Never a day goes by when the Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman doesn’t issue a bellicose statement targeting Iran. The other day while giving an interview to an American journal he said war against Iran can take place in the near future. He also asked America to station its marines in Syria in order to checkmate what he billed as Iran’s advance in the region. It would have been much better if he had, instead, asked all super powers, including the US,to stay away from the Middle East.
When Iran was a monarchy, the Saudi king and princes didn’t grudge the Iranians to the extent they do it now. A king always nurse a soft corner in his heart for another king because they sail in the same boat..After the Iranian revolution in late 1970s,the Saudi rulers suspected that the common man in Saudi Arabia ,taking a cue from the Iranian revolution might not rebel against them so they unleashed a propaganda campaign against the men of the cloth who came to power in Iran after the overthrow of Shahinshah of Iran.
Up till now right from the time when King Saud was put on the throne of Hejaz by the Britishers, almost all his successors were fairly old persons long in the tooth. No one among them was pro-active as they were either octogenarians or on the wrong side of seventy. The present Saudi monarch is,perhaps,last vestige of that old generation of rulers. The Saudi government is now in the hand of younger generation of princes and the crown prince is a dashing young person who is in full command of the things in Riyadh. King Salman suffers from many diseases, including, dementia .The Crown prince is moving very fast on national and international fronts. It is feared that his over enthusiasm to liberalise and modernise Saudi society might pit him on a collision course with the conservative clerics who toe Wahabi sect among Muslims and who have many followers in Saudi Arabia.
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