Portside

It is long past time for a campaign to end the U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia and all of the cruel grasping hereditary dictatorships in the Persian Gulf. While U.S arms merchants are making billions selling weapons to these dictatorships, U.S. taxpayers are underwriting the expenditure of trillions of dollars on military bases, troops, contractors, weapons systems, and fleets, all in support of tyrannical regimes, unending wars and cruel occupations.

While the international media has devoted extensive coverage to the barbaric destruction of museums and archaeological sites in Iraq and Syria by the Islamic State, not so with the continuing aerial vandalism perpetrated in Yemen by Saudi Arabia. The same obscurantist ideology by which the Islamic State justifies its destruction of cultural heritage sites appears to be driving the Saudis’ air war against the precious physical evidence of Yemen’s ancient civilizations.

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Gathering in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh were Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, newly crowned Saudi King Salman, and the organizer of the get-together, the emir of Qatar. The meeting was an opportunity for Turkey and Saudi Arabia to bury a hatchet over Ankara’s support — which Riyadh’s opposes — to the Muslim Brotherhood, and to agree to cooperate in overthrowing the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.

As Saudi Arabia continues its air assault on Yemen’s Houthi insurgents, supporters and opponents of the Riyadh monarchy are reconfiguring the political landscape in a way that’s unlikely to vanish once the fighting is over. The Saudis have constructed what at first glance seems a formidable coalition consisting of the Arab League, the monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Turkey, and the United States. Except that the “coalition” isn’t as solid as it looks.

Claims Iran is supplying the Houthis with weapons ignore the fact the group was already flush with American arms from ex-president Saleh.

By leading a Sunni coalition Saudi Arabia will internationalise the Yemen conflict and emphasise its sectarian Sunni-Shia dimension. US policy across the Middle East looks contradictory. It is supporting Sunni powers and opposing Iranian allies in Yemen but doing the reverse in Iraq. Whatever happens in Iraq and Yemen, the political temperature of the region is getting hotter by the day.

Last October, Saudi Arabia’s Special Criminal Court sentenced Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr, a popular Shi’ite cleric and outspoken political dissident, to death. Now the fate of this Shi’ite cleric hangs over the Gulf like a sword of Damocles. Demonstrations demanding the death sentence be revoked have been held in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, and the United Kingdom, underscoring the international sensitivity surrounding al-Nimr’s imprisonment and death sentence.

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Saudi Arabia, a chief U.S. ally in the “War on ISIS,” conducted 61 beheadings in 2014. Rape, murder, armed robbery, drug trafficking, and apostasy are all punishable by death under Saudi Arabia's strict version of Islamic Sharia Law. Christof Heyns, the UN Special Rapporteur on executions has called for a moratorium on the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, charging the trials are "grossly unfair," often relying on confessions obtained through torture.