By Eric Zuesse

16 December, 2015
Countercurrents.org

An official announcement from the world's leading, and most fundamentalistic, Sunni Islamic nation, Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday December 15th, has introduced a Sunni-Islamic counterpart to NATO, and it includes one NATO member, Turkey, which is already at war against NATO's enemy Russia, and against Russia's ally the non-sectarian, secular Shiite, Bashar al-Assad, who runs Syria. The Sauds' “Joint Statement on Formation of Islamic Military Alliance” has been signed by 34 Sunni-led nations, with “more than ten other Islamic countries” that “have expressed their support for this … alliance and will take the necessary measures” to join, “including Indonesia” (the highest-population Islamic-majority nation). All of those “Islamic countries” are specifically Sunni-led, not  Shiite-led.

The two top importers of U.S. weapons are #1 Saudi Arabia, and #2 Turkey. Both are Sunni, and no Shiite nation is even on the list. The new, 34-nation-plus military alliance could cause U.S. military producers to soar. And the figures shown there for Saudi Arabia grossly understate the reality. For example, on 13 September 2010, Britain's Telegraph  bannered “US secures record $60 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia,” and other lesser arms bonanzas to the U.S. from the Sauds came in the years after, so that a figure of only “$1,199,000,000” for the year 2014 (given in the first of those two links) is no fair indication of the reality, which is that the Saud family dwarfs any other buyer of U.S. armaments. And, U.S. ‘news' media refuse to allow their reporters to cover the ugly reality of how those weapons are being used — and they fire any who publicly object. 

However, ISIS claims that the Saud family are impostors, who must be replaced by the leaders of ISIS, who won't ‘cooperate' with ‘the infidels.' And, so, the Sauds now are arming not only against Shiite-led nations, and against those nations' major ally Russia, but also against groups that, even inside the Sauds' own country, are more popular than the Sauds themselves are (which probably isn't very popular, since the Sauds refuse to allow so important a matter to be polled — any honest poll of it would expose to Western publics the total fraudulence of the aristocracies' rationalizations for their wars to replace the Syrian government and for the rest of the West's geopolitics).

The alleged purpose of this newly formed military alliance is “to fight terrorism” (something that all nations claim to be doing), an ambiguous phrase (something that aristocrats specialize in). It might include even the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh and the anti-Israeli attacks by the Shiite Hezbollah group in Lebanon, but this “terrorism” might (far more feasibly) instead refer only to the “terrorism” practiced by Sunni groups, such as ISIS and Al Qaeda — the groups that, like Saudi Arabia itself, are famous specifically for beheading  people they don't approve. (Shiite nations, even the most fundamentalistic one, Iran, prefer other methods of execution, if they use any at all — typically, such as in Iran, hanging.)

Saudi Arabia was founded in 1744 by an oath between Saud and Wahhab to exterminate Shiites and then take over the world. The Saudi royal family were the main funders of Al Qaeda: that group's bookkeeper and bagman who personally collected in cash each one of the many million-dollar-plus donations to Al Qaeda, said that, “Without the money of the — of the Saudi you will have nothing.” He listed almost all of the top Sauds as people from whom he had been collecting. There also is evidence suggesting that the Saud family's Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud (who was on that list), a longtime buddy of both President Bushes, might have communicated to George W. Bush in private, well prior to 11 September 2001, that Al Qaeda was planning and soon would perpetrate a massive attack in the United States, and that Bush shouldn't let the CIA chief or his anti-terrorism specialists into his presence to provide him the details privately and, because “We don't want the clock to start ticking.” The now-standard cover-story, that the U.S. couldn't have been protected from that attack, was already planned, even as the attack itself was being organized. Furthermore, it's widely suspected that the missing 28 pages from the Senate's investigation into the pre-9/11 intelligence, addresses this “highly sensitive” (meaning: the public isn't supposed to know it) matter. All that's been publicly released is that, “It's about the Bush Administration and its relationship with the Saudis.” The Obama Administration is hiding those 28 pages from the public. 

The Sauds privately agreed to an alliance in 1945 with the United States to continue sharing with U.S. oil companies, if the U.S. would protect them from the Saudi public. Thus, the Sauds receive favorable press coverage in the U.S. press, which are owned by members of the same U.S.-and-allied aristocracy that control the U.S. Government (via the press, lobbyists, etc., all of which they hire if not own). Consequently, too, the Sauds' foreign invasions to impose Sunni rulers even in majority-Shiite lands are hidden by the U.S. press. This is a bipartisan hiding: not only mainstream ‘news' media such as CNN and The New York Times and Salon are part of it, but the clearly partisan (i.e., Republican) conservative 'news' media, such as those of Rupert Murdoch (Fox, WSJ, N.Y. Post, etc.) also are. (In fact, when the Saudi Prince who was the second-largest stockholder in Murdoch's News Corp. sold most of his holding of that stock in 2014, Forbes  noted that he “also has a substantial shareholding in Time Warner,” which includes CNN.) 

The Sauds' imperial announcement, which provided no details on what is to be meant by the phrase “to fight terrorism,” stated:

(The dot before “Yemen” is a typographical error in the Saudi announcement, one that the Saudi Press Agency commonly makes — it means nothing at all, except that the Saud family place low priority on editing “typos” out of English translations of their official pronouncements.)

Turkey is the only NATO member in this group. Turkey (after shooting down a Russian plane over Syria) is at war against Russia, because Turkey is trying to defeat the military campaign by Russia to destroy the many fundamentalist Sunni groups, jihadist groups including Al Qaeda and ISIS, that are trying to take over Syria. Turkey's virtual dictator, the fundamentalist Sunni Recep Tayyip Erdogan, wants to sell Syria's oil on global markets — he's already doing it illegally, and wants to be doing it legally, such as by installing (with U.S. and Saudi help) a fellow-fundamentalist Sunni as Syria's leader.

Tha Saudi announcement says nothing about what relationship (other than already including one NATO member) the new, Saudi-led, military alliance will have with NATO, which is America's alliance against Russia. (It used to be America's anti-communist alliance; but, once communism ended, the U.S. aristocracy kept NATO going, in order to take over Russia itself, such as by surrounding it with NATO nations and ultimately forcing out and replacing the current independent Russian government.) 

Outside NATO, the United States has additional major military bases in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, and longstanding alliances also with Pakistan and Egypt, as well as extensive military cooperation with Jordan, UAE, and Kuwait. 

The U.S. has been trying to conquer Russia ever since the negotiations in 1990 for the end (which occurred in 1991) of the Soviet Union and of its Warsaw Pact (the Soviets' counterpart to NATO). And, like the Saudis, the U.S. is also hostile toward the world's leading, and coincidentally its most fundamentalistically led, Shiite nation: Iran. Moreover, both of these military alliances are also very much against Russia. So: NATO and the newly formed, Saudi-led, Sunni military alliance might ultimately join into one. 

A conference had been expected to meet on December 15th in Riyadh to select which jihadist groups would receive the backing of the Sauds to take over Syria; however, that was cancelled when the Sauds announced that only a single jihadist group that's actually fighting in Syria would be allowed to attend. Most of the jihadist groups still want to overthrow the Sauds for working with ‘infidels.' Consequently that meeting is not being held, after all.

No Shiite nation was mentioned in the Saudi announcement of the new military alliance, and the possibility therefore exists that the reason why the Saud family created this alliance was as part of that family's intense hostility, ever since at least 1744, against Shiites. 

The response of the U.S. regime to the Sauds' war against Shiia has been twofold: to condemn it verbally, while participating in (and even leading it) in the real world, the anti-Shiia operations against Syria and Iran (both of them because they're allied with Russia).