The escalating diplomatic spat between Saudi Arabia and Iran is threatening to further destabilize the war-weary Middle East, a region where many local conflicts are fueled by the rivalry between the two regional heavyweights. But although those conflicts often assume a sectarian dimension, with Saudi Arabia presenting itself as the leader of the world’s Sunni Muslims and Iran claiming the mantle of global guardian of Shia Islam, their conflict is rooted in strategic rather than religious rivalry.
The diplomatic crisis was triggered by Saudi Arabia’s execution last weekend of a prominent Shia cleric and political activist Nimr al-Nimr, which saw a wave of protest that included the storming of Saudi Arabia’s embassy in Tehran. That development prompted Riyadh to break off diplomatic ties with Iran for the first time since 1988, and similar action by Saudi allies Sudan, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. Those developments sounded alarms in world capitals over the prospective damage to efforts to find political solutions to the wars in Syria and Yemen.
Despite its sectarian hue, however, the conflict is at its core a strategic battle for regional influence. After all, many centuries passed between the battles of the foundational schism between Sunni and Shia Islam and the current geopolitical rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia that began in 1979.
That was the year the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran was overthrown and replaced by a Shia clerical regime headed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who proclaimed his regime a revolutionary challenge to the regional political order — claiming to represent Islam in the political sphere, and directly challenging Saudi Arabia’s regional status. Riyadh financed Saddam Hussein’s ruinous eight-year war against Iran in the hope of destroying the Iranian regime, but the two sides eventually achieved a modus vivendi in the 1990s. But their strategic rivalry was rekindled across the region by the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, with Iran-backed Shia political parties dominating the elected governments that replaced Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government.
The strategic competition between Iran and Saudi Arabia escalated in political struggles in Lebanon, and then after the eruption of the Arab Spring rebellions, in increasingly violent clashes in Bahrain, Syria and then Yemen. The nuclear deal negotiated between Iran and world powers and the attendant rapprochement between Iran and the U.S. created unease in the Kingdom, which has traditionally counted on Washington’s backing in its strategic contest with Iran.
Proxy contests between Iran and Saudi Arabia have often followed a sectarian, Sunni vs. Shia trend — at least on the surface — but not always. The 2011 Saudi intervention in Bahrain helped the Sunni-minority leadership crush a popular Shia-led protest movement. But in Syria, where Iran has supplied weapons and even soldiers to prop up the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, the terms are less obviously religious: While the armed rebellion may be led by Saudi-backed Sunni groups, many of its political dimensions are more diverse and complex, while the regime being backed by Iran is neither Shia nor religious, but an avowedly secular regime rooted in the religiously heterodox Alawite minority.
In Yemen, Saudi Arabia leads a military intervention by a Sunni Arab coalition against the Shia Houthi rebels, who Riyadh accuses of being agents of Iran.
Despite the temptation of some media outlets to cast this as a timeless religious conflict, such assumptions should be avoided, say many analysts. “The idea of an unending, primordial conflict between Sunnis and [Shias] explains little about the ebbs and flows of regional politics,” wrote Marc Lynch, director of the Project on Middle East Political Science at George Washington University, on Monday.
“This is not a resurgence of a 1,400-year-old conflict. Sectarianism today is intense, but that is because of politics.”
Posted by tboixy
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