I’m still struggling to come to grips with Nawaf Obaid’s editorial today, where he suggests that Saudi Arabia will take the fight to the Shi’a in Iraq if we pull out. Obaid makes three suggestions. The Saudis might send in their own militias to fight on behalf of the Sunnis. They might fund former Ba’athists. And they might ramp up oil production and cut the price in half in an effort to destroy Iran’s economy. He doesn’t suggest that Saudi Arabia’s armed forces might engage Iran directly, but that is clearly a possibility once the two nations become locked in a proxy war in Iraq. And that is a very interesting prospect. Now, before I get started on this, I want to point to Steve Clemons’s take on this:
What Obaid has articulated here is not offered as a threat if the US leaves Iraq, which the US must do in my view. This is the first robust declaration that the Saudis are willing to fill the vacuum left by the United State in the region and knock back some of the unchecked expansion of Iranian influence in the region.
It’s not good to have rising powers with pretensions of future greatness clashing like this — but there is NO CHOICE.
And frankly, it’s much better to have the Saudis engaged than not engaged in Iraq. Iran must be balanced — and while this may seem like an escalation, it actually is an important potential cap on a worsening of this increasingly ulcerous mess in Iraq.
But what the Saudis are doing and what they need to be do is not new — it has been predicted for quite a while. And this is the consequence of the Bush administration’s failure to think strategically. We have now drawn Saudi Arabia into a potential collision that could destabilize that nation and seriously harm our access to vital oil and natural gas supplies.
Clemons also made this remark in the thread:
Iraq’s civil war will become a regional conflagration if the REGION itself doesn’t stop it….and to do that, nations need to put themselves on the line so that the leaders and commanders can stare into the abyss and see the horror of what could be unleashed — triggered as it were by the horrible missteps of our country.
But this is not a casual deal — and I think that even though things could get worse, they might not if the other big stakeholders in the region move in….they must.
I am not sure why Clemons think this is not a threat, or why he thinks it is a positive development. We’ll see what he posts later today. But I want to make something very clear. The Saudi Arabian armed services are a wholly owned subsidiary of our own armed services. You can see a list of recent arms transfers here. You can read about the U.S./Saudi military relationship (and some of the resulting problems) here.
The Saudis cannot use their armed forces for very long without the consent of the United States. A case in point:
On September 6, 2000 Congress was notified that Saudi Arabia was spending $690 million for:
A continuation of contractor maintenance and training technical services, spare and repair parts, support equipment, modification facilities, and labor to accomplish programmed depot maintenance on their F-15 aircraft.
Our arms industry would not be pleased with the cancellation of such contracts, but their continuation is a prerequisite for any sustained use of the Saudi military. There are, of course, ways to get around a ban or cancellation of military assistance. Iran was able to buy American equipment and replacement parts all throughout the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. Usually they relied on Israeli cut-outs or Chinese knock-offs. But that is not really the issue here. The issue is that any disruption of U.S./Saudi military relationship would signify a collapse of our relationship overall. There is no telling how far-reaching the consequences might be.
If the U.S. and Saudi Arabia begin pursuing divergent military strategies in Iraq then our sixty year relationship might be irrevocably punctured (exactly the outcome sought by the 9/11 hijackers).
Maybe Clemons can explain to me how we can simultaneously support the Maliki government and supply the Saudi military that is fighting them?
This is a catastrophe, and Clemons seems to be welcoming it.
