The Saudis and the Iranians Need to Talk: And we need to make it happen

In recent years I have worked deeply on quiet conflict management interventions from Afghanistan to Iran, but mostly in Syria. I have watched the unnecessary slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Syrians, the greatest civilian displacement in modern history, and I have watched it up close through the lives of my students and friends.

As an analyst my job is to study, inquire and reflect. Everything we conflict analysts, peace builders and trainers–Western, Muslim, Arab and Jewish–are learning from experience in the field, and from our students and friends all over the Middle East, is that we are caught in a deepening maelstrom of violent disasters due to the perpetual state of war between two expansionist states with radical philosophies that have been at loggerheads since 1979, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Since 1979, the expansionist threat of the Ayatollah’s has been met with a ruthless, massively funded Sunni Jihadism, aided paradoxically by the West, that made states across the world into battle zones. But it began earlier than even 1979, and it is important to understand this in order to see the way out.

One of the greatest disasters to ever hit the Islamic world was the discovery of oil beneath the Middle East Gulf region, which in turn became dominated by a radical way of life unfamiliar to most of the billion Muslims around the world. When that began to unfold in the second half of the 20th century, and the great powers greedily raced in for their oil, several countries began to deteriorate away from nascent modernization, and democratic leanings, and toward both secular dictatorships and extremist religious dictatorships. The great powers and Cold War competitors devastated the region by preferring and empowering the worst actors. This pattern has continued, and religious extremism has become a central feature of both defense and expansion, to the detriment of the entire Arab and Muslim world, and, of course, to Christians and minorities wherever they may be.

The long-term solution is the democratization of empowerment across the Muslim and Arab world, and a liberation from the tyrannical abuse of religion for either defense or offense. But this will not happen without global economic powers that stop their complicity in this abuse, and therein lies the rub.

It is true that there are some time-tested ways to manage the situation that lessens violence. There are tried and true methods of violence reduction, such as education, jobs, legal reform, human rights education and advocacy, women’s empowerment in particular, and progressive programs of empathic engagement between minorities and majorities, secular and religious. These all have been proven to work in history and in other regions of the globe today. These methods also have strong advocates in every single Middle Eastern country and in every ethnic group. The problem is that these forces for good are overwhelmed in the Middle East by the massive financial power of extremist politics, the masking of expansionist and imperial state interests behind religious piety, and the complicity of outside great powers in this abusive reality.

Westerners tend to hold this region and this radicalism in contempt, as if A. they are not implicated by who they have supported as business partners, and B. as if Western culture did not go through the exact same struggles of tyranny and the abuse of religion as a tool of conquest and defense in European history.

This contempt of others is both stupid and ill-timed. Now is the time for empathy and solidarity with innocents, with those who religious and secular citizens who are struggling for a better society. It is also self-defeating for Westerners to go on sucking at the breast of oil, and then ridiculing the source.

Americans responded to Middle Eastern extremism at their doorstep with crazy military adventures that utterly failed. Europeans have responded to extremism at their doorstep by banning circumcision, for heaven’s sake. Imagine what they would say if the Organization of Islamic Countries responded to the hundreds of thousands of Muslims dead in Iraq by a Christian army with the banning of crosses across their 57 states?

Too many Westerners at high levels and on the street are panicking and blaming Islam for what are in fact the classic sins of states that steal religion for armor, criminal gangs that use religion, and a few criminal families that don the mantle of secularism who have in fact killed far more innocents than anyone else (Baathists, among others). Westerners would be as wrong in that blame game as permanently blaming German culture, or Christianity, for Hitler, for example. Religion was used in Iran to hijack a legitimate youth movement for democracy, and the results have been terrible for everyone in the region, whereas religion has been used to poison the minds of millions of Sunni youth in a poor attempt to defend royal families that should be defending themselves with jobs and education.

The only move that is constructive in this confusing situation is to identify key achievable goals with metrics, identify key actors that could forward those goals, and identify a process of coaxing those actors to pursue those goals. My argument is that the central method of achieving those goals is through a clear peace process for the Gulf countries, in particular Saudi Arabia and Iran, but must include Qatar as another expansionist state wreaking havoc from Egypt to Syria. Secondarily, there must be a place for inclusion of other key states that have been destroyed by their proxy warfare, such as Bahrain, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria, with the last one being the most immediate human catastrophe. This process is not being pursued or even suggested at the present time because all of these implicated states are the backbone of the American/Western military industrial complex. It is the contracts, stupid. But we civilians are the ones paying the real price.

History suggests clearly that all groups and nations should be engaged in peace processes, everything less than that is just political pandering to domestic constituencies. To engage is to change. All groups change, splinter, evolve with engagement, but solidify with all-out warfare. Therefore everyone should be engaged. Anyone who suggests isolation, such as for Iran, has another agenda of regime change, conquest, and the theft of extraction rights.

At the same time, third parties must be aware of the exact challenge with each party, and also aware of their own biases that they bring to the table. The greatest danger for Westerners is from their public denial of problems with their own allies, trading partners and military clients, in this case in the Gulf and central Asia (many in Washington have told me that this business dependency is the essential reason why American foreign policy cannot be reformed). At the same time there is Western, particularly American, convenient demonization of enemies that prevents engagement, which is also a business tactic that their allies have demanded.

Photo: "We don't believe in the Sykes-Picot Agreement." By Flikr user Karl-Ludwig Poggemann.

Both Saudi Arabia and Iran have legitimate security needs and fears of each other and other enemies, and at the same time display unreasonable behavior that has reached global proportions. The 1979 revolution did have an expansionist and adversarial agenda, but from the beginning what the United States and Saudi Arabia did to counter this revolution and the Soviet role in Afghanistan has massively destroyed Sunni culture. Both trends must be reversed. Iran must withdraw its outrageously destructive role in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the USA must forever foreswear the militarization of radical Islam as a tactic of conquest, and the Europeans must condition their Gulf business on guarantees that their business partners and citizens are not funding genocidal violence against Westerners.

Iran and Saudi Arabia, who have had nonviolent relations in the past, are formidable and dangerous, especially because they can and do embody a long standing Sunni/Shi’ite rivalry, also a Persian/Arab rivalry, that ignites when it is stimulated. One has unlimited financial power to radicalize majority Sunni Muslims the world over, and the other has an indomitable capacity for defense and offense in the region, with a highly resilient educated population that supports many of its foreign policy defense objectives. My sense is that Iran is more easily managed because their goals are more objective and rational, in terms of defense and power in the classic ways of ambitious states.

My problem with the Saudi/American way is that the militarization of the Muslim masses is an irrational way to defend a state, with uncontrollable results, and it is a toxic method that has gotten far more Americans killed on 9/11 than anything Iran has ever done. That being said, the state-based expansionist military agenda of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has killed hundreds of thousands in Syria and Iraq and stimulated sectarian standoffs in Lebanon and elsewhere. Both sides have a lot of blood on their hands and must come to a new way of dealing with the region.

Both nations need a balanced peace process that exposes their threats to each other and the stability of many states, but at the same time acknowledges and works to address their legitimate security needs and demands. For the West and its allies, at no point should there be anymore any notion of regime change anywhere. It guarantees conflict escalation to nuclear levels. We live in a world today where such ultra-violent antiquated forms of foreign policy as regime change get hundreds of thousands of people killed and change nothing, as we have seen in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.

Both parties are highly motivated to engage in a peace process if the West is very insistent and offers serious guarantees of normalization at the table. Even the most conservative elements in Iran are tired of a constant state of siege and threat from neighbors near and far, and especially from the United States. The Saudi Kingdom, having created its own monsters, such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, as well a series of proxy wars with Iran, is not in a great position to guarantee its own longevity, and in my opinion would welcome the stabilization of the region.

A serious peace process must have as its goal full normalization of relations, an end to all proxy wars, and a return of Iranian and Saudi interests in other states to the realm of legitimate nonviolent defense of vulnerable populations and business investment, a complete and enforced withdrawal from the worst offenders–ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Assad family–and a taming of other allies such as Hezbollah and Hamas. In the Syrian case, the evidence from the ground, based on our experience, is that if the Gulf state interests, both Arab and non-Arab, are modified and tamed, the secular and religious populations have much more potential to achieve a post-Assad Syria that will neither be extremist, genocidal, or status quo ante. Even if Syria must be divided, the constructive role of Iran and Saudi Arabia in that process will be the best guarantee of success.

There should be achievable goals set for a peace process and a step-by-step de-escalation of tensions on a number of fronts, from Syria to Yemen. Both countries will have to demonstrate, in a way that is clear to intelligence agencies, that they are withdrawing their support from violent forces in the region.  Iranian complicity in the horror on the ground in Syria is well known and has been a major stimulus for Sunni Jihadi recruitment, and the same with militias in Iraq. By contrast the relationship between the ultra-violent forces of Sunni Jihadism and Saudi funding is very clear and traceable. If I were an Iranian rational actor, I would want clear evidence of a new era of Sunni/Shi’ite cooperation from Lebanon to Iraq to Bahrain, as the basis for concessions and commitments. The Saudis will come with their demands in turn. Both will commit to step-by-step evidence of de-escalation.

There are those in the West who have never been terribly upset when rivals in resource-rich regions are at each other’s throats. At the most crass level it is good for business. But it is quite clear that this is antiquated barbaric thinking that a highly interconnected world can no longer afford. Nor should Arab and Muslim elites tolerate the continuation of a permanent state of proxy wars between the most powerful Muslim countries that has held back so much progress for average people and has been such a major embarrassment for decades. The logic of this direction of peace process is incontrovertible, but it is time for the United Nations, for the major moral authorities of the world, for the people of the world, to demand this peace process from their governments. We face a unique situation where Iranian, Saudi, and Qatari citizens have not been directly killing each other on a battlefield, so that the populations could easily be brought into a peace process. The urgency, however, is not for their sake, but rather for the sake of the tens of millions of victims of the proxy wars they have vomited onto other countries, onto the Syrians in particular that has utterly destroyed their civilization. The world needs to get busy with vigorous diplomacy to make this happen, so that the blood-letting can finally cease.

© Marc Gopin

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