Ally Tehran may welcome Gulf tensions
TEHRAN: Iran’s leaders have been noticeably restrained in their response to the Qatar crisis — and for good reason, analysts say. Not only have they welcomed it, they would be happy to see it quietly drag on.
Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates cut diplomatic and commercial ties with Qatar last month for what they said was its financing of terrorism and working too closely with Iran.
They then delivered a list of 13 demands that Qatar has dismissed as a grave infringement on its sovereignty and threatened further sanctions if those were not met.
For Tehran’s clerical leaders, the confrontation among putative Persian Gulf allies came at a particularly auspicious time: when the entire Sunni Arab world seemed lined up against them after President Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia in May.
“They wanted to weaken us,” Mashallah Shamsolvaezin, an Iranian journalist, said with a chuckle, “but now they are losing themselves.”
While Iran and Qatar share one of the largest gas fields in the world and have diplomatic relations, Qatar is of little or no strategic value to Tehran.
About the most that Tehran has had to say about the situation was a mild remark from President Hassan Rouhani, who told the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, that “Iran’s airspace, sea and ground transport links will always be open to Qatar, our brotherly and neighbour country”.
After Mr Trump’s visit, however, Tehran was preparing to face a united bloc of wealthy, militarily well-equipped Persian Gulf nations ready to isolate Iran with the enthusiastic backing of the United States. Saudi Arabia had bought $100 billion worth of US weapons and had formed a close partnership against Tehran with Mr Trump.
The US, Saudi Arabia and Israel were painting Iran as the primary source of instability in the region, a nation supporting terrorist groups in Yemen, Lebanon and Gaza and fighting on behalf of the government of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The road to ratcheting up the pressure on Iran — a sectarian rival hated by the Saudi kingdom for its version of political Islam — seemed open.
Then they started fighting among themselves.
A Qatari news report, subsequently dismissed by the Qatari government as fake, was said to have quoted the emir as saying he wanted to ease tensions with Iran. Saudi Arabia and the UAE reacted furiously, starting a diplomatic and trade blockade against the gas-rich nation, handing over the list of 13 demands — “demand 13: agree to all our demands” — and even forbidding their citizens to wear Barcelona soccer jerseys because they bear the name of their sponsor, Qatar Airways.
One of those demands is that Qatar close a Turkish military base, which would alienate Turkey, a Nato member and an ally of Saudi Arabia in Syria. “Instead of making an Arab Nato, they are only making more enemies,” said Hamidreza Taraghi, a hardline analyst in Iran. “In the end, only America is benefiting, selling all those weapons to those countries.”
But even there, the Persian Gulf confrontation is creating some nervous moments for the Pentagon, which is running the Syria air campaign out of a major base in Qatar.
It was a familiar turn of events for the clerics in Tehran, whose regional competition with Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries sometimes means just waiting for the Saudis to shoot themselves in the foot, analysts say.
That strategy seems even more appropriate with the rise of Mohammed bin Salman, 31, the recently named Saudi crown prince, who is developing a reputation for impulsive foreign policy moves that do not work out as planned. He is the architect of the Saudi war in neighbouring Yemen, which was supposed to be a blitzkrieg that would end in two days but is dragging into its third year and has caused a horrific humanitarian crisis.
Now, the crown prince is seen as the driving force behind the effort to isolate Qatar.
“Our interests are best served if there is no war, conflict or any further tensions in our region,” said Hossein Sheikholeslam, an adviser to Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif. “We try to act rationally, because the opponents in the region are young and unripe and irrational in their approach with Qatar.”