OBSESSION WITH IRAN DRIVING MIDEAST, U.S. CRAZY
If there is a common denominator explaining so many recent events in the Middle East — actions by Saudi Arabia, the U.S., Syria, Israel and Yemen — it can be expressed in one word: Iran. Everyone has Iran’s growing power and influence in the region on the mind — including Iran — and that obsession is making a lot of people crazy.
For instance, the Trump administration, like Barack Obama’s, actually wants to get away from the Middle East — as much as possible — but while leaving as little Iranian influence behind as possible.
Saudi Arabia, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, wants to get ahead in the Middle East and reform his economy for the 21st century — while curtailing as much Iranian influence in the region as possible.
And the Iranians want to get wide — to expand their influence from Tehran to the Mediterranean — not by creating a successful and attractive development model at home that Arabs and other Muslims would want to emulate, but rather by forcing their way into Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq through local Shiite militias that have created states within these states.
This is generating a lot of anxiety in the Arab world, the U.S. and Israe.
Iran has a richly talented population, and rich Persian culture. But instead of unleashing both and enabling Iran’s youth to realize their full potential — and making the country influential that way — the ayatollahs are suppressing those talents at home and unleashing the power of Shiite mercenaries on Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
It’s actually rather pathetic. The greatest thing that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia could do is to stop working each other into a lather over this Iranian “threat” and to focus on their domestic reform agendas. That would be the best revenge on Tehran.
For starters, American, European and Arab leaders should all be encouraging MBS to keep going where no Saudi leader before him has dared to go — pursuing his stated goal of reversing the religious right turn that the kingdom took in 1979, after the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Muslim extremists.
If MBS fulfills his vow to bring Saudi Islam back to “moderation,” it will surely improve the status of Muslim women, the quality of education in Muslim communities and the relationship between Muslims and other faiths across the globe.
But for MBS to advance that agenda requires a strong, economically healthy Saudi Arabia. Alas, for now Saudi Arabia is far from that; its trajectory in recent years has been sharply downward. Most Saudis today are focused on jobs and education, not on Iran, and if MBS can fix those needs with his reform plan it will only propel his push to moderate Saudi Islam.
Precisely because these intertwined religious and economic reform agendas are so critical, wise friends of MBS would also be offering him some tough love — by telling him that it’s great to arrest thieving Saudi billionaires and throw them in the Ritz-Carlton, but it has to be done with transparency and within a rule of law, not in an arbitrary way that will hurt his legitimacy and frighten future investors. They also have to stress to him that to be an effective anti-corruption campaigner, he has to be open to criticism himself and live modestly. No more giant yachts.
On foreign policy, MBS’ real friends would also tell him that while Iran has expanded its influence across the Arab world, the Saudis do not have the muscles to take it on head-on right now.
My view on Saudi Arabia today is very simple: Because it has so much deferred reform to undertake — before its oil money runs out — the biggest question is not if MBS is too brash, too brutal, too power-hungry or too imperfect. It’s whether he’s too late — that Saudi Arabia is now un-reformable. I think not, but that is why, with all of MBS’ flaws, we need to help increase his chances for success. If he can turn Jiddah into another Dubai, where so many Iranians now love to vacation and bank, he will do more to increase his influence in the region and diminish Iran’s than anything else he could do.