Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei meets with Ansar Allah spokesman Mohammed Abdul Salam in 2019 [photo credit: KHAMENEI.IR]
Regime propagandists like Ali Shihabi and Nawaf Obaid
for years have written and tweeted at length about Iran’s “terrorism”
and “aggressiveness.” So dangerous was the threat the Islamic Republic
was seen to represent, behind the scenes Saudi Arabia even allied with Israel although both countries officially deny this.
In the parallel reality which is Saudi-controlled media, up until the
moment the accord was announced Iran still represented pure and
undiluted evil, which according to the regime’s Orwellian logic
implicitly meant not only that all negotiations were out of the
question, but that any kind of accord with Iran, past, present or future
was completely unimaginable.
In 2017 MbS told the New York Times
Iran’s “supreme leader (Ayatollah Khamenei) is the new Hitler of the
Middle East.” He added: “But we learned from Europe that appeasement
doesn’t work. We don’t want the new Hitler in Iran to repeat what
happened in Europe in the Middle East.”
MbS’s acrobatic volte face - the Wall St Journal called it “shrewd pragmatism”
- shows not just how his word cannot be trusted, but underlines once
again his lack of a strategic vision or ideological principles when
charting Saudi foreign policy, allowing the Iranians to run rings around
him again, as they have for years in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.
The reason MbS was forced to make this latest capitulation and sign a
deal with “Hitler” was because of his urgent need to find a permanent
solution to end the Yemen War which he started in 2015 with the now
laughably named Operation Decisive Storm. It is a war he assumed would
be over in a matter of weeks and which, heading into its ninth year, he
is now losing.
The problem is that while the crown prince is increasingly anxious to
put the war behind him and move on with his ambitious plans for
Vision2030, encompassing tourism and the post-oil era, the current
situation with the Houthis - a ceasefire without a permanent peace
agreement - means hostilities are only in suspended animation and could
flare up again at any moment.
Meanwhile, time is working against him. The longer the ceasefire
drags on with no permanent solution, the more time the Houthis have to
consolidate their forces and prepare for another round of fighting
without MbS receiving any concessions or long-term guarantees at all.
What makes the situation even worse for the Saudis is that although
MbS has refused to commit to any written agreement out of fear this
would make the depths of his capitulation clear, he has already
surrendered to most of the Houthis’ demands.
The bombing has stopped, the air and sea embargo has ended, and factions from the South have ceased their attacks on the Houthis. In April last year Saudi Arabia announced it would give $3 billion to Yemen and in February it paid a billion dollars into the Central Bank making the Yemeni rial jump in value.
Having fought the Houthis inside three Saudi provinces and suffered
drone and missile attacks on his palaces, airports and oil and gas
export infrastructure, MbS now finds himself in the humiliating position
of having to pay the whole budget for north Yemen including the salaries of Houthi fighters.
But for the Houthis that’s not enough. For a full and final agreement
they are demanding US$100 billion in compensation and control of all
Yemen. Though MbS is ready to pay billions more if he thought that would
end the war, complete Houthi control of all Yemen is too catastrophic a
loss of face for him to contemplate.
The crown prince, in turn, has his own demands which the Houthis have
completely refused, notably international observers on the border, an
objective he was hoping détente would help achieve.
The Iranians, it appears, have made some indication they will attempt
this, but given their record the idea that they will exert meaningful
restraint over the Houthis, assuming they even can, seems most unlikely.
Nor has Iran had to make any concessions regarding Syria or Iraq
where it is also winning the power struggle, nor regarding the
activities of Shiite sects inside the kingdom or other parts of the
Gulf. Saudi Arabia has a restive Shiite minority, many of whom are
sympathetic to Iran, and a fear of Iranian proxies inside the kingdom is
another factor that drove MbS to Beijing.
Ironically, although he has been effectively trounced by Shiite Iran,
he has had considerably more success suppressing Sunnis in Saudi
Arabia. The Sunni establishment inside the kingdom has been subjected to
surveillance, torture, the liberal disbursement of extremely long
prison sentences and execution. In Iraq, Saudi Arabia has helped
effectively destroy the Sunnis as a political force.
In Syria, Saudi Arabia has also undermined the Sunni position,
dismantling the resistance and wrecking the revolution, thus also serving Iran.
In Lebanon, the same thing happened: Saudi Arabia destroyed the Sunni
power base of former PM Saad Hariri and effectively handed control of
the country over to Iran's proxy Hezbollah.
Katherine Harvey author of A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The Saudi Struggle for Iraq noted in an article last year how MbS’ s kingdom has played into the hands of Tehran:
Commentators on the Middle East frequently point out
that Iran sees itself as in charge of four Arab capitals—Baghdad,
Beirut, Damascus and Sanaa….The Saudis have pushed these countries away
as the Iranians have simultaneously pulled them in. The Saudis almost
never pass up an opportunity to call the Iranians expansionist, but they
themselves have been responsible for fuelling no small part of Iran’s
expansion. This has been their self-fulfilling prophecy at work.