WASHINGTON – A senior Iranian official has warned Saudi Arabia that it is endangering the entire Middle East with its U.S.-supported aerial bombardment of Iranian-backed al-Houthi positions in neighboring Yemen.
The warning comes just as questions are being raised about U.S. policy, since it is backing Shiite Iran in bombing Sunni ISIS positions in Iraq but supports Sunni Saudi Arabia in Yemen.
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In slamming the Saudis, who are leading a 10-nation coalition of Sunni countries attacking the Houthis in Yemen, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab and African Affairs Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said the Saudi military attacks are a "strategic mistake."
Calling the Saudi military attacks against Yemen an act of aggression, Amir-Abdollahian said "the fire of war in the region from any side … will drag the whole region to play with fire."
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"This is not in the interest of the nations in the region."
Amir-Abdollahian's warning appeared to lay a foundation for a direct sectarian conflict between Saudi Arabia, which represents Sunni Islam, and Iran, leader of the world's Shiite Muslims.
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Both countries for years have been in a series of proxy battles across the terrain of Iraq, Bahrain, Syria and now Yemen. Indeed, their feud goes back to A.D. 680 when Muhammad's grandson, Hussein ibn Ali, was beheaded at the Battle of Karbala after being captured.
The event is seen as the beginning of Shiite Islam's challenge to Sunni Islam, which in turn has morphed into the extremist form of Saudi Arabia's ultra-fundamentalist Wahhabism, the inspiration for the ISIS.
In recent years, especially following the rise of Iranian influence in Iraq, Tehran and Riyadh have made perfunctory efforts toward some form of harmonization.
Those efforts, however, systematically have been undermined by the rise of Saudi-sponsored jihadist groups acting as proxies to Saudi Arabia in Iraq and Syria, with increasing encroachment in Lebanon.
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More recently, Sunni predominance has been shown in the violent putdown of majority Shiite demonstrations against the minority Sunni monarchy in Bahrain. And now there's the disregard of Houthi representation in a predominantly Sunni government in Yemen, where the Shiite Houthis comprise a third of the total population.
Nevertheless, the Iranian official said Tehran and Riyadh can still reach a "political solution" in Yemen.
"We strongly object to the military solution [in] Yemen," Amir-Abdollahian said. "We believe that the Saudi military attack against Yemen is a strategic mistake."
The Saudi-led aerial attacks against Houthi positions over the last week came after Houthis took over government buildings in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa, and Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a close ally of the Saudis, fled to the kingdom.
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The U.S., meantime, has been seeking to determine its role in fast-changing events in the Middle East, which are quickly throwing the region into chaos.
Some of the chaos is a result of actions by the Saudis, who have decided they no longer can rely on the U.S. for security, after ties extending back more than 50 years. They have now pushed for the creation of a 10-nation Sunni military force to combat what they perceive to be a threat from ISIS and to engage Shiite forces in other countries and even Iran itself.
As it now stands, the U.S. has been bombing Sunni ISIS fighters at the request of the Shiite government of Iraqi Prime Minister Haidi al-Abadi, who also has asked Iran to provide fighters on the ground along with more moderate Sunni tribes and Shiite fighters.
To some critics, U.S. assistance makes it appear that the U.S. has become the air force for Iran.
At the same time, the U.S. is providing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to the Saudi-led 10-nation military coalition that continues aerial bombing of Houthi positions in Yemen.
Not surprisingly, the different positions raise questions about U.S. policy, if there is one.
"The United States has undertaken a strategy focused on maintaining the balance of power" in the region, according to George Friedman of the open intelligence group Stratfor.
"This kind of approach," Friedman said, "is always messy because the goal is not to support any particular power, but to maintain a balance between multiple powers."
He said that U.S. strategy is "so complex that it defies clear explanation."
"That is the nature of refusing large-scale intervention but being committed to a balance of power. The United States can oppose Iran in one theater and support it in another. The more simplistic models of the Cold War are not relevant here."
The U.S. balancing act comes amid continued efforts to work out a nuclear agreement with Iran, a position that the Saudis interpreted as a potential threat. Previously the U.S. policy has included commitments with the Saudis other Gulf Arab countries.
But now, it appears that the U.S. is looking to work more closely with Riyadh's regional rival, Iran.
"Deal or no deal," Friedman said, "the United States will bomb the Islamic State, which will help Iran, and support the Saudis in Yemen."
He said that the real issue is that Iran appears to be building a sphere of influence to the Mediterranean Sea, which now includes Yemen. It's a significant expansion from just a few years ago.
At that time, it was a "Shiite crescent" to include Iran, Syria and Lebanon.
"That, in turn, creates a threat to the Arabian Peninsula from two directions," Friedman said.
"The Iranians are trying to place a vise around it. The Saudis must react, but the question is whether airstrikes are capable of stopping the al-Houthis."
He said that current U.S. doctrine requires a balance between Iran and Saudi Arabia, with the U.S. "tilting back and forth."
"Under this doctrine – and in this military reality – the United States cannot afford full-scale engagement on the ground in Iraq.”
Middle East analyst Robert Parry, who writes for ConsortiumNews.com, acknowledges that the tangle of conflicts in the Middle East is confusing, including what he describes as the "transformational Israeli-Saudi alliance" that he says is "dragging the American people into a sectarian religious war dating back 1,300 years."
He said the reason for the "confusion" is that the establishment media "prefer" that the American people "not fully grasp what’s happening." A few points, he said, can help decipher the confusion.
"Israel is now allied with Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Persian Gulf states, which are, in turn, supporting Sunni militants in al-Qaida and the Islamic State," Parry said. "Sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, this Israel-Saudi bloc sustains al-Qaida and, to a somewhat lesser degree, the Islamic State."
Parry pointed out that former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, who then was a close adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said in September 2013 that Israel "favored the Sunni extremists" over Iran-backed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
At the time, Oren pointed to what was the "greatest danger" to Israel.
"The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut," Oren said at the time. "And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc.
"We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren't backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran," Oren said, adding that this was the case even if the "bad guys" were affiliated with al-Qaida.
"From Israel's perspective," Oren said in June 2014, when he no longer was the Israeli ambassador, "if there's got to be an evil that's got to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail."
Friedman said that the regional U.S. strategy of total support of the Saudis is moving away from what it followed from the early 2000s of being the prime military force in regional conflicts.
Now, he said, U.S. policy is evolving from fighting regional powers to playing a "secondary" role.
During that period, however, the Saudis and partners on the Gulf Cooperation Council purchased advanced weapons.
"This means that while the regional powers have long been happy to shift the burden of combat to the United States," Friedman said, "they are also able to assume the burden if the United States refuses to engage."
As WND reported, with the U.S. no longer choosing to be in the lead to squelch conflicts in the Middle East before they get out of hand, Washington has security commitments with Saudi Arabia, the other 22 members of the Arab League and even Israel that could railroad the U.S. into a conflict it doesn't want.
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