by Prof. Hillel Frisch
As was recently demonstrated when Houthi forces in Yemen launched a ballistic missile at the state’s largest airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is fighting an all-out war for survival.
Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Source -
Media Office of the Crown Prince, Wikimedia CC
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 644, November 17, 2017
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Saudi
Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman knows he has to transform the state
into a war machine if the kingdom is to survive the Iranian onslaught.
To do that, he has to amass power by removing the system of checks and
balances of rival princely factions and tribal affiliations as well as a
security system that is weakened by both. The question is whether he
will be able to avoid the fate of the Shah, who transformed Iran into a
regional power but fell victim to wall-to-wall opposition bred by his
concentration of power.
Even in the US, a nation that enshrines its system
of checks and balances, which limits executive power and mitigates the
risk of tyranny, there has always been broad recognition that in times
of imminent and vast external danger, a War Powers Act must be passed to
allow the executive great powers to face the challenge. A well-known
legal classic on the theme was aptly entitled “Constitutional
Dictatorship.”
Saudi Arabia is facing just such an external
threat. In response, young Muhammad Bin Salman (also known as MBS), the
Crown Prince and Minister of Defense, is determined to transform the
kingdom.
Saudi Arabia’s system of checks and balances is
based on rival camps composed of hundreds if not thousands of princes
and rival tribal affiliations. Its security establishment is riven by
competitive strife between an army belonging to one part of the royal
family, a National Guard belonging to another, and a religious
establishment with its own policing arm. Muhammad’s aim is to reshape
this agglomeration into a concentrated, centralized war machine.
Why is this necessary? Because as was recently
demonstrated when Houthi forces in Yemen launched a ballistic missile at
the state’s largest airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is fighting an
all-out war for survival.
Few states have been so beset by geostrategic
misfortune as Saudi Arabia over the past two decades. Mainstays of the
Saudi security environment that had allowed that unique and archaic
state to thrive simply evaporated into thin air one after another as
Iran, its formidable nemesis, went on the ascendant.
One of those mainstays was the US. The Saudis no
longer consider the US to be a reliable policeman who can be relied upon
to stave off external threats and maintain the sovereignty of states,
as it did in 1991 when it amassed a coalition of half a million (mostly
American) troops to roll back Iraqi forces from occupied Kuwait.
During Obama’s term in office, the Saudis could
console themselves to an extent that his belief in “engaging” enemies to
the point of signing an agreement with Iran over its military nuclear
capabilities was a temporary aberration. But the gap between Trump’s
bark and his bite suggests that American disengagement might be more
deep-seated and historic. Trump knows many of his supporters prefer guns
in their closets to American arms abroad. They certainly don’t favor
using American weaponry and personnel to protect the Saudi state, which
produced most of the terrorists of 9/11.
Regionally, the Saudis have had to face the
realization that though there are plenty of Sunni Arab states in the
area, it is the only such entity with the potential power to meet the
Iranian challenge. This solitary position stems from the sharp decline
of Egyptian power in the region. A half century ago, Egypt was in a
position to menace Riyadh by threatening to wage a war to destroy the
Yemeni dynasty and replace it with a military regime of its own making.
Today, Egyptian security forces are only barely succeeding in containing
ISIS, which operates in no more than 1,000 square kilometers in Sinai
between Al-Arish and Rafah. Given this performance, the Egyptian
military scarcely has the ability to come to the aid of the Saudis
beyond its borders.
To the east, the Saudis could once rely on Iraq to
be a buffer between themselves and Iranian imperial ambitions – though
they loathed both the Hashemites who ruled it when it was a kingdom and
the Baathists who came in their wake. This is why Riyadh financed Saddam
Hussein, a man it intensely detested, in his long, grueling war with
Iran during the 1980s.
That buffer has not only ceased to exist, but Iraq
has come under Shiite rule. Its prime minister and political elite, at
least from the Saudi vantage point, have become Iranian puppets.
Militarily, the Shiite militias – which display a clear loyalty to the
Iranian Revolutionary Guard – might be even more powerful today than the
official Federal Army.
To add insult to injury, the US, which destroyed
this buffer by invading Iraq in 2003, has committed itself to the
strengthening of the Iraqi army, which recently routed the Kurds in
Kirkuk. The predominantly Sunni Kurds were the last more or less
reliable ally of the Saudis in the region after the setbacks suffered by
their proxies in Syria.
Worse still has been the failure of Saudi
financial soft power to promote proxies to wage war against the Iranians
on the kingdom’s behalf. Financing proxies was the central mainstay of
the Saudi security architecture for decades, but especially since the
so-called Arab Spring. The comeback of the Assad regime with the
re-conquest of Homs and Aleppo, and the linking of Syrian forces and
Alawite and Shiite militias with their Iraqi counterparts along Syria’s
southeast border to recreate the Iranian-Shiite crescent, has come at
the expense of the Sunni rebels financed by Riyadh. This not only
represents a major strategic loss for the kingdom in terms of its
balance of power with Tehran, but also reflects the inadequacy of a
basic tool of Saudi power.
Muhammad bin Salman understands that Saudi Arabia
has no choice but to wage this war directly. This is why he has hit at
the finely tuned checks and balances of the Saudi system. They might
have preserved internal stability, but they severely limit the
transformation of Saudi Arabia into an effective war machine equipped to
take on the Iranian threat.
Can Muhammad galvanize Saudi youth to meet the
danger? Equally pressing, will he be able to centralize power and become
the leading regional power in the manner of the Shah, yet avoid the
Shah’s fate? Making bold moves like entering the air war in Yemen or
jailing a dozen or so political celebrities in Saudi Arabia might be a
promising beginning, but they in no way indicate how successful Muhammad
will be in meeting the challenges ahead.
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/desperate-saudi-bid-prepare-state-war/
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Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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