August 22, 2015
During a delightful lunch
in Beirut a few days ago with a good friend and colleague from the United Arab
Emirates, during which we discussed a wide range of current developments around
our volatile region, he asked me a direct a simple question that is also on the
minds of many people: “Who is prevailing in the current regional confrontation
between the forces led by the Saudis and the Iranians?”
I took the opportunity of
the time I needed to chew well on my mouthful of fine Lebanese hummus, washed
down with a refreshing dose of tabbouleh salad, to ponder his important
question. I replied, with a smile born of equally deep respect and suspicion
about a loaded question, that I could not answer the question as it was posed,
because I disagree with its fundamental premise that our region is largely
defined by the confrontation between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
I replied that I did not
agree with the primacy of a Saudi- and Iranian-led regional confrontation that
has been heavily promoted by many people in the Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation
Council (GCC), and therefore by extension by most of the Arab and global media;
I thought that analysis was too simplistic to explain the many tensions and
armed conflicts around our region, and also that most Saudis and Iranians are
too smart to waste their money, blood and time on a futile regional conflict
that would only hurt them both by gradually destroying the region.
This destruction is
painfully visible every day in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Bahrain, and
Yemen, at the very least. This spectacle of multiple fragmenting states is bad
enough; it is made even worse by the latest troubling development—it is too
early to call it a trend—which is the spectacle of repeated bomb attacks and
killings of government officials and security forces in three of the most
important regional powers that should be stabilizing forces in the Middle East:
Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Add to this the ongoing war in Yemen, and the
erratic battle against “Islamic State” (ISIS) forces in Syria, Iraq and other
tiny pockets of ISIS presence around the region, the massive refugee flows and
the stresses they cause, and the dangerous sectarian dimensions of some of the
confrontations underway, and we end up with a very complex and violent regional
picture that cannot possibly be explained primarily as a consequence of
Iranian-Saudi rivalries.
A more complete explanation
of the battered Arab region today must include accounting for several other
mega-tends: the impact of the last twenty-fix years of non-stop American
military attacks, threats and sanctions from Libya to Afghanistan; the
radicalizing impact of sixty-seven years of non-stop Zionist colonization and
militarism against Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians and other Arabs; the
hollowing out of Arab economic and governance systems by three generations of
military-led, amateurish and corruption-riddled mismanaged governance that
deprived citizens of their civic and political rights and pushed them to assert
instead the primacy of their sectarian and tribal identities; and, the
catalytic force of the 2003 Anglo-American led war on Iraq that opened the door
for all these forces and others yet — like lack of water, jobs, and electricity
that make normal daily life increasingly difficult — to combine into the
current situation of widespread national polarization and violence.
Most of these drivers of
the current regional condition have little to do with Iranian-Saudi
sensitivities, and much more to do with decades of frail statehood, sustained
and often violent Arab authoritarianism, denied citizenship, distorted
development, and continuous regional and global assaults. Nevertheless, I
finally replied to my friend’s question—as we shared some kind of miraculous
Lebanese dessert concoction of pistachios and dairy products—that in the
existing element of confrontation today between two very loose Saudi- and
Iranian-led groups of actors in the region, I suspect that neither side can be
seen as “winning.”
Viewing our region today
through the lens of a—I believe, largely imagined—Saudi-Iranian rivalry is not
the most useful way to analyze this situation, I suggested. Both Iran and Saudi
Arabia can claim some tangible successes in their regional strategic
situations, in both military and political dimensions, but they also both face
serious challenges. Most of their “allies” across the region strike me as being
in difficult, sometimes precarious, situations that are often more of a burden
than a benefit to Tehran and Riyadh.
Situations on the ground
everywhere are changing every week. Fundamental strategic conditions for both
regional powers may be on the verge of historic changes, given the likely
impact of the Iran nuclear agreement, declining global energy prices, the
continued ravages of militarism as a primary political vocabulary across the
Middle East, and only selective interventions by global powers and the UN Security
Council. Iran and Saudi Arabia have much more incentive to work together for
the sake of regional stability and prosperity, than to fight it out in hapless
and devastated other smaller countries.
We then had coffee, when
we discussed this further, which I will recount in more detail in my next
column.
Rami G. Khouri is
published twice weekly in the Daily
Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam
Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American
University of Beirut. On Twitter @ramikhouri.
Copyright ©2015 Rami G. Khouri -- distributed by Agence Global