Saudi, Lebanon, Iran …WTF?

Continuation of a fairly straight line in Western foreign policy since before the invasion of Iraq: i.e. containment of Iran, until they demilitarize. Bush got rid of Saddam, taking a militarist wild-card out of the deck. But pro-Western Sunnis have had a damaging interior split over the funding of Wahhabism. Obama essentially put the Saudis on notice, chastising them publicly — and at the same time he showed everybody that an international sanctions regime against Iran cannot hold forever, and only gets you an interim nuclear deal. Therefore it’s time for Sunnis to step up and be counted. Kushner may have assured Crown Prince MBS that the U.S. will have his back in a secularizing social reformation (long overdue) and that the U.S. will help if this new Saudi regime targets Iran. Hariri may understand that MBS’s move puts him immediately in Hezbollah’s crosshairs because Iran’s next retaliatory move would include the fight for Lebanon.

I think it’s a mistake to think there is a coherent strategy here. Bush got rid of Saddam, but that was a colossal blunder in foreign policy terms, as it simply magnified Iran’s regional clout. What Obama showed is that it is possible to make a deal with Iran, to move toward a normalized posture with them; that they are at least as rational an actor as is any other regime in the Middle East. This of course means Trump must oppose Obama, Iran, and the deal, and the Saudis (and Israel) are a convenient proxy with which to fight that battle. No doubt Kushner has encouraged the Saudis to up the pressure on Iran, and similarly encouraged Israel. Forcing Hariri out creates instability in Lebanon, which of course is what Israel is always looking for to exploit.

The question remains, though: Why is MBS on board with this? He wants to be king, of course, and that explains the ‘anti-corruption’ coup. But threatening war with Iran is, well, stupid.

I understand that Nasrallah gave a statement a few days ago saying that he didn’t believe Hariri made the statement issued in his name.

I presume the threat is that MBS will have another go at supporting Al Qa’ida/ISIS against Iran, this time in Lebanon, but given that Hezbollah drove them out of Qalamoun recently with the assistance of the LAF and SAA I’m not sure why he would think another go would be more successful.

I think one factor is the new prince is a stupid man who believes himself to be brilliant. Hence the Yemeni war, the neoliberal plans for the economy (which will cause further political destabilization in SA) and the way in which he pushed Quatar into Iranian arms. These are all unforced errors.

@6 Katsue – well no, I don’t think much anyone in Lebanon thinks it was Hariri’s idea. It takes quite a bit to unite Lebanese opinion, but this prince managed it.

As for ISIS in Lebanon. Not only would Hezbollah prevail, but they would be politically far stronger at the end of it. So if that MBS’ plan, and I agree it does seem possible, he’s even stupider than I imagined.

@7 Mario – Business consultants.

“I wonder who the hell convinced the Saudis that an Aramco IPO would be in their interests. They are being duped, badly, and will find out too late. By then they will have no friends left.”

It makes a lot of sense, at least for the princes, if their oil production really has peaked. Cash out while you still can.

I was thinking it was largely about “national unity” at a time of the power rab in SA.
To up the scary factor , what if this is part of a Trump fantasy to ignite a regional war against Iran? With Israel, Saudi-Arabia, and Trump in on the planning. People who are deluded into thinking they are oh-so clever….

as Layman says – these are princes, they confidently assume the right of kings, and coherent strategies are alien to them. I particularly liked the sentence in the Washington post reporting on Kushner’s visit, “The two princes are said to have stayed up until nearly 4 a.m. several nights, swapping stories and planning strategy.”
So basically a bull session between two extremely stupid rich boys..

it’s hard to see what motivates the US enmity with Iran other than path dependence

I wonder if “the US” is the right category to approach this problem, just as I doubt it is when John Quiggin proposes his yearly comprehensive plan for US involvement in the Middle East (a blank post). I think a tiny part of the US élites has a lot to personally gain in having a quasi-symbiotic relationship with autocrats with unlimited access to cash, in the sense that such actors are ideal to organize market distorsions: your constituency demands jobs? They can buy your fighter planes. One of your biggest donor asks for something in return? They can sign a huge construction deal for his company. You need quick campaign money? Here it is. You need a dirty job done? They can do it. Etc.

So I think a tiny but influential part of the US élites has a lot to gain personally in working hands in hands with the Saudi (the ruling dynasty, not the people). The Saudi, in turn, have a lot to gain in achieving regional supremacy over Iran and a lot to lose if Iran achieves it. When this tiny part of the US élites is dominant, as is regularly the case and clearly the case currently, the US antagonizes Iran. But I think it has very little to do with American people and Iran.

A comparable dynamic is at play between e.g “France” and “Morocco” with respect to Western Sahara, or “France” (i.e Sarkozy) with “Libya” (i.e Gaddafi).

What Obama showed is that it is possible to make a deal with Iran

What Trump showed is that it is not possible to make a deal with the US.,

SA barely has an military … renting mercenaries … anyone who sold SA … the people to operate them

Do you have some sort of reference or sources for that? Most online sources seem to agree that the Saudi military consists of several hundred thousand active-duty personnel. I have great difficulty believing those are all or even mostly “mercenaries” or “contractors”, even if we exclude the separate Saudi National Guard, which is recruited from tribes considered loyal to the House of Saud. (Several hundred or a few thousand foreigners providing specialized training or maintenance of certain high-tech items, sure, but more than that?)

Also, things like “God knows actual Saudis couldn’t be expected to do the heavy-lifting” sound, to be honest, slightly racist (“Oh, of course those lazy Arabs can’t do any hard, dangerous work”).

“I understand that Nasrallah gave a statement a few days ago saying that he didn’t believe Hariri made the statement issued in his name. ”

You mean – surely – that he didn’t author it ? He read the statement itself on TV.

One of the key things to remember is that Saudi Arabia is not a state in the modern sense, but an area of land ruled over by a family that conquered it. Saud legitimacy has always been a tricky thing, and one of the ways in which they’ve maintained it is by doing a deal with the Wahhabi clerics. Which is why/how a country as puritanical as Saudi Arabia has been ruled by such a dissolute group of individuals.

As a result there’s a tension in how the government is run and who runs it. Parts of the government (in particular the intelligence services) are run by what are essentially Jihadists, with strong links to the country’s clerics. They’re the guys who helped fund/support 9/11. They’re the guys that are responsible for Al-Quaeda, Isis, et al. There’s never much sign that the Saud family have had any interest in Jihad, but they’ve never been in a position to challenge this stuff.

Then on top of this you have the complex ways in which the Saudi’s intersect with the interests of the various western intelligence agencies. I suspect one reason the CIA was comfortable training Wahhabists in Syria, was because they had long standing relationships with their pay masters. Equally Israel and Isis (and to a lesser degree Al-Quaeda) seem to have come to an understanding of sorts. Everything goes back to Saudi Arabia.

As to what MBS is doing. Well notable is what he hasn’t done. He hasn’t challenged the clerics, and has actually increased his acquiescence with their interests. For example the brutal crackdown on Shiites, destruction of their homes and so forth (and the state murder of senior Shiite clerics). If anything the repressive Saudi justice system has got worse in recent years, rather than better (but he’s a reformer!). This is purely an internal power struggle within the Saud family – it’s not a Saudi Arabian power struggle.

Externally he seems determined to prove that Saudi Arabia is the Middle East dominant power. Yemen was supposed to be that, though it’s failed. His recent (and again failed) attempts to boss Quatar were about that. And to the degree that he was supporting Saudi funding of Syrian rebels – I would guess that to was about that. Unfortunately he has a few problems. First of these is that the Saudi military, despite being ludicrously overendowed with weapons, is pathetic. The weapons systems, planes etc are largely manned by foreign mercenaries, whose loyalty to Saudi Arabia extends to the next pay check. Their brual, genocidal and illegal attacks on Yemen are only possible because the US is providing satellite and guidance support for their aircraft. The other problem is that their main rival, Iran, is good at this stuff. They have a decent army, excellent intelligence services, are good at diplomacy and have loyal allies (the Iranians, unlike the US and Saudis, generally don’t stab you in the back when you’ve served your purpose).

I suspect the other problem that Saudi Arabia is facing, though noone truly knows, is that Saudi oil production is declining fast. Without oil they’re nothing.

” The Saudi, in turn, have a lot to gain in achieving regional supremacy over Iran and a lot to lose if Iran achieves it. ”

What, exactly? If Iran is buddies with Baghdad and Damascus, it doesn’t seem to me it’s any skin off SA’s nose. Regional trade is of no substantial importance to them and I can’t imagine Iran has any interest in threatening SA militarily. I really can’t see any point to all this saber rattling and proxy warring. What would it even mean for the Saudis to gain “regional supremacy”?

For much of the last decade US policy in the Middle East has moved towards finding an accomodation with Iran. It seems to me there are now two contradictory US Middle East policies operative simultaneously – the one of the US state, continuing from the Obama years and prosecuted by whatever remains of the Sate Department bureaucracy, factions in the DoD, and exponents of foreign policy in the Senate; and the one of the Trump family and a small circle of insiders (including the new ambassador to Israel, for example), which seems to attempt to forge a SA-Israel-US alliance to start a regional war against Iran and its allies.

I wonder if Erik Prince would perhaps provide the army?

Yeah, the Israeli lobby has been going after Iran for years because Iran supports both Hamas and Hezballah. Post-Revolution Iran is seen as an existential threat in both Israel and the KSA and that attitude explains both the strange unspoken alliance those two countries have as well as some of the absurd unforced errors (like supporting Saddam in the ’80s) that the US has made in the region.

Cian @8,

I think one factor is the new prince is a stupid man who believes himself to be brilliant.

So an alliance with the USA, whose current President is . . .

How could anything go wrong, go wrong, go wrong . . .?

Richard III comes to mind when it comes to what motivates MBS. But instead of a mere two princes that need offing Saudi Arabia has hundreds each sucking at the oil teat. The closer to the crown, the bigger the nipple. Not a good business model. Not conducive to savings.

The war to come is a desperate plan by Bibi – soon to otherwise be deposed or jailed for corruption; and the Donald – soon to be deposed and stripped of his wealth which is like a prison. They are all tragic figures three who would destroy the world rather than admit to parity with their own people.

And yes Maria. Intelligent minds flock to these places in times of great uncertainty. I look up John’s references and ponder them for days. But any person with half a brain knows that this war to come does note bode well.

One thing to realize is that the KSA has effectively just had a palace coup and is now in the process of forming a new government. It’s not clear how King Salman and his son outmaneuvered their rivals, but they’ve effectively written most of the once powerful princes out of the the Saudi line of succession. The House of Saud may as well have been renamed the “House of Salman.” That this power grab was able to occur at all indicates a profound shift in the mechanisms of the Saudi state and we’re in uncharted territory now.

As the old guard gets systematically purged from positions of power (or just murdered, as has apparently happened to at least one prince), the old axioms about what the Saudi government will or won’t do become obsolete. It’s too soon to call them a sinking shift, but they’re lost in a storm and just threw half the crew overboard. Even they don’t know what course they’re on.

Saudi Arabia is a totalitarian horror, and this is more of the same. But I do think that what crank anti-Zionists say about the power of the Israel lobby is actually about the tacit alliance between Israel and the most anti-Jewish government on earth, S.A. Saudi power is pretty easy to trace in the U.S. economy, and all the usual establishment players hop to it.
It is interesting to compare the outcry when Khodorkovsky was arrested for fraud – and undoubtedly he did commit fraud – with the non-outcry over the arrest of Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud. Alwaleed, like Khodorkovsky, made a name for himself criticizing corruption and fundamentalism in Saudi Arabia, which should tick the boxes for the NYT editors and such. But his arrest comes with nary a blink, plus the unskeptical publication of the charges against him – which are as ludicrous as the charges against the old Bolshevik’s in Stalin’s Great Terror. The only reason the bien-pensant are not running around is: the money is against it. After all, what media company wants to have bad relations with its investors? And everybody knows that Alwaleed’s investments in Fox, Times Warner, etc., will be taken over by some Kingdom stooge. All that guff about humanitarian interventionism and human rights, all that wooing of the center-left, has left us with a shambles. It was always bs. It has now led to an incredible amount of death in the Middle East. It is not only Blair and Bush who should be up on trial at the Hague.

@24 Apologies, you are correct.

SA intelligence services are “responsible” for al-Qaeda? I think that word is too strong. It’s not the impression I got from Wright’s The Looming Tower. Bin Laden himself was expelled from SA and moved to Sudan before going to Afghanistan; the mtg at which Al Qaeda as an organization was born occurred in 1988 and was held in Pakistan. Al-Qaeda’s funding came from more than one source. That said, it’s true that elements of the SA govt plus private rich Saudis fund Wahhabism in many parts of the Muslim world.

Well part of the problem with assigning responsibility is that Al-Quaeda have never really been a distinct entity (even the name seems to have been created by the US in the 90s), and these days it seems to a be a brand that local Wahhabist latch onto for various reasons. But the Saudi intelligence agencies, and religious charities have provided money and support to various parts of it since the Afghanistan days. I don’t think there’s much doubt at this point that they were supporting them (and ISIS) in Syria, including providing weapons and facilitating transportation of fighters from the gulf.

This Andrew Cockburn article on the 9/11 case is excellent, and part of what he discusses is the revelations about Saudi support and funding of the 9/11 hijackers (some of which was already out there, but the US had done a good job of clamping down on discussion of it):
https://harpers.org/archive/2017/10/crime-and-punishment-4/

The other aspect of the Wahhabist part of the Saudi state (for want of a better description) is that they push their extremist ideology all across the muslim world (as far as Indonesia), and provide huge sums to support Madrasas, clerics and other things. And obviously this creates (and is intended to create) the environment from which Jihadism emerges.

Do you have some sort of reference or sources for that? Most online sources seem to agree that the Saudi military consists of several hundred thousand active-duty personnel. I have great difficulty believing those are all or even mostly “mercenaries” or “contractors”, even if we exclude the separate Saudi National Guard, which is recruited from tribes considered loyal to the House of Saud. (Several hundred or a few thousand foreigners providing specialized training or maintenance of certain high-tech items, sure, but more than that?)

I think Maria’s statement is an exaggeration. Saudi Arabia does have an army, it’s just rubbish. Certainly no match for Houthi fighters (let alone Iran or Hezbollah). But yes the military is heavily dependent upon (very well paid) foreigners for both the high tech stuff and maintenance (there are some Saudis flying fighter jets because that’s glamorous). They recruit heavily from the UK and also Pakistan. Probably other places too – those are just the ones I know of. I believe the army relies upon Pakistanis for actual soldier as well.

Also, things like “God knows actual Saudis couldn’t be expected to do the heavy-lifting” sound, to be honest, slightly racist (“Oh, of course those lazy Arabs can’t do any hard, dangerous work”).

Foreigners do the most of the heavy lifting in other aspects of the Saudi economy, why would the military be any different. If the foreigners left, Saudi Arabia wouldn’t function. Incidentally many of the foreigners doing the heavy lifting are from places like Pakistan, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. So I don’t know that the racist card really works here.

PS

google: “Saudi blockade Yemen”

or go here: https://goo.gl/dEXmkb

NB: not for the faint of the heart

I’m also amused by how botched Hariri’s resignation was. Given his financial interests you’d think they could have pressured him to resign from within Lebanon. Instead by doing it this way they’ve convinced the majority of Lebanese (including those who are pretty hostile to Hezbollah) that the Saudis kidnapped him and are holding him under duress. In the short term they’ve unified the Lebanese rather than divided them.

I feel this is further evidence for my theory that the prince is stupid. A smarter man would be less brutal and less overt.

Cian O’Connor@46

The other aspect of the Wahhabist part of the Saudi state (for want of a better description) is that they push their extremist ideology all across the muslim world (as far as Indonesia), and provide huge sums to support Madrasas, clerics and other things. And obviously this creates (and is intended to create) the environment from which Jihadism emerges.

This should be universal knowledge at this point, but it always bears repeating and underscoring. If you ever want to really depress yourself, get one of the Qur’an translations + commentaries the Kingdom freely distributes all over the the globe and compare it to other extant translations – and more significantly, commentaries.

@ Katsue 45

I don’t know if the truce will hold or not, but a truce with Rojava/Northern Syria is different from reconquering it. Compare the situation with Iraqi Kurdistan which has been autonomous since the ’70s but has never been able to claim full independence nor been completely reconquered by Baghdad.

Barring a costly invasion of Rojava, the best the Assad regime can achieve is an “understanding” with the new state that has grown on their territory. They are necessarily less in control of Syria than when they started and their room to maneuver will be restricted in the future.

I’m not sure what’s going on here, but the facts of geography and relative power would seem to rule out a serious kerfuffle. Egypt and Jordan are restoring relations with Damascus and Iraq is openly aligned with it. So there’s no way for Saudi to actually get to Lebanon or Syria (bar open, serious collaboration with Israel, which would surely cause ructions within Saudi). Likewise, there’s no way for Saudi to get at Iran. It lacks the capacity, the allies and the geography is against it. My guess is that most of this is noise to distract from whatever the internal game is.

Likewise, although there are factions in the US pushing for war with Iran, their arguments tend to break down when actual proposals are under consideration. Iran is not Saddam’s Iraq – internally divided, diplomatically isolated and weakened by a decade of sanctions. It’s four times the size, relatively cohesive, on reasonable or good terms with all its neighbours, has Russia and China on side and has a formidable defensive capability. Like “Repeal and Replace Obamacare”, it’s a slogan without serious content behind it.

So my prognosis is more whining, minor moves and nothing much else.

The thing is… right-wing politicians are all self-satisfied morons or grifters. So your “it’s not possible” doesn’t count for a lot: brexit without destroying the economy was impossible, operation barbarossa was impossible, stopping US support for chinese nationalists by a decapitation strike in hawaii was impossible, creating a stable US ally in iraq by invading and sacking the entire government was impossible. But “impossible to achieve” doesn’t mean “impossible to attempt”, and it’s the _attempt_ that does the damage.

So god only knows what the saudis will try. It’ll be doomed and stupid, but that was never enough to stop everyone.

@Peter T 58

I think the Saudis have enough sway in Egypt and Jordan that air access is in the cards. A lot depends on the US and Israel though. The Saudis don’t need to fly over Israeli airspace (and probably wouldn’t want to anyway), but if Israel decides a war in Lebanon is in their interests, the US will almost certainly support it and can readily lean on Egypt and Jordan to allow air access.

Sisi’s Egypt has largely acted as Saudi client and, although there’s been evidence of a split lately, it may not take much to get them back on board. Likewise, Jordan has a complex relationship with its larger neighbor, but has generally sought good relations with the Saudis and the rest of the GCC bloc and also can’t afford to jeopardize its strategic alliances with the US and Israel. The Saudis prefer to act as part of a “coalition” and the smaller Arab League states usually go along. Egypt supported the Yemen war and the Qatar blockade and Jordan provided support and safe havens Saudi and US proxy fighters in Syria for years. I don’t think they’d object as strongly to another “Saudi-led coalition” war in Lebanon as you imagine. Hell they might even join it.

Worth noting that discontent in Congress w U.S. policy re Saudi and Yemen appears to be growing. A recent House of Reps. resolution, though largely symbolic rather than practical in effect, is significant in that “it is the first time the House has acknowledged the U.S. role in the conflict, and it notes that U.S. involvement against parties in the Yemeni civil war is not permitted by either of the two military force authorizations Congress passed after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”

The above quote is from a HuffPo article:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/house-vote-humanitarian-crisis-yemen_us_5a0a6409e4b0b17ffcdfd18a