I'm confused by this, because I thought Saudi Arabia was on our side. Sure there was that whole sentencing a poet to death thing, and we can argue about who or what a moderate Muslim is, but they were the good guys? I mean, John Kerry is sitting right there next to them. Up is down and down is up, what do we do?!

I'm sure them being responsible (somewhat) for ISIS is just a misunderstanding...

How far is Saudi Arabia complicit in the Isis takeover of much of northern Iraq, and is it stoking an escalating Sunni-Shia conflict across the Islamic world? Some time before 9/11, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, once the powerful Saudi ambassador in Washington and head of Saudi intelligence until a few months ago, had a revealing and ominous conversation with the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove. Prince Bandar told him: "The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally 'God help the Shia'. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them."

The fatal moment predicted by Prince Bandar may now have come for many Shia, with Saudi Arabia playing an important role in bringing it about by supporting the anti-Shia jihad in Iraq and Syria. Since the capture of Mosul by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) on 10 June, Shia women and children have been killed in villages south of Kirkuk, and Shia air force cadets machine-gunned and buried in mass graves near Tikrit.

Something that's pretty pivotal there, in case you missed it.

"The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally 'God help the Shia'. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them."

This Prince Bandar is effectively advocating for genocide against the Shiites. I know, I know on its surface, considering that members of Shia-centric Islam make up the bulk of Iran, Iraq and Syria along with most terrorism, this would seem like a wash. For the longest time, many Americans though "Shiites are the terrorist Muslims and the Sunnis are the not so terrorist ones."

ISIS however, is a militant Sunni group. Ah. Things change.The problem here is that Islam is still Islam. And if Saudi Arabia were to act on this, it could throw the entire middle east into the kind of turmoil that could cause economic collapse and yes, possibly a large-scale war. The kind of war that would affect global economies and force many countries to pick a side.

We've seen this before. Picking strategic partners in the middle-east of any Islamic cloth does not yield long-term dividends. Unless those dividends are vest-bombs. You can always find someone in the Muslim world to give you those at a closeout price. A deal's a deal. Case in point, this turd-nugget Prince Bandar. He was a close friend of the Bush family, and up until recently served as the Saudi Ambassador to the United States. He was the prime example of a "moderate Muslim who could prove a valuable ally between the United States and the Islamic world!"

How'd that work out?

That's right, a big swing and a miss.

Listen, I'm not here to berate Bush, or to points out which Presidents forged alliances with which crap-weasels. I'm here to point to two macros.

1. Don't expect to hear about this in the media a whole lot. It's as important as any story out there today, but it takes a backseat to Grammys and Trump's latest tantrums.
2. Any alliance with Islamically-run countries in the middle-east is just a losing proposition. We've been screwed too many times. Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia etc. Long-term, it's invariably a bad play.

Which brings me back to point one. Why won't the media cover this? Well, because the truth is that regardless of "Islamic extremism"... "Moderate Islam" is really crappy too. Learn more below.

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