The Real Aim of ISIS Is to Replace the Saud Family [View all]

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Middle East Time Bomb: The Real Aim of ISIS Is to Replace the Saud Family as the New Emirs of Arabia
Posted: 09/02/2014 8:43 pm EDT

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-crooke/isis-aim-saudi-arabia_b_5748744.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592

This article is Part II of Alastair Crooke's historical analysis of the roots of ISIS and its impact on the future of the Middle East.

BEIRUT -- ISIS is indeed a veritable time bomb inserted into the heart of the Middle East. But its destructive power is not as commonly understood. It is not with the "March of the Beheaders"; it is not with the killings; the seizure of towns and villages; the harshest of "justice" -- terrible though they are -- that its true explosive power lies. It is yet more potent than its exponential pull on young Muslims, its huge arsenal of weapons and its hundreds of millions of dollars.
"We should understand that there is really almost nothing that the West can now do about it but sit and watch."

Its real potential for destruction lies elsewhere -- in the implosion of Saudi Arabia as a foundation stone of the modern Middle East. We should understand that there is really almost nothing that the West can now do about it but sit and watch.

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In political and financial terms, the Saud-Philby strategy has been an astonishing success (if taken on its own, cynical, self-serving terms). But it was always rooted in British and American intellectual obtuseness: the refusal to see the dangerous "gene" within the Wahhabist project, its latent potential to mutate, at any time, back into its original a bloody, puritan strain. In any event, this has just happened: ISIS is it.

Winning western endorsement (and continued western endorsement), however, required a change of mode: the "project" had to change from being an armed, proselytizing Islamic vanguard movement into something resembling statecraft. This was never going to be easy because of the inherent contradictions involved (puritan morality versus realpolitik and money) -- and as time has progressed, the problems of accommodating the "modernity" that statehood requires, has caused "the gene" to become more active, rather than become more inert.