I liked your analogy of Ukraine and such using ‘hoods’.
Remember ‘The Warriors’, a film in which a street gang from Coney Island travels into Manhattan to attend a gang summit under a truce by the Gramercy Riffs?
Kazakhstan, come out and play-i-ay.
A strike on Saudi oil is even more probable if the Shiites come to power in Iraq.
Two birds one stone, al Qaeda does know oil is our Achilles heel and thus would strike Saudi infrastructure or reserves and they can wound the Shiites through such a hit.
I think.
The West has also woken up to the accident of geography that has placed the world’s major oil supplies in areas where they [Shi’ites] form the majority: Iran, the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and southern Iraq. http://www.world-crisis.com/analysis_comments/446_0_15_20_C33/
-Am
Excerpt The Saudi Paradox: This sectarian hatred that the clerics preach bears directly on the United States. Projecting their domestic struggle onto the external world, Saudi hard-liners are now arguing that the Shi`ite minority in Saudi Arabia is conspiring with the United States in its war to destroy Islam. Thus al-Ayyiri, the al-Qaeda propagandist, argued that the Shi`ites have hatched a long-term plot to control the countries of the Persian Gulf.
Many other clerics warn of a Shi`ite-U.S. conspiracy. Safar al-Hawali, for example, a prominent cleric and member of the Internal Front, wrote a long and vituperative response to the Shi`ite petition Abdullah accepted. Al-Hawali characterized the petition as an attempt by the Shi`ite minority to tyrannize the Sunni majority. Throughout history, al-Hawali wrote, the Shi`ites have conspired with the foreign enemies of the Sunnis: in the thirteenth century they aligned with the Mongol invaders; today they conspire with the Americans. If the Saudi authorities meet the demands of the Shi`ite petitioners, al-Hawali continued, one of two outcomes would result: Shi`ite government or a secular state.
All this might sound like the product of an addled brain, but it is not as detached from political reality as it seems. The Saudi clerics and al Qaeda base their political analysis of the Shi`ites on two assumptions: that Wahhabism is true Islam and that it must have a monopoly over state policy. From this perspective, the various forces promoting Taqarub, both domestic and foreign, are indeed in cahoots to upend the status quo. The Shi`ites offer an alternative notion of Islamic community and history, they tend to cluster in strategically key regions, they share bonds with co-religionists beyond the borders of their country, and they have political interests that coincide with those of Sunni reformers. These attributes would allow the Shi`ites to form a powerful political bloc should a participatory political system ever emerge. And offering them even minor political concessions now would be dangerous, the clerics say, since other sects and other regional identities would clamor for political representation and soon overwhelm the system.
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