War of proxies in West Asia

New Delhi: Listening to a Gulf potentate declaring at the recent Arab League summit that the Palestine problem was the cornerstone of the region’s unhappy conflicts, I was reminded of the short shrift Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar gave the late Saddam Hussein who also tried to invoke Palestine to justify his invasion of Kuwait. “What has Palestine got to do with occupying Kuwait?” Chandra Shekhar mused. A similar thought occurred to me as Royal Saudi Arab bombers ravaged Yemen. What has Palestine got to do with Riyadh’s Operation Decisive Storm against Yemen?

Cynical Arab opportunism exploits the plight of dispossessed Palestine refugees for its own purposes. Attacking Yemen has nothing to do with Israel which admittedly tried desperately to sabotage the nuclear talks in Lausanne, Switzerland, between Iran and six global powers, including the US, China and Russia. Israel bitterly opposes any agreement that would allow Iran to retain a certain number of centrifuges capable of enriching uranium. King Salman of Saudi Arabia and Benjamin Netanyahu, the hawk who was recently re-elected Prime Minister of Israel, are at one on this. Despite its human suffering, Palestine is irrelevant to any West Asian calculation. It just happens that Arab leaders find it convenient to invoke the Palestine cause in an effort to unify Asian opinion behind whatever particular political axe they have to grind at the time. Now, it’s the rising challenge of Shia power.

We are witnessing a still nascent struggle for dominance between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran. The two countries are on opposing sides in Iraq, Bahrain, Lebanon and Yemen. Iran, which is also believed to support the two militant organisations, Hezbollah and Hamas, and with which the US broke diplomatic ties in 1980, was widely expected to be the next victim after the Americans attacked Afghanistan and Iraq. Earlier, Iran held its own in the eight-year war with Iraq when the US and the Arab powers tacitly supported Saddam. Perhaps these factors partly explain Iran’s astonishing popularity in the Muslim world. According to one report, Iranians enjoy 75 per cent approval throughout West Asia and a high 85 per cent in Saudi Arabia.