Dear Bob
You really need to cut down on the Koolaid, Mr. Secretary, it interferes with leading the Department of Defense.
You are a bit out of touch when you say things like:Gulf states should confront Iran. Bob, read The Origins of the Sunni/Shia split in Islam where you will learn that they have been confronting the Shi’ia of Iran for more than a millennium, and nothing is apt to change that.
About this terrorism business – Bob, most of the people you are talking to have supported Islamic terrorists, including al Qaeda, and most continue to do so. Your own reporting shows that the Saudis are the largest supporters of “al Qaeda in Iraq.” The Gulf states had been using Saddam Hussein to keep Iran under control but the Hedgemony kind of eliminated that strategy.
Bob, these people know that the claims about the Iranians fueling insurgency in Iraq are American propaganda. Iran has ties with the current Iraqi government, they have no reason to want it overthrown, or for Iraq to be in turmoil. The people you are talking to aren’t the uninformed farmers and villagers of Sunni Iraq who can be frightened by stories of Iranians spread by American agitprop. The US intel community hasn’t provided any high confidence information about Iranian involvement in Iraq, and you should be aware of that.
2 comments
The last time they “confronted” Iran, they paid Iraq to invade Iran. It didn’t quite work. Given that none of them have a military anywhere near what Iraq’s was when Iraq invaded Iran, expecting them to do anything other than quietly pay off the United States to protect them from Iran is laughable.
The UAE was created so the British could protect the individual emirates from the Ottoman Empire. Kuwait shipping is US flagged. All of them feel that a competent military is the basis for a coup. Money is all they can add to the defense of anything.