SAUDI FOR DUMMIES By Ghassan Kadi 26 November 2013

SAUDI FOR DUMMIES:
By Ghassan Kadi

26 November 2013

Rumours are spreading that Saudi Arabia is planning to have nuclear weapons.

For the benefit of those who do not know much about Saudi Arabia, this short and intensive course, “Saudi for Dummies”, might be helpful.

Almost the entire workforce in Saudi Arabia is foreign. Initially the influx of foreign expertise was meant to be of interim nature. It was meant to help develop the country as the sudden financial development fuelled by the oil wealth was not mirrored in peoples’ levels of education and expertise.

In other words, instead of waiting until Saudi Arabia had its own engineers, doctors, craftsmen etc… it imported them and spent billions of dollars on building universities and sending young Saudi men overseas on government-sponsored scholarships. In the meantime, the country was serviced and developed by foreign experts and workers.

A few decades on, little has changed. Saudis refuse to work, full stop. They all want to be big-shot business men. They will take on professions as pilots, engineers, doctors, and they may have titles that present them as the people who make the decisions in the corporate world, but in reality they are just a façade intended to make Saudi Arabia look and feel good. Behind them, stand teams of foreign advisors who do all the designs, calculations, risk management, project management, etc… and all the Saudi “experts” do is to endorse with their signatures and parade in front of journalists as great national heroes.

Saudis also take the most unrealistic and stupid endeavours. They are currently irrigating wheat with desalinized sea water. Their whole objective is to see the kingdom turn green and the desert bloom at any cost. The photo is of such Saudi wheat field comprised of tens of "central pivots", each totally more than 100 Hectares.

Their arrogance leads them to believe that they can buy anything and anyone, and they will always be able to afford to buy any expertise to construct any dream; feasible or otherwise.

When Juheiman Utaibi claimed to be the Mehdi and occupied the Haram (Mecca’s Shrine) back in 1980, the Saudis had to ask the Turkish government for the design of the buildings as they were built by the Ottomans and the Saudis did not have copies of the design. They used mostly Pakistani troops to recapture the shrine, but of course, it was Saudi generals who paraded themselves later as the victors.

The Saudi army may have state-of-the-art arsenal of tanks, fighter jets, you name it, but the big question is, who is manning them?

Furthermore, the average lifespan of a motor vehicle in Saudi Arabia is 2-3 years after which it gets dumped. One wonders, are they applying those same principles to their military hardware?

Cornered, isolated, beaten and angry, Saudi Arabia now wants to raise the bar and decides to have its own nukes.

How can a failed state, a nation that cannot build a house or fix a flat tyre without the use of foreign expertise build an Atom Bomb?

If the Saudis decide to subcontract Pakistan to do the job, how much control will they have on the whole project?

Most importantly, this decision raises two pertinent questions:

1. Will the Saudis not be giving Iran the excuse to build its own? Who will be able to stop Iran from building a nuke if Israel and Saudi Arabia are nuke-ready and poised to strike it?

2. Why is it that the international community did not respond to the Saudi threats of attaining nukes?

Saudi Arabia has got to realize that the international community pays little or no attention to its huffing and puffing, because the international community knows well that Saudi Arabia is a state without any substance, a flame waiting to burn out.

The bottom line is this. Approximately 2 years ago Saudi Arabia (in an alliance with Qatar) convinced the West that it is a regional power and that it was able to get rid of Bashar Al Assad and replace him with a pro-Western puppet regime that served the interests of Saudi Arabia and the West.

The West was so taken by this scenario to the extent that it agreed to foster Islamists and Jihadists, exactly the same people it is fighting now in Afghanistan and Mali. The West took the gamble and the gamble was on the credibility of Saudi Arabia and specifically prince Bandar. It be must remembered that Bandar lived for over 2 decades in America as an ambassador to his country. He has always portrayed himself to the West as being different from the irrational Saudi royals. He gave about himself the image of a Western-educated shrewd and calculated Saudi royal, someone they can rely on as a true partner, unlike the rest of his clan.

Bandar flunked abysmally and has lost his credibility. Saudi Arabia is now getting marginalized and isolated. The Iran deal has been the latest nail in its coffin. Even if Saudi Arabia is able to clinch a deal with Pakistan to buy an existing mail-order nuke within the next few weeks or so, there is nothing it can do which can make it restore its position of a year ago, let alone change the events on the ground in Syria.