Yemen War: Trial Time for Saudi Arabia?

Saudi Arabia is fast approaching trial time on its illegal war on Yemen, as the international humanitarian community will soon have to respond against them. This includes the United Nations and the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

While the United Nations and the international civil society insist they want a peaceful resolution to the worst humanitarian crisis in the 21st century, Riyadh dismisses the idea of diplomacy in the assessment, saying they wouldn’t be willing to bargain away their stated goal, which is regime change in Sana’a.

However, since many people are dying and the country is facing famine, there is no time in which the Saudis and their allies can threaten Yemen any further. Simply put, Yemen is dying and time is almost here. There is an increasing rate of civilian casualties. According to the UN aid agencies, the upsurge in fighting is of particular concern. Civilians are under fire, as Saudi-led forces carry out airstrikes and indiscriminate bombing, without taking care to spare the civilian population, much less respecting the principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution.

This is while any intentional, direct attack against civilians or civilian objects is considered a serious violation of International Humanitarian Law and the UN Charter. The warmongers refuse to take any feasible precautions to avoid, or in any event, minimise, the impact of violence on civilians. And that’s when it’s safe to conclude that the UN and the International Criminal Court in the Hague will have to step in to stop the protracted conflict and hold to account those who want this crisis to continue apace – one way or another:

– It is true that in the wake of unlawful US-backed, Saudi-led bombing, some Western governments have decided to suspend the sale of weapons worth tens of billions of dollars to Saudi Arabia. It is a recognition, a long time in coming, that the Saudi-led coalition’s military campaign in Yemen have devastated the country, killed thousands of civilians and brought it to the brink of famine. However, unlawful airstrikes still continue, which means the decision by some Western governments to suspend arms sales has sent no message to the Saudis. US President Donald Trump, in his first trip to Riyadh for instance, sent an alternative, deeply troublesome message. He sold American weapons to the Saudis worth $110 billion – nearly as much as President Obama authorized during his eight years in office.

– The deals include Raytheon bombs, Lockheed Martin missile defense systems and BAE combat vehicles, and some of the weapons whose sales had been suspended. Thanks to these weapons, the scars of unlawful airstrikes can be found across Yemen, where the Saudi-led coalition has carried out scores of attacks that hit homes, schools, markets, and hospitals since March 2015, when it began its military campaign against the Ansarullah resistance movement and forces loyal to the former President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

– Human Rights Watch has documented numerous unlawful coalition attacks over the last three years, many war crimes. In many of these cases, including the attacks on funeral halls and markets, the organization’s investigators were able to identify the US weapons that were used. These are the very same weapons that continue to drive Yemen, already the poorest nation in the Middle East, toward humanitarian catastrophe.

– Both the Saudi-led coalition and their American allies have blocked or restricted critical relief supplies from reaching civilians. Seven million people face starvation and cholera ravages parts of the country. The UN should be urging the Saudis to shift course by abiding by the laws of war and holding those responsible for past abuses to account.

– Without Washington’s much-needed support and consent this war can never continue. By going to Riyadh to sell the Saudis weapons worth over $110 billion, President Donald Trump effectively told them to continue as before and not to worry about any international backlash at the UN – the flow of US weapons would not stop. This makes the US government complicit in Saudi war crimes. Continued US arms sales to a country that has repeatedly violated the laws of war expose US officials to legal liability for aiding and abetting Saudi war crimes.

It is against this backdrop and others that the UN and The Hague should step in, introducing a resolution intended to end the US-backed, Saudi-led war on Yemen. The resolution should end US arms transfers to Saudi Arabia, as requiring the White House to certify that the Saudi-led coalition is taking all feasible precautions to minimize civilian casualties is not going to mean anything at all – let alone end the human suffering there.

The UN and the International Criminal Court in The Hague are in the know that the people of Yemen can take no more and that they need to react fast. Innocent people are suffering from unlawful airstrikes because the US supports the Saudi-led coalition and because US weapons have been used against civilian populations. This is an international legal problem the UN and the ICC should be paying more attention to. If they won’t try to curtail the ongoing Us-backed war crimes by Saudi Arabia and the rest of the coalition, no other world body would ever step in to make clear – by using its own power to end the war – that the lives of Yemeni civilian can no longer be disregarded.

Saudi Arabia’s Strategic Mistakes in Confrontation with Iran

Hossein Kebriaeezadeh and Kayhan Barzegar

As the Middle East is consumed by war and tensions, Saudi Arabia, which has a claim to be the leader of the Islamic world and the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, is beating the drums of war with its Muslim brethren. The country, which has taken an overtly hostile approach toward its regional rivals under its new monarch, King Salman, has gone as far as using religion as a tool to deprive Iranian Hajj pilgrims from taking part in the religious ceremony of Hajj, which is one of the most important rituals in Islam.

The fact that Saudi Arabia launches a military war on Yemen or, at domestic level, issues death sentence for such an influential cleric as Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, indicates that Riyadh is shifting its strategy from proxy war to direct confrontation with Iran.

Saudi Arabia’s failures in the region and the pursuit of a confrontational foreign policy with Iran should be considered among those strategic mistakes part of which stems from the country’s political order and its foreign policy, which lacks adequate support base. Another part of these measures has its roots in Saudi Arabia’s miscalculations with regard to its allies in the region and, in general, is due to Riyadh’s inability to correctly differentiate friend from enemy.

The roots of conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia are often assigned to ideological Shia-Sunni rivalry or geopolitical competition over each country’s role in the region. These were escalated by the Hajj incident last year in which hundreds of Iranian pilgrims died.

But one should not ignore another significant factor in the equation: the two states’ conflicting views on the presence of the US in the region and the security challenges which flow from it.

The Saudis have traditionally perceived the US presence in the region as supporting their interests and for regional security. From their perspective, such presence is essential for containing Iran’s growing regional role. They complain that, by overthrowing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, the US changed the regional balance of power in favour of Iran. They fear that Barak Obama’s engagement policy in light of the nuclear deal means that Washington has embarked on the the path of accepting Iran’s dominant role in the region.

To counter this, the Saudis have adopted a two-pronged policy. First, they have embarked on an independent and offensive policy in the region, known as the Salman Doctrine, which is aimed primarily at containing Iran everywhere in the region and the world by all available political, military and economic means. Second, they are using intensive lobbying in the US Congress and US think-tanks in order to challenge the positive results of the nuclear deal between Iran and the US

Saudi Arabia took measures in Syria, Yemen and Iraq beyond its political capacities the main result of which was the growth of a phenomenon known as Daesh. Recently leaked emails sent by former US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, clearly prove that Saudi Arabia has been providing financial and arms support to Daesh and other Sunni extremist groups. However, the empowerment of this Takfiri group not only gave Iran an upper hand in the region, but led to a strategic alliance between Iran and Russia in Syria through a change in goals and strategy of this terrorist group.

One of the most important reasons behind Saudi Arabia’s regional failures and the sense of threat it feels from Iran should be sought in Riyadh’s special viewpoint to the region. This country does not believe that regional equations are multidimensional and when formulating its aggressive foreign policy approach toward Iran, considers regional equations as only containing a single variable. As a result, Riyadh believes that its dwindling influence in the Middle East region is the result of the increasing clout of Iran in regional countries. This oversimplification of developments in the complicated Middle East region forces Saudi Arabia to choose the easiest way in its confrontational approaches toward its rivals. This comes while it is clear that in any geographical region from Latin America all the way to the Middle East, there are always at least two countries, which are rivals, but at the same time, they always prevent their rivalry from taking an aggressive and confrontational turn.

On the other hand, Saudi Arabia lacks a correct and purposive viewpoint and strategy for rivalry with Iran. The policy of isolating Iran in the region is pursued by Saudi Arabia due to the spiritual influence that Riyadh sways among Islamic countries. However, apart from a few cases, which have proved successful through Saudi Arabia bribing those countries, this policy has generally failed in all other cases. At the same time, the nuclear deal that Iran clinched last year with the P5+1 group of world powers has practically removed obstacles in the way of Iran’s integration into the international community. On the other hand, developments in Syria have fared in Iran’s favor, as said before, after they led to closer cooperation among Iran, Russia and China.

Riyadh does not take advantage of suitable tools in its rivalry and confrontation with other countries. Supporting and organizing Takfiri groups has caused those groups to be a more serious threat to the international community and the West than being a threat for Iran and its allied countries, and has led to the establishment of  a global anti-Daesh front.

In the meantime, inefficiency of the Saudi-led Arab coalition in its war on Yemen has prevented it from changing the balance of power in favor of Riyadh as Saudi officials expected. On the other hand, diplomatic moves made by Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, especially in the Persian Gulf region, to convince its regional allies and create a coalition among all Sunni states against Iran have proven futile. Domestic tensions and differences between Persian Gulf littoral states and Saudi Arabia in addition to extreme weakness of these countries in military terms will practically render any possible military coalition among them ineffective. This is especially true taking into account that such militarily powerful countries as Pakistan and Turkey have not gone beyond lip service in their support for Riyadh.

After Saudi Arabia suffered frequent failures in the face of Iran, it could only take revenge on Iran, which had gotten rid of restrictions that were imposed on the country over its nuclear program, through a faceoff within the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). However, due to overreliance of Saudi Arabia’s economy on oil revenues and a budget deficit amounting to 98 billion dollars, this ageing tool cannot be a secure means for confrontation with Iran. Under conditions of sanctions, Iran learned that due to global economic conditions and the sway of political motivations over the international community, the policies of the Economy of Resistance must be pursued for transition from an oil-based economy.

The conditions, however, are different for Saudi Arabia due to its monocultural economy and high reliance on oil revenues. As a result, the first field to be affected by militarization of Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy is the Saudi society. At domestic level, delineating the country’s geopolitical strategy on the basis of threatening and having tension with neighboring countries has made it difficult for Saudi Arabia to achieve its vision goals for 2025, according to which Riyadh was supposed to promote its standing in the Middle East in terms of domestic welfare and economic achievements.

On the other hand, focusing on confrontation in relations with Iran has had untoward consequences for this country. Increasing domestic and regional costs and absence of balance in purposive and smart relations with neighboring countries in addition to political passivity have been major outcomes of Saudi Arabia’s effort to define Iran as an enemy. In line with this policy, Saudi Arabia’s unfortunate alignment with Israel, which is the black sheep in the eyes of Muslim nations, has been among those factors, which have served to tarnish the prestige of Riyadh among regional states.

At present, there are two perspectives in Iran for how to deal with Saudi Arabia’s offensive policies. One view maintains that Iran should take a tougher stance towards Saudi Arabia because it will otherwise send a wrong message to the US about Iran’s role and strength in the region and this might dismay Iran’s regional allies, subsequently weakening Iran’s regional stances.

But the other perspective, and this is the dominant one, supports a policy of patience towards the Saudis. From this perspective, Saudi Arabia is currently acting beyond its strategic capability and national strength and since the US is not in favour of getting involved militarily in Syria and Yemen, the Saudis’ current offensive and warmongering policy in these countries will not last long.

In fact, Iran’s continued policy of avoiding tension and conflict with Saudi Arabia is aimed at defusing the Saudis’ bid to involve or commit the US militarily in the region. The reality is that Obama’s non-intervention policy in Syria, along with stressing the necessity for all actors, especially Iran, to take part in any regional peace talks, is a strategic development toward enhancing multilateral diplomacy in the region.

This is the only way to reduce tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The next US president, whether it is Clinton or Trump, should continue this policy and thereby pave the way to sustainable peace and security in the region.