Broadcast 5 March on PARS satellite TV (Los Angeles)

This is an excerpt from the Souresrafil show. He said among other things that Ahmadinejad's trip to Saudi Arabia was initiated by the Iranian side. He described Ahmadenejad's meeting with King Abdullah as an encounter between a disreputable man of small stature with a man of great gravitas and experience, who seemed perfunctory and less than enthusiastic about his encounter with the Iranian president.

In this excerpt Behrouz Souresrafil reviews a few press articles published after the trip while adding a few of his own ideas. He frequently refers to Ahmadinejad as tir-e khalas zan (TKZ), the nickname by which he is known to many Iranians. It means "shooter of the finishing round" and refers to Ahmadinejad's reputed role while a revolutionary guard officer of shooting in the head prisoners whom Islamic Republic authorites had decided should be killed. It is rumored that he shot over 1,000 people.

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Souresrafil: The truth is that the results of TKZ's trip to Saudi Arabia are still unclear. As usual, on his return he said things that the Saudis themselves were obliged to deny.

In other words, he said they reached an agreement with Saudi Arabia that will unite them against the enemies of Islam and save the Muslim world, the kind of nonsense he usually says, with implicit reference to America.

In turn the Saudis announced that this was not what happened and that they regard America as the only guarantor of security for themselves and the entire region. They said they were very worried about the situation after Ahmadinejad's trip and made absolutely no endorsement of what he said--that TKZ!

In any case, this episode has led some people in the Persian Gulf to believe that Iran wants peace, friendship and things like this, based on what has come out in the press. Some of them have written that in sending Ahmadinejad there the Islamic Republic really wanted to thwart Saudi Arabia.

Elsewhere, everyone wrote no, it is really the Islamic Republic that is on its knees, as a result of these measures! For example I read a report in the The New York Sun about the differences in the press narratives about Saudi Arabia and Iran and the results of TKZ's trip to Saudi Arabia. The report said that according to the Iranian government press the result of this meeting was the unification of Iran and Saudi Arabia against foreign plots.

Yet in the Saudi press they wrote that the two parties discussed the unrest in Lebanon. A researcher named Barzan at a think tank called the Defense of Democracies Foundation expressed the opinion that the talks between King Abdullah and Ahmadinejad do not mean that Iran is powerful, but instead show Iran's daily increasing weakness.

Mr. Barzan wrote that certain suspicious people are saying that the Iranians thwarted Saudi Arabia in doing this, but in this meeting with Ahmadinejad the Saudis told him not to meddle in matters pertaining to the Gulf Cooperation Council and other meetings between Sunni nations, one of which was held recently in Pakistan, where they reached an agreement.

You know that the Sunni nations in the region will be holding another conference soon to which they have not invited Iran, and they didn't invite Iran to the last one either!

In addition there is the defeat of the Hezbollah effort to seize power in Lebanon, and additional Security Council sanctions will soon be announced in any case against Iran. If we put these things together we see that the Islamic Republic has been completely defeated and brought to its knees in the region with respect to the plans it had.

It is this very Saudi Arabia that Khomeini called usurpers of the Arabian peninsula--which he called the land of Najd and Nejad--in his will and in many other texts. It was in this very Saudi Arabia that they [the Iranians] mobilized forces repeatedly and on one occasion alone killed 300-400 people during the Haj rites.

They have plotted this entire time to stage a revolt in Saudi Arabia but they have been defeated every time. In any case, what can be understood so far is that it is the Islamic Republic, according to this gentleman, that has been brought to its knees, or if not that, in any case it has been obliged to accept Saudi Arabia's leadership in the region; out of fear of its own collapse and out of fear of a war that it would not be able to withstand, it has had to turn to anyone who might be able to protect it.