Saudi Arabia says: '72 Eurofighter Typhoon jets please'

Britain and Saudi Arabia will be signing a new strategic partnership which promises closer cooperation in defence, intelligence-sharing and, of course, new trade links.
To be cynical (or not). At the heart of this rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and the UK will be the fact that BAE System has a £20 billion contract to deliver 72 Eurofighter Typhoon jets to Riyadh, which will be our biggest defence contract.

Saudi Arabia has always been a favourite amongst many politicians and arms dealers in the UK. I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact it’s the world’s largest oil producer. Thus it has billions of spare pounds with which it can buy loads of weapons from us.

But it’s not all cynicism about money. Saudi Arabia is a terrible places for Muslims. It’s an even worse place for non-Muslims. In addition, non-Arab Muslims, such a Pakistanis and Malaysians, are also treated poorly by the racist and Arabocentric Saudi state and society.

And then there’s Iran. Saudi Arabia is a Sunni Muslim country. Iran is Shia. The two sects have been at each other throats almost since the birth of Islam. And for many reasons. Sunni Muslims often regard Shia Muslims as not real Muslims. As heretics. Sometimes even as a ‘Zionist plot’ against real (Sunni) Muslims.

More specifically, Saudi Arabia is fearful of Iran’s ‘nuclear ambitions’... but not as much as Israel is, of course. Iran’s Ayatollah Rafsanjani, in 2006, said that in a nuclear war with Israel his country 'might loose 15 millions people’, a small ‘sacrifice from among the billion Muslims worldwide in exchange for the lives of five million Israeli Jews’. It’s a trade-off, then! And people wonder why Israel may attack Iran.

The very fact that’s it’s classed as a ‘strategic partnership’ shows that much of this has to do with Saudi Arabia and the UK basically having the same enemy - Iran. And the money which changes hands between the UK and Saudi Arabia is also important, obviously, too.

In any case, the despicable Islamic regime of Saudi Arabia is still preferable to what’s being offered by its hard-core Islamists, some of whom will be the family and friends of Osama bin Laden. If you think that ‘conservative’ Saudi Arabia is bad, think how things would be if the bin-Ladenites took over - even one’s choice of toilet role would need to be ‘sharia compliant’.