KSA torching Middle East to kill diplomacy: Analyst

An analyst says Saudi Arabia’s autocratic monarchy would not hesitate to set the entire Middle East afire in a bid to protect its interests, Press TV reports.

In a Thursday column for the Press TV website, Finian Cunningham referred to the recent killing of three members of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), asking, “Is this Saudi Arabia delivering on its veiled threat to sabotage recent Western diplomacy and to torch the Middle East?”

The guards were killed along Iran’s eastern border on Wednesday just hours after a Saudi diplomat warned its Western patrons that it would “act alone” in pursuing its regional interests.

In a commentary in The New York Times on Tuesday, Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to Britain Prince Mohammed bin Nawaf bin Abdulaziz al Saud criticized the West for its policies vis-à-vis Syria and Iran.

Cunningham said the group behind the death of Iranian military staff shares “the same extremist religious beliefs as the Takfiri militants that Saudi Arabia is bankrolling and arming in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen.”

“It is therefore reasonable to conjecture that the latest terror attacks to have hit Iran are being sponsored by Saudi Arabia. The intelligence, logistics and extremist ideology – in particular the venomous hatred towards Shia Islam – are consistent with Saudi control. An added factor is motivation,” he wrote.

The analyst stated that the Saudis are indeed “going it alone” to “drive the region over a precipice” in a desperate attempt to survive.

Highlighting, however, that both US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry earlier this month spoke of “tactical change” not “strategic change,” Cunningham argued that the Saudis and their Israeli allies have misunderstood “the perception of a fundamental change in Western policy.”

“The trouble with the Saudis (and Israelis) is that they are stuck in a single-groove mentality of aggression, unable to ‘appreciate’ the more sophisticated arts of political machination,” said Cunningham.

He added that the West is set to “exercise its geopolitical objectives towards Syria and Iran through different means, that is, politically not militarily.”