The Yemeni Shiite group’s spectacular attack on Abqaiq
raises the distinct possibility of a push to drive the House of Saud from power
We are the Houthis and we’re coming to town. With the
spectacular attack on Abqaiq, Yemen’s Houthis have overturned the
geopolitical chessboard in Southwest Asia – going as far as introducing a whole
new dimension: the distinct possibility of investing in a push to drive the
House of Saud out of power.
Blowback is a bitch.
Houthis – Zaidi Shiites from northern Yemen – and Wahhabis have been at each
other’s throats for ages. This book is
absolutely essential to understand the mind-boggling complexity of Houthi
tribes; as a bonus, it places the turmoil in southern Arabian lands way beyond
a mere Iran-Saudi proxy war.
Still, it’s always
important to consider that Arab Shiites in the Eastern province – working in
Saudi oil installations – have got to be natural allies of the Houthis fighting
against Riyadh.
Houthi striking
capability – from drone swarms to ballistic missile attacks – has been
improving remarkably for the past year or so. It’s not by accident that the UAE
saw which way the geopolitical and geoeconomic winds were blowing: Abu Dhabi
withdrew from Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s vicious war against Yemen and
now is engaged in what it describes as a “peace-first” strategy.
Even before Abqaiq, the
Houthis had already engineered quite a few attacks against Saudi oil
installations as well as Dubai and Abu Dhabi airports. In early July, Yemen’s
Operations Command Center staged an exhibition in full regalia in Sana’a
featuring their whole range of ballistic and winged missiles and drones.
.
The situation has now
reached a point where there’s plenty of chatter across the Persian Gulf about a
spectacular scenario: the Houthis investing in a mad dash across the Arabian
desert to capture Mecca and Medina in conjunction with a mass Shiite uprising
in the Eastern oil belt. That’s not far-fetched anymore. Stranger things have
happened in the Middle East. After all, the Saudis can’t even win a bar brawl –
that’s why they rely on mercenaries.
Orientalism strikes again
The US intel refrain that the Houthis are incapable of such
a sophisticated attack betrays the worst strands of orientalism and white man’s
burden/superiority complex.
The only missile parts
shown by the Saudis so far come from a Yemeni Quds 1 cruise missile. According
to Brigadier General Yahya Saree, spokesman for the Sana’a-based Yemeni Armed
Forces, “the Quds system proved its great ability to hit its targets and
to bypass enemy interceptor systems.”
Houthi armed forces
duly claimed responsibility for
Abqaiq: “This operation is one of the largest operations carried out by our
forces in the depth of Saudi Arabia, and came after an accurate intelligence
operation and advance monitoring and cooperation of honorable and free men
within the Kingdom.”
Notice the key concept:
“cooperation” from inside Saudi Arabia – which could include the whole spectrum
from Yemenis to that Eastern province Shiites.
Even more relevant is
the fact that massive American hardware deployed in Saudi Arabia inside out and
outside in – satellites, AWACS, Patriot missiles, drones, battleships, jet
fighters – didn’t see a thing, or certainly not in time. The sighting of
three “loitering” drones by a Kuwaiti bird hunter arguably heading towards
Saudi Arabia is being invoked as “evidence”. Cue to the embarrassing picture of
a drone swarm – wherever it came from – flying undisturbed for hours over Saudi
territory.
UN officials openly admit that now everything
that matters is within the 1,500 km range of the Houthis’ new UAV-X drone: oil
fields in Saudi Arabia, a still-under-construction nuclear power plant in the
Emirates and Dubai’s mega-airport.
My conversations with
sources in Tehran over the past two years have ascertained that the Houthis’
new drones and missiles are essentially copies of Iranian designs assembled in
Yemen itself with crucial help from Hezbollah engineers.
US intel insists that 17
drones and cruise missiles were launched in combination from southern Iran. In
theory, Patriot radar would have picked that up and knocked the drones/missiles
from the sky. So far, absolutely no record of this trajectory has been
revealed. Military experts generally agree that the radar on the Patriot
missile is good, but its success rate is “disputed” – to say
the least. What’s important, once again, is that the Houthis do have advanced
offensive missiles. And their pinpoint accuracy at Abqaiq was uncanny.
For now, it appears that the winner of the
US/UK-supported House of One Saudi war on the civilian Yemeni population, which
started in March 2015 and generated a humanitarian crisis the UN regards as
having been of biblical proportions, is certainly not the crown prince, widely
known as MBS.
Listen to the general
Crude oil stabilization
towers – several of them – at Abqaiq were specifically targeted, along with
natural gas storage tanks. Persian Gulf energy sources have been telling me
repairs and/or rebuilding could last months. Even Riyadh admitted as much.
Blindly blaming Iran,
with no evidence, does not cut it. Tehran can count on swarms of top strategic
thinkers. They do not need or want to blow up Southwest Asia, which is
something they could do, by the way: Revolutionary Guards generals have already
said many times on the record that they are ready for war.
Professor Mohammad
Marandi from the University of Tehran, who has very close relations with the
Foreign Ministry, is adamant: “It didn’t come from Iran. If it did, it would be
very embarrassing for the Americans, showing they are unable to detect a large
number of Iranian drones and missiles. That doesn’t make sense.”
Marandi additionally
stresses, “Saudi air defenses are not equipped to defend the country from Yemen
but from Iran. The Yemenis have been striking against the Saudis, they are
getting better and better, developing drone and missile technology for four and
a half years, and this was a very soft target.”
A soft – and unprotected
– target: the US PAC-2 and PAC-3 systems in place are all oriented towards the
east, in the direction of Iran. Neither Washington nor Riyadh knows for sure
where the drone swarm/missiles really came from.
Readers should pay close attention to this groundbreaking interview with
General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps Aerospace Force. The interview, in Farsi (with English subtitles), was
conducted by US-sanctioned Iranian intellectual Nader Talebzadeh and includes
questions forwarded by my US analyst friends Phil Giraldi and Michael Maloof
and myself.
Explaining Iranian self-sufficiency in its defense
capabilities, Hajizadeh sounds like a very rational actor. The bottom line:
“Our view is that neither American politicians nor our officials want a war. If
an incident like the one with the drone [the RQ-4N shot down by Iran in June]
happens or a misunderstanding happens, and that develops into a larger war,
that’s a different matter. Therefore we are always ready for a big war.”
In response to one of my questions, on what message the
Revolutionary Guards want to convey, especially to the US, Hajizadeh does not
mince his words: “In addition to the US bases in various regions like
Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Emirates and Qatar, we have targeted all naval
vessels up to a distance of 2,000 kilometers and we are constantly monitoring
them. They think that if they go to a distance of 400 km, they are out of our
firing range. Wherever they are, it only takes one spark, we hit their vessels,
their airbases, their troops.”
Get your S-400s or else
On the energy front,
Tehran has been playing a very precise game under pressure – selling loads of
oil by turning off the transponders of their tankers as they leave Iran and
transferring the oil at sea, tanker to tanker, at night, and relabeling their
cargo as originating at other producers for a price. I have been checking
this for weeks with my trusted Persian Gulf traders – and they all confirm it.
Iran could go on doing it forever.
Of course, the Trump
administration knows it. But the fact is they are looking the other way. To
state it as concisely as possible: they are caught in a trap by the absolute
folly of ditching the JCPOA, and they are looking for a face-saving way out.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has warned the administration in so many words:
the US should return to the agreement it reneged on before it’s too late.
And now for the really hair-raising part.
The strike at Abqaiq
shows that the entire Middle East production of over 18 million barrels of oil
a day – including Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia – can be
easily knocked out. There is zero adequate defense against these drones and
missiles.
Well, there’s always
Russia.
Here’s what happened at
the press conference after the Ankara summit this week on Syria, uniting
Presidents Putin, Rouhani and Erdogan.
Question: Will Russia
provide Saudi Arabia with any help or support in restoring its infrastructure?
President Putin: As for
assisting Saudi Arabia, it is also written in the Quran that violence of any
kind is illegitimate except when protecting one’s people. In order to protect
them and the country, we are ready to provide the necessary assistance to Saudi
Arabia. All the political leaders of Saudi Arabia have to do is take a wise
decision, as Iran did by buying the S-300 missile system, and as President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan did when he bought Russia’s latest S-400 Triumph
anti-aircraft system. They would offer reliable protection for any Saudi
infrastructure facilities.
President Hassan
Rouhani: So do they need to buy the S-300 or the S-400?
President Vladimir
Putin: It is up to them to decide [laughs].
In The Transformation of War, Martin van
Creveld actually predicted that the whole industrial-military-security complex
would come crumbling down when it was exposed that most of its weapons are
useless against fourth-generation asymmetrical opponents. There’s no question
the whole Global South is watching – and will have gotten the message.
Hybrid war, reloaded
Now we are entering a
whole new dimension in asymmetric hybrid war.
In the – horrendous –
event that Washington would decide to attack Iran, egged on by the usual neocon
suspects, the Pentagon could never hope to hit and disable all the Iranian
and/or Yemeni drones. The US could expect, for sure, all-out war. And then no
ships would sail through the Strait of Hormuz. We all know the consequences of
that.
Which brings us to The Big Surprise. The real reason
there would be no ships traversing the Strait of Hormuz is that there would be
no oil in the Gulf left to pump. The oil fields, having been bombed, would be
burning.
So we’re back to the realistic bottom line, which has
been stressed by not only Moscow and Beijing but also Paris and Berlin: US
President Donald Trump gambled big time, and he lost. Now he must find a
face-saving way out. If the War Party allows it.
