Saudi Shura Council Chairman Muhammad ibn Jubair has called on Muslims to concentrate their efforts to overcome the crisis they are facing since the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States and the subsequent war in Afghanistan. He spoke a meeting with visiting Iranian Parliament Speaker Mehdi Karubi. Karubi said he agreed that "Muslims were undergoing a very difficult and sensitive period since there is a plot against Islam and Muslim peoples... Innocent people are being killed in Palestine and other innocent people were killed during the anti-terrorism campaign launched after the attacks in New York and Washington." Karubi has also voiced Tehran’s opposition to expanding the US-led war on terror to include Iraq. "We are against any (eventual) American campaign against the Iraqi people. Muslim countries must use all their capabilities to prevent such a campaign from targeting Iraq," he said. "The duty of all Muslim countries is to stand against excuses by the US administration" to justify expanding the anti-terror campaign."
Looks like the new anti-American axis is starting to firm up: two repressive regimes who can't turn their backs on their people, and which have a lot to lose once we start getting close to the real "root causes" of the conflict. Iran now has an Afghan rock on its eastern border, and it doesn't like the thought of a pro-American Iraqi hard place to its west. The ayatollahs have seen what's happening to rule by mullah, and they don't like that even a little bit. The Saudis have left enough tracks in financing their anti-western networks to know we'll eventually trace it back to them. The current crop of princelings and their puppet clerics could find themselves living someplace like Yemen while Hashemites - or Turks - roll in their oil money. |