The New Middle East By David Pryce-Jones
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/12/17/the-new-middle-east/
From Israel to the Gulf States to Iran, the troubled region is changing
‘Normalization” is the rather cumbersome jargon for what seems to be happening in the Middle East. For the time being, it’s to do with expectations. Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have signed peace treaties with Israel. At the signing ceremony in the White House, the Arab foreign ministers looked like officials going about their business. The expression on the face of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, was beatific.
For the Arabs, it is taboo to normalize anything with Israel. The sole exceptions are Egypt and Jordan, which signed peace treaties to mitigate their wartime losses. When Islamist soldiers then assassinated the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian treaty pretty much fell by the wayside. More to the point, the peace process known as the “Oslo Accords” had been negotiated in secret, and in 1993 a party was held on the White House lawn to mark that at last the Palestinians were coming to terms with Israel. Yasser Arafat signed for the Palestinians, but the ink was hardly dry on the page before he gave orders for an intifada, which translated into violent civil disobedience and cost hundreds of Israelis their lives. That’s not going to be repeated; times have changed, the look on Netanyahu’s face plainly signified. Bahrain and the UAE are too insignificant to be independent actors and too marginal to be harmed if normalization goes wrong. They are testing the waters. A grand reversal of alliances is getting under way.
It has long been common knowledge that Saudi Arabia and Israel are holding confidential talks. That is extraordinary enough. The Saudi Arabian public has a perception that Jews are as pernicious a people as any in the wide world. Learned imams appear on Saudi television to recite the age-old anti-Semitic fantasies, Hitler’s Mein Kampf is in the bookshops, and Jews are not allowed to enter the country. The supposition is that participants in these confidential talks are considering the conditions that might oblige Israel to intervene in a strictly Muslim struggle for supremacy between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has taken the Islamist position against the infidel Christians and the Jews. Iran devised the anti-American war cry “Death to the Great Satan” and the corresponding anti-Israeli war-cry “Death to the Little Satan.”
Saudi policy is in the hands of Mohammed bin Salman, the titular crown prince acting on behalf of his father, the king. MBS, as he likes to be known, is in his mid thirties and has already proved to be an autocrat with blueprints for reforming the country. His ruthlessness is not in doubt and neither is his ambition. Some suspect him of complicity in the grisly murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a mildly dissident journalist. He is on record saying that if he made friends with the Jews, his subjects would kill him. He has virtually no choice. My enemy’s enemy is my friend. Saudi Arabia is facing an existential threat. Netanyahu and the head of Mossad flew to a meeting with MBS in Saudi Arabia. If some concrete plan of action were to emerge, the Middle East might truly change.
Ayatollah Khomeini was an Iranian Shiite cleric who might well have lived quietly somewhere in the countryside, studied the holy texts, and died forgotten. The Shiites have the tradition of quietism, which involves staying altogether clear of politics. But he held the belief that peace on earth would be achieved only when everyone was a Muslim; his task was to bring this about, and Iran was the means available for it. Here was a challenge to the identity of everyone of another faith or of no faith at all.
Sunni Muslims far outnumber the Shia, and Saddam Hussein, then the absolute ruler of Iraq, spoke for them. His extreme brutality, his declaration of war with Iran, his invasion of Kuwait, his pretense to possess a nuclear weapon led the United States to mount two expeditions to get rid of the man, bringing him to an Iraqi trial and the gallows. At the time, justice seemed to have been done, but in retrospect the critics are able to argue that there was a natural balance of forces between Iraq and Iran, and that to knock out one was to leave the field open to the other.
Henry Kissinger once said that Iran has to decide whether it is a nation or a cause. Handed this unforeseen American victory over Saddam Hussein, Iran has had an open invitation to go beyond the nation-state and re-create a long-lost empire. A corridor of territory leading from Tehran to the Mediterranean is now under Iranian control. Successive prime ministers in Iraq have been Shiite nominees who take instruction from Tehran. In the Syrian civil war, Iran rescued Bashar al-Assad on the grounds that he is an Alawi and so passes as a Shia. The Iranian ambassador in Damascus is reported to be the most influential man in what little is left of the country. In Lebanon, there is the outline of a shadow government, but actual power rests with Hezbollah, a militia 50,000 strong, some of them Iranian volunteers. The sheikh in command is on record saying that without Iranian arms and subsidies, there would be no Hezbollah. Iranian determination to proceed with the state’s nuclear program is further evidence that a test of strength with the United States is likely to occur in the near future. So far, neither appeasement nor confrontation on the part of the last two American presidents has had the slightest effect. The Iranian media regularly present some ayatollah or public figure boasting that Iran is strong enough to drive the United States out of the Middle East, predicting its ruin and fall, and then going on to glory in the expectation that what he refers to with contempt as the “Zionist entity” will have the same fate.
The corridor runs along the Israeli border, and various fortifications, barracks, and arsenals indicate that Iran is preparing to launch a premeditated attack on Israel. In command of the air, Israeli bombers are proving that prevention is better than cure. Superior intelligence seems to give Israel and the United States the edge in this low-intensity warfare. On arrival one day at Baghdad’s airport, General Qasem Soleimani, the head of the secretive Quds Force and unofficial viceroy of the newly acquired Arab territories, was killed by an American drone. An ingenious conspiracy theory has it that the clerics suspected the general of mounting a military coup against them, and that they therefore passed to the Americans the information that got rid of him. Israel stands accused of the equally dramatic assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the scientist generally held to be in charge of the secret development of a nuclear weapon. The deed required exceptional intelligence and coordination, altogether exposing the regime’s real weakness. Everybody under the age of 40 has known nothing except the regime’s irrationality and the savage behavior of the Revolutionary Guards, experts in repression. Anger has reached a new level right now because a promising young wrestling champion has been unjustly hanged.
The Houthis are a large tribe settled in the northern mountains of Yemen bordering on Saudi Arabia. Shiites, they are voluntary proxies of Iran and recently mounted an attack that took out the main Saudi oil installations at Abqaiq. Unlike Iran’s, however, Saudi Arabia’s armed forces have no battle experience. A proportion of the fighter pilots are from Pakistan. One visiting expert (a friend of mine) was taken into a garage to inspect the latest up-to-date tanks only to discover there were no mechanics to service them. In the event of a real test of strength, only the Israelis will have an army capable of standing up to Iran.
The Palestinian leadership accuse Saudi Arabia of betraying them and their cause. At various conferences and summits, the Palestinian representative can be heard cursing Bahrain and the UAE. Sudan has been announced as the next in line to sign a treaty with Israel, then perhaps Oman. Rightly or wrongly, the accident that blew up half of Beirut, leaving some 6,000 casualties, is attributed to Hezbollah, and since there is no way to discover the truth, the Lebanese Sunnis and Christians are also thinking that a treaty is due. Israelis are putting into practice the Jewish national-liberation movement, and opposition to it only increases the steps that movement will take in self-defense. Israelis are not settlers who will go back where they came from if only the level of violence is high enough to make their lives too miserable to be endured. The fate some days ago of Saeb Erekat perfectly symbolizes this illusion. After a lengthy career as chief Palestinian negotiator, making demands ever more rabid, he went to die in an Israeli hospital. It may yet be too soon for normalization to work successfully, but it is the way to stop fighting wars that cannot be won.
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