September 24, 2008:  A former Iranian diplomat, now living in exile in Sweden, believes that Iran is continuing to build a network of agents in Persian Gulf Arab countries. All of these have Shia minorities. One country, Bahrain (65 percent Shia), has a majority. The others are minorities; Oman (4 percent), Kuwait (23 percent), Qatar (5 percent), Saudi Arabia (15 percent), Yemen (45 percent) and the United Arab Emirates (15 percent).

While some 88 percent of the 1.3 billion Moslems on the planet are Sunni, about 11 percent are Shia. While most other Islamic sects just represent religious differences, many Shia believe they should be running the Islamic world, and that all Moslems should be Shia. The Sunnis disagree, often violently.

Iran has long been known to have local agents among the Shia population in all the Persian Gulf states. Several outbursts of Shia terrorism and political violence were found, after raids, arrest and vigorous interrogation, to have Iranian support.

There has been trade across the Persian Gulf, between Iranians and Arabs, for thousands of years. Until oil was discovered on the Arab side of the Gulf in the 1930s, Iranians saw nothing of great value over there. Now that it is know that a third of the world's oil reserves are on the Arab side of the Gulf, Iran is suddenly interested. This scares the Arabs, and the growing Iranian intelligence and terrorist network on the west side of the Gulf is downright unnerving. Now Iranian officials are openly questioning the Sunni Arab rule over the Moslem holy places, and the legitimacy of the Sunni governments in all the nations on the Arabian peninsula. It's no wonder that those nations are spending over a hundred billion dollars on weapons, and paying closer attention to what their Shia citizens think.