Iran and Saudi Arabia: The Showdown Between Islam’s Rival Powers
By Robin Wright
The
rule of thumb in the Middle East is that diplomacy often—too
often—makes progress only to be overtaken by unforeseen violence on the
ground. It’s happening again. Tensions between the Islamic world’s rival
powers—the Sunni monarchy of Saudi Arabia and the Shiite theocracy in
Iran—that erupted over the New Year’s weekend now jeopardize a string of
fragile peace initiatives: Peace talks on Syria (the political
complement to the military campaign against the Islamic State) are set
to begin January 25th. The Iran nuclear deal was expected to be
implemented this month. Iraq is trying to consolidate its first military
and political gains against ISIS, which were achieved
last month. And a three-week ceasefire in Yemen’s ruthless civil war
collapsed on January 2nd, endangering a second round of peace talks
scheduled for this month. These initiatives are essential to the
international effort to reconstruct the disintegrating map of the Middle
East.
Saudi Arabia and Iran—and
their allies—are pivotal players in each flashpoint. Both countries have
to make concessions for diplomacy to succeed anywhere. But, on January
3rd, Riyadh abruptly severed diplomatic relations with Tehran.
The
drama began on January 2nd, when executioners in a dozen Saudi cities
carried out death sentences—by beheading or firing squad—on forty-seven
men. It was the largest mass execution since sentences were carried out
against extremists who seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, more than
thirty-five years ago. This time, many of the men were convicted of
having links to Al Qaeda, whose agenda was not all that different from
that of the earlier extremists. Most were Sunni.
But
among them was Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a charismatic cleric with no
connections to Al Qaeda, who had championed the long-oppressed Shiite
minority in Saudi Arabia. Shiites make up between ten and fifteen per
cent of Saudi Arabia’s twenty-seven million people. They live and work
in oil-rich areas of the country but have long felt they aren’t getting a
fair share of their own resources. For decades, there were sporadic
protests among Shiites in the eastern provinces, over economic and
political grievances. Nimr was arrested in 2012, after a round of
protests spawned by the Arab Spring. He was beheaded on Saturday for
“breaking allegiance with the ruler,” instigating unrest, and
“undermining the kingdom’s security.”
At
a meeting with U.S. officials in 2008, Nimr insisted that he was not as
radical as he had been portrayed publicly, according to a diplomatic
cable released by Wikileaks. He told the Americans that he strongly
opposed the “authoritarianism of the reactionary Saudi regime” and, in
any future conflict, would stand with the people, rather than with the
government. But he “sought to distance himself from pro-Iranian and
anti-American statements,” the officials reported to the State
Department and U.S. intelligence agencies, and noted that he “espoused
other conciliatory ideas such as fair political decision-making over
identity-based politics, the positive impact of elections, and strong
‘American ideas’ such as liberty and justice.” The cable noted the
Sheikh’s growing appeal among the young, the lower classes, and those
disaffected by discrimination and the kingdom’s economic malaise.
Nimr’s
execution sparked immediate protests among Shiite communities from
Turkey to Lebanon, Bahrain, Pakistan and northern India—and in Dearborn,
Michigan, and New York City. At a demonstration at Columbus Circle on
Sunday, protesters carried a sign comparing Nimr to Martin Luther King,
Jr.
The protests turned violent in
Iran, where the government stoked passions about injustice and
martyrdom, concepts at the core of the Shiite faith and the split with
the dominant, Sunni branch of Islam, shortly after the Prophet
Muhammad’s death. Relations had been deteriorating since September, when
hundreds of Iranian pilgrims were among two thousand crushed to death
during the annual hajj pilgrimage. Iran accused the Saudis of
mismanagement and abuse; for months, the Saudis did not return many of
the bodies.
After Nimr’s execution, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, warned
that “divine retribution” would “grip the neck of Saudi politicians.”
Within hours, mobs attacked and set fire to the Saudi Embassy in Tehran
and ransacked the consulate in Mashhad. Saudi Arabia charged that
repeated appeals to Tehran to rein in the crowd were ignored. On Sunday,
Tehran arrested forty protesters. “We do not allow rogue groups to
commit illegal actions and damage the holy reputation of the Islamic
Republic of Iran,” President Hassan Rouhani pledged. But it was too
late, and the Saudis broke off diplomatic relations.
“The
history of Iran is full of negative and hostile interference in Arab
countries, always accompanied by ruin, destruction, and the killing of
innocent souls,” the Saudi Foreign Minister, Adel al-Jubeir, told a
hastily convened press conference. Complicating matters, in 2011, when
Jubeir was the Saudi Ambassador to Washington, he was the target of a
bizarre assassination plot by an Iranian-American used-car salesman,
Manssor Arbabsiar, who tried to hire a Mexican drug cartel to bomb a
restaurant where Jubeir dined. Arbabsiar admitted
to plotting with members of the Iranian military. In 2013, he was
sentenced in a Manhattan court to twenty-five years. The animosity has a
personal as well as a professional dimension among the current crop of
politicians in both capitals.
On
Monday, Bahrain and Sudan also severed relations with Iran, and the
United Arab Emirates downgraded ties. The regional fallout is probably
not over.
The outside world, while
faulting the Saudis for initiating the current crisis, condemned
actions by both Riyadh and Tehran. In an unusually candid statement on
Saturday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that he was “deeply
dismayed” by Nimr’s execution, and questioned “trials that raised
serious concerns over the nature of the charges and the fairness of the
process.” The European Union called into question “freedom of expression
and the respect of basic civil and political rights” in Saudi Arabia.
Jubeir rebuffed criticism of the executions. “We should be applauded for
this, not criticized,” he said Monday, in an interview with Reuters.
The
United States is now scrambling to contain the damage, even as U.S.
officials are alarmed by Saudi Arabia’s provocative act. “We are
particularly concerned that the execution of prominent Shia cleric and
political activist Nimr al-Nimr risks exacerbating sectarian tensions at
a time when they urgently need to be reduced,” the State Department
spokesman John Kirby said. “The United States also urges the government
of Saudi Arabia to permit peaceful expression of dissent and to work
together with all community leaders to defuse tensions in the wake of
these executions.” From his vacation, Secretary of State John Kerry
talked with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif on Sunday, and on
Monday he spoke by telephone with Saudi and other Arab leaders to
prevent the crisis from worsening. Russia also offered to intervene with
both countries, while the U.N. special envoy for Syria set off for
meetings in both capitals to salvage the Syria peace talks.
The
last break in relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, also initiated
by Riyadh, occurred in 1988. It lasted three years. The current split
mirrors a fundamental ideological and strategic division across the
Middle East that is now at least as significant as the Arab-Israeli
divide, which defined Mideast conflicts over the past six decades. The
escalating sectarian rift in recent years is also one of the deepest
fractures since the original schism between Sunnis and Shiites, nearly
fourteen centuries ago, shortly after the death of the Prophet Muhammad.
Then there are the ethnic tensions, dating back centuries, between
Arabs and Persians. Even if the United States and others succeed in
limiting the damage of the immediate crisis, prospects for healing the
deeper divide seem more than unlikely.
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