Bandar Bin Sultan’s offers advices to Obama

It seems that Ban­dar bin Sul­tan is back to lobby by the new Amer­i­can pres­i­dent Obama, blam­ing all the “mis­takes” in the Mid­dle East on Bush. This is the full trans­la­tion of Al-Akhbar spe­cial report today:

The Pres­i­dent of the National Secu­rity Coun­cil in Saudi Ara­bia, Prince Ban­dar bin Sul­tan vis­ited Wash­ing­ton, in the sec­ond week of last Decem­ber, and held a series of meet­ings with offi­cials of George Bush’s admin­is­tra­tion and Obama’s advisers

Ban­dar claimed that he rep­re­sents the opin­ions of the Gulf-States, Egypt, Jor­dan, the Pales­tin­ian Author­ity and the March 14 Forces in Lebanon.

The pri­or­i­ties of the sub­jects, dis­cussed are:

- The Iran­ian nuclear file:

Must be within the pri­or­i­ties of the next admin­is­tra­tion, given the degree of risk involved which rep­re­sents a threat to Gulf States and U.S. inter­ests in the region.

Ban­dar crit­i­cized the Bush admin­is­tra­tion because they spoke a lot and did lit­tle but it did not take the nec­es­sary actions required to elim­i­nate Iran’s nuclear ambi­tions, and only imposed for­mal sanc­tions do not affect or the course of the obtain­ing a nuclear weapons.

- Syr­ian:

And explained to Obama’s advis­ers that inter­nal change [regime change] is essen­tial because the Syr­ian regime is fac­ing prob­lems at home and inter­nal con­flicts, and was con­fi­dent that the sys­tem was on the verge of falling before the inter­ven­tion of France, Europe and Turkey, which has cre­ated oppor­tu­ni­ties for the polit­i­cal regime to decrease the impact of the embargo and iso­la­tion through the revival of the nego­ti­at­ing between Dam­as­cus and Tel Aviv.

- the Pales­tin­ian file:

Ban­dar stressed on the impor­tance of the next U.S. admin­is­tra­tion to pay a spe­cial atten­tion to acti­vate of the Palestinian-Israeli nego­ti­at­ing. He [Ban­dar] sug­gested the fol­low­ing steps:

- The Secu­rity Coun­cil to release a res­o­lu­tion that sup­ports the nego­ti­a­tions between the parties(which is what hap­pened through Res­o­lu­tion 1850, few days ago and Saudi Ara­bia played a role in this resolution)

- Sup­port Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Abbas’ author­ity, who faces a dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion if he does not pro­duce results of the nego­ti­at­ing process.

Besides, Ban­dar wanted more pres­sure on Iran and Syria, and strikes at the forces sup­ported by these coun­tries, such as Hezbol­lah in Lebanon and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Palestine.