"... Riyadh is ill-advisedly turning up the heat on the region's cold war ..."

link

Mai Yamani in the Guardian, here

" .... Saudi military intervention marks the first time in the kingdom's history that its army has crossed its borders without an ally. Previously, the kingdom engaged only in proxy wars. The Saudis used royalist Yemenis to fight Nasser's Egypt in the 1960s, Iraq's Saddam Hussein to fight Iran in the 1980s, and the US to fight Iraq in the 1990s.

Indeed, Saudi Arabia has fought every "ism" that has sought to dominate the Middle East, including Nasser's pan-Arabism, communism, and today's Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, the terrorism of al-Qaida and the Shi'ism of Iran. The tools it relied upon were oil money and Wahhabi Islam. During the 1980s, Saudi Arabia spent more than $75bn on the propagation of Wahhabi doctrine, in an effort to bolster its influence....

But now this policy has backfired, with the Houthis openly rebelling against Wahhabi encroachment on their religious ideology ...

After four months of fighting, Saleh's domestic forces had failed to contain the revolt. So, unable to prosecute the war on his own, Saleh turned a domestic rebellion into a sectarian and security threat to the entire Arabian peninsula, thereby manoeuvring the Saudis – eager from the outset to help Saleh, whom they view as their proxy – into providing military backing.

The Saudis' justification for intervening is that their national territory is under threat. But that argument is weak, ...... The Saudi state doubts the loyalty of its own Ismaili and Zaidi populations, whose natural sympathies are suspected to lie with the Houthis........ the Saudis are unlikely to succeed militarily in Yemen. Yemen's army of 700,000 could not suppress the Houthi rebellion, despite five attempts since 2004. Now they are leaving Saudi Arabia's untested army of 200,000 men to do the job for them. And, while the Saudis are currently relying on their air force, a full-scale land battle will have to follow – on the same harsh terrain that helped defeated Nasser's battle-hardened troops in the 1960s.... and with the policy failure of Saudi Arabia's military intervention eroding its position in the Arab world. The dilemma for the Saudis is that now the damage will be much greater if they do not crush the Houthis, as this would embolden al-Qaida. This is the biggest threat facing Saudi Arabia, but its rulers' ill-considered war strategy has only brought that threat closer."

Posted by G, Z, or B at 10:30 AM

Sa