The New Cold War

I found a fascinating article from the Wall Street Journal online (you can read it HERE).

It would seem that Saudi Arabia is engaged in a real, persistent, and dangerous Cold War style confrontation with Iran. A real spy versus spy, proxy phasers engaged sort of dust up, with huge implications.

Apparently Israel was not the only one blindsided by the PoTUS' rapid movement towards supporting the ouster of Mubarak. But let me back up a moment ...

Saudi Arabia is a Sunni Muslim kingdom of ethnic Arabs, Iran a Shiite Islamic "republic" populated by ethnic Persians. Shiites first broke with Sunnis over the line of succession after the death of the Prophet Mohammed in the year 632. Sunnis have regarded them as a heretical sect ever since. Arabs and Persians have vied for the land and resources of the Middle East for almost as long.

Fast forward to 2011 and the two sides have assembled loosely allied camps. Iran holds in its sway Syria and the militant Arab groups Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. In the Saudi sphere are the Sunni Muslim-led Gulf monarchies, Egypt, Morocco and the other main Palestinian faction, Fatah. Radical Shiite clerics in Iran have been stirring sentiments in each of the Muslim nations awash in revolution, in particular those aligned with the House of Saud. Yemen, Oman, the UAE and Bahrain have all experienced recent upheavals. If one is to examine a map (and you can do so along with noted points of Iranian contributions to insurrection here), you'll see that each of these either border or are in close proximity to Saudi Arabia. This is on top of the toppling of Egypt, a nation which was seen as the chief military bulwark against a nuclear hungry Iran. For their part Saudi Arabia has contributed to the recent dissenters in Syria, Damascus being practically a suburb of Tehran.

I urge you to read the article, it's quite detailed.

What concerns me (besides the obvious energy implications) is that in the middle of all this sits over 100,000 US troops in Iraq. And with Obama's new "duty to protect" doctrine (which the UN Secretary General picked up on and ordered heli gun ships to engage in Ivory Coast in order to oust a president refusing to concede his losing election - since when does the UN shoot at people?, that's new) we could see our forces in the middle of a regional war in which there are no good guys, only degrees of bad.

Not to mention, $4 a gallon could look like a golden age if this war were to go from cold, to hot.