An important conference was held on Dec. 12th in Kuwait City: Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, UN secretary general and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) delegates from Bahrein, Qatar, Kuwait and United Arab Emirates. The meeting aim is to promote the future “bilateral political and defensive cooperation” between both entities, as GCC secretary general Abdel Rahman al-Attia said in his speech.

An edgy summit. It might seem just an ordinary meeting but a greater strategic plan lies under its façade: a plan to control Iran’s new hegemony in the Gulf region. This strategy had already been outlined by Donald Rumsfeld successor, the US defense secretary Robert Gates: in a public speech he underlined that Iran “is surrounded by nuclear powers”.
The shocking point of this declaration was that Tel Aviv might have a nuclear bomb. And this suspect was confirmed by the Israeli PM Ehud Olmert tv gaffe in Germany, when he admitted Israel is member of a nuclear club. This is not a big surprise as hardly nobody still believes Israeli army has no nuclear weapons.
But the most important truth is that, as Gates put it, Iran is surrounded: many different subjects were dealt with at the conference (Afghanistan for example) but it is obvious that Teheran is the main problem for Israel. Shia became the main power in the region after Saddam's fall and Saudi Arabia, self-proclaimed champion of Sunni Islam, won’t just stand watching Iran spreading hegemony over Syria, Lebanon (through Hezbollah), Iraq (where the Shia majority took the power) and so on, to the extent that Palestinian PM Haniyeh was paid to never acknowledge the state of Israel.

Sunni against Shia. The Iranian foreign policy, helped by intelligence agencies, is working to strengthen the hegemonic role of Iran in the region. Anyway Saudi Arabia won’t easily let this process go ahead and some of the royal family members are believed to keep in contact with Israel to share a common strategy to control Iran. The strategy main point is supposed to be nuclear power. Although the marginal role played in the UN meeting in Kuwait City, Saudi diplomacy strongly supported an astonishing proposal at GCC summit in Dec. 9th and 10th in Riad: launching a common program to achieve the development of nuclear power for civil use. It wouldn’t seem a serious thing on paper (nuclear power is not developed for military purpose, as Teheran nuclear program says), considering the growing trend of energy production diversification in those countries that live on oil trade. But this declaration can be also read as a threat for Ahmadinejad and Iran: if a Shia atomic bomb is ready, a Sunni one will match it.  GCC countries have always favoured business in their links with western states, they can’t stand Teheran’s aggressiveness in foreign affairs and have to cope with Shia community’s agitation. Taking all this into account, the political opening between GCC members and the UN is not a good sign.