How Obama can push the Saudis to talk to Iran
As US President Barack Obama is due to visit Saudi Arabia, the UN Security Council should consider acting on its mandate to jump-start dialogue between regional actors on an inclusive security architecture.
Following the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action last year, the United States has been attempting to assure its Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) allies that this will not open the way to Iranian-US rapprochement. "My view has never been that we should throw our traditional allies overboard in favor of Iran,” President Barack Obama has publicly declared. In this vein, Obama is scheduled to soon arrive in Saudi Arabia, which is set to host a GCC summit, gathering the organization’s other member states, namely Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
As the fight against terror remains the highest priority for the world, the United States and the GCC continue to blame Iran for terrorism. However, the reality is that Iran is actively fighting the very terrorist groups that the UN Security Council has defined as constituting an “unprecedented” threat to international peace — namely the so-called Islamic State and al-Qaeda. The United States and NATO know very well the source of the ideology and funding of these groups. Obama himself recently told The Atlantic, “In the 1990s, the Saudis heavily funded Wahhabist madrassas, seminaries that teach the fundamentalist version of Islam favored by the Saudi ruling family.”
Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton also said at the Brookings Institution last September, “Much of the extremism in the world today is the direct result of policies and funding undertaken by the Saudi government and individuals. We would be foolish not to recognize that.”
Vice President Joe Biden, meanwhile, has accused US regional allies of supporting extremists in Syria in their eagerness to oust the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. In light of this, the sustained knee-jerk support of the United States for some of its regional allies is bewildering. As Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has stated, “Certain powers, the United States in particular, are neither sincere nor serious in the campaign against terrorism.”
