I hate the wordage of this headline...
- Iraq's ambitious plan could see it clash increasingly with the regime in Saudi Arabia, which has used its influence in OPEC over the last decade to keep oil prices above $100 a barrel. Saudi itself is now under pressure to boost output to maintain market share. The kingdom pumped 9.8m bpd in December up by about 100,000 barrels from the previous month.
Shiite majority states getting more buddy-buddy. I don't think this is particularly breaking news, but it seems as though Shiites and Sunnis are solidifying the gaps between the two groups. Also because there is no doubt Saudis provide significant funding to Sunni groups; I've heard rumors of rich Saudis paying large sums of money for combat videos for their own enjoyment. They do weird things with their wealth.
- “We are all against the Iranian regime because this plan is being implemented on behalf of the Iranian regime, its rulers in Tehran and it agents in Baghdad. We say to Maliki war will reach areas near Baghdad if he doesn’t release Dr. Ahmed al-Alawani.”
Alwani being a big player in Sunni anti-government protests who was arrested. On top of Iranian officials supposedly entering the Iraqi army.
It will be interesting to see how this continues to develop.
So this is interesting for a few reasons, despite being a Telegraph article. For starters, Iraq is essentially a vassal state of the US at this point. Meanwhile, Iran is normalizing towards the US. People forget that prior to Mossadegh and the Shah, Iran was the most Western-friendly nation in South Asia. And while the US has been flying drone recon over Iran (although I'll bet they cut that shit out after the Iranians got one), they haven't been flying drone interdiction. Stephen Kinzer wrote an interesting book called Reset in 2010 that argues, in no uncertain terms, that the United States would benefit most from tempering our relationships with Israel and Saudi Arabia and realigning around Turkey and Iran because they're both recently emergent economies with a largely secular past and a great deal of historical entanglement with the United States. We installed the Shah in Iran primarily to kick the British out and, in doing so, ending their world hegemony. And the Ayatollahs, no matter how crazy they act, are a mere fraction as crazy as the Mullahs. I'm a little hazy on the demographics on the ground, but Persia has always been the land of the Shiites. Iraq is kind of the center ground where the world shifts from Shia to Sunni. This could very well lead to nothing more than Sunni-on-Shia violence.