Gulf War IV could erupt

The men who carried out Saturday’s attack on the parade in Ahvaz, in Iran’s southwest province of Khuzestan, were well trained: four of them killed 25 people and wounded 70 others before they were shot dead. The question is whether they were trained by Islamic State or by the backers of the low-profile Ahvaz National Resistance, which also claimed credit for the attack.

Islamic State is an independent ultra-extremist Sunni Muslim movement that kills Shias – most Iranians are Shia – on principle, so there are no big political implications if it was ISIS that planned the attack. However, if it was the Ahvaz National Resistance, then these were the opening shots in the next Gulf War, because the resistance is backed by Saudi Arabia and its smaller Arab allies such as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

Iran is convinced it was the latter. ‘‘It is absolutely clear to us who committed this crime . . . and who they are linked to,’’ Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said. ‘‘The small [Arab] puppet countries in the region are backed by America, and the United States is provoking them.’’

There is reason to suspect this is true. The Arab countries of the Gulf are smaller and weaker than Iran and have talked themselves into the paranoid view that Iran plans to destroy them. They talk of war with Iran as inevitable, and dream of drawing the United States into a war to even up the odds.

US President Donald Trump is also paranoid about Iran and talks about overthrowing the Iranian regime. His lawyer Rudolph Giuliani boasted on Saturday that US sanctions are really hurting Iran: ‘‘I don’t know when we’re going to overthrow them. It could be in a few days, months, a couple of years. But it’s going to happen.’’

So this could be a marriage made in heaven – or somewhere else in the supernatural world, perhaps. But first there has to be a spark, some Iranian action that gives both Trump and the Arab Gulf states a pretext for attacking Iran – for they both think of attacking Iran first, not of defending against a highly improbable Iranian attack.

Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, said last year that ‘‘we won’t wait for the battle to be in Saudi Arabia. Instead, we will work so that the battle is for them in Iran.’’ If they get their war, both leaders expect that most of the heavy lifting will be done by the US Air Force, but something bad has to happen on the ground first. Iran has to do something stupid.

How do you get it to do something stupid? Well, you could try supporting separatist movements in the various ethnic minority areas that ring the country: Arabs in the south-west, Kurds in the north-west, Turkmen in the north-east and Baloch in the south-east. With luck, the Iranian regime will over-react and massacre enough of the separatists, and innocent bystanders, to provide the pretext for an Arab-us attack.

After Saturday’s attack in Ahvaz, Dr Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a prominent United Arab Emirates scholar who tends to say what other people don’t dare, tweeted the attack wasn’t really a terrorist incident at all. He pointed out ‘‘moving the battle to the Iranian side is a declared option’’ and predicted the number of such attacks would increase. ‘‘If that’s the Saudi-american strategy, then sooner or later they will manage to goad the Iranian regime into committing some atrocity in return, and then we’re away to the races.’’

Of course, the attack in Ahvaz on Saturday could just have been another meaningless spasm of hatred by ISIS and not a Saudi-us initiative at all. But if not now, then soon.

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