“Tougher Days Ahead for Saudi Arabia”

A Farsi opinion piece published by the Khabar Online news website has discussed why tougher days await Saudi Arabia and its staunch supporter, the Trump administration.

Here you can find the full text of this article:

These days are not the days of Nikki Haley and Mohammed bin Salman. Haley is a belligerent woman, who under different pretexts, wants to wage war on Iran, and Bin Salman is a man, who dreams of becoming a king, but is not as mature as previous Saudi kings since he looks at everything through the lens of tension and chaos. The US ambassador to the United Nations and the crown prince of Saudi Arabia will do their best to compensate for a defeat they themselves have inflicted on their own countries. However, apparently the more they try, the more they get stuck in their own-made quagmire.

These days the US and Saudi Arabia have directed their efforts to Yemen and of course Iran, in order to have the poor and war-torn country (Yemen) under fire; a country which is still resisting by launching missiles over Saudi Arabia and even King Khalid airport.

Washington and Riyadh assume that in this way they could inflict sort of a defeat on Iran. Yemen’s second missile targeted Riyadh and the headquarters of the kingdom showing that the Saudis would have tough days ahead, and Yemen is not that much weak as they initially assumed. In this regard, a spokesman for Yemen’s military and popular forces said targeting of Saudi Arabia’s command centre was a pre-emptive operation to counter the enemy’s moves.

Landing of the Burkan-2 missile at Saudi airport was a very heavy blow to the Saudis. Launching rockets from war-torn Yemen, breaking up of political and military equations, and seeing their security at stake have forced them to achieve a victory for themselves in this lost game at any cost. Hence, instead of finding the leak in their plans and strategies, they seek to condemn Iran. Nikki Haley appeared in front of the cameras with documents that she knew was not acceptable for anyone, to accuse Iran of providing rockets for the Yemeni people. She did not mention when and how the missiles were transferred from Iran to Yemen. She only attributed it to Iran and called for an international coalition against the Islamic Republic.

This is not the first time they are making such accusations against Iran, and it seems to be a project to increase pressures on Iran. This was not even accepted by Trump’s aides. The US Secretary of Defence dismissed the claim within nearly 24 hours. Pointing out that none of the military figures were next to Haley, James Mattis implicitly said that Haley’s claims are not credible. He also added that the coalition against Iran is a political one, not a military one. Mattis responded to Haley’s remarks saying that the US is thinking of a diplomatic coalition against Iran, not a military one! He told reporters at the Pentagon that there is no need to change the US defence strategy on Iran and escalate it.

This approach was not bought by Europeans as well. The French took a negative stance, and the United Nations rejected the claims that the missile was of an Iranian origin. After investigating the wreckage of missiles launched by the Ansarullah movement over Saudi Arabia, UN experts said in a report that they would not be able to confirm the missiles are made in Iran.

The only country that confirmed the words was Saudi Arabia. The Saudis completed Haley’s blame game and repeated their anti-Iran positions again; the words that show their frustration after the failure of their recent policies in the region.

The Independent in a recent article introduced Bin Salman as the man of 2017 in the Middle East. It was not because of his successes, but it was for his failures; a man whose foreign policies in the Mideast have failed in the current year.

Bin Salman sees his aggressive and illogical foreign policy have failed in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. Bashar al-Assad is still in power, Sana’a is under Ansarullah’s control, Saad Hariri has revoked his resignation, and Iraq is in its post-ISIS days to achieve stability. It is confusing enough to think of any of these, which caused great costs to Saudi Arabia in either of these countries.

However, why doesn’t Saudi Arabia want to put an end to creating tensions? This comes as Riyadh knows Trump’s administration will support the aggressive and illogical Saudi policies to a limited extent. Nevertheless, Bin Salman does not want to stop thinking about this because for him an opportunity like Trump will not be repeated again. Perhaps this is because Bin Salman sees the region and its equations as a gamble that he should win at any cost. Nonetheless, his successive failures make him more fervent to play another game as he cannot resist the temptations of a win.

Likewise, Haley has the same feelings about the strategies she has whispered to Trump. Iran and the nuclear deal have turned into a nightmare for them. They punted the case to the Congress and after 60 days it has become a headache for Trump.

However, Haley may be the developer of this strategy; a woman, who went to Vienna and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to change the equations to find a way to bypass the JCPOA, but after trying different ways, Yemen and rockets launched over Saudi Arabia with a handful of documents and photos were all she has.

This was a path that very soon turned out to be a fiasco at the end. Trump and his envoy to the United Nations should have sooner found out that waging a war with lame excuses is more difficult than they imagine. Especially, when an experienced diplomat like Mohammad Javad Zarif not only does not act like them, but using his Twitter diplomacy he speaks with logic and reasoning to reveal their secret strategies. Zarif on his Twitter account referred to US’s past and the baseless charges they brought against Iraq to launch a ruinous war writing  “When I was based at the UN, I saw this show and what it begat.”