Saudi Arabia's Yemen offensive is bigger than anyone expected

[FGB]

Saudi Arabia's Yemen offensive is bigger than anyone expected.

Since it was first announced, the Saudi Arabia-led war in Yemen has developed very rapidly. Air strikes have already hit numerous targets, resulting in many civilian deaths.

Clearly, the Saudis are not prepared to watch Yemen’s long-running domestic turmoil become a full-blown collapse. Ever since a rebellion led by the Shia Houthi faction has chased the Saudi-backed president, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, out of the country, its leaders have been battling domestic and foreign forces loyal to him in a country long rent by civil conflict and terrorism.

Saudi Arabia has responded by

more... Read more: http://theconversation.com/saudi-ar...gger-than-anyone-expected-39706#ixzz3WGyy2IuW





Read more: http://theconversation.com/saudi-ar...gger-than-anyone-expected-39706#ixzz3WGyhYWBl

 

[FGB]

What are your thoughts and what do you think about future conflicts involving united mid-eastern forces?

 

[KingOrfeo]

This article by Juan Cole is very informative.

The Saudi intervention in Yemen, and its organization of key members of the Arab League into a coalition to support that military move, is unusually adventurous for the royal family, which likes to work behind the scenes and more subtly. The muscular character of the intervention is a sign of how frightened Riyadh is of the instability in Yemen. There, the tribal Houthi movement of Zaydi Shiites has allied with military units loyal to deposed president Ali Abdullah Saleh to topple the government of Saleh’s successor, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

The Houthis have pledged to topple the Saudi throne; they chant “death to America” and have friendly relations with Iran. Nothing could be more threatening to the Saudis than a grassroots populist movement of this militant sort, and that it springs from a Shiite population makes it worse. The Saud dynasty is allied at home with the Wahhabi movement, which typically views Shiite Muslims as worse idolators than Hindus. Still, the late King Abdullah appointed two Shiites to his national Advisory Council, the embryonic Saudi parliament, and deployed the Ismaili Shiites of Najran against Yemen. It is not Shiite Islam that is the red line for the kingdom, but populist movements that talk dirty about the Saudi monarchy.

Another worry for King Salman, as for the United States, is that the Houthis’ attempt to rule all of Yemen despite being from a minority community (Zaydis are about a third of Yemen’s population) will create a power vacuum in the Sunni south of the country. There, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has long been active, with between 400 and 2,000 fighters. In 2011–12, AQAP attempted to take territory in Abyan province, but was defeated by the Yemeni army.

<snip>

The aged billionaires of the Saud dynasty have been buffeted by potentially destabilizing gales since 2011. They depended on the relatively secular-minded, nationalist Egyptian officer corps for their security, to some extent (Pakistan and the United States also offered the kingdom security umbrellas). The overthrow of Hosni Mubarak and the rise to power in Egypt of the populist Muslim Brotherhood posed an existential crisis for the kingdom. The Muslim Brotherhood was seen by the Saudi royal family as rooted in the people and as disrespectful of the religious charisma of the king in Riyadh. Saudi Arabia thus colluded with the Egyptian officer corps in the July 2013 coup against then-President Mohamed Morsi. The Saudis have long memories. They remember that in 1815 Egypt invaded Arabia on behalf of the Ottoman sultan to crush the Wahhabis. They were worried that the Muslim Brotherhood, if it were able to consolidate its control in Egypt, could carry out or encourage similar attempts to undermine their power in the Arabian Peninsula.

Also by Cole:

The rise of the Houthi movement in Yemen, the militias of Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon and even the Syrian Arab Army of Bashar al-Assad are being configured by many analysts as evidence of a wide-ranging Iranian Shiite incursion into the Middle East. The Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen, Israel’s recent bombing of Hezbollah bases in southern Syria, and Gulf Cooperation Council unease about Iraq’s Tikrit campaign are all a result of this theory of “the Shiite Crescent,” a phrase coined by King Abdallah II of Jordan. But is Iran really the aggressor state here, and are developments on the ground in the Middle East really being plotted out or impelled from Tehran?

It is an old fallacy to interpret local politics through the lens of geopolitics, and it is a way of thinking among foreign policy elites that has led to unnecessary conflicts and even wars. Polarized analysis is only good for the military-industrial complex. The United States invaded Lebanon in 1958, ostensibly on the grounds that Druse shepherds protesting the government of Camille Chamoun were Communist agents. A retired State Department official once confessed to me that many in Washington were sure that the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini was planned out in Moscow. On the other hand, I met a Soviet diplomat at a conference in Washington, DC, in 1981 who confessed to me that his country simply could not understand the Islamic Republic of Iran and was convinced that the CIA must be behind it. I would argue that Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and many Saudi and Gulf analysts have fallen victim to this “geopolitics fallacy.”

Iraqi Shiite militias can’t be read off as Iranian instruments. The Peace Brigades (formerly Mahdi Army) of Muqtada al-Sadr are mostly made up of Arab slum youth who are often suspicious of foreign, Persian influences. They became militant and were made slum-dwellers as a result of US and UN sanctions in the 1990s that destroyed the Iraqi middle classes and then of the US occupation after 2003. The ruling Dawa Party of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi does not accept Iran’s theory of clerical rule, and in the 1980s and ’90s many Dawa Party stalwarts chose to live in exile in London or Damascus rather than accept Iranian suzerainty. At the moment, Iraq’s Shiite parties and militias have been thrown into Iran’s arms by the rise of ISIL, which massacres Shiites. But the alliance is one of convenience and can’t just be read off from common Shiism.

 

[KingOrfeo]

What are your thoughts and what do you think about future conflicts involving united mid-eastern forces?

The West should stay out of them when possible.

 

[FGB]

The West should stay out of them when possible.

I certainly agree on that.

What happens if they decide jump on Israel someday for whatever reason?

Head to the fall out shelters?

 

[miles]

I certainly agree on that.

What happens if they decide jump on Israel someday for whatever reason?

Don't count on The Fraud to lift a finger to protect them.

 

[KingOrfeo]

I certainly agree on that.

What happens if they decide jump on Israel someday for whatever reason?

Head to the fall out shelters?

The Israelis can take care of themselves. They have already survived and won several wars with their neighbors, and their neighbors now have other things to worry about.

 

[sr71plt]

This seems a good one for the United States to stay out of, to tell its citizens they are completely on their own if they go near there, and then stick with that. I'm leary about doing anything at all with the Saudis that we can avoid.

 

[BotanyBoy]

I certainly agree on that.

What happens if they decide jump on Israel someday for whatever reason?
\

Then Israel has a problem...and they need to handle it, we have spent bazzilions and bazzilions making them the single most POWERFUL military entity on that side of the planet.

Don't count on The Fraud to lift a finger to protect them.

Why should he?

 

[JackLuis]

Let's see how well the Saudis are at Nation Building. They at least have to money to do it.

I don't see why we should get involved, it will just give the side we support extra problems.