Saudis and Iran Moving Together

WASHINGTON, Apr 22, 2002 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- Saudi Arabia and Iran are regional rivals whose traditional approach to the Israel-Palestinian conflict has been diametrically opposite. But now they are moving closer together on that and other issues, with potentially immense consequences for the United States and the entire world.

Over the past 20 years, Saudi Arabia has been moderate on both global oil prices and in its approach to the Israel-Arab conflict. The Saudis strongly support the Palestinians. But until recently, that support has been low-key. And the Saudis quietly strongly supported the Oslo Peace Process over the past decade from its initiation in August-September 1993 to its breakdown after the July 2000 Camp David II summit.

However, these relatively moderate policies have become increasingly hard-line over the past three years because of the replacement of the pro-American King Fahd by the tougher Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz and because of the collapse of the Oslo Process and start of the second Palestinian Intifada. Therefore now Saudi and Iranian policies on the Israel-Arab conflict are converging although the domestic reasons for this are very different in each country.

Both governments sit uneasily on large reservoirs of resentment and frustration because economic growth and even massive oil revenues have had difficulty in keeping up with explosive population growth. In Saudi Arabia, resentment against the regime takes the form of intense anti-American and radical Islamic sentiments.

The Saudi regime has sought to immunize itself against these sentiments by showing itself to be an impeccable champion of Islamic causes from Bosnia to the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan's first Islamic nuclear weapon. Support for the Palestinian second intifada fits into this pattern.

The Iranian regime appears to be more stable than the Saudi one because it is far more broadly based. There is genuine, if limited, choice in elections in Iran and -- again within clearly defined boundaries -- genuine difference and debate in the national press. But, again, the government is unpopular because of its failure to solve longstanding economic and social problems. The difference is that, in contrast to Saudi Arabia, resentment and alienation in Iran takes the form of support for more moderate, pragmatic policies and sympathy with American popular culture.

In Saudi Arabia, supporting the Palestinians is seen as a lightning rod to distract a population feared to be far more radical than its rulers. In Iran, supporting the Palestinians serves the same purpose. But there the aim is distract a population that is believed to be far less radical and hard-line than its leaders.

The Bush administration has consistently wooed Saudi Arabia and turned a blind eye to the two-faced nature of many of its policies. At the same time, it has repeatedly ignored and failed to woo more moderate elements in Iran.

President Bush's now famous -- indeed notorious -- inclusion of Iran in an international "axis of evil" in his State of the Union speech this year is widely regarded in Tehran and throughout the region, as a crucial turning point.

Since then, pro-American sentiments in Tehran have been less openly and enthusiastically expressed and popular feeling, has coalesced anew behind a government that, for all its faults, is seen as representative of the national interest against a potential direct threat from the dominant superpower.

Iran in contrast to Saudi Arabia has always been a hard-line hawk on the Israel-Arab conflict. All through the years of the Oslo Peace Process, its support for the Islamic Shiite fundamentalist Hezbollah, or Party of God, guerrilla group in southern Lebanon never wavered.

Iran flatly opposed even the tentative moves that late President Hafez Assad of Syria made to explore peace with Israel in the early years of the Oslo process. And the ever-cautious Assad never dared risk losing his Iranian protector and counterbalance against both the United States and Iraq by committing himself to any kind of full-scale peace negotiations with the Jewish state.

Saudi Arabia has a population of around 20-22 million. Iran's population is 80 million and rising faster. Saudi Arabia's oil reserves remain virtually inexhaustible. Iran's are clearly running out.

The Iranians have already started making ambitious plans to use regionally available natural gas to re-pressurize their older oil fields to make cost effective extraction of their resources feasible for another decade or two. Yet with such a large population, Iran must maintain high oil prices in the short term to maximize its revenues and future investment prospects.

Through the 1980s and 90s, the Saudis could afford to take a long-term view of the oil market and allow prices remain relatively low. They did not want to kill the Reagan and Clinton-era economic booms in the United States, as these were the driving forces in global economic growth and soaring demand for their product. Therefore during those two decades, Saudi energy and Israel-Palestinian conflict policies were both generally supportive of U.S. interests and initiatives.

In the past few years, however, that has been changing dramatically for a variety of reasons.

First, the ailing King Fahd, ruler of the Desert Kingdom for nearly a quarter of a century as crown prince under King Khaled and then as monarch in his own right finally had to relinquish the reins of power because of his failing health. His half-brother, Crown Prince Abdullah, took over and has cautiously but steadily followed a policy of strengthening ties to powerful, potentially hostile neighbors like Iraq and Iran while distancing himself from the United States.

Second, in 1999, Crown Prince Abdullah negotiated a radical and ambitious production cutting agreement with Iran to shore up global oil prices.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries was a dead duck, they said. Its old market stranglehold of the 1970s had been rendered obsolete by two decades of new oil fields coming on line around the world and radically more advanced technology becoming easily available to access them.

Nevertheless, Crown Prince Abdullah's supposedly old fashioned and out of date deal with the Iranians worked. Global oil prices soared by 350 percent in less than two years though they then fell significantly. But now they are showing signs of rising again.

Third, Crown Prince Abdullah's succession to effective power in Riyadh was followed by the collapse of the Oslo Peace Process after the failure of the Camp David Summit and the start of the second, or "al Aksa" Palestinian intifada at the end of September 2001.

Since then, radical pro-Palestinian sentiment throughout the Middle East including Saudi Arabia itself has remorselessly intensified. And under Abdullah's quiet but firm direction, Saudi policy and tacit encouragement for tougher policies and public statements has intensified too. The recent Saudi telethon that raised millions of dollars for Palestinians was a dramatic but entirely consistent example of this process.

The converging policies of Saudi Arabia and Iran on oil pricing and the Israel-Palestinian conflict do not bode well for hopes of any rapid resolution or even easing of the conflict. Iran has become increasingly bold in providing massive weapons supplies to the Palestinians, as the Israeli interception of the Karine freighter earlier this year showed.

The Bush administration has shown itself repeatedly willfully blind to the radical changes taking place in Saudi policy under Crown Prince Abdullah's direction and they have also shown themselves deaf and blind to the prospects of improving relations with Iran offered by President Mohamed Khatami in Tehran. As a result Saudi policies are changing in ways inimical to U.S. interests anyway while Iranian polices are not changing at all.

The global oil crisis of the 1970s was only possible because Saudi Arabia and Iran, the two greatness oil producers in the world, teamed up to enforce their mutual colossal energy clout. The 1979 Iranian Revolution had the paradoxical effect of ensuring 20 years of global economic growth based on cheap oil supplies because the new Iranian rulers were so hostile to the Saudis. But now, for the first time in almost a quarter of a century, Saudi and Iranian policies are converging again.

This is good news for the Palestinians and bad news for the Israelis. It may also prove to be very bad news indeed for the United States and the Bush administration.

What might be bringing the current Iranian & Saud regimes together? Perhaps they feel that involuntary retirements of dedicated public servants are pending. By locals who will take heart when a nearby regime suffers a similar involuntary regime change, either through a 9mm resignation notice or express delivery of a smart munition.

Re #1

Perhaps we need more Iranian soccer riots like the one we had a several months ago(?). OPEC cartel cannot enforce its price anymore because Russia is indicating that it won't join the cartel and play for market share.

Check out:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/24/magazine/24NITV.html?ex=1015436343&ei=1&en=ca90a2409258db6a

"A few months ago, on Nov. 5, 2001, to be exact, The Wall Street Journal ran an odd report from Tehran. Thousands of young Iranians had taken to the streets to wave American flags and chant pro-American slogans. They had responded to the appeal of Reza Pahlavi, son of the former shah, who lives in Maryland and addressed the Iranian people via a call-in television talk show broadcast from North Hollywood, Calif. In Iran there were enough satellite television dishes and enough people watching what came through them that a man on a telephone call to Los Angeles could hijack a demonstration on the streets of Tehran.
..."

What might be bringing the current Iranian & Saud regimes together?

Could it possible be their disdain for the Bushes. What GWB has professed on world wide television has got to have ruffled a whole lot of Arab feathers and they way they maybe looking at it is, Arab blood is thicker than water.

Re #3

This is the ticket to knock out the current Iranian regime. Thanks for the excerpts. I was not sure if it was this year or last year. Iran has enough potential popular support for regime change if it can be harnessed properly.

Arabs and Persians are completely different ethnic groups who dislike each other intensely. Not to mention the still more virulent religous differences - Arabs are generally Sunni Moslems, and Persians are Shi'ia Moslems.

The Saudis specialize in oppressing the @ 300,000 strong Shi'ite Arab minority which happens to compose almost all of the residents of Saudi oilfields near the Persian Gulf. The Iranian mullahs objected to that, at least until now.

The Iranians aren't Arabs. They are Persians. They speak a different language - Arabic is a language and Arab designates the nation of those who speak it. The Iranians are no more Arab than the Germans are French. They also have a different religion - they are Shiites while the Saudis are fundamentalist Sunnis. A much more plausible cause is similarity of interest based on both of them having unstable governments worried about being overthrown, who both use Islamic stridency and hatred of Israel to appeal to their people.

Arabic is a language and Arab designates the nation of those who speak it.

Since Arabic has been a language of empire and religion, it isn't really true that those who speak Arabic are all Arabs much more than those who speak English are all Englishmen.

Fair enough, in the sense that it is also a sort of Latin throughout the Muslim world. But the political phenomenon of Arab nationalism is based on a desire for political unity of action among those whose native language is Arabic. For instance, one manifestation of Arab nationalism was the revolt against the Turkish Ottoman Empire during WW I. The fact that Arabic was the language of the Turk's religion did not make the Arabs feel great affinity with them. Instead it reminded them that the Turks were later-comers to empire, former mercenaries who had usurped and replaced the Arab rulers who hired them. Another example is gulf Arab support for Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, which was definitely part based on Arab nationalist solidarity against Persian speakers, regarded as outsiders.

"A primary objective of the strategy here is to achieve a partnership with the fundamentalists in Iran and Algeria and to replace the present American-oriented rulers of Saudi Arabia with fundamentalists. The opening in Saudi Arabia of a Russian Embassy and the probable opening of Embassies by Muslim states of the CIS should be seen, not only as an attempt to extract a few extra Saudi billions, but as part of an offensive to bring about a political reorientation in that country.

Chinese Muslims can also be expected to play an active role in promoting alliances with the fundamentalists. The supply of missiles to Iran by the Chinese should be looked at in the context of this strategy."

China providing advanced aid in long-range missiles to Iran, Syria (6/6/00)
Russia, N.Korea, China give Iran missile aid -CIA (9/8/01)

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