So long, glad times?
The current round of fighting, now into its second week, is the sixth uprising in this area since 2004. What raises the profile of this development are accusations of foreign intervention in the conflict. The Yemeni government has accused Iran of providing funding and weapons to the Shiite rebels. Iran’s news media has in turn reported that Saudi Arabia’s military forces have joined in the fighting. The Saudi government acknowledges consultations with Yemen but denies any direct participation by its forces. Evidence of foreign intervention in the conflict is sparse. But Yemen’s foreign minister was at least concerned enough to summon Iran’s ambassador his office. Meanwhile the Saudi and Yemeni defense ministries have stepped up consultations. According to The Economist, Iran’s Arabic language news service has been reporting the latest round of fighting including Saudi Arabia’s support of the Yemeni government.
Other than the Iranian ambassador getting invited for an Interview Without Coffee, what does this exactly mean for the region? Haddick suggests that “the conflict is probably the newest front in a broadening proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia”, along with Lebanon and the rest of the Gulf, where Iran has been garnering support with Shi’ite populations against governing Sunni regimes. Needless to say, Shi’ite empowerment is one message that would fall on a very receptive audience in Iraq, where it is in fact at the same time an avowed aim of the Coalition to redress the imbalance in favour of Sunnis maintained during the Ba’athist years by hiring more Shi’ite judges, administrators, policemen and civil officials.
The interesting part of this question is how this will align with another fault-line in the Islamic world. The Sunni/Shi’a conflict dates back to the death of the Prophet Mohammed, and Sunnis and Shi’ites have been duking it out for the last couple of hundred years in small intermittent conflicts. The more recent division in the Muslim, especially the Gulf Arab, world is between the states that support the Western powers and states that are adamantly opposed. From that perspective, assuming that Iran is indeed funding various Shi’a groups throughout the Islamic world, three explanations are possible.
First, the Yemeni conflict and the other placeholder wars, present and to come, may be yet another round in the Sunni/Shi’a match. If that is true, it is essentially a religiously motivated story, and has nothing to do with what the parties’ idea about the place of the Islamic world in the world order is. The Sunni/Shi’a Cold War Haddick argues may be emerging from the increasing Iran-Saudi Arabia tensions with placeholder wars like Yemen is, then, just another layer upon all the other divisions that split the Islamic world, including the division between those who see the West as a friend to embrace and those that see it as an infidel enemy to be demolished. What speaks against this explanation is that Iran, as theocratic as it is, would just not go on a sojourn to randomly fund people pushing the same religious agenda.
Alternatively, the Iranians may be using the Sunni/Shi’a conflict and Shi’a minority resentment in Sunni-dominated pro-Western Arab countries like Saudi Arabia to weaken and distract one of America’s most important allies in the region. If this is the case, conceptualising the outcome will be a challenge indeed. For quite a number of prominent and vehemently anti-American jihadists were committed Sunnis - AQ’s leadership, Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are both Sunni Muslims, for instance, and highly critical of Iran. This suggests the emergence of a tripartite conflict: Wahhabi Sunni Al-Quaeda is propagating its form of Qutbism, that is, the rejection of everything other than a Sunni-run Sharia-governed state, and fights both the Sunni powers cooperating with the West and Iran. Iran, on the other hand, is trying to use the age-old Sunni/Shi’a split to destabilise pro-Western Sunni regimes, first and foremost the House of Saud. In Iraq, where the Sunni/Shi’a issue is still unresolved, this could have a big, big bang at the end. Both, at the same time, will seek to harm the strategic interests of the US, but not in cooperation. If so, the Chinese curse has come to pass, and we indeed are living in interesting times.
