The Saudi Arabia/Iran Conflict

Simon Henderson is the Baker fellow and director of the Gulf and Energy Policy Program at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, specialising in energy matters and the conservative Arab states of the Persian Gulf. A former journalist with the Financial Times, Simon Henderson has also worked as a consultant advising corporations and governments on the Persian Gulf. During a visit to Australia hosted by the Australian/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, Simon Henderson addressed The Sydney Institute on Thursday 25 August 2016. What follows ia an edited transcript of that talk.

THE SAUDI ARABIA/IRAN CONFLICT

SIMON HENDERSON

Thank you very much, thank you for coming out this evening. I’m now a US citizen, with a US passport in one pocket and a British passport in the other. My American friends are very happy that I’m a US citizen but they doubt whether I’ll ever become an American. It’s a work in progress.

It’s a rule, as you are well aware, of a society based on immigrants that immigrants have to contribute. And my contribution to the United States is my Englishness.

I’m a journalist by background and started my career with the BBC in London. I then joined the Financial Times, I was a foreign correspondent in Pakistan in 1977 and 1978. And for those of you with memories that might go back as far as then, that is when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was Prime Minister until he was overthrown by the military. It was an interesting time to be in Pakistan.

It meant that when I joined the Financial Times a few months later, and the revolution in Iran was about to happen, the Financial Times sent me out to Iran as they thought if I could survive Pakistan I might be able to survive Iran.

My speciality at the moment and, indeed, half the subject of tonight’s discussion, is Saudi Arabia. I’d never been to Saudi Arabia. This is because, before I wrote about Saudi Arabia, I wasn’t prepared to go through the various hoops that they’ve constructed in order to get a visa. And if you write about the Saudi Royal Family this isn’t a quick way of getting a visa.

My Saudi friend once said to me, “Why do you have to write about the Royal Family. He said, Saudis talk about the Royal Family and the politics of the Royal Family all the time, but we don’t write about it. I replied that this was a different intellectual tradition. I come from one where if you only talk about things you’re considered a speaker of nonsense. To attempt to be someone of substance you have to write it down, and have it published. And that’s what I do. I write an enormous amount about Saudi Arabia, a very interesting country with some very interesting dynamics.

The Middle East is a mess. You’re going to say, when was it not a mess? I agree. The unfortunate aspect of today’s mess is that people are dying, people are suffering and people are becoming refugees. I say this in reference to Syria. I have no particular prescription of how to sort out Syria.

However, there are some good things happening in the Middle East as well. Certainly changes that suggest some good might come out of it. My own particular background and particular focus is on energy. The Middle East has, depending on how you do the numbers, 65 per cent of the world’s oil reserves and about 45 per cent of the world’s natural gas reserves. When I talk about the Middle East I talk about the Middle East as a whole, but much of this is concentrated in the Gulf area.

I call the Gulf the Persian Gulf, which irritates and upsets countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar and so forth. But I follow the discipline of the United States government on this which has an organisation called the Board of Geographic Names which has looked at the background, history and geography and decided the Gulf should be called the Persian Gulf. Having declared it should be the Persian Gulf, the US military then called it the Arabian Gulf because they have to actually work with the Gulf Arab states. If they call it the Persian Gulf, they upset people that they want to work with. That is in the nature of the Middle East.

Energy-wise, the Middle East at the moment is a good story and an optimistic story. The price of oil (I haven’t checked it today) crept up to around $49 per barrel a couple of days ago. Then there was a bit of a setback because so I can’t figure out what is today in New York and Washington. For the moment, the oil price is slow. It might not be good for oil companies or governments earning oil revenue or taxing oil exports, but for consumers it’s good. And, what used to be the perennial story of the Middle East that scared us about energy security, is no longer – despite the problems in the Middle East, oil is continuing to flow.

Now, Saudi Arabia and Iran clearly don’t like each other. Is this antagonism going to worsen the economic situation? Or is it going to have no particular impact on it. Is it going to worsen the political situation? And lead to a continuing confusion for the next 10 – 20 years? Beyond our lifetimes, we’ll get to a stage where we realise the future is for our children rather than necessarily for ourselves.

I fear the answer is yes. But I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be cataclysmic. We should be able to live with these tensions. I don’t want to give you a lecture about religious differences but there are a few key elements in the division between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The essence of the division, the tension, between Saudi Arabia and Iran today is religious difference. There’s a schism in Islam. Most Muslims regard themselves as Sunni Muslims. People in Iran regard themselves as Shiite Muslims. And there are Shiite communities elsewhere in the Middle East as well. The challenge is that Sunni Muslims regard Shiite Muslims as not proper Muslims, or not even Muslims at all. And, at the extremes, they would regard them as so unworthy of being Muslims that they should be killed. That’s one of the fundamental divisions between Saudi Arabia and Iran today. And it is a major problem.

The difference in essence in the Sunni/Shiite divide is one of authority. After the Prophet Mohamed died, it was a question of what happened to the succession for the title of leader of Islam. Sunnis thought it should be passed to close followers of the Prophet, whereas Shiites thought it should go down the line of the Prophet’s relatives. This was complicated by the fact that the Prophet Mohammed didn’t have any sons, he only had daughters. So the first in line to succeed was the Prophet’s son-in-law.

But I don’t want to emphasis this division too much. There are two other aspects of the divide. One is racial. Ethnically, Iranians are Persian and Saudis are Arab. This is a big difference at least to them. The main characteristic of this is language. Saudis are Arab – meaning they speak Arabic. Iranians are Persian – they speak Persian. There are exceptions to these labels but they remain essentially true.

The second aspect is geographic rivalry. Look at a map. Saudi Arabia is huge, especially compared with many of its neighbours. But Iran is also big. Each attempts to dominate the waterway known as the Gulf.  Saudis call it the Arabian Gulf. Iranians call it the Persian Gulf.  In terms of length of coastline, Iran’s is longer.

This history goes back hundreds of years to the time of the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century. A more recent divide is a consequence of the discovery of oil in the last century.  Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves are larger but Iran’s are still substantial.  In terms of natural gas, Iran has much more than Saudi Arabia. Indeed, Iran has the largest reserves of natural gas – the fuel considered to be much cleaner than oil – than any other nation in the world.  Production-wise Saudi Arabia is a much larger oil producer and exporter.  Iran’s natural gas export potential has yet to be realized.

Politically, the ingredients of history, geography and energy provide a potent mix. This has been the case since the 1979 revolution which overthrew the Shah in Iran.  The Islamic regime in Tehran wants to overcome the second class status which it feels and become the regional leader, the hegemon.

Saudi Arabia, a very conservative country, and does not like change. Iran does not like the status quo.  Riyadh has traditionally looked to America for security guarantees. The Obama administration is exasperated by Sunni/Shiite tension and Saudi-Iranian rivalry.  Today’s Iran defines itself as anti-American and wants to upset the status quo.

A consequence of this tension is the proxy wars in Syria, Iraq, Bahrain and Yemen, where Riyadh and Tehran seek local advantage.

Iran considers it is the principal country and the proper leader of the Middle East, but finds itself not recognised as the leader of the Middle East. This irritates Iranians. The Saudis are very happy not to recognise the Iranians as the leaders of the Middle East because they view themselves as the custodians of the holy place of Islam – the cities of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia. Saudis fear an Iranian challenge to their leadership.

Some of you might argue that we want high prices for hydrocarbons in order to encourage a shift to renewables. Frankly, that’s another subject area. A colleague, in front of a group of people, asked me why we were supporting Saudi Arabia rather than Iran. It’s a good enough question. It was at a time earlier this year when there’d been a couple of horrific news stories from Saudi Arabia. One was of a blogger who had blogged some criticisms of Saudi Arabia and been flogged in public on a Friday after prayers in a mosque. I can’t remember if it was 40 lashes or 50 lashes but either way it wasn’t a very pleasant experience. Another incident, caught somewhere on Youtube, was of a woman who had apparently murdered somebody and was being beheaded in the street. Cell phone cameras are ubiquitous these days. It wasn’t a great piece of video, but it was clear what happened.

So how can one support a country which does this sort of thing? The answer I gave was that these are the unfortunate aspects of Saudi behaviour which should be condemned and they should be deterred from repeating this sort of thing. The Saudis look to the West, the US, Europe, even Australia, as being their friends and allies. We should make use of that alliance in order to improve it some otherwise distasteful parts of their behaviour.

By contrast, the Iranians don’t look to us as friends. They look to us as rivals and enemies. This is clearer to state in terms of the United States where the Islamic republic in Iran views America as being an evil influence which needs to be outmanoeuvred at all times.  They believe it would be a good thing if the United States were push out of the Middle East. Americans may want to leave the Middle East, but leaving the Middle East because the Iranians push them out is not a good thing. It would only lead to instability. Iran today, despite much of its population being sympathetic to the West but powerless in the power structure, is not a status quo country. This Iran wants to undermine the role of the West, not only in the Middle East but also in the rest of the world. And that is something that we need to confront.

I’ll draw my remarks to a conclusion by reflection on a curious aspect of this tension. Something surprising has emerged as a result of tension between Saudi Arabia and Iran. In a wider sense, Iran is up to no good. And what is happening is that there is something of a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Israel who have been enemies since 1948, and the foundation of the State of Israel. On occasion Saudis have sent troops to fight Israel, on some occasions they’ve funded other people’s troops and they’ve also funded the Palestinians.

Now, because of the apparent mutual fear and suspicion of Iran, and Iran’s intentions, Israel and Saudi Arabia are talking to each other. This is a work in progress, but let me give you a few examples of what is happening. If I’d suggested these five years ago, people would have fallen about laughing and thought I was a less than serious person.

There is a Saudi Prince called Turki Al Faisal which means he was a son of a King called King Faisal who died in 1974. Turki Al Faisal spent 20 years of his career in Saudi intelligence and then became the ambassador in London followed by the post of ambassador in Washington. He doesn’t actually have an official role at the moment, but in the last two or three years he’s had public meetings with Israelis.

Public meetings are meetings that we all know have happened; they have been photographed, and sometimes videoed. Turki Al Faisal was a guest speaker at an annual dinner this year in Washington DC at my own institute, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy which is supportive of Israel. He shared the platform with a man called Yaakov Amidror. He is a retired Israeli general who, after retiring from the military, served as Prime Minister Netanyahu’s national security advisor for a couple of years.

At our annual dinner, these two men had a discussion on what they agreed with and what they didn’t agree with. There weren’t too many areas of agreement, and there wasn’t, to my mind, sufficient concentration on Iran, which was clearly the subtext of why both of them were there. But it was important enough that the event happened. Turki Al Faisal has also this year had his photograph taken shaking the hands of a man called Moshe Ya’alon, while he was the Israeli Minister of Defence. They met at a security conference in Germany earlier in the year in what I think politicians call a “brush past” which is when they walk close to each other and they have their photograph taken shaking hands. These sort of things don’t happen unless people want them to happen.

Meanwhile, there is another Saudi, who is not a Royal and therefore has less status, who has had public meetings with Israelis. He is Anwar Eshki who was a Major General in the Saudi military. Last year, Eshki had a public meeting at the Council of Foreign Relations in Washington DC with a man called Dore Gold. Dore Gold is a confidant of Netanyahu and now the Director General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the top bureaucrat in the ministry. Eshki’s meeting with Dore Gold took place after Dore Gold had been named the next director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Fast forward to a few weeks ago, Anwar Eshki crossed into the West Bank and stayed for a few days under the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. While he was there, Eshki took a cab to Jerusalem, half an hour’s drive away to have coffee at the King David Hotel with Dore Gold. He also met the Israeli general who is in charge of relations with the Palestinian Authority because there are security arrangements in common between the two.

All this, again, happened in public. It was only for three hours and the rest of his stay in the West Bank was several days. But those three hours got most attention. Eshki also had his photograph taken with a bunch of Israeli parliamentarians, mainly from left wing parties.

So where is this all going? The simple answer to that is, I don’t know but I’m prepared to discuss it. The larger answer is that despite the historical tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran and indeed the historical tensions between Saudi Arabia and Israel, there are things that are happening. There is movement. There are elements of a diplomatic dance. What the dance is, isn’t clear. How long the dance will last isn’t clear, and whether they will take the next dance together or change partners is also not clear. But this makes for a very interesting Middle East.

And yes, the Middle East is a mess. The historical antagonism between Saudi Arabia and Iran is an important feature and likely to be a dominant feature as we go forward. But the other historical antagonism, which many of us thought was even greater than the Iran-Saudi Arabia divide, would appear to be in a process of some adjustment. Perhaps even radical change.