An Iranian agent tries to recruit a Mexican drugs cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in an American restaurant. “Nobody could make that up, right?” asked US secretary of state Hillary Clinton yesterday. But the FBI says it’s the latest blow in a Middle Eastern Cold War that has dragged on since 1979 between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Dangling above the states of the Persian Gulf, post-revolutionary Iran has long been the over-riding strategic threat for the sheikdoms and emirates in the region.
For years, Saudi Arabia led the conservative, pro-American camp in the Middle East against Colonel Nasser’s radical Egypt. That era ended when Egyptian ambitions dissolved in the defeat of 1967. When Egypt went on to sign an unpopular peace treaty with Israel in 1979, Cairo’s dreams of regional leadership faded. But that was also the year of a political earthquake: Iran’s revolution.
With its separate language and ethos, Iran had always sneered at the Arabs. Who were these uncultured nomads to talk down to one of the world’s oldest civilisations? Moreover, Iran is 90 per cent Shia, whereas the states of the Arab League are more than 80 per cent Sunni. The Saudi monarchy has reigned with the backing of the ultra-conservative Wahhabi religious establishment, which sees the ruling clerics of Iran as dangerous heretics.
If the Iranian government indeed ordered an assassination and bombing on American soil, it represents the escalation of a proxy war that has been unceasing for 30 years. Almost as soon as he assumed power, Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran’s revolution, declared that “the concept of monarchy totally contradicts Islam”. He similarly despised Saddam Hussein’s secular government in Iraq. Read on and comment » | Shashank Joshi | Wednesday, October 12, 2011
