Britain’s Sunday Telegraph reports on a Gulf air warfare conference in D.C. last week attended by the United Arab Emirates and Jordan. It seems that
Pentagon air chiefs have helped set up an air warfare centre in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) where Gulf nations are training their fighter pilots and America has big bases. It is modeled on the US Air Force warfare centre at Nellis air force base in Nevada.
Jordan and the UAE have both taken part in combined exercises designed to make sure their air forces can fly, and fight, together and with American jets.
As the Telegraph notes:
Gen Michael Mosley, the US Air Force chief of staff, used the conference to seek closer links with allies whose support America might need if President George W Bush chooses to bomb Iran.
It is interesting to note that also last week the UAE went to the United Nations to request resolution of its dispute with Iran over
"the three islands of Greater and Lesser Tunb and Abu Musa (and asked that Iran) return the territory to them by peaceful means."
Located in the middle of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran appropriated Abu Musa in 1971 for a military installation and it’s no stretch to say that retaining the island is critical to its self-defense.
With news of the air warfare conference in D.C. last week and the UAE appeal against Iran to the U.N, it would seem that a confluence of events continue to emerge in favor of potential military action against Iran. These events serve to remind us that there are other interested regional actors in the neo-con run up to the coming war with Iran who may not regret an Israeli or U.S. strike, Saudi Arabia not least among them.
In Saturday’s English language Ashark Alawsat Saudi journalist Mshari Al-Zaydi boils Iran down for us:
"Whatever honeyed words [Ali] Larijani and [Manouchehr] Mottaki use to gloss it over, it is a fundamentalist revolutionary expansionist regime that is based on the ancient concept of ‘imperialism’."
The reference to the ‘ancient concept of imperialism’ seems to me to hark back to a Persian empire that once ruled over the lands of current day Syria, Iraq and Egypt, as well as to a modern day Iran which still harbors a superiority complex over its racial heritage as >Aryan, rather than Arabic. While it’s doubtful that Saudi Arabia, Jordan or Egypt would unite with Israel against Iran (the reverse being the most likely scenario), Iran's ancient racial superiority complex combined with its Shi’a character is enough to (potentially) have its neighbors ’stand back’ during a U.S. and/or Israeli attack.
The following comment by Jordan‘s King Abdullah, was noted during Sunni protests against the execution of Saddam Hussein:
Jordan has been a vocal critic of the growing Iranian influence in the region, including Iraq. Two years ago, King Abdullah had issued a warning that a Shia "crescent" was rising in an area stretching from Iran to Lebanon. A senior Jordanian official has been quoted as saying that "[Iran] is operating through its local allies in Iraq and through Hizbollah and Hamas. It is engaging with the marginalized Shia communities in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait to turn them into arrows that can challenge their government's legitimacy and authority. (emphasis mine)"
The Gulf states fear of their Shi'a minorities is,IMHO, the lynchpin that may allow a U.S. air war with Iran to go unchallenged in that region. This is a dangerous state of affairs, but we have been warned. Again by Ashark Alawsat:
No one wishes for a war; it is reprehensible and harrowing. But history is full of wars, and despite the tragedies in their aftermath, they were responsible for guiding the course of history whether we like it or not. We cannot envisage the world if World War II had not taken place and the Nazis had not been vanquished, or if the war that expelled Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait had not occurred, or if Napoleon’s war against the Mamluks had not happened, and the ensuing repercussions of this French intervention on all Mohamed Ali’s accomplishments in all fields. What would the world have been like if the Thirty Years’ War between Catholics and Protestants in Germany did not take place? It ended with the Peace of Westphalia [Treaty of Münster and the Treaty of Osnabrück] in 1648, which was the paradigm that helped shape modern political thought in terms of the contemporary concept of the state
.
Despite the fact that most people in this community find war with Iran unlikely because of U.S. military deficiencies, or unthinkable because of its global implications, our Saudi commentator has this to say:
War is sometimes bloody; however with the spilled blood an infection is purged, which if left unattended would slowly kill the rest of the body.
In some circles at least, the stage is being set, and the U.S., drunk as it is on the use of military power, is not the only hand playing its cards. Like drunks everywhere, the U.S. will not be able to act aginst Iran without its enablers.