and Islamists in Britain today. By having a common foe in western capitalism, which they conveniently blame for all of the world's ills, they have developed a marriage of convenience against the odds.

This alliance can also be seen on the international stage as Hugo Chávez holds hands with Iran's Ahmedinejad while our own Ken Livingstone hugs Yusuf al-Qaradawi. It was also evident at anti-Iraq war rallies where CND, the Socialist Workers Party and Respect shared platforms with the likes of the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) and the British Muslim Initiative which are schismatic offshoots of radical Islamism.

Azzam Tamimi (spokesman for MAB) when asked by BBC Hardtalk's Tim Sebastian if he was prepared to blow himself up in Palestine, replied: "If I can go to Palestine and sacrifice myself I would do it. Why not?"

Now don't get me wrong – I'm all for people of different backgrounds coming together and working in harmony. But it worries me slightly when the only thing that's really binding these divergent factions is not their love for all humanity or their desire to see a totalitarian state, but their common hatred of the west which can be called "westophobia". There, I've used it, the one word that can actually sum up all the various groupings that are ideologically driven to view the west and western capitalism as "the enemy". An Unlikely Alliance: Islamists and the radical left have little in common apart from a hatred of the west and western capitalism >>> Ghaffar Hussain | September 30, 2008

Cross-posted at The Shrewd Economist >>>

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