The US and Israel must come to Saudi Arabia’s aid - opinion

Saudi Arabia has never been the strong and powerful state it is often portrayed as.

In 1979, the Iranian revolution placed at the helm of a more populous neighbor a Shi’ite revolutionary and theocratic leadership that loathed the Sunni Kingdom, not least for its long-standing suppression of Saudi Arabia’s Shi’ite minority in the south along the Yemen border and, more critically, the Shi’ites who populated the same region in which the Saudis produce most of their oil.

The Saudis were quick to acknowledge Iran’s dire threat. Saudi’s support of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) kept then-president Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime afloat. Their investment clearly paid off: the harried, tired Iranian mullahs and the Revolutionary Guard, for all their ideological ardor, refrained by and large from attacking Saudi Arabia directly for the next decade.

But that was the last time Saudi Arabia engaged (however indirectly) successfully with the Iranian threat.

Since then, it has all been downhill for the Saudis as Iran expanded its militia proxies in nearby countries both to produce a ring of fire over Israel but also to transform in the long run the Gulf states into Iranian vassals that would pay financial tribute (or more simply, protection money) into Iranian coffers.

Lebanon was probably the first battle zone in the Iranian-Saudi proxy war; the Saudis clearly lost to the Iranians. The Saudi’s in vain tried mobilizing the Sunni minority, along with their Christian-Maronite counterparts, to fight the rising Shi’ite militias, first “Amal” and later Hezbollah, who were backed by the Alawite Assad regime in Syria, Iran’s only Arab state ally.

For a while, it looked like the Saudis had succeeded with the creation of a government headed by the pro-Saudi Rafic Hariri, backed by the Sunni community and most of Lebanon’s Christian political forces.

The Saudis soon realized that in the Middle East at least, the military and terrorist power Iran and its proxies possessed would prevail over Saudi’s financial clout. Hariri was assassinated in 2005, in a demonstration of force on Beirut’s streets.

Three years later, Hezbollah cowed the Lebanese parliament into changing the rules of the game so that it would give it essentially the decisive say in Lebanese government and politics. The Saudis backed out of Lebanese politics, leaving the Lebanese population to bear the costs of the war Hezbollah initiated in 2023 against Israel in support of Hamas.

Graver still were the losses on the Iraqi and Yemeni fronts, both battle zones on Saudi Arabia’s long borders. Unfortunately for Saudi Arabia, the United States got rid of the Hussein Sunni regime that served as the counterpoise to the Iranian threat.

The Saudis in vain tried to support the minority Sunni militias, even possibly ISIS, to prevent Iraq’s Shi’ite majority from taking over and consolidating its regime.

Meanwhile, the Iranians used the threat ISIS posed to the new Shi’ite regime in Iraq to create powerful Shi’ite militias that would control the Iraqi political elite and the state apparatus as it did in Lebanon. Once again, the Saudis backed off in defeat.

Protecting the free world

In Yemen, the Saudis directly confronted the Houthis backed by Iran in a war that lasted six years to little avail. The Saudis, in 2022, sued for a truce, and the air force ceased its attacks on the Houthis, though the Kingdom continued to support the official Yemeni government the Houthis ousted from Sanaa, the capital, and most of Yemen’s populated areas.

And recently, in one more regional war not of Saudi-making, Saudi Arabia is witnessing Houthi advances that give them increasing control of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait through which much of Saudi oil and gas transits and, more critically, greater control of the Red Sea, in which the Houthis can jeopardize Saudi Arabia’s major pipeline and the Yanbu port from which the oil is exported to Europe through the Suez Canal.

Yet even more ominous is the possibility that the Houthis will make a surprise attack in Saudi Arabia’s vast and unpopulated south (and if populated, it is mostly by a Shi’ite population) and advance along Route 10, the Saudi highway that links the south to the massive Saudi oil fields and its capital, Riyadh.

The aim would be not to take over the capital but to advance to the point of directly threatening the oil fields and processing plants and thus force the Saudis to acknowledge defeat and become a tributary state of Iran and its Houthi proxy.

The US and Israel, acutely aware of the possibility of surprises in the Middle East (the Hamas attack on Israel, the fall of the Assad regime, for example), must prevent this possibility at all costs.

They must closely monitor Houthi movements, quickly establish intelligence to distinguish between Houthi forces and civilians fleeing from the Houthis, especially as the Houthi forces may disguise themselves as civilians, and stop the Houthis even at the price of boots on the ground.

An Iran backed by Saudi financial clout is a nightmare for the free world, a “free” world where only two states amongst so many, the US and Israel, are ready and able to protect, at least in the Middle East. Preventing the fall of Saudi Arabia is vital to protecting the free world.

The writer is a senior researcher at the JISS and professor emeritus at Bar-Ilan University.