By: S. Nawabzadeh

A brief get-together of a few hours last Sunday, complete with a lavish meal and sumptuous drinks, in a modern luxurious palace in the midst of the Arabian Desert by a bunch of oil-rich princes, failed to conjure up fantasies of the "Arabian Nights” (Alif Layla wa Layla) – ironically compiled by a Persian.

Even the less-than-an-hour closed-door meeting in Riyadh, the capital of the British created fiefdom of Saudi Arabia, among the four despotic heads of state, joined by a prime minister and a minister of state for foreign affairs of two other member countries of the 6-nation (Persian) Gulf Cooperation Council, failed to remove the gloom from the faces of the participants, who sat around a table in awkward silence at the close before a bland final communique was read out.

The 7-point communique of the 39^th summit was as barren as the land of Najd with stereotyped emphasis on unity of a divided body, economic challenges, and the threats to regional stability – not by the intruding Americans, neither by the Zionists, nor by the joint Saudi-UAE massacre of the innocents in Yemen, but by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The anti-Iranian tone of the gathering had been set by the inaugural address of the host, King Salman the Senile, who, as predicted, accused Tehran of meddling and support for terrorism, while he read (without realizing what he was a reading) an opening statement probably prepared jointly by his murderous Heir Apparent MBS and the Jewish-looking Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir, under the directions of the US and Israel.

The PGCC, set up in May 1981 during the US imposed war on the Islamic Republic through Saddam of the tyrannical Ba’th minority regime of Baghdad at a time when the heroic resistance and counterattacks of the Iranians had bogged down the Iraqi invasion, was aimed at countering what the Americans told the Persian Gulf potentates "Iran’s revolutionary influence on the Arab Muslim masses” – groaning under sandals of the hereditary British-installed rulers.

In 1990, when a defeated Saddam thanklessly turned on his own generous financers of the disastrous 8-year war and his periodic massacres of Iraq’s Shi’a Arab majority and ethnic Kurds, by swallowing up Kuwait and firing missiles at Saudi Arabia, the PGCC began to realize that the Islamic Republic of Iran was not an enemy.

The neo-rich Sheikhs, although some of them tried their best to build bridges with Iran, couldn’t fully succeed, because of the pressures from Washington and London, in addition to the blind hatred of anything Iranian or Shi’a Muslim by the heretical Wahhabi cult of Saudi Arabia, especially after Lebanon’s legendry anti-terrorism movement, the Hezbollah, inspired by Islamic Iran, shattered the myth of Zionist invincibility in 2006 during the 33-day war – the first time an Arab force (not a national army) had defeated Israel.

This victory in turn encouraged the Palestinians to blunt the Israeli invasion of Gaza during the 22-day conflict of 2008, ringing alarm bells in not just Tel Aviv, but in the capitals of the pro-Zionist West, which now resorted to the dirty plot to destabilize Syria, the Frontline Resistant Nation, which along with a democratic post-Saddam Iraq, became a potential point for the cherished Islamic goal of liberation of Bayt al-Moqaddas.

These developments, along with Iran’s moral support for the oppressed people of Bahrain, as well as of Yemen who are struggling to preserve the only republican state of the Arabian Peninsula, led to divisions in the 6-member PGCC, as some of its members opposed the free reign given to the macabre takfiri terrorists in Syria and later in Iraq, and some of them to the state terrorism of Saudi Arabia and the UAE in Yemen.

Iran for its part, sensing the danger of the intricate American-Zionist plot to destabilize the whole of West Asia and if possible Judaize it through the services of the takfiris, positively responded to the requests for help from the governments and peoples of Syria and Iraq, and succeeded in saving the two countries, the fate of their masses, their historical-cultural heritage, and their rich religious legacy, to the chagrin of Washington, Tel Aviv, and Riyadh – the unholy trinity all set for the devilish plan to sell out Islam’s first qibla and obliterate the Palestinian cause.

In the meantime, the impetuous MBS, dreaming of at least a 50-year reign as king of Saudi Arabia (actually a slave of the US), picked up a fight with Doha for its total subservience to Riyadh and along with like-minded PGCC members tried in vain to isolate it – a move that has badly backfired, similar to his planned week-long invasion of Yemen, which is now in its 4^th year with no signs of ending as casualties and economic woes mount for the aggressors.

In view of these facts, it was a wise decision by the Emir of Qatar against biting the bait of an invitation from Saudi Arabia for the Riyadh summit, where he would have been humiliated by MBS, who is writhing in pain like an injured snake as calls grow worldwide for bringing him to justice for his ordering of the gruesome murder of journalist Adnan Khashogchi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

Thus, in such a situation the 39^th PGCC summit should be called a requiem in Riyadh for a fast disintegrating body which is no longer of use to the US and in next year’s summit to be held in Abu Dhabi, might be formally dissolved and replaced by the new American grouping against Iran "MESA” (Middle East Strategic Alliance) that in addition to some Persian Gulf states includes Egypt and Jordan, and will most certainly boomerang on all American meddling in the region, along with the end of Israel and Arab reactionary regimes.

A fitting finale indeed to the exhaustive Arabian Nights tale related by Sheherzad to Shahriyar.