Saudi Arabia’s propaganda war on Iran has reached a new level of the absurd

 by Timothy Alexander Guzman

The regime in Riyadh, with complete dependence on the U.S., is acting in a senseless manner against the Islamic Republic, oblivious of its own rapidly declining conditions that may well bring the curtain down on the ruling clan.

Stay with us for an article in this regard by Timothy Alexander Guzman for ‘Global Research’, titled: “Saudi Arabia’s Propaganda War on Iran Has Reached a New Level of the Absurd”.

Saudi Arabia’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Adel al-Jubeir has recently called out Iran for its alleged “support of terrorist groups, its ballistic missile program and its destabilizing effect” in West Asia even though Iran has not attacked a country in more than 200 years.

The Saudi Gazette, an English-language online daily newspaper published in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia which likes to call itself “The Tone of Truth and Moderation” reported on October 21 ‘Iranians are on a rampage, says al-Jubeir’.

It was referring to a Q&A event that took place at the Chatham House, a think tank based in London with al-Jubeir, who claimed that “Iran’s hand is in almost all countries in the region… Iranians are on a rampage and have been on a rampage since 1979″ and that there is an ‘Iran Problem’ and unless we deal with those problems, “we will always have an Iran problem as they keep on meddling in the internal affairs of other countries.”

Nothing could be far from the truth.

Al-Jubeir alleged that Iran poses problems when it comes to the internal affairs of other countries. So is he talking about Syria who its President, Bashar al-Assad has invited not only Iran but also Russia to help fight the Daesh terrorists – ironically funded by Saudi Arabia?

Let’s go back to 2011, during the start of the Syrian conflict when there were U.S. backed so-called moderate rebels and members of Daesh and other terrorist groups that came from Iraq, Libya and elsewhere who infiltrated the demonstrations.

Professor Tim Anderson, a Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Sydney and an author of several books including ‘The Dirty War on Syria: Washington, Regime Change and Resistance’ and ‘Daraa 2011: Syria’s Insurrection in Disguise’ described how the Syrian conflict actually began.

He wrote: A double story began on the Syrian conflict, at the very beginning of the armed violence in 2011, in the southern border town of Daraa. The first story comes from independent witnesses in Syria, such as the late Father Frans Van der Lugt in Homs. They say that armed men infiltrated the early political reform demonstrations to shoot at both police and civilians. This violence came from sectarian elements. The second comes from the so-called moderate rebels and their western backers, including the Washington-based Human Rights Watch.

Iraq, Libya and Syria did not want to be controlled by the U.S. and its allies in the West Asia-North Africa region, including Israel and Saudi Arabia, so they were targeted for regime change, now they are destabilized and the results are never-ending conflicts, increased poverty and even human trafficking in regards to Libya, so the revolution against the Syrian government was anything but organic.

Investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh published ‘The Red Line and the Rat Line’ in the London Review of Books in April 2014 where he interviewed an anonymous former pentagon official who claimed that the U.S. diplomatic post located in Benghazi, Libya existed for the purpose of sending weapons through a secret pipeline to the Syrian rebels who were fighting Syrian government forces. Hersh elaborated on the Obama administration’s role in sending weapons from Libya through Turkey and finally into the hands of the terrorists or the moderate rebels within Syria’s borders.

He wrote: “The full extent of US co-operation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in assisting the rebel opposition in Syria has yet to come to light. The Obama administration has never publicly admitted to its role in creating what the CIA calls a ‘rat line’, a back channel highway into Syria. The rat line, authorised in early 2012, was used to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition. Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida.

“That’s just one side of the story. The majority of fighters that made their way into Syria were trained and armed in Jordan by the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies under ‘Operation Timber Sycamore’ that began in 2011 and supposedly lasted until 2013 according to the mainstream media.”

The pipeline to Daesh was through Saudi Arabia according to a September 2016 report by The New York Times, titled: ‘U.S. Relies Heavily on Saudi Money to Support Syrian Rebels’, said:

“When President Obama secretly authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to begin arming Syria’s embattled rebels in 2013, the spy agency knew it would have a willing partner to help pay for the covert operation. It was the same partner the C.I.A. has relied on for decades for money and discretion in far-off conflicts: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Since then, the C.I.A. and its Saudi counterpart have maintained an unusual arrangement for the rebel-training mission, which the Americans have code-named Timber Sycamore. Under the deal, current and former administration officials said, the Saudis contribute both weapons and large sums of money, and the C.I.A takes the lead in training the rebels on AK-47 assault rifles and tank-destroying missiles

In June 2016, another report by The New York Times, titled: ‘C.I.A. Arms for Syrian Rebels Supplied Black Market, Officials Say’ suggested that weapons delivered to Jordan that were intended for the Syrian rebels were stolen by Jordanian intelligence operatives and sold on the black market ending up in the hands of Daesh and other terrorists groups. “The theft, involving millions of dollars of weapons, highlights the messy, unplanned consequences of programs to arm and train rebels — the kind of program the C.I.A. and Pentagon have conducted for decades — even after the Obama administration had hoped to keep the training program in Jordan under tight control.” Well, the world knows who supported Daesh and it was not Iran.”

Al-Jubeir also tried to blame Iran for the September 14 attack on Aramco that were carried out by Yemen’s Ansarallah Movement in retaliation for Saudi war crimes.

The question is: How would Iran even remotely benefit from such an attack in the first place?

Saudi Arabia itself has been involved in a relentless bombing campaign in Yemen, one of the poorest countries in West Asia, since March of 2015. Death and misery is the only result for the Yemeni people. This geopolitical tragedy is the making of U.S. foreign policy in West Asia that has backed the Saudi’s destruction of Yemen.

The British daily Guardian’s Mohamed Bazzi wrote an opinion piece on October 19, titled: ‘America is likely complicit in war crimes in Yemen. It’s time to hold the U.S. to account’ on the full-picture of what is actually going on with Saudi Arabia’s barbaric war on Yemen.

He wrote: “The full scope of human suffering in Yemen has been partly obscured because the UN stopped updating civilian deaths in January 2017, when the toll reached 10,000. And while the actual death toll is far higher, many news reports still rely on the outdated UN figures. In June, an independent monitoring group, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, released a report detailing more than 90,000 fatalities since the war began in 2015.

“In April, the United Nations Development Programme issued a report warning that the death toll in Yemen could rise to 233,000 by the end of 2019 – far higher than previous estimates. That projection includes deaths from combat as well as 131,000 indirect deaths due to the lack of food, health crises such as a cholera epidemic, and damage to Yemen’s infrastructure”.

Thus, the fact cannot be denied that the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia are the destabilizing factors in West Asia. Human rights for Saudi Arabia is non-existent in its foreign policy as well as their internal affairs with its own citizens.

Saudi Arabia, in my view is possibly the worst dictatorship on the planet is launching an all-out propaganda war against Iran. For a country like Saudi Arabia to criticize and accuse Iran of being hostile and dangerous is absurd. Saudi Arabia is on a rampage in Yemen and Syria, and don’t forget the rampage it has on its own citizens when it comes to women’s rights, torture, public beheadings and other human rights abuses.