Washington consolidates control over global jihad

The Muslim Brotherhood is officially on the shit list.

We know that because Saudi Arabia has officially declared them a terrorist group. These notions don't spontaneously pop into King Abdullah's head out of nowhere.

The Brotherhood has in fact been nothing like a terror group. What the Saudi move means is that there is a bit of rebranding going on in the world 'o jihad. The al-Nusra Front and al-Qaeda have also been placed on Riyadh's Washington dictated verboten list.

This move is part and parcel of the news two days ago that most of the GCC were recalling their ambassadors from Qatar. Qatar has become the rogue state sponsoring not only the Brotherhood, but various other free-lance conglomerations of jihadis who operate outside of official US-Saudi oversight.

There was a time when Saudi money flowed freely to the many iterations of jihad terror around the Middle East and beyond. Saudi Arabia was the primariy financier of al-Qaeda for years. Bin Laden himself was financed out of Saudi Arabia.

Those days are now officially over. What brought about this U-turn?

The free-for-all in Syria. When Assad failed to follow the Washington script for regime change, random jihadi groups were given a green light to join the fray. Those myriad free-booters have proved to be well beyond the control of their financial backers, and as a result international jihad has a PR problem and their backers are pissed off.

Hence the current crack-down and consolidation.

Does the fact that Saudi Arabia has condemned al-Nusra and al-Qaeda mean we have won the war on terror?

Not at all. It means that terror groups have to buck up and do the bidding of their financial backers. No more of this random free-lance stuff where kids from Minneapolis and Winnipeg morph into "al Qaeda leaders" within six months of leaving Minneapolis and Winnipeg.

Where does that leave the Brotherhood?

The MB has been stomped on, persecuted, prosecuted, and driven underground for years. Its rise to legitimacy in Egypt and Turkey was never more than tenuous, as Morsi has found out and Erdogan will soon. It will continue as an underground organization.

Does this mean the end of al Qaeda and radical Islam? Hell no! This isn't about ending radical Islamist terror; it's about getting it under control.

Wahhabi zealots who once worked under the al-Qaeda or al-Nusra banners are simply being rebranded. Those who don't play ball and accept the US-Saudi directorship can count on a) being left out of the money & materiels supply chain, and b) finding themselves running zig-zag patterns in the desert as they try to avoid the drones with their names programmed into the guidance systems.

Once firmly under control, the jihadi hordes will be reliable allies. We'll finally be able to give them the kind of support we've been giving them all along, but now we'll be able to do it in the open.

They are an invaluable resource in the tool kit of Empire.