If the crown prince of Saudi Arabia has in mind a war with Iran,
President Trump should disabuse his royal highness of any notion that America
would be doing his fighting for him.
Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS,
the 32-year-old son of the aging and ailing King Salman, is making too many
enemies for his own good, or for ours.
Pledging to Westernize Saudi
Arabia, he has antagonized the clerical establishment. Among the 200 Saudis he
just had arrested for criminal corruption are 11 princes, the head of the
National Guard, the governor of Riyadh, and the famed investor Prince Alwaleed
bin Talal.
The Saudi tradition of
consensus collective rule is being trashed.
MBS is said to be pushing for
an abdication by his father and his early assumption of the throne. He has begun
to exhibit the familiar traits of an ambitious 21st-century autocrat in the
mold of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.
Yet his foreign adventures
are all proving to be debacles.
The
rebels the Saudis backed in Syria’s civil war were routed. The war on the
Houthi rebels in Yemen, of which MBS is architect, has proven to be a Saudi
Vietnam and a human rights catastrophe.
The crown prince persuaded
Egypt, Bahrain and the UAE to expel Qatar from the Sunni Arab community for
aiding terrorists, but he has failed to choke the tiny country into submission.
Last week, MBS ordered
Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri to Riyadh, where Hariri publicly resigned
his office and now appears to be under house arrest. Refusing to recognize the
resignation, Lebanon’s president is demanding Hariri’s return.
After embattled Houthi rebels
in Yemen fired a missile at its international airport, Riyadh declared the
missile to be Iranian-made, smuggled into Yemen by Tehran, and fired with the
help of Hezbollah.
The story seemed far-fetched,
but Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said the attack out of Yemen may be
considered an “act of war” — by Iran. And as war talk spread across the region
last week, Riyadh ordered all Saudi nationals in Lebanon to come home.
Riyadh
has now imposed a virtual starvation blockade — land, sea and air — on Yemen,
that poorest of Arab nations that is heavily dependent on imports for food and
medicine. Hundreds of thousands of Yemeni are suffering from cholera. Millions
face malnutrition
The U.S. interest here is
clear: no new war in the Middle East, and a negotiated end to the wars in Yemen
and Syria.
Hence, the United States
needs to rein in the royal prince.
Yet, on his Asia trip, Trump
said of the Saudi-generated crisis, “I have great confidence in King Salman and
the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, they know exactly what they are doing.”
Do they? In October, Jared
Kushner made a trip to Riyadh, where he reportedly spent a long night of
plotting Middle East strategy until 4 a.m. with MBS.
No one knows how a war
between Saudi Arabia and Iran would end. The Saudis has been buying modern U.S.
weapons for years, but Iran, with twice the population, has larger if
less-well-equipped forces.
Yet the seeming desire of the
leading Sunni nation in the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia, for a confrontation
with the leading Shiite power, Iran, appears to carry the greater risks for
Riyadh.
For,
a dozen years ago, the balance of power in the Gulf shifted to Iran, when Bush
II launched Operation Iraqi Freedom, ousted Saddam Hussein, disarmed and
disbanded his Sunni-led army, and turned Iraq into a Shiite-dominated nation
friendly to Iran
In the Reagan decade, Iraq
had fought Iran as mortal enemies for eight years. Now they are associates, if
not allies.
The Saudis may bristle at
Hezbollah and demand a crackdown. But Hezbollah is a participant in the
Lebanese government and has the largest fighting force in the country, hardened
in battle in Syria’s civil war, where it emerged on the victorious side.
While the Israelis could
fight and win a war with Hezbollah, both Israel and Hezbollah suffered so
greatly from their 2006 war that neither appears eager to renew that costly but
inconclusive conflict.
In an all-out war with Iran,
Saudi Arabia could not prevail without U.S. support. And should Riyadh fail,
the regime would be imperiled. As World War I, with the fall of the Romanov,
Hohenzollern, Hapsburg and Ottoman empires demonstrated, imperial houses do not
fare well in losing wars.
So far out on a limb has MBS
gotten himself, with his purge of cabinet ministers and royal cousins, and his
foreign adventures, it is hard to see how he climbs back without some
humiliation that could cost him the throne.
Yet we have our own interests
here. And we should tell the crown prince that if he starts a war in Lebanon or
in the Gulf, he is on his own. We cannot have this impulsive prince deciding
whether or not the United States goes to war again in the Middle East.
We alone decide that.
Patrick J. Buchanan is
co-founder and editor of The American Conservative. He is also the
author of Where the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War.
His latest book is Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke
a President and Divided America Forever See his website.
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