Sunnies plus Israel: the ulimate Persian Gambit

Sunni governments - like the Egyptians, the Saudis and the Jordanians - watched with horror as their fears of a new Shia ascendancy appeared to be coming true. Such fears have prompted the beginnings of a re-alignment. "Something is happening that could have a strategic potential," says Dennis Ross, the US peace envoy to the Middle East during the Clinton years. Ambassador Ross dates the genesis of this to Saudi Arabia's criticism of Hezbollah during last summer's Lebanon war. "Iran," he said, was perceived by many Arab states "as trying to seize control of the Israel-Palestine issue and was using Hezbollah and Hamas as tools". This the Saudis and the other Sunni states saw as a threat because, as Ambassador Ross put it, "if the Iranians were in a position in which they could control the most evocative symbols in the region they could use it against these regimes". Add in the widespread unease at Iran's nuclear activities and you have a potential new alignment where the moderate Arab states and Israel all share common interests. BBC News

David Seaton's News Links
If the Iranians are able to force the Egyptian dictatorship and the Sunni Arab monarchies into an alliance with Israel and the USA against Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, who are the only ones to have carried out effective resistance to Israel, it will totally deligitimize those regimes in the eyes of their masses and open the door for the Islamists. What looks a very clever, "divide and conquer", tactic is in fact, suicidally superficial. DS