How Saudi Arabia 'pulled a proxy out from under Iran's wing'
By Armin Rosen
11 hours ago
(Raheb Homavandi/Reuters) Iranian
revolutionary guard corps chant slogans in support of Iran's nuclear
programme during Friday prayers in Tehran May 26, 2006 The
latest round of tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia is unsettling
what little is left of the Middle East's regional order.
Saudi Arabia's execution of the country's most prominent Shi'ite cleric on January 2nd triggered the apparently state-sanctioned burning of Saudi diplomatic facilities
in Tehran and Mershad, a breach of international order that in turn
resulted in Saudi Arabia cutting ties with their Persian Gulf neighbor.
Luckily, in the past Saudi Arabia and Iran have demonstrated at least a limited ability to keep their animosity in check.
The countries didn't go to war when an Iranian plot to assassinate
the Saudi ambassador to the US at an upscale Washington, DC restaurant was revealed in 2011. It's unclear what if any long-term impact the latest series of incidents will have.
But they're likely to have one lasting effect, a political
development that could tangibly shift hte terms of the Middle East's
sectarian divide.
On January 4th, Sudan announced that it was also severing diplomatic ties with
Iran. This move denied Iran of its sole Sunni Arab ally, undercutting
the Tehran regime's argument that Iran's Islamic revolution is capable
of transcending sectarianism and uniting the world's Muslims.
More practically, the freeze in relations also closes off the Red Sea
port of Port Sudan to Iranian warships and weapons shipments,
takes away a staging area for Iran's regional arms pipeline,
ends a partnership with a fellow revolutionary Islamist regime, and
flummoxes whatever remained of Iran's efforts to win over potential
supporters in the Sunni world.
(Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah/Reuters) Iran's
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (R) hugs Sudan's President Omar Hassan
al-Bashir after talks focused on boosting political and economic ties
between their countries, at the Khartoum international airport on
September 26, 2011. The relationship between Iran and
Sudan stems from the National Islamic Front's elevating to power after
the 1989 military coup in Khartoum, an event that marked the first
instance of a revolutionary Islamist movement taking power in an Arab
country.
Even if these measures turned Sudan into an
internationally sanctioned rogue state, they created an opportunity for a
partnership with a fellow revolutionary regime in Tehran, which had
been the world's only revolutionary Islamist government between 1979 and
1989.
The relationship paid off: Iran provided Sudan with weaponry and
expertise that allowed the country to set up a fairly extensive domestic
arms industry, giving it the capability of building its own automatic
weapons, rocket launchers, and even tanks.
The Sudanese regime lost many of
it its Islamist trappings. The Islamic Movement changed its name to the
National Congress Party (NCP) in the late 1990s and began evolving into
a somewhat more conventional dictatorship in hopes of improving the
country's economy and relations with the west.
That began to change as the NCP
began to faced steep financial crisis — and as Saudi Arabia began
mobilizing the Sunni Arab states against Tehran.
(Reuters) Sudanese
President Omar Hassan al-Bashir (L) meets Iran's President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad during his arrival at Khartoum Airport September 25, 2011. The
NCP, which is still under international sanctions related to the
Sudanese government's human rights abuses in Darfur, had faced a
prolonged economic drought after the southern third of the country became the independent state of South Sudan in 2011.
Khartoum and South Sudan failed to reach a durable compromise over the
post-independence split of South Sudanese oil revenues (the oil's export
is dependent on an oil transit infrastructure in the north of Sudan).
Oil from the south had previously constituted nearly the entirety of
Sudanese government revenue.
At the same time, the
Middle East ignited. The escalating conflict in Syria sharpened the
region's sectarian divisions, and events like the Yemeni civil war and
the thaw in Iran-US relations heightened the competition between Riyadh
and Tehran.
These tensions raised made a potentially swing state like Sudan even more important.
(Reuters) Flames rise from Saudi Arabia's embassy during a demonstration in Tehran on January 2, 2016. As
Alberto Fernandez, current Vice President at the Middle East Media
Research Institute and the Charge d'Affaires at the US embassy in
Khartoum from 2007 to 2009 explained to Business Insider, amid both
domestic and regional turmoil the increasingly pragmatic regime in
Khartoum began to realize that its survival depended more on
Saudi largess than on its relationship with Iran.
"These guys have been in power now for 26 years,"
Fernandez says of the NCP. "They're no longer the revolutionaries that
they were. They're now a regime that wants to hold onto power. And in
that sense they were fruit ripe for the plucking by the Saudis."
The thaw culminated in Sudan's March 2015 decision to join the Saudi-led anti-Houthi rebel coalition in Yemen,
which is fighting to restore Yemen's internationally recognized
government after an Iranian-supported Shi'ite militant movement deposed
it in early 2015.
By that point, the NCP had determined that the Saudis had the
unrivaled resources and willingness to secure the regime's long-term
survival. "The Saudis can still outbid the Iranians," says
Fernandez. "The Iranians have technical expertise and other things they
can offer, but they're not swimming in cold hard cash the way the
Saudis are."
(Emmanuel Pene/Agathocle de Syracuse/The Maghreb and Orient Courier)
The move has strategic implications for Iran. Sudan's
partnership was more than just a symbolic victory for Iran, 0r a sign
that the the Islamic Republic's state ideology was capable of resonating
with Sunni Arab Islamists too. It also gave Iran a strategic way-point
for weapons trafficking into both the Gaza Strip and Central and East
Africa.
Sudan was a frequent staging
area for Iranian weapons shipments heading north, to Hamas and
Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza. Sudan gave the Iranian arms industry,
and the Iranian regime, access to regions of strategic and possibly
commercial concern. Suspected Israeli attacks targeted Hamas weapons
shipments or facilities in Sudan in 2009, 2011, and 2014. And as a 2012 study
by Conflict Armaments Research detailed, Iranian munitions have been
found throughout Africa, in places spanning from South Sudan to Cote
D'Ivoire.
Iran also helped seed a Sudanese domestic weapons industry purported
to be the third-largest in Africa, behind only Egypt and South Africa.
According to a 2014 Small Arms Survey report, Iran owns a 35% stake in the Yarmouk industrial facility in Khartoum, which is believed to produce artillery, rocket launchers, and military-grade firearms.
Iran's Yamrouk investment hasn't been cost-free for the Sudanese regime: in October of 2012, the Israeli air force attacked the site, likely in order to destroy Iranian-supplied long-range rockets bound for Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Yarmouk was also cited in a 2006 US diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks for its alleged connection to activities "that have the potential to contribute materially to WMD, missile, or certain other weapons programs in Iran or Syria."
As the Small Arms Survey recounts, Sudanese weapons factories produce a range of armaments,
including light weaponry and small rocket launchers of Iranian design.
Sudan has flown military drones of Iranian origin, and Patrick Megahan, a
research associate for military affairs at the Foundation for Defense
of Democracies, noted in an email to Business Insider that Sudan's state
weapons enterprises had exhibited "a copy of an Iranian remote weapons
station" at an international defense exhibition in Abu Dhabi in early 2015.
But it's still "unclear," he wrote to Business Insider in an email, "whether
the Iranian technicians working in the Sudanese arms factories (some
hundreds of workers, according to reports) can be replaced with local
specialists."
(AP) In
this Friday, Jan. 23, 2015, file photo released by the Saudi Press
Agency, King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud makes his first speech as
king following the death of King Abdullah. Sudan's value
as a strategic asset to Iran, and Iran's role in helping Sudan establish
a domestic arms production capability, suggest that the relationship
between the two countries may continue in some more muted, sub-official
form. There might be some enduring (if informal) cooperation between
officials from the two countries regarding weapons trafficking or
continued Iranian involvement in the arms sector.
"My sense is that we're
going to see Sudan inch away from Iran but Iran will maintain lingering
assets in the country whether Sudan likes it or not," says Jonathan
Schanzer, vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of
Democracies.
But on the geopolitical level,
Saudi Arabia was able to ply away Iran's only Sunni Arab ally — a
country that enjoyed longstanding military and strategic ties with
Tehran.
"It looks
like the Saudis have outmaneuvered the Iranians," Schanzer told
Business Insider. "They pulled a proxy out from under Iran's wing."
The lifeless body of Yemen's top Salafi cleric in the southern port city
of Aden was found disfigured on Sunday hours after he was abducted
following an anti-extremism sermon, security officials told The
Associated Press.
Government forces repelled Shiite rebels from Aden last July, but have
been unable to restore order there ever since. With government forces
now pushing north toward the rebel-held capital, Sanaa, the vacuum in
Aden has given rise to affiliates of extremist groups like al-Qaida and
the Islamic State group, who have grabbed lands and exercised control in
various parts of the city for months.
The influential cleric, Samahan Abdel-Aziz, also known as Sheikh Rawi,
had delivered a fiery sermon against the al-Qaida and IS branches on
Friday, the officials said. His body was found bloodied and bearing
signs of torture in Sheikh Othman, an area largely controlled by
extremists, they added.
Abdel-Aziz was kidnapped by gunmen outside his mosque late Saturday in the pro-government neighborhood of Bureiqa, they said.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not
authorized to talk to the media. They remain neutral in the war that has
splintered the Arab world's poorest country.
Also Sunday, Saudi Arabia's Civil Defense said in a statement that a rocket fired from inside Yemen
toward Saudi Arabia's southern border region of Najran landed on a
Saudi home, killing an 11-year-old child and wounding nine others in the
family. Saudi forces frequently fire rockets at rebel positions in
Yemen from just inside the kingdom's border and the Yemeni rebels
frequently fire ballistic missiles at Saudi border guard positions,
killing dozens of soldiers and civilians.
Yemen's conflict pits a loose array forces fighting on the side of the
internationally recognized government against the Shiite rebels and
troops loyal to a former president, who together control the capital and
much of northern Yemen. A Saudi-led coalition backed by the U.S.
intervened on the government's side last March.
Earlier in the day, Human Rights Watch said the rebels, known as
Houthis, have for months restricted food and medical supplies to Yemen's
third-largest city, Taiz, in what it described in a statement as
"serious violations of international humanitarian law."
"The Houthis are denying necessities to residents of Taiz because they
happen to be living in areas that opposition forces control," said Joe
Stork, deputy Middle East
director at Human Rights Watch. "Seizing property from civilians is
already unlawful, but taking their food and medical supplies is simply
cruel."
The United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Yemen said Saturday his
organization is seeking ways to ensure unconditional access to Taiz, a
city of about 25,000 that has been under Houthi siege and shelling for
months.
World Food Program Deputy Director Adham Musallam said his group managed to bring in enough food supplies for 3,000 families in the city.
Taiz, which lies on the border between northern and southern Yemen,
could be a major turning point in the civil war, potentially cementing
the Houthis' loss of Yemen's south.
———
Associated Press writer Brian Rohan in Cairo contributed to this report.
http://time.com/
Yemen Is the Latest Victim of the Increase in Iran-Saudi Arabia Tension
Hani Mohammed—APA man inspects his house destroyed by Saudi-led airstrikes in Sanaa, Yemen on Jan. 8, 2016.
The Arabian country has become the scene of the Middle East's second proxy war
When an airstrike hit near the Iranian embassy in Sanaa on Friday,
the incident underscored a harsh political reality: Saudi Arabia and
Iran are locked in a spiraling regional showdown, and few places will
suffer more than Yemen.
The renewed tensions that followed Saudi Arabia’s announcement on
Jan. 2 that it executed 47 people, including a leading Shiite cleric,
are adding more fuel to the fighting in Yemen, where nearly 6,000 people
have been killed since Saudi Arabia launched a military campaign in the
country in March 2015.
In reaction to the execution of sheikh Nimr Al-Nimr—a preacher
critical of the Saudi regime—protesters stormed the Saudi embassy in
Tehran. The Saudis countered by severing diplomatic ties with Iran. It
was an escalation in tensions between states engaged in a power struggle
playing out on battlefields across the region.
The fighting in Yemen has already intensified, with residents of the capital, Sanaa, reporting the heaviest bombing to date by Saudi-led warplanes. Peace talks planned for this week have been postponed. An airstrike near the Iranian embassy appears to have struck nearby, although Iran initially accused Saudi Arabia of bombing the compound directly.
The escalation is one illustration of an increasingly lethal rivalry
between Saudi Arabia and Iran, with the two powers backing opposing
factions in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Bahrain.
Some Yemenis see their country as increasingly engulfed by a
confrontation between the two regional powers. The turmoil which began
following Yemen’s 2011 pro-democracy uprising first transformed into
civil war and is now an internationalized conflict, one that continues
to claim the lives of numerous civilians and has plunged millions into a
humanitarian crisis.
“This is a war one year ago you could have—maybe one and a half year
ago to be accurate—you could have solved it domestically. But right now,
even if all Yemenis come to one table and say ‘we want peace’ the
decision is no longer in their hands,” says Farea Al-Muslimi, a Yemeni
analyst and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center,
speaking by phone from Beirut.
“For peace to possibly exist in Yemen, it will have to get at least the consensus of at least Saudi Arabia and Iran,” he says.
The war in Yemen began in the turmoil spawned by a popular uprising
in 2011 against Ali Abdullah Saleh, a U.S. and Saudi-backed autocrat.
Saleh ultimately left power under a transition plan signed in 2011 and
backed by the Gulf Cooperation Council, a group of Arab states. Under
the transition, Saleh’s vice president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi became
president in 2012
The Houthis, Shia tribes from the north of the country that had
fought several wars with the Saleh government, opposed the agreement. In
2014, the Houthis overran Sanaa, and forced Hadi to flee the country on
March 25, 2015.
Backed by the U.S. and flanked by a coalition dominated by Gulf Arab
states, Saudi Arabia launched its war in Yemen the day after Hadi’s
departure. The campaign has exacted an immense human toll.
Over nine months of war, Saudi-led coalition warplanes have bombed
hospitals and weddings. The coalition placed Yemen under a blockade,
cutting vital supplies of food and medicine. Nearly 2,800 civilians have been killed, close to half of the overall death toll, since the Saudi campaign began.
Of course, Saudi Arabia and its allies are not blamed for all of the
casualties, but they stand accused of some of the most grave abuses.
Last week, Human Rights Watch reported that Saudi-led coalition forces dropped cluster bombs on residential areas in Sanaa, an act the group said could amount to a war crime.
Arrayed against the Saudis are the Houthi rebels and their allies
within Yemen. The Houthis are a movement committed to Zaidism, which is
an offshoot of Shiite Islam and aligned with Iran. Some Saleh loyalists
have also entered an alliance of convenience with the Houthis.
The nature and scope of Iranian support for the Houthis is a matter
of debate. Iran is the principal Shiite power in the region whose regime
claims the legacy of the 1979 revolution, which the Houthis are said to
admire. Iranian support for the group, according to officials cited by
Reuters, is reported to include money and weapons. But questions remain
about the scale of that aid. “Iran’s military role is negligible and
Iran can’t ship weapons to the Houthis in large quantities,” said
Alireza Nader, a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation.
In other words, while both Saudi Arabia and Iran are involved in
Yemen, their involvement is imbalanced. Al-Muslimi, the Yemeni analyst
said, “If Saudi suddenly stops supporting Hadi, how long does he have in
power? Maybe a few days a few days? A few weeks maximum, but if the
Iranians stop supporting the Houthis, I think they’ve got at least a few
years in power,” he said. “They’re a group that you cannot ultimately
deny their local roots.”
But Iran could be tempted to exploit the asymmetrical dynamic in
Yemen, playing the role of the spoiler. In Yemen, the two rivals occupy
the opposite of the roles they play in Syria, where Iran backs the
regime and the Saudis support some rebel groups.
“Iran’s role in Yemen remains limited and low-cost. But the gloves
are off now. If the Saudis double down on turning Syria into Iran’s
Vietnam, the Iranians could try to do the same with Yemen. Their
options, however, are as limited as access is to Yemen is restricted,”
said Ali Vaez, a senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group.
And the Saudi-led coalition has taken extraordinary measures to limit
that access. In April 2015, when an Iranian jet ignored orders to turn
back from the Yemeni capital, coalition jets bombed the runways at Sanaa’s airport.
Meanwhile, with the conflict grinding on and the Saudi and
coalition-imposed blockade limiting supplies of food, fuel, and
medicine, the reality of the Saudi-Iranian conflagration is one of daily
suffering for Yemenis. “It will be a larger catastrophe,” says
Al-Muslimi.
http://www.cnn.com/
(CNN)The
fallout of Saudi Arabia's execution of a Shiite cleric is spreading
beyond a spat between the Saudis and Iranians, as other Middle East
nations chose sides Monday and world powers Russia and China weighed in.
Relations between Saudi Arabia
and Iran -- two Middle Eastern powerhouses -- quickly deteriorated
following Riyadh's execution of Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr Saturday.
Hours
after the death sentence was carried out, protesters in Shiite-majority
Iran attacked the Saudi Embassy in Tehran. The Saudis cut diplomatic
relations with Iran over the attack on its embassy.
Officials from both countries defended their positions Monday and showed no sign of backing down.
Saudi Arabia suspended all flights to and from Iran. It also sent a letter to the U.N. Security Council accusing Iranian authorities of failing in their duties to protect the Saudi embassy.
Jaberi
Ansari, a spokesman for Iran's foreign ministry, said his country is
committed to protecting diplomatic missions and reiterated that no Saudi
diplomats were harmed -- or even present -- during the attack.
He accused Saudi Arabia of "looking for some excuses to pursue its own unwise policies to further tension in the region."
Meanwhile, some nations picked sides while others called for calm.
Bahrain
announced Monday that it was severing diplomatic ties with Iran, citing
Tehran's "blatant and dangerous interference" in Bahrain and other Arab
countries.
The United Arab Emirates
said it was "downgrading" its diplomatic relations with Iran. The UAE
recalled its ambassador in Tehran and said it would also reduce the
number of diplomats stationed in Iran, according to state news agency
WAM. A government statement said the UAE"has taken
this exceptional step in light of Iran's ongoing interference in
internal (Gulf Cooperation Council) and Arab affairs that has recently
reached unprecedented levels."
The
diplomatic row spread to Africa, where Sudan -- a majority Sunni Muslim
country -- expelled the Iranian ambassador and the entire Iranian
diplomatic mission in the country. Sudan also recalled its ambassador
from Iran.
The Saudi government
announced the Sudanese move, saying Sudan acted because of "the Iranian
interference in the region through a sectarian approach."
Russia
and China, two of the biggest geopolitical players in the hemisphere,
released statements calling for restraint between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
"Moscow is concerned about escalation
of the situation in the Middle East with participation of the key
regional players," the Russian foreign ministry said Monday. Russia
called on the Saudis and Iranians to "show restraint and to avoid any
steps that might escalate the situation and raise tensions including
interreligious ones."
China's foreign
ministry said it is paying close attention to the events and hopes "all
parties can remain calm and restrained, use dialogue and negotiations to
properly resolve differences, and work together to safeguard the
region's peace and stability."
It
had -- even before Saudi Arabia announced its decision to cut ties with
Iran, said Fawaz Gerges, chair of contemporary Middle Eastern studies
at the London School of Economics.
"Their conflict is playing out on Arab streets big time," he said.
Already
the two nations were on opposite sides of conflicts in Syria, Iraq,
Yemen, Bahrain and Lebanon. Now, he said, the question is how much worse
things might get.
"The situation is
extremely volatile between the two most powerful states in the Gulf,
Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia and Shiite-dominated Iran. You have a war
of words. You have war by proxies ... This really could get very ugly
and dangerous in the next few weeks and next few months," Gerges said.
It's
possible a more direct military conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran
could erupt, said retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, a CNN military
analyst.
"That's the key issue," he said. "This is spiraling very quickly."
Why are there tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia?
It's nothing new that the two countries aren't seeing eye to eye.
"Iran
and Saudi Arabia are neither natural allies nor natural enemies, but
natural rivals who have long competed as major oil producers and
self-proclaimed defenders of Shia and Sunni Islam, respectively,"
University of South Florida Professor Mohsen M. Milani wrote in an analysis for CNN in 2011.
Both Saudi Arabia and Iran are painting themselves as victims as tensions between them escalate, Gerges said.
"What
you have is not only a clash of narratives, you have basically a huge
divide, a war by proxy, a cold war taking place between Saudi Arabia and
Iran," he said. "It's a war about geopolitics. It's about power. It's
about influence."
Saudi Arabia executions spark protests in Iran02:23
It
wasn't long before protesters attacked the Saudi embassy in Tehran,
hurling Molotov cocktails and cheering as the building caught fire.
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called for divine revenge
against Saudi Arabia.
"It was almost
inevitable that this (the severing of diplomatic relations) would
follow, especially since the response from Iran, completely expectedly,
was full of rage, and Iran's supreme leader essentially summoned the
wrath of God against Saudi Arabia," said Bobby Ghosh, a CNN global
affairs analyst and managing editor of Quartz.
But
analysts say looking within Iran and Saudi Arabia gives a greater
understanding of why both countries have an interest in fueling the
rivalry.
"There are domestic reasons
for both of these countries right now to refuse to pull punches against
each other," said Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group consulting
firm.
Saudi Arabia, he said, is
dealing with plummeting oil prices and an internal succession battle
over who will next take the throne.
Saudi Arabia drops generation in succession02:44
Iran,
he said, needs a way to block reformists and Western advances in light
of the recent nuclear deal. For both sides, he said, nationalist
behavior can score points at home.
"That," Bremmer said, "makes this an incredibly dangerous conflict."
What can we expect to see in the coming days?
Don't expect the heated rhetoric to die down any time soon, analysts said.
"This is Saudi Arabia saying, 'The gloves are off,'" Ghosh said.
Gerges said that could ripple across the region.
"We
were hoping that a diplomatic solution could be found to the Syrian
crisis in the next few months. Forget about it," he said.
"We
were hoping for a diplomatic solution in Yemen. Forget about it. ...
Here, you have the two most powerful Islamic states in the heart of the
Middle East now basically waging a direct confrontation, as opposed to
an indirect war by proxy, so ... we should be really alarmed at the
escalation of the confrontation."
CORRECTION:
A previous version of this story incorrectly identified the country
that executed Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr. Saudi Arabia executed him.
http://theweek.com/
There are big changes underway in Saudi Arabia
The WeekStaff
The House of Saud is crushing dissent and cutting
benefits at home, while intervening militarily abroad. Why? Here's
everything you need to know:
Are the Saudis nervous?
Very. The
royal family feels threats from within the country and without, as the
price of oil plunges, the predominantly young population grows restless,
and Saudi Arabia's bitter rival, Shiite Iran, seeks to expand its
influence throughout the region. The Saudis were also deeply alarmed by
the Arab Spring, which saw long-established regimes crumble; the U.S.'s
nuclear deal with Iran; and the rise of ISIS. Since King Salman took the
throne a year ago, Saudi authorities have intensified government
repression to a severe degree. New counterterrorism legislation, enacted
shortly before he took power, defines terrorism as any act with
criminal intent that undermines public order, as well as any "deviant
thought" that questions Wahhabism, the fundamentalist sect of Sunni
Islam that dominates all aspects of Saudi life.
What is the impact of this law?
Any
form of dissent is being prosecuted as a crime. Executions are at a
two-decade high, with more than 150 public beheadings in 2015 and 47 in
just the first week of this year — including the execution of a
prominent Shiite cleric (see below), an act that led
Iran to sever diplomatic ties. For urging Saudi society to be more
liberal and secular, prominent blogger Raif Badawi was flogged, and his
lawyer was jailed for defending him. When the lawyer's wife complained
on Twitter about his arrest, she was jailed, too.
Who's pushing this crackdown?
A new
group of leaders. The House of Saud has been led by elderly sons of
modern Saudi Arabia's founder, Ibn Saud, for many decades. But King
Salman, 80, has chosen not to name one of his younger half-brothers as
his likely successor. Instead, he appointed his son Mohammed bin Salman
al Saud, 30, as deputy crown prince and defense minister — and Mohammed
is clearly the real power behind the throne. Unlike the older,
U.S.-educated generation, Mohammed went to a Saudi university, has had
little exposure to Western culture, and has "a reputation for arrogance
and ruthlessness," says Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution.
What has Mohammed done?
The young
prince plunged straight into a war in Yemen. "The previous, cautious
diplomatic stance of older leaders within the royal family is being
replaced by a new, impulsive policy of intervention," said a report from
the German foreign intelligence service BND. Saudi Arabia is locked in a
struggle with Iran for primacy in the Middle East. The rise of a Shiite
government in Iraq brought that country firmly into the Iranian camp,
and Lebanon was already there. The conflict in Syria has become a proxy
war between the Assad regime, backed by Iran, and militias funded by the
Saudis. So when Shiite Houthi militants toppled the Yemeni government,
Mohammed moved in swiftly to prevent his country from being bookended by
Shiite powers. Saudi airstrikes have killed thousands of Yemeni
civilians, but the prince has been undeterred.
What about domestic policy?
Mohammed
says he plans sweeping, market-based economic reforms. For 80 years, the
Saudi economy has been based almost entirely on oil revenue. High oil
prices brought in enormous wealth, which enables the government to fund a
generous welfare state without levying any income tax. Most actual work
is done by foreigners — a vast army of nearly nine million immigrants
from South Asia and the Middle East who serve some 18 million Saudis.
Saudis are employed largely in the bloated public sector, many of them
drawing fat salaries for little work. But this model is becoming
unsustainable. People under 25 make up more than half the population,
and there aren't enough jobs for them as they reach working age. Worse,
the collapse in oil prices — from $115 a barrel in 2014 to under $35 now
— means there isn't enough money flowing in to sustain benefits at such
generous levels.
Why not?
In the past, when oil prices
have fallen, the Saudis have cut production to raise them. But this
time, they've kept pumping with abandon. The goal is to preserve Saudi
market share by driving higher-cost oil producers — notably the U.S.
fracking industry — out of business. But the sharp drop in revenue
requires painful cuts to the subsidies and expense accounts that so many
Saudis rely on.
How will Saudis react to those cuts?
That's
one of the things worrying the royal family. The Saudi people have long
had a tacit agreement with their rulers: In return for a cushy life and
generous benefits, they put up with an almost total lack of political
freedom or say in their own government. Many Saudis are rich enough to
skip off to Bahrain or Dubai for the weekend, where they can drink
alcohol and the women can shed their burqas. Most, though, are
middle-class, and around one-fifth are actually poor, and if Mohammed
makes good on his pledge to replace the free health care with an
insurance-based system and partially privatize education, they will
suffer. "With a decline in social spending and a reduction in
subsidies," says analyst Alberto Gallo, "comes the risk of rising
domestic turmoil."
The oppressed Shiite minority
The Saudi regime
said it executed Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr for terrorism, but critics
said the real reason was his activism in organizing the Shiite minority
and denouncing the House of Saud. Shiites make up 15 percent of the
population in Saudi Arabia, and they are strongly discriminated against.
They are excluded from the cushy government jobs, and Saudi television
and Saudi clerics routinely spread anti-Shiite propaganda. For three
years, activists in the oil-rich eastern province of al-Ahsa, abutting
Shiite-majority Bahrain, have been protesting, sometimes violently. "You
are now standing on top of oil fields that feed the whole world,"
Shiite activist Fathil Al Safwani told the BBC. "But we see nothing of
it. Poverty, hunger, no honor, no political freedom, we have nothing."
By executing Nimr, the House of Saud sent a clear signal that nothing
will change; indeed, even complaining about anti-Shiite discrimination
will get you beheaded.
What’s the Saudi-Iran Feud Really About?
The Sunni-Shiite divide doesn’t explain it, according to one expert.
Iraqi Shiites protest Saudi Arabia's execution of the Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr.Khalid al Mousily / Reuters
In recent days, news of Saudi Arabia’s execution of the Shia leader Nimr al-Nimr, and the diplomatic clashes
with Iran that followed, has often been accompanied by an explanation
that, in simplified form, goes something like this: The schism between
Sunni and Shia Islam is an ancient one,
expressed today in part through the rivalry between Sunni Saudi Arabia
and Shia Iran. Those two countries are intractable enemies—“fire and
dynamite,” as one Saudi journalist memorably described them. Their proxy battles and jockeying for leadership of the Muslim world have ravaged the Middle East and, as has been vividly illustrated this week, could yet ravage it further.
Frederic Wehrey doesn’t buy that narrative. A scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who researches
identity politics in the Persian Gulf, Wehrey believes the execution of
Nimr, rather than being the latest salvo in the Saudi-Iran shadow war,
was primarily motivated by domestic politics in Saudi Arabia.
Specifically, the Saudi royal family wanted to appease powerful Sunni
clerics angered by the kingdom’s cooperation with the United States in
the fight against ISIS, a Sunni jihadist group. Nimr,
Wehrey pointed out in an interview, was executed along with dozens of
Sunni jihadists. To Wehrey’s knowledge, the Shia cleric never called for
armed insurrection against the state (as the state alleged he did). But
Nimr’s biting condemnations of the royal family made him an “easy
target for the House of Saud to throw in and dispose of, and they could
say to their Sunni constituents, ‘Look, we’re not being soft on Iran,
we’re not abandoning the Sunnis even though we’re fighting ISIS.’”
(Wehrey, who in 2013 visited
the village in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province where Nimr preached
until his arrest in 2011, characterized the cleric as a “populist” who
didn’t appear to be a full-throated supporter of Iran. Nimr, he said,
advocated not just an end to discrimination against Saudi Arabia’s
minority Shiites, but also economic development for the downtrodden
community where he worked.)
Wehrey also challenged the idea that Iran and Saudi
Arabia are the puppet masters of the region’s sectarian struggles—from
Syria and Iraq to Yemen and Lebanon—arguing that the two countries are
just as much at the whim of forces well beyond their control.
“When
you have the regional order collapsing, regional states are collapsing,
these two oil-rich powers—each of which claims to be a leader of the
Islamic world and a leader of the Middle East—are drawn into the
vacuum,” he told me.
Nor, he added, can the Sunni-Shiite split
fully or even largely explain hostilities between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
As Wehrey and several coauthors detailed in a 2009 study,
the Saudi-Iranian relationship has actually oscillated between
cooperation, competition, and confrontation in recent decades, even as
religious differences between the two nations have remained constant.
“This
notion that these two powers are predestined for immutable rivalry
because of the ancient Persian-Arab divide or the ancient Sunni-Shiite
divide—that can only get us so far,” he said.
Likewise,
in Wehrey’s view, Sunni-Shiite tensions are not some intrinsic
dimension of the Middle East; instead, they’re the product of a series
of tectonic shifts in the region’s power politics, which in turn have
prompted state (and, increasingly, non-state) actors to advance their
interests by manipulating religious sentiments. What matters most in
this story of upheaval is the interplay between government institutions
and individual identity, he argues, not religion per se.“The
reasons these religious differences get inflamed or get sectarianized
is because of a breakdown of governance, a breakdown of economic
distribution,” Wehrey asserted. “There have been plenty of times in the
Middle East when these differences have been subsumed by other
identities.”
According to Wehrey, we’re currently witnessing a
“third wave” of sectarianism brought on by the Syrian Civil War and the
ascent of ISIS, and accentuated by social media. The first wave followed
Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979 and Saudi Arabia’s decision to
promote the fundamentalist Salafist strain
of Sunni Islam to counter Tehran’s Shia ideology. The second gathered
force in the power vacuum resulting from Saddam Hussein’s ouster in Iraq
in 2003, and swelled amid the rise of Sunni jihadism, the renewed
assertiveness of Iran, and the spread of the Internet.
“What I
think is so dangerous about this wave of sectarianism that we’re in
right now ... is that it has escaped the ability of states to manage
it,” Wehrey told me.
An edited and condensed transcript of my conversation with Wehrey follows. Uri Friedman:
We hear rumblings from time to time about a Saudi-Iran proxy war—the
two countries supporting opposite sides of conflicts in Syria, in Yemen,
in Lebanon, and elsewhere in the region. Is the news surrounding Nimr’s
execution an example of the shadow war coming above the surface and
suddenly being evident to people? Frederic Wehrey:
I would not place the execution in the context of a proxy war or shadow
war, because Iran was not waging a proxy war inside Saudi Arabia or the
Gulf. … Since the 1990s, Iran has pulled back from really meddling in
the Gulf and trying to stir up violence and unrest in the Gulf. …
When
you have the regional order collapsing, regional states are collapsing,
these two oil-rich powers—each of which claims to be a leader of the
Islamic world and a leader of the Middle East—are drawn into the vacuum,
for a variety of reasons. A lot of it is rooted in the domestic
politics of each country. In Iran, you have a hardline Revolutionary
Guard clique that is trying to assert itself vis-à-vis the pragmatists
that have just signed the nuclear deal [with world powers], so they’re
trying to assert themselves on the regional front by saying, “We still
are a power to be reckoned with.” They’re asserting themselves in these
regional conflicts. In Saudi Arabia, there’s this new king ... who is
using these regional wars as a way to bolster his bona fides and raise
his nationalist profile and build support. We can’t really separate the
regional adventurism from the domestic politics of each country.
But
this notion that these two powers are predestined for immutable rivalry
because of the ancient Persian-Arab divide or the ancient Sunni-Shiite
divide—that can only get us so far, because there’s been periods where
[Iran and Saudi Arabia have] been on the same sides of conflicts,
they’ve cooperated in a chilly manner—never warm. During the Cold War,
they were both monarchies, they both faced a threat from a communist
insurgency, [and]from [Egyptian President Gamel Abdel] Nasser. They cooperated there.
Now,
what [the rivalry is] really about is different styles of government.
When the Iranian regime came to power, [Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini was
against monarchy, he promised to overturn monarchy; the Saudis are a
monarchy. It’s also about regional legitimacy—who speaks for Muslims.
And I think there was a period, not so much now, but around 2006, where
Iran seemed to be stealing the thunder from the Saudis on issues that
matter to the Arab street … [like] Palestine, standing up to the West,
fighting the American occupation in Iraq. Iran was really seizing the
day on all those issues—especially during the 2006 Lebanon War, where
you had Arabs cheering in the street for this Iranian-backed proxy group
[Hezbollah]. There was this famous poll that was taken in Cairo where
[the pollsters asked] “Who’s the most popular Arab leader?” and the
average Egyptian on the street said it’s [Iranian President Mahmoud]
Ahmadinejad. We’re well past that now because now Iran is being forced
into a sectarian mode, the mask is off, they are clearly against
Sunnis—you could argue they’re against Arabs.Friedman:
Can you go into more detail about the domestic component of the
execution of Nimr? Put yourself in the House of Saud—in the head of King
Salman. What do you think was the primary motivation for the execution? Wehrey:
At the time when Nimr was sentenced to death, the Saudis had just
signed up for the anti-ISIS coalition with the Americans, and so that
put them in a difficult position vis-à-vis their Sunni clerical
constituency. The Sunni clerics have always said, “Well, ISIS is kind of
bad, but at least ISIS is standing up to the Shias in Iran,” and there
was some question about the royal family [being] allied with the
Americans against ISIS. Now, there is a real threat to the royal family
from the Sunni militants, from Sunni jihadists. The Saudi regime decides
to execute all of these Sunni criminals. To soften the blow, they have
to throw in a couple Shia. That’s the way I see this. They lumped it all
together, they did it all at once, because Nimr has been such an object
of hatred and venom for the Sunni clerics. He was an easy target for
the House of Saud to throw in and dispose of, and they could say to
their Sunni constituents, “Look, we’re not being soft on Iran, we’re not
abandoning the Sunnis even though we’re fighting ISIS.” It’s this
sectarian balancing. …
Another point we should emphasize is that
it’s been tremendously useful to the Saudis to inflate the Iranian
threat as a way to ingratiate themselves with the U.S., as a way to
distract from their own failings at domestic governance, to rally the
rest of the Gulf into a state of emergency. The sense that there’s this
external threat—the Gulf states need to form this union and the Saudis
are best-equipped to lead it—it’s a classic nationalist strategy: Create
this external enemy to deflect attention from domestic pressures and
challenges. …
Iran
definitely is backing proxies in Syria, definitely in Lebanon, but in
the Gulf the real roots of Shia unrest are local, they are not Iranian
proxies. There may be a few fringe, marginal groups that receive Iranian
support, but the majority of the dissidents and the protesters are
homegrown, and many of them want change within the system. They’re not
seeking to overthrow the government—they want reforms that are
non-sectarian, constitutional, releas[ing] political prisoners, economic
reform. That’s what I heard when I was in the Eastern Province. …Friedman:
In the coverage of the Iran-Saudi spat over the last few days, there’s
been a lot of talk about the Sunni-Shia struggle, and that these
countries are the two titans of that struggle. To what extent do you
think that sectarian framing of the conflict is valuable versus a red
herring? Wehrey: We are living in a sectarian age
where sectarianism has resonance. There are people, there are elites,
there are media, there are clerics that peddle it, that inflame it, but
they would not be doing so if there weren’t an appetite for it. It
matters in the sense that this is the way that identities are being
constituted with the breakdown of institutions, the breakdown of
governments; people are turning to these identities. And you have these
two regional powers that are inserting themselves into conflicts—that
are backing proxies that are themselves very sectarian.
Does that
mean that [officials are] sitting in Tehran and saying, “We need to
think about how to safeguard Shia in the region?” I don’t think they
really care, and I think statesmen and politicians and policymakers view
the region in more cold, realist, power-political ways, and I think
they see a vacuum, they see a rival. They’re using sectarianism as a way
to advance interests, especially the Saudis. The Iranians have always
downplayed sectarianism because if you’re a Shia minority in the Sunni
world, it doesn’t serve your interests to highlight the sectarian
divide, because that means you’re always going to be in the minority.
[The Iranians] have always said that, “We want to speak for all Muslims,
we advance all Muslims,” or they play the class card. They say, “We
advance the interests of the oppressed.” The oppressed can be
Palestinians, the oppressed can be Bahrainis. It just so happens that
the oppressed in many regions are in fact the Shia. But that logic
hasn’t really helped them with Syria, because they’re backing a [Shia]
government that is killing its own. …
I don’t doubt there are
[Saudi] royals that genuinely hate the Shia and are sectarian, but I
think from a political and policy perspective, they are looking at the
region in realist terms and they also see an expediency to sectarianism.
And the actors that they’re backing on the ground in these places are
very sectarian—are Salafis, are Sunni jihadists. …What
I think is so dangerous about this wave of sectarianism that we’re in
right now—and I call it “third-wave sectarianism”—is that it has escaped
the ability of states to manage it. There was this notion—I think [U.S.
President Barack] Obama may have alluded to it—that if only Iran and
Saudi Arabia were to bridge their differences and reach an
accommodation, the sectarianism in the region would go away. And that’s
true to a certain extent, maybe the temperature would be lowered a bit.
But what’s happening on the ground in Iraq, and the struggle for local
power between Sunnis and Shias, is very real, and it’s beyond the
ability of Saudi Arabia and Iran to stop or manage or maybe control.
Now
does that mean it’s all about these two rival sects of Islam? I think a
lot of this is about governance, it’s about access to economic
resources, it’s about the center and the periphery, it’s about class.
There are other ways of looking at it. The reasons these religious
differences get inflamed or get sectarianized is because of a breakdown
of governance, a breakdown of economic distribution. There have been
plenty of times in the Middle East when these differences have been
subsumed by other identities. Some of the early members of [Iraq’s
Sunni-dominated] Baath Party were Shia. The Saudis did in fact back the
Shia candidate in the [2010] Iraqi elections, [Ayad] Allawi. Iran is
backing Hamas, which is a Sunni power. There are examples of this theory
collapsing elsewhere.
The U.S. needs to not get drawn
into talking about Shia-Sunni reconciliation. The U.S. needs to focus on
governance in the region and restoring the broken system. How does the
region meet the needs of its citizens? If there were more open
societies, if governments were more representative. I heard this in the
Gulf: “If we had a more representative political system, people wouldn’t
be drawn into these Sunni-Shia identities. They would matter less,
there would be other forms of affiliation.” But you have ruling families
in the region that find it very expedient to play the sectarian card to
keep power.Friedman: If we’re currently experiencing “third-wave sectarianism,” what were the first two waves? Wehrey:
I think the first wave was from 1979 up until the 1990s, and that was
where you had the Iranian Revolution, which was a real threat to the
Sunni system—to the Sunni monarchies and the Sunni governments—and it
sparked a counter-reaction led by Saudi Arabia that was sectarian. So
the Saudis thought, “What’s the best way to marginalize and isolate the
Iranian threat?” Well, it’s to whip up a Sunni sense of identity and
play up [the fundamentalist movement known as] Salafism. This is when
you have the emergence or the mushrooming of Salafism as a counterweight
to Iranian ideology; a lot of the Saudi religious tracts that are
anti-Shia that we see right now originated from that period. It was an
attempt to demonize and exclude Iran as an aberration from the
mainstream. There was [then a] lowering of tensions, a rapprochement
between Iran and Saudi Arabia, in the 1990s.
I think the second
wave was with the fall of Saddam in Iraq and later with the rise of an
aggressive Iran under Ahmadinejad in 2005, which was seen in Arab
capitals as part two of the Iranian Revolution. The removal of Saddam as
an Arab buffer, the breakdown of an Arab state, created this vacuum.
You also had the rise of jihadism. The second wave is when you start to
have non-state actors using sectarianism. You have [al-Qaeda in Iraq
leader] Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, you have Hezbollah in Lebanon. This also
coincided with social media. ... [In the past] if there was a massacre
of Shia in one corner of the region, maybe people didn’t know about it.
Maybe they saw it later on TV, and then you had Al Jazeera, and now you
have YouTube, now you have Twitter, so it’s instantaneous. It creates a
form of instantaneous participation in an event that exacerbates
feelings of partisanship among sects. A Sunni that is watching the
killing of Sunni in Bahrain, that is watching the killing of Sunnis in
Fallujah, Iraq, it creates a shared affinity and it gives a platform for
very sectarian voices to propagate their vitriol. …The
third wave was post-Arab Spring. The Syria conflict was this vortex of
sectarianism that really sectarianized the Arab Spring. The Arab
uprisings were not about sectarian grievances—even in [the Shiite-led
protests in] Bahrain, many of the grievances were about housing, about
reform, and there were some Sunnis that participated. Certainly there
were Shia. The Arab Spring really took a nosedive with Syria and then,
of course, the Islamic State. We know where we’re at with that. Friedman:
You often hear commentary that Iran and Saudi Arabia are orchestrating
turmoil and local actors in the Middle East—that they’re inflaming
sectarian conflicts. But you seem to be describing both countries as
subject to forces they don’t totally control anymore and responding to
larger regional breakdowns, without necessarily the agency that some
people ascribe to them. Wehrey: It’s a
misunderstanding of how power politics works in the Middle East to
ascribe authority or control to any power to control events on the
ground. Yes, the Iranians have [the ability] to train and equip and
control these proxies, but I can tell you from working in Iraq and
having followed this Iranian regional power from the Pentagon, that
that’s not always the case—that the Iranians have been surprised,
frustrated, flummoxed, angry at the way things have happened on the
ground. And the same thing with the Saudis. The Saudis have even less of
an institutional capability to create and manage proxies. They
typically just distribute cash, whereas the Iranians at least have
advisors on the ground. …
I don’t think this is being
stage-managed by these two powers. The analogy there is the Cold War. It
wasn’t like the Kremlin was central for everything. We [Americans]
tended to have that mistaken view, but many of [the real players] were
autonomous actors across the Third World.
By Michael Knights
Best Defense guest columnist
When asked to address the question of what a Saudi-Iran war would
look like, my first instinct is to ask the reader to look around because
it is already happening. As the futurist William Gibson noted, “the
future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
Already, Saudi Arabia and Iran are killing each other’s proxies, and
indirectly are killing each other’s advisors and troops, in Yemen,
Syria, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia’s Shiite Eastern Province.
The future is likely to look similar. The existing pattern will
intensify, eventually spill over in a short, sharp direct clash, and
then sink back down again to the level of proxy wars in other people’s
territories.
The preferred method of conflict between these states has for a long time been proxy warfare. Since its devastating eight-year war against Iraq, the leadership in Tehran has demonstrated a strong preference for acting through proxies like
Lebanese Hezbollah, the Iraqi Shiite militias, and Hamas. Lacking a
strong military for most of its existence, the state of Saudi Arabia has
likewise used proxy warfare to strike painful blows against its enemies, notably against Egypt’s occupation forces in the 1962-1970 Yemeni civil war and against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Both these players try to get others to do most of their fighting and dying for them.
Iran’s powerful support for Shiite militias is well-documented.
Lebanese Hezbollah has evolved into a central pillar of Iran’s
retaliatory capability against Israel, and more recently has answered
Iran’s call to provide reliable ground forces to prop up the Assad
regime in Syria. Lebanese Hezbollah is no militia:
it has Zelzal-1 missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv. Hezbollah has
large stocks of advanced anti-tank guided missiles and
Explosively-Formed Penetrator (EFP) roadside bombs capable of
penetrating any Israeli tank. Iran as also supplied Hezbollah with
advanced C-802 anti-shipping missiles, which crippled an Israeli warship
in 2006, and most recently with even more advanced Yakhont anti-ship missiles.
Now Iran seems to have provided its Shiite Houthi allies with C-802 missiles,
which have been used in a number of attacks on United Arab Emirates
(UAE) warships in the Saudi-led war in Yemen. The Houthis are inflicting
heavy damage on the Saudi military, destroying
scores of U.S.-supplied main battle tanks and other armoured vehicles
using Iranian-provided anti-tank guided missiles. Iran’s proxies are
seizing terrain in southern Saudi Arabia and lobbing Scud missiles at
military bases deep within the kingdom.
In Iraq the Iranian-backed militias have been provided with Iranian air support, artillery, electronic warfare equipment and medical support. Badr,
the main Shiite militia in Iraq, fought as a military division in the
Iranian order of battle during the Iran-Iraq War. Badr now leads Iraq’s
largest security institution, the half-million Ministry of Interior, and
the Shia militias are being formed into a proto-ministry that resembles their patron, Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC).
The “Hezbollah-ization” of two key regional states is well-underway.
Most worryingly for Saudi Arabia the Iranian bloc is demonstrating a
disregard for long-lasting “red lines” over Bahrain and Saudi Arabia’s
oil-rich Eastern Province, which has a majority Shiite population. In
2011 Saudi Arabia and the UAE deployed scores of main battle tanks and armoured personnel carriers to
directly safeguard the Bahraini royal family in the face of Arab spring
uprisings. This robust move seemed to deeply shake Tehran, triggering
the hapless Iranian plot to
assassinate Adel Jubeir, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United
States. In the last year Iran seems to have been acting increasoingly
recklessly in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province. Iraqi Shiite
militias like Badr spin-off Kataib Hezbollah have worked with
Iranian-backed cells in Bahrain and Eastern Province to import advanced EFP munitions in
large numbers with the evident intent of giving Shia communities the
ability to self-defend against future Saudi military crackdowns. This
kind of game-changing behaviour by Tehran is undoubtedly one reason the
Saudi government chose to recently execute Eastern Province Shia
dissident Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.
Long before the current hullabaloo Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni Gulf States have been slowly cultivating their own network of military proxies.
The first major recipient of Gulf military support was the
Saudi-supported Lebanese government. The UAE sent nine fully-armed and
crewed SA-342L Gazelle helicopters to help the Lebanese government crush
Al-Qaeda-linked Fatah al-Islam at Tripoli’s Nahr al-Bared refugee camp
in May 2007. In 2009, a year after Saudi’s King Abdullah called for the
U.S. to “cut the head off the snake” by
bombing Iran, Riyadh launched a nine-week military campaign against the
Houthi rebels in northern Yemen, losing 137 troops. This triggered a
major intensification of Saudi Arabian, Jordanian and UAE provision of
training, salaries, armored vehicles, and weapons to anti-Houthi
militias in northern Yemen. Now the Gulf States and other allies like
Pakistan and Somalia are building up new proxy forces in Yemen to assist
in the Saudi-led military campaign against the Houthis.
So what happens next? Saudi and Iran will want to test and hurt each other, signal limits, but not suffer mutual destruction.
Iran will begin to stir violence in Eastern Province and Bahrain, and
it may try harder to fight supplies through to Yemen by sea by
bolstering Houthi coastal missile batteries.
The next stage in the Saudi Arabian war with Iran will be an
intensification of the proxy war in Syria. This is where Riyadh plans to
fight its main battle against Iran. Then Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister
Prince Saud al-Faisal signaled as far back as March 2012 that “the arming of the [Syrian] opposition is a duty.” Already Saudi, Qatari and Turkish support has allowed rebels in northwestern Syria to inflict severe armor losses on pro-Assad forces using anti-tank guided missiles.
The provision of anti-aircraft missiles may be next. The U.S.-led
coalition seems to be backing away from the morally-ambiguous war west
of the Euphrates in Syria, where the main opposition to the Islamic
State and Assad are radical Salafists that Western nations cannot
engage. But Saudi Arabia and its allies have been doing exactly this in
Yemen for half a decade and are now likely to take over the war west of
the Euphrates in Syria. Riyadh now seems to view Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula as a lesser evil to
the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen: how soon before it views “moderate
splinters” of the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra the same way in
western Syria?
Though neither Saudi Arabian nor Iran envisage an open conventional
war between them — a result that Saudi Arabia’s crown price and defence
minister Prince Mohammed bin Salman recently terms “a major catastrophe” —
there is always the potential for frontier skirmishes on their shared
littoral borders and in the neutral space of the Gulf. Shared gas fields
and disputed islands are obvious touchpoints. Iran might test missiles
closer and closer to Gulf sea-lanes and coasts. Aerial patrols might
begin to test each other: this happened during the Iran-Iraq War along
the so-called “Fahd Line” until a Saudi interceptor shot down two
Iranian fighter aircraft in 1984. Iran (or the Gulf States) could
undertake tit-for-tat harassment, boarding or even deniable use of naval
mines against each other’s trade routes. (Iran also used this tactic in
the 1980s). Cyberwarfare is a likely deniable weapon of choice for both
sides also.
At some point in the coming years we are likely to see both sides
miscalculate and unleash a very short, very sharp burst of military
force against each other. This will be a wake-up call. Both Iran and the
Gulf States are far more powerfully armed than they were during the Iran-Iraq War.
The advanced air forces of the Saudis and their key ally the UAE are
now capable of destroying practically all Iran’s port facilities, oil
loading terminals and key industries using stand-off precision-guided
munitions. Iran can shower the Gulf coastline with multitudinous
unguided rockets and a higher concentration of guided long-range
missiles than ever before. In 1988 the Iranian navy was destroyed by the
United States in a single day of combat — Operation Praying Mantis.
Even a day or two of such “push-button warfare” would serve as a
reminder to both sides of their overriding imperative to avoid direct
conflict and to keep their conflict limited to the territories of
unfortunate third-parties.
Michael Knights is
the Lafer Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He
has worked on the military balance between Iran and the Gulf States for
over twenty years.
Photo credit: Lintao Zhang/Getty Images
http://www.businessinsider.com/
The Saudis are 'drawing lines in the sand' — and showing they are serious about confronting Iran
Kevin Lamarque/ReutersUS
President Barack Obama meets with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Nayef, center, at the White
House on May 13, 2015. At left is Saudi
Foreign Minister Adel Al Jubeir.
Saudi Arabia warned its citizens against traveling
to Lebanon on Tuesday after one of its biggest allies, the United Arab
Emirates, banned travel to Lebanon altogether.
The move, which followed the Kingdom's decision last week to halt $4 billion in funding for Lebanese security forces, shows that the Saudis "appear to have had enough," said Tony
Badran, a researcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies
specializing in the military and political affairs of the Levant.
"Saudi Arabia is signaling that they're not going to bankroll
an effective Iranian satrapy that's actively aligned against them,"
Badran told Business Insider on Tuesday.
That satrapy is Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant organization sending
fighters to Syria to support Iran-backed Shi'ite militias battling
Saudi-backed Sunni rebel groups that oppose Syrian President Bashar
Assad. One of Hezbollah's staunchest allies is the right-wing Christian
Free Patriotic Movement, headed by Lebanese Foreign Minister Gibran
Bassil.
Majed Jaber/ReutersSaudi
Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir speaks during a joint news conference
with his Jordanian counterpart Nasser Judeh at the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs in Amman, Jordan, July 9, 2015.
Saudi Arabia cut diplomatic ties with Iran
earlier this year, after the Saudi embassy in Tehran was attacked by
protestors decrying Riyadh's decision to execute a prominent Shi'ite
cleric.
Lebanon has long had a strong relationship with Saudi Arabia, but Bassil apparently took Iran's side in the most recent spat between Tehran and Riyadh.
Elie Fawaz, writing for the Lebanese news outlet NOW,
notes that the Saudis have withdrawn aid because of how state
institutions are, "one way or another, support[ing] Hezbollah's military
effort in Syria."
The Saudis, then, are now "showing their seriousness about confronting Iran" and warning Lebanon that they won't underwrite an Iranian vassal, Badran said.
"The talk is that the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] might take
tough action against Hezbollah's allies, especially the Christian ones,
who support Hezbollah's domination of Lebanon," Badran said. "And some
believe that these allies are the weakest link."
'Obama is a big hurdle'
The Saudis' determination to take on Iran and its proxies is clearly growing.
Earlier this month, the spokesman of the Saudi-led coalition force in Yemen told reporters that the Kingdom had made a "final" decision to send ground troops into Syria.
And last week, Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir called for sending surface-to-air missiles to rebel groups in Syria "to change the balance of power on the ground."
The Saudis have since walked back both announcements somewhat. But they clearly have remained eager to counter Iran's expanding influence in the region.
"The question now for the Saudis is about how to align
that determination with means and actual steps," Badran said. "Obama is a
big hurdle."
ReutersUS
President Barack Obama and US Secretary of State John Kerry, left, look
on during a meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the
World Climate Change Conference 2015 (COP21) in Paris, France, December
1, 2015.
The Saudis have shown no
signs of abandoning their proxy war with Iran in Syria, especially since
doing so would effectively guarantee Assad's indefinite hold on power
and, by extension, a bridge to Hezbollah for Iran. Though it has
softened its position on Assad's ouster, the White House has reiterated
that it believes the war cannot end as long as Assad in power.
But the Kingdom is still waiting for reciprocity
and readiness from the Obama administration to more aggressively
support anti-Assad rebels, who are rapidly losing ground to pro-regime
forces as Russian airstrikes clear the way for them to advance in the
north.
Indeed, as the Saudis continue to balk at the US's decision to lift nuclear-related sanctions on Iran, Washington has shown few, if any, signs that it intends to prevent Syria from becoming a Russian-Iranian sphere of influence.And that may be intentional.
"The Iranians hold the Obama legacy in their hands,"Aaron
David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator and now the vice
president at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said in a January interview with Bloomberg View. "We
are constrained and we are acquiescing to a certain degree to ensure we
maintain a functional relationship with the Iranians."
Badran largely agreed.
"The Saudis are pressed for time given the
situation in northern Syria," Badran said, referring to rebels' recent
defeats around Syria's largest city, Aleppo. "But, as long as Obama is
in office, I don't think the odds are good" that they'll significantly
escalate the stakes there, he added.
"For now," he added, "the Saudis are drawing lines in the sand."
http://www.businessinsider.com/
One of the Obama administration's biggest gambles in Syria is completely backfiring
Rodi Said/ReutersFighters from the People's Protection Units (YPG).
Turkey's prime minister said on Monday that Ankara will not allow the strategic city of Azaz in northern Syria to fall to Kurdish YPG forces, promising the "harshest reaction" if the Kurds did not retreat.
His comments come two days after Turkish artillery began firing
on YPG positions in northern Syria from Turkey's southern border,
targeting Menagh airbase near Azaz that the predominantly Kurdish Syrian
Democratic Forces (SDF) had reportedly captured from Islamist rebel
groups days earlier.
"The YPG will immediately withdraw from Azaz and the
surrounding area and will not go close to it again," Turkey's prime
minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, told reporters on Saturday. He added that Turkey would make Menagh "unusable" if the SDF did not withdraw.
Syrian Kurdish members of the SDF are allegedly affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers' Party, a Kurdish political party deemed a terrorist organization by Turkey.
In assaulting Menagh — which lies 6 miles south of Azaz —
the Kurds defied previous US requests to not coordinate with the
Russians, who have been targeting rebels in the area in an effort to
retake Aleppo.
Google Maps
"US has previously put pressure on YPG to not cooperate with RuAF
east of Efrin," Aaron Stein, a Turkey expert and senior fellow at the
Atlantic Council, said Saturday on Twitter. "They did not listen."
Even so, Washington apparently asked Turkey to hold its fire against the US-backed Kurdish forces on Monday. The request was reportedly met with "astonishment" by Turkish officials ''because they put US ally Turkey and a terrorist organization in the same equation," Tanju Bilgic, the Turkish foreign-ministry spokesman, told reporters on Monday.
Though the Afrin division of the YPG does not have as much contact
with the US as YPG forces in Kobani and Jazira, YPG forces further west
now appear to be actively coordinating with Russia to recapture
territory taken by Syrian rebels fighting forces loyal to Syrian
President Bashar Assad. That complicates Washington's insistence that
supporting the YPG-dominated SDF is key to defeating ISIS.
It also means that the gamble the US has made to support the
Kurdish-dominated SDF at the cost of alienating Turkey — a NATO ally —
is backfiring in a big way. Turkey is shelling Kurdish-held positions in the north, and SDF fighters are attacking Syrian rebel groups backed by the US.
Rodi Said/ReutersA Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) fighter.
"Totally bizarre seeing US-vetted & supported [rebel groups]
Jabhat al-Shamiya & Faylaq al-Sham being attacked by US vetted &
supported SDF" in northern Syria, said Syria expert Charles Lister, a
resident fellow at the Middle East Institute, on Twitter.
He added:
It really cannot be said enough how
catastrophic the policy disconnect between (1) CIA (2) CENTCOM & (3)
Obama Admin has been on Syria. The CIA & CENTCOM have each empowered armed groups that directly oppose the other's reasons for being on the ground.
The CIA has quietly been working with Saudi
Arabia to vet and supply "moderate" rebel groups battling government
forces in Syria — including Jabhat al-Shamiya and Faylaq al-Sham — with
TOW antitank missiles. The Pentagon, meanwhile, was tasked with
empowering the SDF after its first attempt at building a rebel force to
combat ISIS in Syria failed.
The government offensive near Azaz, aimed at severing Turkey's supply line to rebels near Aleppo, has brought pro-regime forces to within 15 miles of the Turkish border, Reuters reported on Monday.
REUTERS/Rodi SaidFighters from the Democratic Forces of Syria.
"Absent a ground incursion, or deft diplomacy, I don't see how
Turkey can prevent [the] YPG from taking control of Azaz corridor,"
Stein wrote on Twitter.
"If YPG takes Tel Rifat, can then put pressure on Azaz from
West and South. Turkey will be forced to respond. May move fighters from
Idlib," Stein added.
By Monday morning, the YPG-dominated SDF had reportedly seized 70% of Tel Rifaat, which lies just south of Azaz and north of Aleppo.
Significantly, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — a staunch opponent of the Russia-backed Assad — signaled last week that Turkey would be prepared to intervene in Syria if asked by its coalition partners.
"We don't want to fall into the same mistake in Syria as in Iraq," Erdogan told reporters on Sunday, according to the Turkish daily newspaper Hurriyet. "If ... Turkey was present in Iraq, the country would have never have fallen into its current situation."
He added: "It's important to see the horizon. What's going on in
Syria can only go on for so long. At some point it has to change."
http://www.businessinsider.com/
'Weakest position in Syria in years': Russia and Assad may have just delivered a decisive blow to Turkey
Sergei Karpukhin/ReutersTurkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan.
Pro-government forces in Syria have reportedly broken a rebel siege of two villages northwest of Aleppo, effectively cutting off Turkey's supply line to opposition groups operating in and around Syria's largest city.
Government troops, accompanied by Iran-backed Shiite militias and Hezbollah forces, apparently reached the cities of Nubl and Zahraa with the help of heavy Russian airstrikes on Wednesday.
The opposition had held these cities since 2012, according to the Institute for the Study of War.
Russian airstrikes across northern Syria had been steadily shifting the epicenter of the war
toward the corridor north of Aleppo since late November, in retaliation
for Turkey's decision to shoot down a Russian warplane that it said
violated its airspace.
A stepped-up Russian bombing campaign in the Bayirbucak region of northwest Syria, near the strategically important city of Azaz, had primarily targeted the Turkey-backed Turkmen rebels and civilians — and the Turkish aid convoys that supplied them.
As a result, Turkey's policy in Syria of bolstering
rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime — and
establishing a "safe zone" for displaced Syrians that might hinder the
regime's efforts to take Aleppo — has been unraveling for months, and
now appears to have been defeated entirely. Google Maps
Pro-government forces reportedly broke a rebel siege on Nubl and Zahraa, northwest of Aleppo, on Wednesday.
"It cuts Turkey off from Aleppo via Azaz," Aaron Stein, an expert on Turkey and Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, told Business Insider on Wednesday.
"Ankara can
still access Aleppo via Reyhanli, through Idlib," Stein said in an
email. But "Turkey is on the back foot in Syria and is at a disadvantage
now that Russia is deterring them from flying strike missions," he
added.
Indeed, Turkey's
ability to retaliate against the Russian bombing campaign in northern
Syria was severely limited by the de facto no-fly zone Russia created in
the north following Turkey's downing of the Russian warplane in
November. "This has to be Turkey's weakest position in Syria in years," David Kenner, Foreign Policy magazine's Middle East editor, noted on Twitter. "Shooting down of that Russian jet was a pivot point — backfired in a major way."
Institute for the Study of War
After the incident, Russia reportedly
equipped its jets flying in Syria with air-to-air missiles for
self-defense and sent a state-of-the-art S-400 missile system to the
Russian Hemeimeem air base near Latakia — about 30 miles south of the
Turkish border.
"Turkey lost its capacity to change the
strategic situation both on the ground and in Syrian airspace as an
independent actor" following the incident, Metin Gurcan, a Turkish military expert, told Business Insider at the time.
Paul Stronski, a senior associate in the
Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment, agreed that the
close proximity of Russia's airstrikes to the Turkish border — a "matter
of minutes" for fighter jets — has made it much more difficult for
Turkey to defend its airspace and retain northwestern Syria as a Turkish
sphere of influence.
On Twitter, Stein noted that another
aspect of Turkey's Syria policy is on the brink of total collapse
— namely, restricting the movements of the Kurdish YPG, with whom Turkey
has clashed, to east of the Syrian city of Marea.
"Weapons and aid now must be sent through Bab
al Hawa via Idlib," Stein wrote. "Turkish efforts to secure Marea line
in trouble. Huge implications." To Turkey's chagrin, Russian
President Vladimir Putin offered to help the Kurds consolidate their
territorial gains in northern Syria by linking the Kurdish-held town of
Kobani with Afrin in September. He apparently
began to make good on his after Turkey shot down a Russian
warplane, offering to arm and support the Kurdish YPG in the name of
cutting Turkey's rebel supply line to Aleppo.
Google Maps
In December, "Moscow delivered weapons to
the 5,000 Kurdish fighters in Afrin, while Russian aircraft bombed a
convoy of trucks that crossed the Turkish border into Syria at Bab
al-Salam," the Washington Institute's Fabrice Balanche wrote in an analysis of the Azaz corridor's strategic importance.
As Stein noted on Twitter, "A viable
way for Kurds to connect Efrin with territory East of the Euphrates now
in play. Route is out of range of TR [Turkish] artillery."
Efrin is an alternative spelling for the Kurdish-held Syrian city.
Aykan Erdemir, a Senior Fellow at the
Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former member of Turkish
parliament, told Business Insider in December that Turkey trying to
intervene to stop the Kurds' expansion westward would "undoubtedly have serious drawbacks."
Any intervention, Erdemir said, "could
further escalate the Turkish-Russian crisis, prompting heavier
sanctions, and even new episodes of clashes between the two armies."
The Salman Doctrine: the Saudi Reply to Obama's Weakness
Obama abandoned the Arab world. Riyadh is picking up the slack.
Following a thorough explication of Obama’s foreign policy doctrine in a recent Jeffrey Goldberg article,
it is now clearer than ever that America and Saudi Arabia are on a
collision course over strategic decisions in the Middle East. This is
because the “Obama Doctrine” is diametrically opposed to the emerging
“Salman Doctrine,” which the Kingdom is developing in order to restore
peace and a modicum of stability to the region. And while the Saudis and
their allies would benefit immensely from having the United States at
their side, Washington also has much to lose by distancing itself from
the Saudi agenda. Since the end of World War II, American influence and
standing in the Arab world has, to a large extent, been dependent on the
“special relationship" with the Kingdom.
President Obama expressed this doctrine on his first campaign trail when he said
that “the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian
problems.” This explains his decisions to refrain from taking out Assad
after Syria crossed
his “red line” by using chemical weapons on its people, to capitulate
to Iran’s regional ambitions to strike the nuclear deal, to allow the
development of Shia militias in Iraq, to avoid pressing Israel on the
Palestinian issue and to initially go easy on ISIS because it is “not an
existential threat to the United States.” Yet, as the Goldberg article
makes clear, the Obama Doctrine not only represents the president’s
extreme hesitation toward American military intervention, but also
evinces his specific abandonment of the Arab world and his now declared
support for a more powerful Iran.
The best way to demonstrate the complete opposite worldview of the Obama doctrine is to look at the Salman Doctrine. The Saudi leadership believes
that Assad must be removed from Syria; that Iran’s regional and nuclear
ambitions must be denied; that the Shia militias of Iraq, Syria,
Lebanon and Yemen are terrorist groups and must be destroyed; that the
world needs to recognize a Palestinian state; and every global effort
must be made to defeat ISIS and Al Qaeda. At the center of many of these
doctrinal differences is the Saudi assertion that Iran is at the root
of numerous security problems
now plaguing the Middle East. Obama’s assertion that Saudi Arabia
should “share” the region with Iran is patently absurd, given Tehran’s
vast and unending support for terrorism.
There are three elements one must understand about the Salman
Doctrine: it has not spontaneously appeared, it is based on a solid
assessment of history and it is bringing about significant real world
changes. First, the Salman Doctrine has emerged from strategic
necessity, following the increasing withdrawal
of American leadership from the region as a result of the Obama
Doctrine. Second, just as President Obama’s views are steeped in
American history, King Salman’s views are steeped in Arab history, and
he has no intention of allowing Iran, which seeks to give its minority
Shia sect the upper hand in worldwide Islam, to disrupt 1,400 years of
majority Sunni domination. Finally, the Salman Doctrine is backed up by
extensive, transformational developments in Saudi Arabia’s military,
public policy and Arab alliance system.
Indeed, when one looks closely at what the Saudis and their allies are
doing in order to push back against the region’s chaos, mostly supported
by Iran, one can see that the Obama Doctrine is cutting America out of a
major growing multinational coalition of like-minded states taking
shape in the Islamic world.
The Saudi military expansion
that took place over the past five years is unprecedented. The Kingdom
has already committed over $150 billion to an enhanced defense posture;
this will increase by about $100 billion over the next five years.
The Saudi military and its allied forces are seeing more frequent
action in the region, as evidenced by its deployment into Bahrain in
2011 and the current war in Yemen to fight Iranian proxies. Further, the
air forces of Saudi Arabia and certain of its Arab allies are part of
the anti-ISIS coalition in Syria, and these efforts could be extended to
Iraq in the near future.
The Kingdom recently announced a thirty-four-nation Islamic coalition against terror.
Among the main allied states are Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Malaysia and
Nigeria. This coalition just completed major military exercises, called
Northern Thunder, around the Saudi military city of Hafr al-Batin, in
which 150,000 troops from twenty Islamic countries practiced possible
battle scenarios. While the coalition certainly has its sights set on
ISIS and Al Qaeda, it is also training for potential incursions into
Iraq and Syria in order to take on the Shia militias that have been
growing there. These Iran-sponsored terrorist groups, which have
substantial arsenals and about seventy-five thousand mostly irregular
fighters, have for far too long
been ignored by the Obama administration, although they are an emerging
major regional threat. It is now only a matter of time before this new
Saudi-led alliance will be forced to begin military operations against
them inside Syrian and Iraqi territory.
The so-called Arab Spring, which caught the Obama administration off guard, but to which it gave its tacit support, has turned into an absolute disaster.
In its wake, the Obama Doctrine has ushered in an era of noninvolvement
in the Middle East on the part of the American military. This policy
has led to increased chaos and bloodshed.
To fill this deadly vacuum, the Saudis and their allies have had to
step up in order to attempt to bring order to an area suffering from the
scourges of failing states, ISIS and various Iranian proxies.
However, President Obama's tenure is nearly over. Hopefully the new
administration will take a more realistic, positive approach toward
America’s critical role in preserving stability in the world’s most
strategically important region. Nawaf Obaid is a visiting fellow with Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Image: Flickr/The White House
Saudi
Arabia is no state at all. It's an unstable business so corrupt to
resemble a criminal organization and the U.S. should get ready for the
day after.
For half a century, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been the linchpin of U.S.
Mideast policy. A guaranteed supply of oil has bought a guaranteed
supply of security. Ignoring autocratic practices and the export of
Wahhabi extremism, Washington stubbornly dubs its ally “moderate.” So
tight is the trust that U.S. special operators dip into Saudi petrodollars as a counterterrorism slush fund without a without a second thought. In a sea of chaos, goes the refrain, the kingdom is one state that’s stable.
But is it?
In fact, Saudi Arabia is no state at all. There are two ways to
describe it: as a political enterprise with a clever but ultimately
unsustainable business model, or so corrupt as to resemble in its
functioning a vertically and horizontally integrated criminal
organization. Either way, it can’t last. It’s past time U.S. decision-makers began planning for the collapse of the Saudi kingdom.
In recent conversations with military and other government personnel,
we were startled at how startled they seemed at this prospect. Here’s
the analysis they should be working through.
Understood one way, the Saudi king is CEO
of a family business that converts oil into payoffs that buy political
loyalty. They take two forms: cash handouts or commercial concessions
for the increasingly numerous scions of the royal clan, and a modicum of
public goods and employment opportunities for commoners. The coercive
“stick” is supplied by brutal internal security services lavishly
equipped with American equipment.
The U.S. has long counted on the ruling
family having bottomless coffers of cash with which to rent loyalty.
Even accounting today’s low oil prices, and as Saudi officials step up
arms purchases and military adventures in Yemen and elsewhere, Riyadh is
hardly running out of funds.
Still, expanded oil production in the face of such low prices—until the Feb. 16 announcement of a Saudi-Russian freeze at very high January levels—may reflect an urgent need for revenue as well as other strategic imperatives. Talk of a Saudi Aramco IPO similarly suggests a need for hard currency.
A political market, moreover, functions according to demand as well as supply. What if the price of loyalty rises?
It appears that is just what’s happening. King Salman had to spend lavishly to secure the allegiance of the notables
who were pledged to the late King Abdullah. Here’s what played out in
two other countries when this kind of inflation hit. In South Sudan, an
insatiable elite not only diverted the newly minted country’s oil money
to private pockets but also kept up their outsized demands when the
money ran out, sparking a descent into chaos. The Somali government
enjoys generous donor support, but is priced out of a very competitive
political market by a host of other buyers—with ideological, security or
criminal agendas of their own.
Such comparisons may be offensive to Saudi leaders, but they are
telling. If the loyalty price index keeps rising, the monarchy could
face political insolvency.
The Saudi ruling elite is operating something like a sophisticated criminal enterprise.
Looked at another way, the Saudi ruling elite is operating something
like a sophisticated criminal enterprise, when populations everywhere
are making insistent demands for government accountability. With its
political and business elites interwoven in a monopolistic network,
quantities of unaccountable cash leaving the country for private
investments and lavish purchases abroad, and state functions bent to
serve these objectives, Saudi Arabia might be compared to such
kleptocracies as Viktor Yanukovich’s Ukraine.
Increasingly, Saudi citizens are seeing themselves as just that:
citizens, not subjects. In countries as diverse as Nigeria, Ukraine,
Brazil, Moldova, and Malaysia, people are contesting criminalized
government and impunity for public officials—sometimes violently. In
more than half a dozen countries in 2015, populations took to the
streets to protest corruption. In three of them, heads of state are
either threatened or have had to resign. Elsewhere, the same grievances
have contributed to the expansion of jihadi movements or criminal
organizations posing as Robin Hoods. Russia and China’s external
adventurism can at least partially be explained as an effort to
re-channel their publics‘ dissatisfaction with the quality
of governance. Related: Defense One‘s complete coverage of Saudi Arabia
For the moment, it is largely Saudi Arabia’s Shiite minority that is
voicing political demands. But the highly educated Sunni majority, with
unprecedented exposure to the outside world, is unlikely to stay
satisfied forever with a few favors doled out by geriatric rulers
impervious to their input. And then there are the “guest workers.” Saudi
officials, like those in other Gulf states, seem to think they can
exploit an infinite supply of indigents grateful to work at whatever
conditions. But citizens are now heavily outnumbered in their own
countries by laborers who may soon begin claiming rights.
For decades, Riyadh has eased pressure by exporting its
dissenters—like Osama bin Laden—fomenting extremism across the Muslim
world. But that strategy can backfire: bin Laden’s critique of Saudi
corruption has been taken up by others and resonates among many Arabs.
And King Salman (who is 80, by the way) does not display the dexterity
of his half-brother Abdullah. He’s reached for some of the familiar
items in the autocrats’ toolbox: executing dissidents, embarking on
foreign wars, and whipping up sectarian rivalries to discredit Saudi
Shiite demands and boost nationalist fervor. Each of these has
grave risks.
There are a few ways things could go, as Salman’s brittle grip on power begins cracking.
One is a factional struggle within the royal family, with the price
of allegiance bid up beyond anyone’s ability to pay in cash. Another is
foreign war. With Saudi Arabia and Iran already confronting each other
by proxy in Yemen and Syria, escalation is too easy. U.S.
decision-makers should bear that danger in mind as they keep pressing
for regional solutions to regional problems. A third scenario is
insurrection—either a non-violent uprising or a jihadi insurgency—a
result all too predictable given episodes throughout the region in
recent years.
An energetic red team should shoot holes in the automatic-pilot thinking that has guided Washington policy to date.
The U.S. keeps getting caught flat-footed
when purportedly solid countries came apart. At the very least, and
immediately, rigorous planning exercises should be executed, in which
different scenarios and different potential U.S.
actions to reduce the codependence and mitigate the risks can be
tested. Most likely, and most dangerous, outcomes should be identified,
and an energetic red team should shoot holes in the automatic-pilot
thinking that has guided Washington policy to date.
“Hope is not a policy” is a hackneyed phrase. But choosing not to consider alternatives amounts to the same thing.
Authors
Sarah Chayes is senior associate in the Democracy and Rule of
Law and South Asia Programs at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace. She is the author of Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens
Global Security. She previously was special adviser to Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff ...
Full Bio
Alex de Waal is executive director of the World Peace Foundation
and a research professor at The Fletcher School. Considered one of the
foremost experts on Sudan and the Horn of Africa, his scholarship and
practice has also probed humanitarian crisis and response, human rights,
HIV/AIDS and ...
Full Bio
Iran–Saudi Arabia relations
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bilateral relations between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
have been strained over different geo-political issues such as the
interpretations of Islam, aspirations for leadership of the Islamic
world, oil export policy, relations with the US and the West. Although
Saudi Arabia and Iran are both Muslim-majority nations and follow and
rule through Islamic Scripture, their relations are fraught with
hostility, tension and confrontation, due to differences in political
agendas that are strengthened for their differences in faith. Saudi
Arabia is a conservative "Wahhabi" Sunni Islamic kingdom with a tradition of close ties with the United States and United Kingdom. Iran is a Twelver Shia
Islamic Republic founded in an anti-Western revolution. Both Saudi
Arabia and Iran are seen to have aspirations for leadership of Islam,
and have different visions of stability and regional order. After the Islamic Revolution, relations deteriorated considerably after Iran accused Saudi Arabia of being an agent of the US in the Persian Gulf
region, representing US interests rather than Islam. Saudi Arabia is
concerned by Iran's consistent desire to export its revolution across
the board to expand its influence within the Persian Gulf region --
notably in post-Saddam Iraq, the Levant and within further south in addition to Iran's controversial, much debated nuclear program.[1]
Tensions between the two countries have waxed and waned. Relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran soured particularly after the Iranian Revolution, the nuclear program, the 2011 alleged Iran assassination plot and more recently the execution of Nimr al-Nimr.
There have also been numerous attempts to improve the relationship.
After the 1991 Gulf war there was a noticeable thaw in relations.[2] In March 2007 President Ahmadinejad of Iran visited Riyadh
and was greeted at the airport by King Abdullah, and the two countries
were referred to in the press as "brotherly nations". After March 2011,
Iran's financial and military support for Syria during the Syrian Civil War,
has been a severe blow to the improvement of relations. On January 3,
2016. Saudi Arabia cut diplomatic ties with Iran following the execution
of Saudi-born Shia Islam cleric Nimr al-Nimr. The execution prompted widespread condemnation within the Arab World as well as other countries, the European Union and the United Nations, with protests being carried out in cities in Iran, Iraq, India, Lebanon, Pakistan and Turkey. Saudi Arabia's foreign minister said that all Iranian diplomats are to leave the country within 48 hours.[3]
The difference of political ideologies and governance has also
divided both countries. The Islamic Republic of Iran is based on the
principle of Guardianship of the Islamic Jurists, which holds that a faqīh
(Islamic jurist) should have custodianship over all Muslim followers,
including their governance and regardless of nationality. Iran's Supreme Leader is a Shia faqīh. The founder of the Iranian revolution in 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini, was ideologically opposed to monarchy, which he believed to be unIslamic.
Saudi Arabia's monarchy, on the other hand, remains consistently
conservative, not revolutionary, and politically married to age-old
religious leaders of the tribes who support the monarchy and the king
(namely the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques) is given absolute
obedience as long as he does not violate Islamic sharia law.[4]
Saudi Arabia has, however, a Shia minority which has recently made
bitter complaints of institutional discrimination against it,[5] specifically after the 2007 change in Iraqi governance and particularly after the 2011 events that spanned the region.[citation needed] At some stages it has gone as far as to call for overthrowing the king and the entire system.[6]
Both countries are major oil & gas exporters and have clashed
over energy policy. Saudi Arabia, with its large oil reserves and
smaller population, has a greater interest in taking a long-term view of
the global oil market and incentive to moderate prices. In contrast,
Iran is compelled to focus on high prices in the short term due to its
low standard of living given recent sanctions after its decade old war
with Saddam's Iraq.[1]
After the Saudi embassy in Tehran was ransacked by Iranian
protesters, Saudi Arabia broke off diplomatic relations with Iran on
January 4, 2016.[7]
Timeline
1920s–1970s: during Pahlavi Dynasty
Saudi Arabia and Iran established diplomatic relations in 1929 following the signing of a Saudi-Iranian Friendship Treaty.[8]
However, relations were not active until the 1960s mostly due to differences in religious practices and Iran's recognition of Israel.[9] In 1966 the late King Faisal of Saudi Arabia visited Iran with the aim of further strengthening relationships between both neighboring countries. The Shah of IranMohammad-Reza Pahlavi
reciprocated by paying an official visit to Saudi Arabia which
eventually led to a peaceful resolution of the islands. The Shah
supported King Faisal's
efforts regarding Islamic solidarity and actively contributed to the
establishment of multinational Islamic institutions, including the
Organization of the Islamic World Congress, the Muslim World League, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference.[8]
In 1968, Saudi Arabia and Iran signed a demarcation agreement.[10] When the United Kingdom announced to withdraw and vacate from the Persian Gulf in the late 1960s,[11]
Iran and Saudi Arabia took the primary responsibility for peace and
security in the region. In the late 1960s, the Shah sent a series of
letters to King Faisal, urging him to modernize Saudi Arabia, saying,
"Please, my brother, modernize. Open up your country. Make the schools
mixed women and men. Let women wear miniskirts. Have discos. Be modern. Otherwise I cannot guarantee you will stay on your throne."[12] In response King Faisal wrote, "Your majesty, I appreciate your advice. May I remind you, you are not the Shah of France. You are not in the Élysée. You are in Iran. Your population is 90 percent Muslim. Please don't forget that."[12]
During the 1970s, Saudi Arabia's main concerns over Iran were
firstly, Iran's modernisation of its military and its military dominance
all over the region; secondly, Iran's repossession of the islands of Big Tunb, Little Tunb and Abu Moussa in 1971 which challenged the United Arab Emirates claim over the islands. The dispute remains till today. [13] But the relationship between Iran and Saudi Arabia was never as friendly as between the years 1968 and 1979.[9][14]
The relationship between the two countries was not without its
tensions in the mid-to-late 1970s. As the Shah attempted to build an
Iranian security architecture in the region, the Saudis resisted these
efforts. Instead, King Khalid
attempted to build bilaterial security relationships with the smaller
neighboring Persian Gulf states which has lasted till today. The Saudis
also argued for more modest OPEC price increases in 1976 and 1977 than Iran wanted.[15]
1979: Iranian Revolution
Following the theocratic Iranian Revolution lead by Khomeini in 1979, Iran started to openly attack and criticise the character and religious legitimacy of the Saudi regime.[16] However King Khalid,
the then ruler of Saudi Arabia, sent Khomeini a congratulatory message,
stating that "Islamic solidarity" could be the basis for closer
relations of two countries.[17]
He also argued that with the foundation of the Islamic Republic in Iran
there were no obstacles that inhibited the cooperation between two
countries.[18]
In 1987 public address Khomeini declared that “these vile and ungodly Wahhabis, are like daggers which have always pierced the heart of the "Muslims" from the back,” and announced that Mecca was in the hands of “a band of heretics.”[19] Upon this statement diplomatic relations between the two countries ended until 1991.[20]
1980s: during Iran–Iraq War
The Shia–Sunni conflict between the two countries also played a pivotal role in the Iran–Iraq war when Saudi authorities pledged US$25 billion of aid to the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein.
The Iran–Iraq War increased Saudi concerns over stability in the
region, hence their financial support to Iraq regardless of the
"not-so-warm" relations between Baathist Iraq and Conservative Saudi
Arabia. In doing so, Saudi Arabia recognised its worries that
revolutionary Iran was a far greater threat to its survival and the
stability of the region. Saudi Arabia also encouraged other Arab states of the Persian Gulf, including Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, to do the same by giving financial support to Iraq.[21]
To cover the costs of the war Saudi Arabia dramatically increased its
oil production. This increase in oil production by Saudi Arabia was
aimed to weaken Iran's ability to fund its campaigns. But this measure
by Saudi Arabia did not have a desired impact on Iran because it also
cost the Saudi government billions in revenue as oil prices plunged from
over $30 a barrel to less than $15 by the mid 1980s.[21]
During the Iran–Iraq war, Iran flew their aircraft in Saudi airspace
and also threatened Saudi Arabia and Kuwait with severe consequences if
they would not stop supporting Iraq. Unlike America, Saudi Arabia, due
to its very traditional Arab-Bedouin culture, did not break diplomatic
relations with Iran even during the worst periods of tension following
the revolution and during the Iran–Iraq war.[22]
1987 Hajj Incident
Until 1987, no satisfactory resolution was made to decrease the
tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The already strained relationship
between the two countries further deteriorated when clashes occurred between Iranian-led demonstrators and Saudi security forces on 31 July 1987.[16] The clash claimed the lives of around 400 pilgrims, out of which two thirds had Iranian nationality[citation needed].
This incident angered the Saudis and in retaliation, the Saudi
administration instituted a ban on all Hajj (Pilgrimage) rituals and
activities[citation needed]. Angry protesters in Tehran responded by ransacking the Saudi embassy
and also detained and physically attacked a number of residing Saudi
diplomats. As a result, one of the Saudi officials died from the
injuries[citation needed]. In response, Saudi Arabia in 1988, cut its diplomatic relations with Iran and ensured that no Iranian could obtain a Saudi travel visa for performing the Hajj (Pilgrimage)[citation needed]
Responses to Satanic Verses
The relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran gradually started to
improve after the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988. Iran had accepted
ceasefire with Iraq in July 1988 and soon afterwards, Saudi Arabia
started improving relations with Iran.
In October 1988, the late King Fahd halted all media campaigns against Iran and asked Saudi administration to pressure Iraq into implementing the UNSCR 598. In 1989, Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani stated that Iran and Saudi Arabia were holding indirect talks to improve their relations.[23] But the issuance of fatwa by Khomeini against the Indian author Salman Rushdie
again soured the relations between the two countries. Khomeini, the
spiritual leader of Iran at that time, declared a death sentence for Salman Rushdie for certain anti-Islamic remarks in his book Satanic Verses
published in 1988. The Saudi government, which took this religious
decree against Rushdie as an act aimed at gaining Muslim sympathy across
the world, came up with its own verdict of making Rushdie appear before
an Islamic tribunal before he could be delivered a death sentence.[23]
1990s
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 2, 1990
When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990,
Iran criticised and condemned the invasion. This stance from Iran, in
favor of the Kuwaitis, and the anti-Iraqi coalition of the Persian Gulf
states helped to improve relations between Iran and the GCC, namely
Saudi Arabia. Both Iran and Saudi Arabia rejected the use of force as a
solution to regional problems and opposed the invasion of Kuwait by
Iraq. Iran went further, by backing UN sanctions against Iraq. Iran
viewed the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait as a serious threat, considering
it the first step towards its expansionist mindset. During the war,
relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia thawed considerably and the
official ties were restored in 1991.[24]
This short resumption of political ties was followed by quick high
level visits, notably, in April 1991, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati visited Saudi Arabia to propose an Iranian-Gulf Cooperation Council alliance with a mandate for the security of the Persian Gulf, during a meeting with the late King Fahd. He claimed the Gulf Cooperation Council
was too weak and hence failed to prevent the invasion of Kuwait, and
stressed the need of the inclusion of Iran to strengthen such a regional
agency to ensure stability.[24]
The Hajj (Pilgrimage) issue was also resolved. In 1991, the Saudi
authorities allowed 115,000 Iranian pilgrims, which was more in number
compared to the 1988 quota of 45,000, that had led to Iran's abrupt
boycott. The Saudis also agreed to an Iranian request of allowing 5,000
relatives and friends of the 412 "martyrs" of the 1987 incident to
attend the Hajj Pilgrimage that year. In later years, Iran adopted a
careful approach and undertook measures for preventing a repeat of that
incident. Iranian authorities tried to discourage large demonstrations
by its pilgrims and attempted to have them held within the confines of
the Iranian encampment.[25]
(Explanation: Certain Iranian Shi'ite rituals are not accepted by other
sects of Islam and could endanger the lives of Iranian Pilgrims if
conducted openly).
Khobar Towers Bombing
On 23 June 1996, a massive truck bomb exploded near U.S. military barracks in Dhahran,
Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen U.S. servicemen and wounding hundreds.
The US government held Iran responsible for the attack. The charges
against Iran, however, remained unconfirmed, and therefore did not
substantively affect the Iranian-Saudi relations.[25]
1997 OIC meeting
The 1997 meeting of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference
(OIC) in Iran heralded a shift in the attitude of the Arab States
towards Iran. Several Arab countries confirmed their commitment to the
conference. Saudi Arabia, which was previously criticized by Iran
because of its control over the main Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina
and also because of its perceived reliance on the United States for
security, also participated in the meeting. In the OIC summit meeting,
Saudi Arabia was represented by Crown Prince Abdullah (later King) and
its Minister of Foreign affairs Saud Al Faisal.
Saudi participation proved helpful in the process of further
reconciliation between Iran and Saudi Arabia. As a result, Saudi
ministerial delegations visited Iran and later on, the official visit of
President Mohammad Khattami to Saudi Arabia took place in February
1998.[26]
This was the first visit by the Iranian Premier to Saudi Arabia after
the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The aim was to address pressing economic
issues of the time. Iran was looking for a reallocation of OPEC (Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries)
producing quotas to which it required strong support from Saudi Arabia.
It was also reported that Iran was trying to persuade Saudi Arabia to
consider exporting the Iranian Infrastructure to Central Asia. Iran also
expected that the issue of the regional security alliance would be
raised in which the alliance for the security of the region could be
made to ensure stability on both borders of the Persian Gulf.[26]
A Comprehensive Cooperation Agreement was signed between Saudi Arabia
and Iran in May 1998, in which both countries agreed to cooperate in
the field of economics, culture and sports. The relationship between
Saudi Arabia and Iran was further improved when Khatami, the then
President of Iran, on his tour to neighboring Arab countries, visited
Saudi Arabia in May 1999. President Khatami stayed for five days in
Saudi Arabia in which various discussions were held between the heads of
both countries. Discussions included Persian Gulf security, efforts to
increase global oil prices, the situation in Iraq and the development of
a common geo-strategic approach to regional issues. The partial détente
between Iran and the USA encouraged Saudi Arabia to apply more
cooperation with President Khatami. In addition to this, Saudi Arabia
and Iran signed an agreement known as the Saudi-Iranian security
agreement in April 2001.[26]
In July 1999, the late King Fahd
of Saudi Arabia urged other Persian Gulf countries to improve their
relations with Iran. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, speaking at the opening
session of the Shura Council
said that it was in the interest of all the countries of the Persian
Gulf to improve relations with Iran. He further said that all the other
countries should follow Saudi Arabia's lead.[27] This improved relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran also brought criticism from the United Arab Emirates, which criticised Saudi Arabia of abandoning UAE in its territorial disputes with Iran over three strategic Islands.[27]
2000s: Yemen
Yemeni rebels, known as Houthis,
who are a politically infused religious rebel group based in the Yemen,
crossed into Saudi Arabia, whereby they killed two border guards and
seized Saudi territory, including the strategically important Mount
al-Doud.
This triggered the largest Saudi military operation since the Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Yemen's government, as well as the Arabs,
accused Iran of arming the Houthis. Iran has heavily criticized Saudi
Arabia for their intervention in the Shia insurgency in Yemen.
Iran's then president Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying: "Saudi Arabia
was expected to mediate in Yemen's internal conflict as an older brother
and restore peace to the Muslim state, rather than launching military
strike[s] and pounding bombs on Muslim civilians in the north of Yemen,"
whilst Saudi foreign minister Saud Al Faisal counter-accused Iran of
meddling in Yemen's internal affairs. Ahmadinejad went even further
saying: "Some Western states invaded the region (Afghanistan and Iraq)
in the wake of the September 11 attacks, whilst Al-Qaeda's main hub was
located in another country in the region, which enjoys huge oil revenues
and good relations with the United States and Western countries. There
are some countries in the Middle East region that do not hold even a
single election, don't allow women to drive, but the US and European
governments are supporting their undemocratic governments," in reference
to Saudi Arabia.[28]
2010s: Arab Spring
Yemeni Crisis standoff
Two Iranian officers were captured in Yemeni city of Aden during the fighting between local militia and Houthis.[29] According to local pro-Saudi militia they served as military advisors to Houthis and were connected with Iranian Quds Force.[30]
Further worsening of bilateral relationship between Iran and Saudi
Arabia is generally expected as both countries are involved intensively
in Yemeni crisis.[31]
Jeddah airport incident
In April 2015, media reported that two Iranian teenage pilgrim to
Saudi Arabia had been sexually harassed by Saudi police at the Jeddah Airport.[32][33][34][35]After that, 80 members of Iranian parliament
presented a bill for minor Haj rituals to be suspended until the Saudi
officials guarantee the security of Iranian pilgrims and stop their
harassment.Hundreds of Iranians protested outside Saudi Arabia's Embassy
in Tehran over the alleged abuse of these two Iranian pilgrims in April
11 and clashed with police forces after trying to climb the embassy
walls.[36][37]In
April 8th, Saudi authorities said they had prevented a plane carrying
260 Iranian pilgrims from landing in the kingdom, saying the airline
operators had not applied for a permit to enter Saudi Arabia.[37][38]In
April 13th, Iran suspended minor hajj trips to Saudi Arabia until the
Saudi government "applies a strong attitude" to the case.[39] Saud al-Faisal,
foreign minister of Saudi Arabia have pledged to Iran's Ambassador that
his government will punish the two Saudi policemen, very soon.[40]
Mansour al-Turki, spokesman of Interior ministry of Saudi Arabia,
informed that the accused airport staff members have been arrested and
referred to court and Iranian ambassador to Saudi Arabia has been
informed and the suspects have been referred for investigation.[41]
2015 Hajj stampede
Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Tehran under Iranian police protection after Mina stampede crisis.
The 2015 Hajj stampede
escalated tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran due to the deaths of
Iranian pilgrims in the stampede. Iranian leaders accused Saudi
authorities of being responsible for the disaster.[42][43][44]
A Saudi Prince, Dr. Khalid bin Abdullah bin Fahd bin Farhan Al Saud
tweeted that : "Under the threat of the enemy Zoroastrians- historically
- to the Kingdom - it is time to think- seriously - to ban Iranians
from coming to Mecca to preserve the safety of the pilgrims".[45]
2016 execution of Nimr al-Nimr
On January 2, 2016, 47 people were put to death in several Saudi cities, including prominent Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr.
Protesters of the executions responded by demonstrating in Iran’s
capital, Tehran. That same day a few protesters would eventually ransack
the Saudi Embassy in Tehran and later set it ablaze.[46]Police donned riot gear and arrested 40 people during the incident.[47][48][49]
On January 3, 2016, Saudi Arabia's foreign ministry announced that it
would cut diplomatic ties with Iran due to the violence that had
occurred at their embassy.[50] and President Rouhani called the damage on embassy "by no means justifiable".[51]
2016 Iran embassy bombing in Yemen
On January 7, 2016, Iran's foreign ministry made the claim that Saudi
warplanes had "deliberately" targeted its embassy to Yemen in the city
of Sanaa. Iran's report included claims that,"a number of the building's
guards" had been injured as a result of the bombing. Despite this
assertion Sanaa residents and the Associated Press have reported that
the embassy suffered no visible damage. Currently General Ahmad Asseri
from the Saudi-led coalition is investigating Iran's allegations.[52]
Historically, Iran–Saudi relationships have always been uncertain,
something attributed to the different sects that the majority
populations in both the countries follow. Saudi Arabia which is a
predominantly Sunni society has always been skeptical of Shi'ite Iran's activities in the Persian Gulf region, thus labeling Iranian ambitions to dominate the Muslim world as a form of Safawid/Safavid rule.
Leading Sunni and Shi'ite Clerics in both the countries deemed each
other's religious beliefs as incorrect for decades. An attempt was made
by the Sunnis to take the Tomb of Imam Hussein, one of the important
religious leaders of Shi'ite theology and the grandson of the Prophet
Muhammad whose life is considered the main difference between Sunni and
Shi'ite sects, due to Wahabbi focus on the spiritual aspect of Islam
rather than the tangible. Since then, tensions between both major sects
of Islam, their followers and their affiliates, have increased and this
tension is considered unlikely to be resolved any time soon.[22] According to Le Figaro, on 5 June 2010, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia told Hervé Morin, then Defense Minister of France that: "There are two countries in the world that do not deserve to exist: Iran and Israel."[53]
Saudi Arabia, Iran and the United States
As far as the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. is
concerned, both countries have been strategic allies for more than sixty
years. Saudi Arabia sees itself as a firm and generous partner of the
U.S. in the cold war and in other international conflicts. The visits by
US President George W. Bush to the Kingdom in 2008 reaffirmed these
ties. Yet Saudis have always distanced themselves from American Foreign
Policy, particularly with regards to Iran. Even when there was growing
criticism against the former Iranian President, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, for
his alleged hostile foreign policy in connection to Israel,[54]
Saudi Arabia recognised that Iran was a potential threat, and a
regional power that was in position to create trouble within their
borders. Therefore, Saudi Arabia's security over time required
accommodation and good relations with its geographic neighbors notably
Iran.[54]
Prior to this visit, Saudi National Security advisor Prince Bandar
bin Sultan, seen as one of the most pro-American figures in the region,
had made a trip to Tehran to voice his government's interest in building
harmonious relations with Iran.[55]
During Iranian President Ahmadinejad's 3 March 2007 visit, he discussed
with King Abdullah the need to protect the Islamic world from enemy
"conspiracies."[56]
In 2007, President Ahmadinejad of Iran attended the first-ever annual summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council
(GCC) which was established in 1988 that aimed to contain the ambitions
of revolutionary Iran. This visit by the President of Iran was an event
which signaled a possible change in relations. Yet soon after the
meeting, Saudi Arabia, the most senior member of the six GCC member
states invited Mr. Ahmadinejad to Saudi Arabia to take part in the
annual Hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca.
In 2009, Saudi Prince Faisal said in a press conference with Hillary
Clinton that the "threat posed by Iran demanded a more immediate
solution than sanctions." This statement was condemned by Iranian
officials.[57]
On 11 October 2011 US Attorney GeneralEric Holder accused Iran of planning to assassinate the Saudi-Arabian ambassador to the United States Adel Al-Jubbair.
In 2013, Saudi Ambassador to Britain Mohammed bin Nawaf bin Abdulaziz Al Saud wrote an editorial in The New York Times
criticizing Saudi Arabia's Western allies for not taking bold enough
measures against Syria and Iran, thus destabilizing the Middle East and
forcing Saudi Arabia to become more aggressive in international affairs.[58]
The Obama administration continues to reassure the Persian Gulf states
that regional security is a U.S. priority, but, as of December 2013, the
Gulf states express skepticism.[59]
In 2012, in response to the global sanctions against Iran, Saudi Arabia offered to offset the loss of Iranian oil sales and Iran warned against this.[62] The same year Turki Al Faisal,
former head of Saudi General Intelligence and a Saudi royal, suggested
that Saudi Arabia would support the U.S.-led sanctions against Iranian
oil.[63]
International efforts to normalize the relations
There are international efforts going on to normalize the relations
between two countries after the crisis which started with the execution
of Sheikh Nimr. Pakistan's prime minister Nawaz Sharif and Chief of Army Staff Raheel Sharif visited Riyadh and Tehran. The Sharifs peace mission started after some high level visits from Saudi Arabia to Islamabad.[64]
Pakistan's opposition leader Imran Khan
also visited the embassies of Iran and Saudi Arabia and met their head
of commissions in Islamabad on 8 January 2015 to understand their stance
regarding the conflict. He urged the Government of Pakistan to play a
positive role to resolve the matter between both countries.[65]
Saudi Arabia Warns of Economic Fallout if Congress Passes 9/11 Bill
President Obama at a Sept. 11
ceremony in 2015. The Obama administration argues that the bill would
put Americans at legal risk overseas.Credit
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Saudi Arabia
has told the Obama administration and members of Congress that it will
sell off hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of American assets held
by the kingdom if Congress passes a bill that would allow the Saudi
government to be held responsible in American courts for any role in the
Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The
Obama administration has lobbied Congress to block the bill’s passage,
according to administration officials and congressional aides from both
parties, and the Saudi threats have been the subject of intense
discussions in recent weeks between lawmakers and officials from the
State Department and the Pentagon. The officials have warned senators of
diplomatic and economic fallout from the legislation.
Adel
al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, delivered the kingdom’s message
personally last month during a trip to Washington, telling lawmakers
that Saudi Arabia would be forced to sell up to $750 billion in treasury
securities and other assets in the United States before they could be
in danger of being frozen by American courts.
Several
outside economists are skeptical that the Saudis will follow through,
saying that such a sell-off would be difficult to execute and would end
up crippling the kingdom’s economy. But the threat is another sign of
the escalating tensions between Saudi Arabia and the United States.
The
administration, which argues that the legislation would put Americans
at legal risk overseas, has been lobbying so intently against the bill
that some lawmakers and families of Sept. 11 victims are infuriated. In
their view, the Obama administration has consistently sided with the
kingdom and has thwarted their efforts to learn what they believe to be
the truth about the role some Saudi officials played in the terrorist
plot.
“It’s
stunning to think that our government would back the Saudis over its
own citizens,” said Mindy Kleinberg, whose husband died in the World
Trade Center on Sept. 11 and who is part of a group of victims’ family
members pushing for the legislation.
President Obama
will arrive in Riyadh on Wednesday for meetings with King Salman and
other Saudi officials. It is unclear whether the dispute over the Sept.
11 legislation will be on the agenda for the talks.
A spokesman for the Saudi Embassy did not respond to a message seeking comment.
Saudi
officials have long denied that the kingdom had any role in the Sept.
11 plot, and the 9/11 Commission found “no evidence that the Saudi
government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually
funded the organization.” But critics have noted that the commission’s
narrow wording left open the possibility that less senior officials or
parts of the Saudi government could have played a role. Suspicions have
lingered, partly because of the conclusions of a 2002 congressional
inquiry into the attacks that cited some evidence that Saudi officials
living in the United States at the time had a hand in the plot.
Those conclusions, contained in 28 pages of the report, still have not been released publicly.
The
dispute comes as bipartisan criticism is growing in Congress about
Washington’s alliance with Saudi Arabia, for decades a crucial American
ally in the Middle East and half of a partnership that once received
little scrutiny from lawmakers. Last week, two senators introduced a
resolution that would put restrictions on American arms sales to Saudi
Arabia, which have expanded during the Obama administration.
Families
of the Sept. 11 victims have used the courts to try to hold members of
the Saudi royal family, Saudi banks and charities liable because of what
the plaintiffs charged was Saudi financial support for terrorism. These
efforts have largely been stymied, in part because of a 1976 law that
gives foreign nations some immunity from lawsuits in American courts.
The
Senate bill is intended to make clear that the immunity given to
foreign nations under the law should not apply in cases where nations
are found culpable for terrorist attacks that kill Americans on United
States soil. If the bill were to pass both houses of Congress and be
signed by the president, it could clear a path for the role of the Saudi
government to be examined in the Sept. 11 lawsuits.
Obama
administration officials counter that weakening the sovereign immunity
provisions would put the American government, along with its citizens
and corporations, in legal risk abroad because other nations might
retaliate with their own legislation. Secretary of State John Kerry told
a Senate panel in February that the bill, in its current form, would
“expose the United States of America to lawsuits and take away our
sovereign immunity and create a terrible precedent.”
The
bill’s sponsors have said that the legislation is purposely drawn very
narrowly — involving only attacks on American soil — to reduce the
prospect that other nations might try to fight back.
In
a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill on March 4, Anne W. Patterson,
an assistant secretary of state, and Andrew Exum, a top Pentagon
official on Middle East policy, told staff members of the Senate Armed
Services Committee that American troops and civilians could be in legal
jeopardy if other nations decide to retaliate and strip Americans of
immunity abroad. They also discussed the Saudi threats specifically,
laying out the impacts if Saudi Arabia made good on its economic
threats.
John
Kirby, a State Department spokesman, said in a statement that the
administration stands by the victims of terrorism, “especially those who
suffered and sacrificed so much on 9/11.”
Edwin
M. Truman, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International
Economics, said he thought the Saudis were most likely making an “empty
threat.” Selling hundreds of billions of dollars in American assets
would not only be technically difficult to pull off, he said, but would
also very likely cause global market turmoil for which the Saudis would
be blamed.
Moreover, he said, it could destabilize the American dollar — the currency to which the Saudi riyal is pegged.
“The only way they could punish us is by punishing themselves,” Mr. Truman said.
The
bill is an anomaly in a Congress fractured by bitter partisanship,
especially during an election year. It is sponsored by Senator John
Cornyn, Republican of Texas, and Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New
York. It has the support of an unlikely coalition of liberal and
conservative senators, including Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, and
Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas. It passed through the Judiciary Committee
in January without dissent.
“As
our nation confronts new and expanding terror networks that are
targeting our citizens, stopping the funding source for terrorists
becomes even more important,” Mr. Cornyn said last month.
The
alliance with Saudi Arabia has frayed in recent years as the White
House has tried to thaw ties with Iran — Saudi Arabia’s bitter enemy— in
the midst of recriminations between American and Saudi officials about
the role that both countries should play in the stability of the Middle
East.
But
the administration has supported Saudi Arabia on other fronts,
including providing the country with targeting intelligence and
logistical support for its war in Yemen. The Saudi military is flying
jets and dropping bombs it bought from the United States — part of the
billions of dollars in arms deals that have been negotiated with Saudi
Arabia and other Persian Gulf nations during the Obama administration.
The
war has been a humanitarian disaster and fueled a resurgence of Al
Qaeda in Yemen, leading to the resolution in Congress to put new
restrictions on arms deals to the kingdom. Senator Christopher S.
Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, one of the resolution’s sponsors and a
member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that Congress has
been “feckless” in conducting oversight of arms sales, especially those
destined for Saudi Arabia.
“My
first desire is for our relationship with Saudi Arabia to come with a
greater degree of conditionality than it currently does,” he said.
Iran is our external enemy of the moment. Saudi Arabia is our
enduring internal enemy, already within our borders and permitted to
poison American Muslims with its Wahhabi cult.
Oh, and Saudi Arabia’s also the spring from which the bloody waters of global jihad flowed.
Iran humiliates our sailors, but the Saudis are the spiritual jailers
of hundreds of millions of Muslims, committed to intolerance, barbarity
and preventing Muslims from joining the modern world. And we help.
Firm figures are elusive, but estimates are that the Saudis fund up
to 80% of American mosques, at least in part. And their goal is the same
here as it is elsewhere in the world where Islam must compete with
other religions: to prevent Muslims from integrating into the host
society.
The Saudi royal family promotes the radical Wahhabi cult of Islam.Photo: Getty Images
The Saudis love having Muslims in America, since that stakes Islam’s
claim, but it doesn’t want Muslims to become Americans and stray from
the hate-riddled cult they’ve imposed upon a great religion.
The tragedy for the Arabs, especially, has been who got the oil
wealth. It wasn’t the sophisticates of Beirut or even the religious
scholars of Cairo, but Bedouins with a bitter view of faith. The Saudis
and their fellow fanatics in the oil-rich Gulf states have used those
riches to drag Muslims backward into the past and to spread violent
jihad.
The best argument for alternative energy sources is to return the Saudis to their traditional powerlessness.
I’ve seen Saudi money at work in country after country, from Senegal
to Kenya to Pakistan to Indonesia and beyond. Everywhere, their
hirelings preach a stern and joyless world, along with the duty to carry
out jihad (contrary to our president’s nonsense, jihad’s primary
meaning is not “an inner struggle,” but expanding the reach of Islam by
fire and sword).
Here’s one of the memories that haunt me. On Kenya’s old Swahili
Coast, once the domain of Muslim slavers preying on black Africans, I
visited a wretched Muslim slum where children, rather than learning
useful skills in a state school, sat amid filth memorizing the Koran in a
language they could not understand. According to locals, their parents
had been bribed to take their children out of the state schools and put
them in madrassas.
Naturally, educated Christians from the interior get the good jobs
down on the coast. The Muslims rage at the injustice. The Christians
reply, “You can’t all be mullahs — learn something!” And behold: The
Saudi mission’s accomplished, the society divided.
The Saudis build Muslims mosques and madrassas but not hospitals and universities.
The basic fact our policy-makers need to grasp about the Saudis is
that they couldn’t care less about the welfare of flesh-and-blood
Muslims (they refuse to take in Syrian refugees but demand Europe do
so). What the Saudis care about is Islam in the abstract. Countless
Muslims can suffer to keep the faith pure.
The Saudis build Muslims mosques and madrassas but not hospitals and universities.
Another phenomenon I’ve witnessed is that the Saudis rush to plant
mosques where there are few or no Muslims, or where the Wahhabi cult
still hasn’t found roots. In Senegal, with its long tradition of humane
Islam, religious scholars dismiss the Saudis as upstarts. Yet, money
ultimately buys souls and the Saudis were opening mosques.
And jihadi violence is now an appealing brand.
In Mombasa, Kenya, you drive past miles of near-empty mosques.
Pakistan has been utterly poisoned, with Wahhabism pushing back even the
radical (but less well-funded) Deobandis, the region’s traditional
Islamist hardliners.
Shamelessly, the Saudis “offered” to build 200 new mosques in Germany
for the wave of migrants. That was too much even for the politically
correct Germans, and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s deputy had as close to a
public fit over the issue as toe-the-line Germans are permitted to do.
But our real problem is here and now, in the United States. Consider
how idiotic we’ve been, allowing Saudis to fund hate mosques and
madrassas, to provide Jew-baiting texts and to do their best to bully
American Muslims into conformity with their misogynistic, 500-lashes
worldview. Our leaders and legislators have betrayed our fellow citizens
who happen to be Muslim, making it more difficult for them to integrate
fully into our society.
President Obama meets with King Salman in September.Photo: Getty Images
In the long run, the Saudis will lose. The transformative genius of
America will defeat the barbarism. But lives will be wrecked along the
way and terror will remain our routine companion.
Why did we let this happen? Greed. Naivete. Political correctness.
Inertia. For decades, the Saudis sent ambassadors who were “just like
us,” drinking expensive scotch, partying hard, playing tennis with our
own political royalty, and making sure that American corporations and
key individuals made money. A lot of money.
But they weren’t just like us. First of all, few of us could afford
the kind of scotch they drank. More important, they had a deep
anti-American, anti-liberty, play-us-for-suckers agenda.
And we let the Saudis exert control over America’s Muslim communities
through their surrogates. No restrictions beyond an occasional timid
request to remove a textbook or pamphlet that went too far.
Think what we’re doing: The Saudis would never let us fund a church
or synagogue in Saudi Arabia. There are none. And there won’t be any.
Wouldn’t it make sense for Congress to pass a law prohibiting foreign
governments, religious establishments, charities and individuals from
funding religious institutions here if their countries do not
reciprocate and practice religious freedom? Isn’t that common sense? And
simply fair?
Saudi money even buys our silence on terrorism.
Decades ago, the Saudi royal family realized it had a problem. Even
its brutal practices weren’t strict enough for its home-grown zealots.
So the king and his thousands of princes gave the budding terrorists
money — and aimed them outside the kingdom.
Osama bin Laden was just one extremist of thousands. The 9/11
hijackers were overwhelmingly Saudi. The roots of the jihadi movements
tearing apart the Middle East today all lie deep in Wahhabism.
Which brings us to 28 pages redacted from the 9/11 Commission’s
report. Those pages allegedly document Saudi complicity. Our own
government kept those revelations from the American people. Because,
even after 9/11, the Saudis were “our friends.”
(We won’t even admit that the Saudi goal in the energy sector today
is to break American fracking operations, let alone face the damage
their zealotry has caused.)
There’s now a renewed push to have those 28 pages released.
Washington voices “soberly” warn that it shouldn’t be done until after
the president’s upcoming encounter with the Saudi king, if at all.
Do it now. Stop bowing. Face reality.
If we’re unlucky, we may end up fighting Iran, which remains in the
grip of its own corrupt theocracy — although Iranian women can vote and
drive cars, and young people are allowed to be young people at about the
1950s level. But if fortune smiles and, eventually, the Iranian
hardliners go, we could rebuild a relationship with the Iranians, who
are the heirs of a genuine, Persian civilization. Consider how
successful and all-American Iranian-Americans have become.
War with Iran will remain a tragic possibility. But the Saudi war on
our citizens, on mainstream Islam, and on civilization is a here-and-now
reality.
Ralph Peters is Fox News’ strategic analyst.
Weakened Saudi Arabia Could See Social Unrest After Economic Shakeup
By ZeroHedge
April 25, 2016 2:10 PM
Despite oil's rebound from cyclical lows and the world's
exuberance that the energy space may be saved (on the basis of
headline-reading algo pumping momentum into commodity futures products
that only leveraged Chinese speculators could find value in), something
ugly is occurring in Saudi Arabian money-markets. There appears to be a
growing funding squeeze in The Kingdom as 3-month interbank rates spike
above 2 percent for the first time since January 2009, prompting King
Salman to approve a 'post-oil economic plan'.
View photo
.
(Click to enlarge)
Whether this spike is responsible or not, The Kingdom is clearly seeking ways to reduce its reliance on crude.
As Bloomberg reports, King Salman approved a blueprint for
diversifying the country’s economy away from oil on Monday, a package of
developmental, economic, social and other programs.
Saudi
Arabia’s plan for the post-hydrocarbon era will have to overcome habits
developed over decades of relying on crude sales to fuel economic
growth, create jobs and build infrastructure.
Almost
eight decades after oil was first found in the country, officials on
Monday are to unveil Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s “Saudi
Vision 2030,” a blueprint seeking to reduce the current reliance on
revenue from crude exports. King Salman has approved the package of
developmental, economic, social and other programs. Prince Mohammed,
known as MbS among diplomats and Saudi watchers, disclosed details of
the plan in interviews with Bloomberg in Riyadh.
“Shifting from an oil-based economy to something different is
very difficult,” said Gregory Gause, a professor at Texas A&M
University. “The Saudis have been talking about it for decades, but have
made little progress. So MbS has his work cut out for him.”
Prince Mohammed is leading the biggest economic shakeup since the
founding of Saudi Arabia in 1932, with measures that represent a radical
shift for a country built on petrodollars. His drive may face
resentment from a population accustomed to government largess and power
circles that have been stunned by the rapid rise of the 30 year-old
prince, political analysts say. Part of the program envisages selling less than 5 percent of
Saudi Aramco and creating the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund.
The drop in crude prices has prompted Gulf Arab monarchies to dip
into reserves they had accumulated since 2000. Saudi Arabia’s net
foreign assets fell by $115 billion last year to plug a budget deficit
that reached about 15 percent of economic output. The government also
turned to the domestic bond market and is planning its first
international dollar bond sale. Related: SunEdison Continues Operations Despite Bankruptcy And Lawsuits
After decades of talk of diversification, more than 70 percent of
Saudi government revenue came from oil in 2015 and the state still
employs two-thirds of Saudi workers. Foreigners account for nearly 80
percent of the private-sector payroll.
“The issue really is how to get
the Saudi private sector to hire locals, how to make the numbers on that
right, since so much of the Saudi private sector has had business
models based on lower-wage foreign labor,” said Gause.
In response to the country’s
weakened fiscal position, Prince Mohammed’s plan is to raise non-oil
revenue by $100 billion by 2020. The government announced cuts in
utility and gasoline subsidies in December. Including future reductions,
authorities expect the restructuring to generate $30 billion a year by
2020.
“There
is a realization among many Saudis that the economic challenges that
the kingdom is facing are daunting,” said Fahad Nazer, who worked at the
Saudi embassy in Washington and is now a political analyst at JTG Inc.
“Given the fact that some 70 percent of Saudis are under the age of 30,
Prince Mohammed’s penchant for making quick decisions and holding
officials accountable for their performance – or lack thereof - does
have wide support among Saudis.”
Past rulers of Saudi Arabia have
largely avoided seeking additional revenue from their citizens. As
water prices surged after the reduction in subsidies, Saudis turned to
social media to express their anger at the government. King Salman fired
the water minister on Saturday.
Saudi leaders also have unique
social challenges that other nations implementing economic changes
didn’t have to manage. While steps have been taken to get women into the
workforce, the kingdom still prohibits them from driving. The country’s
feared religious police, despite having their powers to arrest curbed
this month, still enforce gender segregation and prayer times.
“The foremost challenge
Mohammed bin Salman faces over time is the inevitable need to
restructure the Al Sauds’ relationship with the Wahhabis,” said
James Dorsey, a senior fellow in international studies at Nanyang
Technological University in Singapore. “This restructuring is inevitable
both to be able to truly reform the economy and because the increasing
toll identification with the puritan sect is taking on Saudi Arabia’s
international reputation.”
His efforts to shake up the
economy come against the backdrop of mounting domestic security threats
and regional turmoil, with the Sunni-ruled kingdom bogged down in a war
in Yemen against Shiite rebels it says are backed by Iran. He has also
consolidated more power than anyone in his position since the founding
of the kingdom.
“Within
Saudi Arabia, the main challenges MbS will face will involve not the
substance of oil policy but rather resistance within the royal family to
so much power being concentrated in the hands of one prince of his
generation,” he said.
So perhaps the spiking money-market rates are more indicative of the potential for social unrest?
Saudi Arabia warned its citizens against traveling
to Lebanon on Tuesday after one of its biggest allies, the United Arab
Emirates, banned travel to Lebanon altogether.
Turkey's prime minister said on Monday that Ankara will not allow the strategic city of Azaz in northern Syria to fall to Kurdish YPG forces, promising the "harshest reaction" if the Kurds did not retreat.
Pro-government forces in Syria have reportedly broken a rebel siege of two villages northwest of Aleppo, effectively cutting off Turkey's supply line to opposition groups operating in and around Syria's largest city.
Despite oil's rebound from cyclical lows and the world's
exuberance that the energy space may be saved (on the basis of
headline-reading algo pumping momentum into commodity futures products
that only leveraged Chinese speculators could find value in), something
ugly is occurring in Saudi Arabian money-markets. There appears to be a
growing funding squeeze in The Kingdom as 3-month interbank rates spike
above 2 percent for the first time since January 2009, prompting King
Salman to approve a 'post-oil economic plan'.
No comments:
Post a Comment