Is Saudi Arabia Seeking to Sabotage the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions?

The acute obscurantism that informs Saudi domestic policies also serves as the basis for the kingdom's foreign policy. Saudi foreign policy is simply reactionary. Saudi Arabia wants an Arab world devoid of any hints of liberalism where absolute tyrants rule, the people are subdued and a puritanical form of Islam dominates.

saudi eN4T6 19672

That is why the vile cadre making up the royal family have been wary of the Arab revolution from the beginning and have already crushed the Bahraini uprising and are now acting as the mid-wife in the Libyan revolution in order to ensure, or so they wish, a post-Gadhafi Libya preferable to Saudi interests. Ditto for Yemen and Saudi mediation there.

And the royals lobbied the US to allow for a brutal and bloody crackdown on Egyptians in order to save Mubarak. They've failed there and failed to even see the Tunisian revolution. But now in both countries the Saudis are pouring money to support Islamists in order to sabotage a liberal democracy. The heart of the kingdom's ideology is Wahhabism, a fanatical strain of Islam that is unassailable in its antisemitism, anti-Christian, anti-Shia (even though 20% of the kingdom's population is Shia), misogynistic character. And Saudi oil money has been used to prop up this most militant and intolerant sect in Islam.

Saudi Arabia would feel comfortable in a region residing in the Dark Ages for fear that liberal democracies will inspire Saudis to also fight for their rights. So it hopes that Tunisia's and Revolution's revolutions will be hijacked by radical Islamists who would do away with the short-lived democracies and institute a new, harsher tyranny and the Arabs would once again be without a liberal model of governance. The Saudis would be pleased and do not underestimate the audacity and manipulative style of this widely-detested (in the Arab world) family.

In Egypt they are funding Salafi fanatics and in Tunisia giving millions to the more moderate, but still illiberal, Nahda Islamist political party. They hope these Saudi clients will win the day and bow before the brutal king.

But they will not win the day. Egyptians and Tunisians are aware of this insidious Saudi plot and have reported about it respectively in their press and no amount of money (the Saudis think that other people are as susceptible to bribery as their own) will convince the majority to vote for Islamist and Saudi clients. On the contrary, Saudi money is the kiss of death in a free Arab world.

So the Saudi royals will lose, the Arab hatred for the kingdom of horrors will only increase, the royals will grow more isolated and their time is near.