US’ hand in Saudis’ game of thrones

When a longtime Saudi watcher went to pay his respects last month to the suave veteran who has run the kingdom’s foreign policy for over 40 years, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister Saud Al Faisal could barely sit upright, much less hold a conversation.

On Wednesday, only months since Salman bin Abdel Aziz took over as Saudi Arabia’s King, he finally replaced the ailing 75year-old with Adel Al-Jubair, the Gulf nation’s savvy ambassador to Washington, and the first man outside the house of Ibn Saud to hold such a post.

Seen as no more than an internal reshuffle by a new King, intent on cementing his own bloodline, it’s actually much more than just a simple game of thrones. It’s Washington’s hand that is clearly visible as the Obama administration seeks to quietly regain some say over the new dispensation that has set the peninsula aflame, by provoking a needless war against the Houthis in Yemen, in the fantastic claim that the tribesmen were being armed and instigated by Tehran.

Unlike the rest of the Muslim world, the Houthis are a people who, their Shia faith notwithstanding, have prayed alongside Yemen’s Sunnis in mosques they have shared for centuries.

The Zaidi stream of the Shias, known as the “Fivers”, is closest to the Sunnis, differing, principally, over the Zaidi’s belief in an Imamate. Former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, incidentally, is a Zaidi. The Iranian Shias are “Twelvers”, recognising 12 imams over the Sunni’s one Prophet.

Barring a few protests after Friday prayers outside the spectacular Al Saleh mosque in Sana’a after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, where Houthi youngsters chanted “Death to America”, the US, albeit concerned over the rise of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — to which Riyadh, their staunchest allies in the region, had turned a blind eye — knew that the Houthis were simply not Tehran’s cat’s paw in the region.

Instead, with a new King in Riyadh, the Houthis rapidly became the laboratory rats for the coming-of-age ritual of a young Saudi prince, promoted over the heads of his own older brothers and a slew of other hopefuls to the powerful post of defence minister, crown prince and ultimate heir.

Washington’s bringing an Al-Jubeir into play as foreign minister is, therefore, no accident. It comes after the US, that watched as a Saudi-led coalition rained bombs on unarmed civilians in Yemen, fell back on the trusted Al-Jubeir, who had more than filled the rather large shoes of the colourful Bandar bin Sultan, the previous envoy to the United States after the powerful Turki bin Faisal put in his papers.

Bandar, after secretly arming and running an irregular force against Syrian President Bashar Al Assad with the blessings of his uncle and former Saudi King Abdullah, has, incidentally dropped from public view, reinforcing speculation he is out of favour, or in poor health.

Either way, Al Jubeir was the only choice as America’s eyes and ears in the kingdom.

Two other appointments in King Salman’s dramatic Cabinet reshuffle are meant to signal a generational shift, but, in fact, is an US effort to repair ties with an ally with whom a deep mistrust had developed, capped by US President Barack Obama’s pursuit of nuclear peace talks with arch-enemy Tehran.

Riyadh, transfixed at the toppling of Saddam Hussein and Sunni Iraq’s absorption into Iran’s sphere of influence alongside Syria and parts of Lebanon, was horrified as allies in key frontline states like Tunis, Egypt and Libya were brought down by the Arab Spring, popular uprisings which mirrored US-inspired movements that rocked the Russian near abroad. Bahrain, where the Saudis also got involved, withstood the Shia insurgency; even if it was more civil unrest, less Iranian malfeasance.

The sidelining of princes Mitaib and Muqrin were a foregone conclusion. (Muqrin’s exit is a loss for India. Muqrin was Indian external affairs minister Jaswant Singh’s host when Mr Singh was gifted two Arabian horses on behalf of then Crown Prince Abdullah at his farm in 2000 during a pathbreaking visit). But it is the catapulting of two others Prince Mohammed bin Nayef and Prince Mohammed bin Salman — to lead the country as it transitions from a slow moving gerontocracy to one that will be led by this new generation of Ibn Sauds, where the US may have over-reached itself.

Little question that the inheritors of Abdullah’s mantle want to continue to stamp their nation’s ultraconservative imprimatur, be publicly proclaimed undisputed leaders of the greater Sunni nation.

But whether they have the subtlety and ease of doing business that the older generation brought to the table is moot. And there’s no saying whether the new crown prince, the Washington-favoured “moderate”, Mohammed bin Nayef, will be able to rein in the hot-

Washington bringing Al-Jubeir into play as foreign minister is no accident. It comes after the U.S., who watched as a Saudiled coalition rained bombs on unarmed civilians in Yemen, fell back on the trusted Al-Jubeir, who had more than filled the shoes of Bandar bin Sultan.

headed second crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

Son of the feared former interior minister Prince Nayef, he not only heads that ministry, and is more feared than his father, given the indifferent health of the 78year-old current King, this moderate nurtured by Washington will be the de facto ruler of an oil-rich nation that is at the fulcrum of US power in the region.

The changes in the Saudi power structure come at a difficult time for the guardian of two of Islam’s holiest shrines. Already mired in a protracted existential war where Shia Iran and the Saudi-led Sunni states seek to end the domination of each other’s temporal reach, Riyadh, despite its ideological reach, must guard against a more powerful religio-military force like ISIS that threatens its own survival.

The house of Ibn Saud has long fought proxy wars beyond its own borders, in the form of the earlier avatar of the Taliban, a slew of other jihadi groups that have destabilised — and continue to destabilise — not just Eastern Europe during the Bosnian wars, and Afghanistan, India and now Pakistan, but also now, a neighbouring country, under the pretext that a staunch ally was under threat. It was that overt muscle-flexing that got Washington’s attention, raising questions over whether this is a more muscular Saudi Arabia that will go from strength to strength, or one that in its over-reach could simply self-destruct. The writer is resident editor, Deccan Chronicle, Bengaluru