Upping the ante
The attack in Iran could spiral quickly
The attacks in Tehran on the parliament and the mausoleum of the Ayatollah Khomeini, whoever carried them out and why, are dangerous actions that can easily lead to a Middle East regional war, not to America’s advantage.
The lineup in the Mideast is Saudi Arabia and its faithful Sunni-state adherents against Shiite Iran and Qatar, and Israel. In the past Saudi Arabia and fellow Sunni states have tried to achieve their objectives through money, as opposed to war and other violence. This approach has included sometime support of fellow Sunni organizations al-Qaida and Islamic State.
The reason for that approach is their extreme vulnerability. In spite of having built up on paper strong militaries with American help, with their small populations, aged monarchies, dependence on oil and soft, unrepresentative leadership, they are not organized in such a way to be able to wage war effectively. They are unlike Iran, Iraq and Syria in that regard. Iran and Iraq took an estimated 1 million casualties in their eight-year war in the 1980s.
The Iranians are already saying that the Saudis were behind Wednesday’s attacks in Tehran, which killed 12. The so-far political assault on Qatar by the Saudis and their various Sunni colleague states, including Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, are rightly or wrongly being attributed to support by the United States, during President Donald Trump’s visit to Riyadh, when he is believed to have given them the green light to go after Qatar.
There are several problems with that U.S. position. The first is that America has had for 26 years important military installations in Qatar, including 11,000 troops at present, regional command centers, and lots of aircraft and other weapons. If Saudi Arabia were to lead an actual invasion of Qatar, the international response would have to be, for consistency, comparable to the Americanled response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. France, Iran and Turkey have so far signaled support of Qatar. Turkey is sending more troops to its base in Qatar.
The bone Saudi Arabia and the others want to pick with Qatar’s leaders is its support of Al-Jazeera, which tells truth to power in the region. They also object to Qatar’s relations with Hamas,Hezbollah and Iran and the emirate’s willingness to support the Afghan Taliban. To start, Qatar could put the word in Egyptian leader Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi’s ear that if he doesn’t tell the Saudis to back off, Qatar will send the 300,000 Egyptian workers in Qatar home, a painful economicblow.
America’s concerns in the region include the fact that, in spite of America’s lessened dependence on Middle Eastern oil, fuel prices in the United States will go up if major war breaks outthere. There is also the U.S. war on global terrorism, waged from bases in the region, including Qatar. U.S. arms sales to the Arab states that can still pay will go up. Israel isn’t troubled much by war among the Arabs because it means that it is left in peace, in general, on the subject of the Palestinians, including by the Americans, otherwise distracted.
The really serious danger is if Qatar allies like Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah strike at Saudi Arabia or the Persian Gulf emirates in response to the attacks in Tehran, America risks the Saudis saying — you got us into this, now you get us out. In that regard, Washington should be supporting the effort of the emir of Kuwait to make peace between the contesting Sunni states’ leaders.