Reflections: War of proxies in West Asia

New Delhi: Listening to a Gulf potentate declaring at the recent Arab League summit that the Palestine problem was the cornerstone of the region’s unhappy conflicts, I was reminded of the short shrift Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar gave the late Saddam Hussein who also tried to invoke Palestine to justify his invasion of Kuwait. “What has Palestine got to do with occupying Kuwait?” Chandra Shekhar mused. A similar thought occurred to me as Royal Saudi Arab bombers ravaged Yemen. What has Palestine got to do with Riyadh’s Operation Decisive Storm against Yemen?

Cynical Arab opportunism exploits the plight of dispossessed Palestine refugees for its own purposes. Attacking Yemen has nothing to do with Israel which admittedly tried desperately to sabotage the nuclear talks in Lausanne, Switzerland, between Iran and six global powers, including the US, China and Russia. Israel bitterly opposes any agreement that would allow Iran to retain a certain number of centrifuges capable of enriching uranium.

King Salman of Saudi Arabia and Benjamin Netanyahu, the hawk who was recently re-elected Prime Minister of Israel, are at one on this. Despite its human suffering, Palestine is irrelevant to any West Asian calculation. It just happens that Arab leaders find it convenient to invoke the Palestine cause in an effort to unify Asian opinion behind whatever particular political axe they have to grind at the time. Now, it’s the rising challenge of Shia power.

We are witnessing a still nascent struggle for dominance between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran. The two countries are on opposing sides in Iraq, Bahrain, Lebanon and Yemen. Iran, which is also believed to support the two militant organisations, Hezbollah and Hamas, and with which the US broke diplomatic ties in 1980, was widely expected to be the next victim after the Americans attacked Afghanistan and Iraq. Earlier, Iran held its own in the eight-year war with Iraq when the US and the Arab powers tacitly supported Saddam. Perhaps these factors partly explain Iran’s astonishing popularity in the Muslim world. According to one report, Iranians enjoy 75 per cent approval throughout West Asia and a high 85 per cent in Saudi Arabia.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are also believed to be advising troops in Shia-majority Iraq which was for many decades ruled by the Sunni minority under an artificial constitutional arrangement. In Yemen, the Houthi rebels, who are Shia Muslims, are suspected of receiving Iranian support. The Saudi Air Force launched Operation Decisive Storm as the Houthi captured Sana’a, the capital, and President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi fled to Riyadh, the Saudi Arabian capital. The accepted version seems to be that Riyadh will not tolerate Tehran’s nominee ruling Yemen in Mr Hadi’s place. Leaving aside traditional Shia-Sunni rivalry, the Saudis have been pro-foundly suspicious of Iran’s regional and global intentions ever since Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown in 1979, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called on all Muslims to rise against feudal rulers, promising them support if they rebelled.

Iran needed recipients for its stated policy of exporting revolution. A possible candidate for that position in Yemen could be the former President, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was forced to stand down in favour of Mr Hadi in 2011, after ruling Yemen for 33 years. But, in a curious arrangement, he was allowed to remain in the country, and even to groom his son, Ahmed Ali, as a possible successor. Mr Ali flew to Riyadh recently with hopes of discussing a settlement. Reports indicate that Saudi defence minister Mohammad bin Salman bin Abdulaziz met him at the airport and sent him packing whence he came. The Saudis have no intention of calling off Operation Decisive Storm while the Houthis are on the rampage, and Mr Saleh is their political ally.

Spread over 527,968 sq km of hills and sand dunes, Yemen is one of the region’s poorest countries with declining oil reserves and a per capita gross domestic product of $2,500 for its 26 million struggling people. Grim predictions by UN agencies suggest Sana’a might run out of water by 2017. Yemen has known bloody revolutions, proxy wars, sectarian violence and military dictatorship, but it has never acquired a viable identity of its own since it emerged in May 1990, through the merger of three or four warring entities in the south-western corner of the Arabian Peninsula. But despite the country’s bleakness, it has always dealt firmly with foreigners. King Ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia, was foiled when he tried to unite the entire peninsula under his dynasty in 1934. Egypt retreated with a bloody nose after it intervened in the 1960s. Al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams have both sought a foothold but been rebuffed by impoverished but proud and warlike Yemenis.

Now, Saudi intervention has turned what was an internal civil war into a foreign war between proxy powers. Whether or not Iran supports the Houthis, the latter have captured most of the military equipment worth $500 million that the Americans gave Yemen. Saudi strikes have so far exacerbated and not resolved the Yemeni problem. The aggression seriously threatens West Asia’s economy. The Red Sea port of Hodeida could be affected. The one-time British port of Aden services 20,000 ships, and 3.8 million barrels of oil were shipped through the nearby Bab el-Marsdeb Strait in 2013. Now, Aden is rocked by looting. The Arab League is believed to have mobilised 150,000 ground troops from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain for a ground offensive. Such an exercise may pre-empt Iranian ambitions and lead to a Saudi annexation of Yemen. But that won’t solve the local tribal and sectarian problems that underlie Yemen’s civil war. Blaming Israel will achieve even less.