Ron Paul said in this column that the Saudi arms deal is about Iran. I understand that the United States supported Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War after the Iranian Revolution because they overthrew the Shah. And then we went against Iraq when they invaded Kuwait in order to protect our [oil] interests in Saudi Arabia.
I don’t really understand how it’s against Iran, though. Is there reason Saudi Arabia is enemies with Iran, or am I missing something?
No government would be on good terms with its neighbors if it had the massive backing of the US government. Moreover, I remember reading that the invasion of Iraq removed the only regional power capable of holding Iran at bay, and that since than Iran is striving to become a regional hegemon. No wonder everyone in the area is upset.
Okay, that’s what I thought. When we have bases in Saudi Arabia, it completes a nice thick thin all around Iran, and even though we took out most of our troops from Operation Southern Watch in 2003, I’m assuming the huge addition of weapons to Saudi’s military (clearly being openly available to the United States at command) is like we’re still there. I kind of compare it to if Iran were to set up bases in Canada, Mexico, and Cuba, but I was hoping that made sense.
A long series of reasons.
The first one is religious. Arabia is ruled by the House of Saud, very devoted and traditionalist Sunni Muslim: they follow the teaching of Wahhabi Islam. The people of the Iranic Plateau have long been adherents of the Shia branch of Islam. While Shia Islam has many theological differences with the more conventional branches of Sunni Islam the main reason the people of Iran embraced Shia was as part of the “national awakening” which followed the Arabian conquest of the Sasanid Empire in the VII and VIII century. The two groups have little sympathy for each other, each believing to be the true follower of Mohamed’s original teachings.
The second one is nationalistic. Iranians (and all ethnic groups of Persian descent) have long had little sympathy for Arabs following centuries of warfare with both the original Caliphate and its successors. This feeling is mutual.
The third one is more recent: of course centuries old theological and ethnical differences have limited weight in the modern world. Ever since Reza Pahlavi was installed by the CIA in 1953 Iran, after centuries of decadence and foreign occupation, quickly became a regional superpower. The reasons are many: the US and the UK saw Iran as a way to keep the ever unruly Gulf States in check and a strong border nation that could bring some pressure to bear on the USSR. Also Iran, with its petro-dollar wealth, became a top buyer of weapons from NATO countries. During the 1973 crisis, when the US engineered “oil crisis” got out of hand, Iran was ready to unleash its military might on its neighbors. This threat was what caused the Gulf States to balk. After Reza Pahlavi was unseated in the 1979 Revolution, the Ayatollahs found themselves in possession of a decaying country, but still a mighty superpower to be reckoned with. Iran quickly became an “oddball”, as proven by the never ending Gulf War with Iraq: while it had no true “allies” (just like Iraq) nobody, not the US, not the USSR not China, wanted either side to obtain what could be called a clear victory.
After the Gulf War ended in 1988 Iran found itself in a changing world: both its most powerful neighbors (Iraq and the USSR) were in complete decay. Iran itself was in very bad shape: it suffered immense human casualties during the war, most infrastructures were crumbling and the Ayatollahs found their grip on power to be not as solid as they thought. Truth to be told President Rafsanjani saw this decline and tried to implement some modest reforms which met with widespread resistance. State revenues depend more and more on oil and natural gas but this is becoming less profitable: Iranian oil and gas output is decling at a record pace. The Iranian press often blame the Saudis to “steal their oil” but the reality is that the Iranian petrochemical industry is falling to pieces: equipment is obsolete, efficiency is dropping, mismanagement is the norm and rationg on petrochemical products has been introduced. Instead of aiming at true reforms that could really improve the country’s situation, the Iranian leadership has started to play the nationalist card. This was not lost to the Israeli and Saudi leaderships, ever on the lookout for the next boogeyman.
As always a good reply Kakugo. How do you know so much stuff on historical topics? Do you have a list of books you’d recommend?
Thank you for that. I actually had a lot of that in my column, but I just learned about everything this week, so I’m happy to be reassured of the stance I took. Considering it was due to my editor yesterday, I’ll probably finish in about 20 minutes and I’ll post the link to my Mises blog where I’ll put the finished product.
I also wouldn’t mind a list of historical books, especially as pertaining to Middle Eastern politics.
EDIT: Here is the final link.
The US was backing Hussein, but his biggest backer was Saudi Arabia. Iranians certainly did not forget that.
The Saudi regime has an internal legitimacy problem. It is collaborating with the US in a region where the US is highly unpopular. Post-revolutionary Iran is a threat to it, because it showcases the feasability of the alternative - to stand up to the US and exist as an independent regional power, rather than one subserviant to the US. Thus the Saudis paint the picture of Iran as a threat and themselves as the centre of a coalition of the Gulf states standing up to it as a way of distracting attention from them not standing up to the US. In this they are somewhat successful since they can in painting Iran as an outsider exploit traditional Sunni-Shia and Persian-Arab differences.
Both Saudi Arabia and Iran posture as patrons of Muslims everyhwere. That means they spend money to compete in winning prestige and popularity abroad. Iran’s role in this is resented by the Saudis because Iran scores points in the Muslim world by helping fund the highly popular Hezbollah and Hamas, thus showcasing how little the Saudis do in regard to the Palestinians - the most important issue to the Muslim world. The Saudis hands are naturally tied here due to their relation with the US. Iran on the other hand resents Saudi patronage of Muslims because the Saudis promote Wahahbism, the official religion of Saudi Arabia, according to which Shias do not count as Moslem. You have to remember neither state is a secular one, and their official religions are at odds with one another.
Since 2003 they are competing for influence in Iraq as well. Here Iran is much better positioned. All the Shia parties which rule the country now look to Teheran to one extent or another. They suspect the Saudis of playing a spoiler role in providing money that finds its way to radical Sunni outfits that continue to attack the government and Shia civilians, but I do not know if that is something they would do - on the account that this would probably be against stated US interests, something they generally do not go against.
Another matter is that within Saudi Arabia there is a Shia minority which is being treated poorly as you might expect from a Wahhabi state while Iran on the other hand is seen as a patron of Shia Muslims. This Shia minority is not that large, however it makes up for the mayority of the population in the crucially important Saudi Arab eastern region on the gulf coast where all the oil is located. Without this one region Saudia Arabia is just a giant desert so the consequences of some kind of an upheavel here could be devastating for it. Therefore this is a giant worry for the Saudis even if the chances of anything like that occuring are actually very minor.
That being said I don’t know why the weapons sale would be against Iran. The Saudis already greatly outspend Iran on defense, jet everyone continues to regard them as a bad joke in military terms. I am saying, the sale will not affect the situation on the ground directly. It is more about the Saudis having to recycle their oil money with the US military-industrial complex as per their longstanding arrangement, than about them getting their hands on weapons to augment their military capability.
I don’t think that that the other muslim countries care much about the Palestinians, they just want to be sure that they won’t have to deal with a wave of immigrants.
Unless you consider that giving them missiles instead of real economical cooperation is “caring”.
The irianian goverment is not exactly very popular among iranians, what is one more reason to not intefere, since a foreign intervetion would be a perfect excuse to united the peole under one wise leader/party.
That is the attitude of the regimes, but Iranians and the Saudis are also attempting to score points with the populaces.
Of course I had to rush out so I left the topic unfinished after starting ranting and raving as usual… I am sorry for that!
Anyway, let’s get back at the Saudi arms deal.
Ever since the end of the 1991 Gulf War, Gulf States have become overenthusiastic buyers of sophisticated weapon systems. Three countries have benefited immensely: the US, the UK and France. A few analysts have long questioned the sanity of this decision, for no other reason that these military systems require highly trained personell to be operated: military personel is always in short supply in the Gulf States, to the point that foreign mercenaries are often employed. Saudi Arabia has tons of money but no conscription and it has 25 millions inhabitants (including 5 millions non-nationals). Even allowing for the traditional warlike tendencies of desert peoples, that’s a bit of stretch. That leaves politics.
The Gulf States replaced Iran and to a lesser extent Taiwan (whose improved relationships with mainland China have resulted in reconsidering the whole concept of a “fortress island”) as a big “cash” buyer of weapons from NATO countries. While giant defence contractors like Boeing, BAE or Dassault make a nice bundle by selling weapons to their respective countries, sales to countries like Saudi Arabia allow them to be highly profitable. It also allows not-so-profitable weapons merchants to be kept from bankruptcy: many of you are too young to remember (old geezer moment) but have you ever wondered why Iran bought Grumman F14 interceptors? The F14 (which the US Navy retired from duty but is still used by Iranians) is a heavyweight interceptor made to protect carrier battle groups using its powerful radar and murderous AIM54 Phoenix long range missile (ironically the US Navy never used this extremely expensive missile while Iran used it with outstanding results during its war with Iraq… insert your own joke here). The McDonnell-Douglas (now Boeing) F15 was a much more logical choice, for no other reason it used the same weapons as the F4 Phantom II Iran already had in service. But at the time Grumman was close to bankruptcy so the Shah was persuaded to “lend a helping hand” to this old time military contractor. Same thing when Saudi Arabia purchased the more or less useless Tornado F3 interceptor from the British: the Saudi already had the excellent F15 in service so the move made absolutely no sense from a common sense point of view. But at the time BAE could really use all the help it could get…
Well, the 84 F-15E bought by the saudis are indeed overkill, specially since they already have other F-15s and even Eurofighters. Easy money, fancy toys.
I agree that buying F-15 S, Tornados, Eurofighters AND F-15 SE (aye, the next best thing to an F-22) is strange. But form a military point of view, especially since its very constricted in manpower, Saudi Arabia must make up for it in tech if it want to compete. has, what, 60 million inhabitants? must be high-tech to compete. Plus many consideration specific to play a role here.
Saudis outsource all of their maintenance to foreign firms. That means that they don’t give a hoot whether they buy 100 F-15s or a 100 singe specimens of every fighter ever invented. Commonality is not an issue. Thus, instead of but the whole, say, 200 fighters they need form Boeing, they buy in planks to get the best deal. The Eurofighter for example, was a cool move as to pay form their Tranche 3 deliveries, the EF partners are selling their Tranche 1 and 2 planes very cheaply (relatively speaking). Plus the F-15 S they had was inferior to the Israeli models while the EF can easily establish air superiority against the best has to offer. Prestige is an important consideration here.
And finally, consider you options if you’re a client state with an anti-american population ( too is a client, but at least people here are overwhelmingly pro-american). They’ll need you to do things in the region. Can you commit ground forces? Not if you dont like revolutions at home. Keeping it within the bounds of intervention form the air would make a lot of sense. We too would be better of committing gunships (if we had any) in and instead of ground troops.
Thus it makes sense that Saudis should 1) invest very much in its air force and 2) look around for the bets fighter available, with no regard to commonality. Heck, f it wasn’t politically impossible, I’m sure they’d be looking for the Flanker by now.
The iranian air force is really out of shape right now. The Saudis are really competing with the UAE air force that has 60 F16 Block 60 and Israel whose AF is the best trained and has nice tech of their own.
Kakugo’s post has it right. The dislike is mainly due to the division between Sunni and Shia Islam.
The Royals that are the Saudi family have little to do with representing Sunni Islam- they have their own agendas that have nothing to do with this “divide”. Which I think is given a bit too much weight these days since many Sunni-Shia are intermarried at this point. Although Im sure their governments could easily use those old resentments in propaganda.
You are right, they don’t represent it. They patronise it as a way of trying to win foremost legitimacy but also popularity and prestige. Saudi Arabia is an enthusiastic builder of mosques from Bosnia to the Phillippines. And not so much Sunni Islam but a radical reform movement of Sunni Islam - Wahhabism.
It is about politics plain and simple. Saudi-Iranian relations when Iran was also a monarchy subservient to the US were much better, which would not be the case if it were primarily about traditional religious differences.
Arabia has always been at war with Persia, dontcha know. (Hey, it’s not far from the truth.)
What I find amusing about Saudi Arabia’s arms dealings is that no matter how many fancy toys they buy from America, they still need American soldiers to come in and rescue them when things get hot.
As I wrote in my post centuries old grudges will only go that far in the modern world. Sure, if you talk to Greeks most of them will tell you they hate their Turkish and Albanian neighbors and some Serbs will tell you how Bosnians will burn in Hell for converting to Islam en masse after the battle of Kosovo but this only carries modern politics that far.
The third point I made was all about the balance of power in the Gulf after WWII which is by far the most important issue. Until the 1979 Revolution Iran was by far the most powerful nation in the area (nuclear armed Israel excluded), not in only by virtue of its large military but also due to the fact that it had more or less full NATO backing. The decline started immediately after Khomeini and the Ayatollahs took power. The war with Iraq sapped the country of its lifeblood and the lack of desperately needed reforms did the rest. Also Iran has been jousting for three decades now to find powerful allies. Sure, it has big trading partners and many governments are sympathetic to its cause but it lacks proper allies. Russia has kept an ambiguous stance on Iran, mostly not to irritate the US too much, while relationships with China are a mixed bag. Chinese foreign politics are a growing cause of concern for many countries and plainly put the Iranian leadership don’t trust the Chinese that much.
To get back to the Saudi arms deal I think we nailed it squarely on the head: it’s all about politics. US weapon manufacturer get some much needed cash, US government proves Middle East “allies” it doesn’t only think of Israel and the Saudi get some more weapons to add noise to the general saber rattling. All’s right with the world.
James, most arabs nation have extremely stubborn politicians and commanders, they think fancy weapons will solve any hardship and simply ignore tactiics and a more modern military doctrine, what is fatal no matter how good your tech is, so that’s why they tend to ask for help when things feel any hard.
Well, I guess one can’t talk about military equipment being ‘wasted’… It’s at its most productive when it’s gathering dust in an armoury. 