It is no secret that Saudi Arabia, along with its Gulf and Western allies,
has played a direct role
in fueling the fires of grinding sectarian conflict that has kept Syria burning
for the past five years. It is also no secret that Russian intervention has
radically altered the kingdom’s “regime change” calculus in
effect since at least 2011. But an internal Saudi government cable sheds new
light on the kingdom’s current threats
of military escalation in Syria.
Overthrow the Regime “by all means available”
A WikiLeaks cable
released as part of “The
Saudi Cables” in the summer of 2015, now fully translated here for
the first time, reveals what the Saudis feared most in the early years of the
war: Russian military intervention and Syrian retaliation. These fears were
such that the kingdom directed its media “not to oppose Russian figures
and to avoid insulting them” at the time.
Saudi Arabia had further miscalculated that the “Russian position”
of preserving the Assad government “will not persist in force.”
In Saudi thinking, reflected in the leaked memo, Assad’s violent ouster
(“by all means available”) could be pursued so long as Russia stayed
on the sidelines. The following section is categorical in its emphasis on regime
change at all costs, even should the U.S. vacillate for “lack of desire”: