Prince Al-Faisal Worries About Washington And Its Iran Deal

Given the long record of American naivete in dealing with the Muslim East — “here lies one who tried to hustle the East” — now reaching its apotheosis, apparently, in the negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran, possibly the Arabs are now regretting that they never tried to explain to the hapless Americans such things as Taqiyya and Kitman, or how the souk-bargainers manage to sell things at ten times what they would actually be willing to take, by convincing Western tourists that, because they really reallly like them, effendi, they are willing to take a price that is ten times its value, instead of the original asking price which was one hundred times its value.

In these negotiations, the Americans have given and given, and gone within little more than a year from 1,500 allowable centrifuges, to 4,000, and now to 6,500. The Iranians have given nothing. And Iran is now simultaneously involved in four Arab countries, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, where it is stuck, in four tar babies, and has to keep supplying money, men,, and weapons to Hezbollah, to Assad, to the Shi’a in Iraq, to the Houthis, with little prospect that Assad, the Houthis, the Shi’a in Iraq, or Hezbollah, will manage to defeat, and end, the Sunnis now at war against them. Prince Faisal would like the Western powers, especially the Americans, to be wary. He wishes they would listen — strange but true — to the warnings, about Iran, of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Geopolitics makes strange bedfellows.