Ban Ki-moon, the affable United Nations Secretary-General, issued then retracted an invitation for Iran to attend the opening session of the Geneva II Summit on Syria, after Tehran insisted that it did not support the political transition accord first reached in June 2012. In as much as the secretary-general seldom acted without the full approval of the five Security Council permanent members (Britain, China, France, Russia and the US), one wondered what prompted him to engage in this embarrassing volte-face.
Earlier, Ban Ki-moon had clarified that he received strict assurances from Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, which Iran rescinded. Was the change of mind a reflection of internal disputes in Tehran or, more likely, was it an affirmation that Iran was not in a position to help end the Syrian Civil War? It must be emphasised that while both Iran and Saudi Arabia coveted leading regional socio-political roles, Tehran committed significant financial, military and human resources in Syria, whereas Riyadh selectively backed revolutionary entities. This did not prevent critics to clamour that the two countries were engaged in a proxy campaign, whose alleged purpose was to encourage rising sectarianism that, presumably, was the work of the diabolical Saudi Prince Bandar Bin Sultan. Anti-Saudi analysts, to focus on just a single group of the perplexed, concluded that “Riyadh’s traditional accommodation of perceived enemies, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and its regional affiliates,” was not sufficient “to reverse the decline of its regional power”. This stark assessment, delivered by Hilal Khashan in a recent Middle East Quarterly essay, opined that “nowhere was this weakness more starkly demonstrated than in Riyadh’s botched Syrian intervention”.
For his part, Christopher Dickey, the Paris Bureau Chief and Middle East Regional Editor for Newsweek magazine, guessed that Prince Bandar’s goal was “to undermine Iranian power”. Towards that end, and because Saudis presumably believed that Bashar Al Assad endangered their own stability, they heartily sustained jihadists, including the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Jabhat Al Nusra — two groups presumably affiliated with the so-called Al Qaida organisation. In reality, Riyadh stood by the Free Syrian Army (FSA) from the very beginning, authorised a large financial package and supplied the FSA with light defensive weapons. Efforts to do more, including sorely needed transfers of anti-tank and surface-to-air missiles to the FSA, were rebuffed by Turkey, Jordan and leading western allies.
Notwithstanding such setbacks, and according to Dickey, “the master spy of the Middle East” ran several covert operations and was determined to roll back Iranian advances in Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere. Others chimed in with equally tortuous evaluations — extrapolating from the prince’s supposed secret discussions in various world capitals — of an incredibly rich array of conspiracy theories. The most comical was that Riyadh accommodated Tehran and Damascus over the years, but almost always failed to tame either. In fact, Saudi Arabia avoided confrontation to prevent additional schisms, shunned an escalation in fresh sectarian divisions and precluded foreign interventions even if few tolerated the Syrian killing machine.
Still, and frustrated at his inability to stop the ongoing war in Syria, Prince Bandar travelled to Moscow last August, where he apparently offered President Vladimir Putin a sweeping secret deal — $15 billion (Dh55.17 billion) in arms purchases as well as a Gulf Cooperation Council pledge to renounce the European gas market — if Kremlin backed away from the Baath regime. Hilal Khashan, who taught Political Science at the American University of Beirut, believed that while the Russian president may well have conceded, he did not appreciate the prince’s carefully worded threats. Reportedly, Bandar infuriated Putin when he “promised to rein in Chechen insurgents and prevent them from targeting the upcoming 2014 Winter Olympics to be held in Sochi, Russia.” How anyone knew what transpired in this secret four-hour long closed-door meeting were anyone’s guess. Until transcripts were mysteriously leaked, first to the Russian press, before a detailed version appeared in the Lebanese newspaper Al Safir, which is close to Hezbollah and is remarkably hostile to the Kingdom. Khashan referred to Al Safir’s version in his essay, without asking whether this was a reliable source or how was it possible for it to have “acquired” them, which further coloured his analysis.
Even quainter was the professor’s inference that Prince Bandar was in such a “desperate need of scoring a victory in Syria,” presumably “to obscure mounting internal problems in Riyadh,” that he was ready to take such huge risks. Khashan’s source for these gems was the Hezbollah Al Manar Television network.
Those who concluded that Prince Bandar meddled in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere because of desperation or, even worse, because he wished to prevent a spillover of violence into the Kingdom, befuddled their analyses. In reality, Saudi Arabia neither professed military weakness nor was it in search of any type of equilibrium within the Arab and Muslim worlds. Rather, King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz and other senior members of the ruling family firmly believed that Riyadh must become a credible military power, if for no other reason than to create a strong deterrent against potential foes.
To thus assert that the Saudis perceived the Arab uprisings as existential threats, which they would tame by running covert operations to roll back Iranian advances, skirted the issue. Rather, what Riyadh wished for throughout the Arab World, and especially in Syria, was for Tehran to back a desperate people fighting for liberty. The UN Secretary-General found out how fragile that commitment was after he received Zarif’s assurances, before realising that he was duped.
To be sure, Saudi Arabia struggled with its own socio-political challenges, though it remained consistent in its belief that no country could possibly add value and usher in peace when it tolerated massive killings.
Dr Joseph A. Kechichian is the author of the recently published Legal and Political Reforms in Saudi Arabia (London: Routledge, 2013).
