We are led to believe, by Western media at least, that the House of Saud is reforming itself internally after the Khashoggi affair and that the Saudi King is clipping the wings of his young tempestuous Crown Prince. Much has been written in recent days about the King's brother arriving in Riyadh and how Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) may even be replaced.

But the problem with a lot of these reports is that they are being fed to Western journalists covering the Middle East from London, for example, from Saudi exiles or other such dubious individuals who have an axe to grind against MbS.

It is the same journalists in fact who are reporting each and every gory detail of the Khashoggi murder – fed by Turkish officials who do not give media any concrete evidence – which is leading to this erroneous conclusion that MbS is in trouble in Riyadh.

And yet there is nothing new in the West making such colossal gaffes. Traditionally London and Washington have habitually misunderstood the nuances of the Middle East and its opaque dynasties, which I would argue have led to many of the crises which we accept today as being locally made, intractable problems.

In fact, you don't even have to go far back to see how the West is more part of the problem than the solution. Saddam Hussein was believed to have weapons of mass destruction in Iraq capable of being launched within 45 minutes which we believed as our own experts – diplomats and intelligence officers – couldn't understand the man himself, and therefore couldn't understand the leverage that this lie gave him on his own people, let alone his enemies in the region.

The invasion by US troops in 2003 was a huge mistake. But a much bigger one, which effectively created the impetus for ISIL to be created and flourish in Sunni regions of the country, was the decision to not pay back pay of around 500,000 soldiers of the Iraq army. What do half a million hungry, angry soldiers, many armed, do, when they go home and look at their malnourished kids?

It's a similar story with Bashar al-Assad. In 2007, Nancy Pelosi, then US house speaker, visited Damascus and convinced Congress and the EU that it was time to bring Assad back in from the cold. Despite three years of talks, not much progress was made, and Assad was seen as an adversary simply because he chose not to become servile to US hegemony.

It is also known now that in 2010, the CIA was financing a number of opposition groups in Syria and thus when the Syrian civil war started in 2011, Assad automatically became a de facto "dictator" and "enemy" of the US.

The West, yet again, couldn't understand how Syria historically had always used its autonomy in the region to protect itself from other countries' invasions and that Assad considered the uprising against his control as a repeat of history, i.e. a Western-backed Muslim Brotherhood attempted overthrow identical to that of Hama in 1982, backed in part by US cash. Assad became an enemy of Washington because he had the temerity to fight a CIA-backed coup.

There is no limit to the ignorance and narrow-minded prism of US officials though. A similar story is repeating itself in Turkey as Recep Tayyip Erdogan is seen as a Western ally who Washington can work with. He has all the right credentials, after all. He wants to buy US arms, respects Trump and hates Assad – which can be used as a rod for Saudi Arabia's back when Trump's ideas on how to deal with MbS flounder.

But supporting Erdogan and the Muslim Brotherhood will be yet another disastrous overture in the Middle East which will merely continue the same theme of pouring new oil onto old fires. The weary American public cannot keep up with which particular Sunni-extremist Saudi or Israel-supported terrorist groups the US is assisting in the Middle East as it continues to paint the Iranians, who are these groups' greatest enemy, as the bad guys. America's unconvincing anti-Iran agenda is almost entirely about fueling fear and boosting US arms sales to Gulf Arab states and appeasing Israel. Nothing more.

What we are seeing now with MbS in Saudi Arabia is not only dangerous fake news, but it will have consequences beyond our reaches if we do not contain it.

The Washington Post editorials which naively lambast the MbS continue to show support for the detention of almost 200 journalists in Turkey. Consequently, we can expect more Western journalists to join them in the future and more abductions if this dangerous path of disinformation continues with numerous titles espousing the ignorant line that the Saudi Crown prince's power is compromised due to the hue and cry from the West over Khashoggi. It simply isn't true.

While it's true to argue that part of the price that Saudi Arabia pays by not allowing the journalist to freely report on its elite is that it fuels speculation and conspiracy theories, we shouldn't indulge ourselves with convenient, yet poor, analysis. We should be careful what we wish for.

Indeed, just as the miscalculated actions of the West in Syria, Iraq, and Turkey have impacted and often made matters worse for the countries on the receiving end of such folly, the same applies to Saudi Arabia.

My own sources close to King Salman tell me that if the West continues with this disinformation which unsettles the monarch, he is much more likely to abdicate and hand his son the throne as a way of preventing MbS from being threatened any more by his enemies than consider removing him.

What hacks in the West don't get is that they are accelerating MbS' path to become monarch. The thinking in the house of Saud in recent years, which has pushed the young crown prince into the position he vacates, is that ‘we need to have a more authoritarian ruler' in power, not a softer, more liberal one who is likely to be swayed by Western ideas.