World View: By blaming the street protests at home on their Shia neighbour, Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are playing with fire
By Patrick Cockburn
"....This demonisation of Iran at times seems to set the stage for a military attack on Iran by the US and Israel. The propaganda build-up is very similar to that directed against Saddam Hussein's Iraq in 2002. In both cases, an isolated state with limited resources is presented as a real danger to the region and the world....
It therefore came as a shock when the distinguished Egyptian-American lawyer Cherif Bassiouni, who led the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry into this year's unrest, said flatly in his 500-page report last week that there is no evidence of Iranian involvement in events in Bahrain.....
The protests in Eastern Province are likely to intensify. As elsewhere in the Arab world, youth no longer obeys traditional leaders. The Saudi and Bahraini monarchs may blame Iranian television for inflaming the situation, but what really fuels Shia anger is what they see on YouTube or read on Twitter or the internet. What influences protesters is less Iran and more the example of young demonstrators similar to themselves demanding political and civil rights in Cairo and Syria....
.... The Iraqi Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari, used to say that it was amusing at conferences, where both the US and Iran were represented, to see the Americans and the Iranians furiously denounce each other's evil actions in Iraq – and then make very similar speeches supporting the Iraqi government....."
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