{"id":15612,"date":"2015-12-23T12:26:30","date_gmt":"2015-12-23T17:26:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15612"},"modified":"2015-12-23T12:26:30","modified_gmt":"2015-12-23T17:26:30","slug":"the-coming-saudi-crack-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15612","title":{"rendered":"The Coming Saudi Crack-up?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Coming Saudi Crack-up?<\/h3>\n

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Is the Saudi monarchy coming apart at the seams?\u00a0Scholars and journalists have long predicted the kingdom\u2019s demise, but this time the forecasts may finally prove correct.<\/p>\n

The reason is an unprecedented avalanche of problems pouring down on Saudi Arabia since 79-year-old Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud assumed the throne last January.\u00a0A hardliner in contrast to his vaguely reformist\u00a0predecessor\u00a0Abdullah, Salman lost no time in letting the world know\u00a0that a new sheriff was in town.\u00a0He upped the number of public executions, which, at\u00a0151<\/u><\/a>, are now running at nearly double last year\u2019s rate.<\/p>\n

\"King<\/a><\/p>\n

King Salman greets the President and First Lady during a state visit to Saudi Arabia on Jan. 27, 2015. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

After meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, he promised to intensify efforts to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by increasing aid to Al Nusra, Al Qaeda\u2019s official Syrian affiliate.\u00a0A few weeks later, he assembled a coalition of nine\u00a0Sunni\u00a0Arab states to launch nightly bombing raids on Yemen, quickly reducing one of the poorest countries in the Middle East to ruin.<\/p>\n

People certainly took notice.\u00a0But if Salman thought such actions would win him respect, he was wrong. Instead, the result has been a steady drum beat of negative publicity as the world awakes to the fact that, with its public beheadings and barbaric treatment of women, the Islamic state headed by the House of Saud is little different from the Islamic State headed by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in northern Syria and Iraq.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Coming Saudi Crack-up? Exclusive:\u00a0President Obama, like generations of Western leaders, has coddled the oil-rich Saudi monarchy by tolerating its reactionary politics, its\u00a0financing of radical Islam and its\u00a0military support for Sunni jihadist terrorism. But the spoiled Saudi leaders may finally be going too far, as Daniel Lazare describes. Is the Saudi monarchy coming apart at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[150,6963,6618,2559,522,11214,584,701,11215,776,818,827,901],"class_list":["post-15612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-collapse","tag-consortium-news","tag-house-of-saud","tag-islam","tag-middle-east","tag-monarchy","tag-obama","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-sunni-jihadist-terrorism","tag-syria","tag-turkey","tag-united-states","tag-yemen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15612"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15613,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15612\/revisions\/15613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}