Monday, September 16, 2019
Iran and Saudi Arabia
Ok. I freely admit I'm not smart enough to do foreign policy. If indeed Iran was the bomber of Saudi oil refinery capacity over the weekend, such that it cut Saudi production in half and will take the Saudis weeks or months to recover, then, by the standards that have prevailed on the planet, how is that not an act of war? And how does this not play into Benjamin Netanyahu's hands on the eve of an Israeli election? And how does this not make Trump right and Europe wrong about the trustworthiness of the Iranian regime, vis a vis the nuclear treaty?
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Have they definitively established that Iran did the bombing?
ReplyDeleteIt seems like the next move is Saudi Arabia's. The US is already taking heat for its involvement in Yemen's humanitarian crisis.
"Have they definitively established that Iran did the bombing?"
DeleteThat may depend on whom you believe. Robin Wright takes the cautious approach to reporting on that question:
"The attack was claimed by Houthi rebels in Yemen, who have been under Saudi bombardment for more than four years. On Saturday, Brigadier General Yahya Sare’e, a Houthi spokesman, said that the movement “carried out a massive offensive operation of ten drones targeting Abqaiq and Khurais refineries.” The conflict, which has killed up to seventy thousand people, has produced the world’s gravest humanitarian disaster. The Houthis had previously fired ballistic missiles and drones at Saudi oil installations, military facilities, and airports—from Jeddah, in the west, to the oil fields in eastern Saudi Arabia, on the Persian Gulf.
"For years, Iran has been the primary arms supplier to the Houthis, whose military capabilities have increasingly expanded. If the attacks did come from Yemeni soil—a fact the United States and Saudi Arabia disputed—the drones would have had to fly more than five hundred miles. In January, the U.N. reported that the Houthis had drones capable of flying up to fifteen hundred kilometres, or about nine hundred and thirty miles. On Monday, Sare’e threatened further Houthi attacks on the kingdom. “We assure the Saudi regime that our long arm can reach any place we choose and at the time of our choosing,” he tweeted."
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/in-saudi-arabia-world-oil-supplies-are-in-flames?source=EDT_NYR_EDIT_NEWSLETTER_0_imagenewsletter_Daily_ZZ&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_091619&utm_medium=email&bxid=5be0aa2b6780894f7647cb9c&cndid=55365693&esrc=&mbid=&utm_term=TNY_Daily
Eli Lake in Bloomberg News:
"Following the Houthi attack on Saturday on Saudi Aramco’s crude-oil processing facility, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made an obvious and necessary point: Blame Iran.
"It is obvious because the Houthi rebels in Yemen lack the drones, missiles or expertise to attack infrastructure inside Saudi Arabia. In 2018, a United Nations panel of experts on Yemen examined the debris of missiles fired from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen into Saudi Arabia and concluded there was high probability the weapons were shipped in components from Iran. As one Hezbollah commander told two George Washington University analysts in 2016: “Who do you think fires Tochka missiles into Saudi Arabia? It’s not the Houthis in their sandals, it’s us.” Hezbollah, of course, is a subsidiary of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps."
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-15/iran-is-responsible-for-the-houthi-attack-on-saudi-arabia-s-oil
If this is an act of war by Iran, it's not by Iran against us. It's against the Saudis. Let the Saudis decide what they want to do. But leave us out of it.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me to be a strange argument where the Saudis can kill 70 thousand people using, mostly, US arms, but if the Houthi retaliate against the Kingdom using advanced weapons supplied by Iran, it's "not fair".
ReplyDeleteIn any case, it's not clear that this is a proxy war being waged by Iran against Saudi Arabia. It began as a nine country intervention by Saudi and others (including the company formerly called Blackwater, whom we know very well) in support of the overthrown Saudi supported president of Yemen, who won in a single candidate election in 2012 and ousted in 2015.
Stanley and Patrick have nicely taken care of the first point. When Saudi Arabia decided to destroy Yemen as a proxy for Iran, and created the worst ongoing humanitarian disaster we have, it should have expected its enemy to fight back. Whether it was the enemy or an ally is, at this point, for fussbudgets to discuss.
ReplyDeleteI don't know how it will affect Israeli voters. If they realize that there is a big mess next door because of Bibi's greatest (and maybe only) friend in the world, they may vote him out.
As for whether Trump was right and Europe wrong, if Trump had not pulled out of the deal, Iran probably would have continued doing what it agreed to, as it was doing. Britain, Germany and France -- not "Europe" -- Russia, China all were not happy with Trump for killing the agreement to which they also were part. Trump said he could get a better deal. He may have gotten an increase in gasoline prices. Well, he said he could get a better deal with Mexico and Canada and didn't. He said he could get a better deal with individual Asian countries, and all he got out of that was a free shirt from the Phillipines dictator. He said he could get better deals with individual European countries and hasn't. So, I guess whether "Europe" was right or wrong, it's a pretty good bet that Trump was wrong.
I've had a further thought, if anyone cares. As Sen. Chris Murphy said, America wasn't attacked; Saudi Arabia was. "We" do not, technically, have to respond at all. This is a minor fact, lost on most of the media I've been reading and, obviously, on the gerbils serving the CinC. But it's Saudi Arabia's problem. They started the war with Yemen; it's the Yemen "rebels" who claim credit for the attack on Arabia, and if the attacker actually was someone helping the "rebels," so what? It is still part of THAT war.
ReplyDeleteOf course there is more to it. Everything in that part of the world traces back at least to Alexander the Great, whose very name set Mohammed Mossadegh's teeth on edge as recently as the 1950s. Or maybe to Cyrus. One of those old guys, anyway, is reponsible for everything.
But, just as a mind game, suppose the United States, after 9/11 had gone after the country from which most of the attackers, including their maximum leader, came. That would have been Saudi Arabia. Well, of course, the Saudis had bailed both Bushes, pere et fils, out of financial problems in the past. So we couldn't go there. Instead we went to Afghanistan and Iraq, from which none of the attackers had come. The boss was hiding in Afghanistan, so there was some point to that. But no one looked too closely -- no one dared look too closely -- at the country whose chestnuts the CinC is being urged to pull out of the fire today. As I say, everything that happens in that part of the world has a very long tail.
The first thought that occurs to me is not whether we'll go to war (I don't expect we will) but that Saudi Arabia vs. Iran is Sunni vs. Shiite. It resonates beyond two nations in dispute.
Delete"Sunni vs Shiite", brings back memories of Ayatollah Khomeini's scowling, beetle-browed visage in the 1980s. I believe he was Shiite. I am unclear how the two sects differ theologically. I know there is dispute about who is the rightful leader. Culture wars on steroids, even though the cultures don't appear to be much different.
DeleteIt looks to me like even Trump is slow walking this one. Saudi Arabia may have to pull their own chestnuts out of the fire. And the Kashoggi incident is still not that far in the rear view mirror.
ReplyDeleteIt is in Trump's -- if he even bothers with a rear view mirror.
DeleteIt looks more and more like Old Locked and Loaded doesn't want to go to war. Which is fine. Too bad he provoked Iran enough to make it look like he is wimping out. But nobody believes the United States anymore anyway.
ReplyDeleteHowever: Sen. Lindsay Graham says -- Let us pause here. Graham served in the Judge Advocate General Corps. That is military service. But I never heard of a Combat Prosecutor or saw a magistrate rappel from a helicopter. So he looks like a chickenhawk to me -- anyway, Graham says old Dunning-Kugler does not need congressional approval to intervene.
Say what?
When did Congress approve our involvement in the Saudi-Yemen War? This is not terrorism in any way, shape or form. Yemen had a civil war -- or the great humanitarian Mohammad Bin Salman said it did -- and the Saudis interfered.
So, I ask Graham, as Henry Kissinger once shouted when a referee thew a penalty flag against the Redskins, "Upon what principle?"
We need to bring back the idea that Congress has the only authority to declare war, and that the president can't enter war without a declaration.
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