China Brokers Iran-Saudi Pact
Three of the Worst Human Rights Offenders on the Planet Have a Chit-Chat. What could possibly go wrong?
Human Rights. The concept itself is a beacon of light in a world darkened by war, famine, ecological danger, nuclear threat, and the othering of people based on gender, gender-orientation, color, ethnicity, religious affiliation, national origen, and level of wealth.
In 1941, Democrat Eleanor Roosevelt, closely supported by Republican Wendell Wilkie, founded Freedom House, which early on explored the impact of fascism and Nazism and opposed McCarthyism. In the early 1970s, Freedom House began to assess nations and territories on a scale of 0 to 100 along two dimensions:
Political Rights, on a scale of 0 to 40, and
Civil Liberties, on a scale of 0 to 60.
In aggregate, this gives a country a score of 0 to 100 although—depressingly—a country’s abuse of political or civil rights can descend into negative territory, as we’ll see.
In the new pact between Saudi Arabia and Iran, brokered by China, we may have an agreement that comes to have an outsized impact on the balance of power between the world’s most influential cultures, all brought to us by states which are some of the worst actors on this planet for human rights.
SAUDI ARABIA—Political Rights: 1 of 40. Civil Liberties: 7 of 60. TOTAL SCORE: 8 of 100.
IRAN—Political Rights: 4 of 40. Civil Liberties: 8 of 60. TOTAL SCORE: 12 of 100.
CHINA—Political Rights: -5 of 40. Civil Liberties: 11 of 60. TOTAL SCORE: 6 of 100.
Contrast this with Sweden, Norway, and Finland, all of which have aggregate scores of 100.
Now to the pact.
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Iran and Saudi Arabia. They have, by turns, been friends and enemies since the day the Prophet Muhammad died in 632 CE. Ali, the Prophet’s Persian cousin and son-in-law, was seen by many to be the Prophet’s favorite, and these favored him to lead Islam. In fact, Ali was given the honor helping the Prophet’s family plan his funeral. Behind his back, however, community leaders elected Abu Bakr the first caliph of Islam, and Ali was presented with a fait accomplis.
Never one to argue, Ali accepted the situation, but the slight against the Persians by the Arabians did not go unnoticed, and the rift caused a schism that divided Islam into its two main sects:
Shias, a term that stems from shi’atu Ali, Arabic for “partisans of Ali,” believe that Ali and his descendants are part of a divine order—and Sunnis, meaning followers of the sunna, or “way” in Arabic, of Mohammed, are opposed to political succession based on Mohammed’s bloodline.
In 656 CE Ali became the 4th caliph of all Islam after the Caliph Uthman was assassinated. Immediately some Muslims began to rebel against him, and violence spread among the Islamic communities until his assassination in 661 CE. In 680 CE, Ali’s son Husayn marched against the caliphate in Karbala (in present-day Iraq). His army was massacred in a resounding defeat, and Husayn was beheaded. It is with the death of Husayn that all hope of healing the schism in Islam was irretrievably lost.
Between then and now, Sunnis, centered in Saudi Arabia, and Shias, positioned in Iran, have been variously peaceful and warring, close and distant, tolerant of each other and violently and vehemently hating each other. Saudi Arabia had a notoriously bad reaction to the Iranian Revolution of 1978-1979—and Iran had a notoriously bad reaction when Iraq invaded Iran, starting an 8-year war financed by a billion dollars a month that Saudi Arabia gave Saddam Hussein to wipe the Shias off the face of the earth. During the same period, Shias attending the Hajj revolted against Saudi police claiming discrimination; the resulting stampede killed 400 people.
And both have been engaging in proxy wars for decades. The war in Yemen is a proxy war pitting Yemeni Sunnis against Shia Houthis. In Syria, Iran supports Bashar al-Assad (who is from a Shia sect) while Saudi Arabia supports the Sunni-majority populace that despises him.
Throughout this period, diplomatic ties remained in place most of the time, but tensions came to a head again after Saudi Arabia executed Shiite cleric Nimr al Nimr in January 2016. Protesters attacked the Saudi embassy in Tehran, and Riyadh promptly severed relations. …
Sometime in April of last year, China began to engage Iran and Saudi Arabia in talks to restore formal diplomatic status between the two Persian Gulf states. Now, most of a year later, it’s mission accomplished.
But is it a good thing?
No.
Why?
Well, how much time do you have?
(1) SAUDI ARABIA: First of all, let’s take Salman of Saudi Arabia. If there were ever a man who exemplified the notion that war is deceit, it’s this guy. He’s been planning to ally with Iran for almost a year, and in the interim, he’s been sidling up to Israel. Now that Iran and Saudi Arabia are going to be chums again, where does that leave Israel? In an Arctic freeze-out. According to AL-Monitor:
Israel’s Foreign Minister Eli Cohen was forced to cancel his trip to Saudi Arabia scheduled for Sunday, in what is considered by Israeli officials as a negative diplomatic signal by Riyadh. Cohen decided not to travel to Saudi Arabia after Riyadh repeatedly ignored requests to discuss security measures for the visit.
No Israeli minister has ever made a public visit to the kingdom. Still, Cohen was hoping to participate in the United Nations World Tourism Organization "Best Tourism Villages" ceremony, as the Israeli Circassian Kfar Kama village has been selected as one of the 32 winners for the UN competition.
When the USA tried to convince Riyadh to extend diplomatic security to Cohen, the Biden Administration didn’t even get an answer. And the Saudis also did not reply to the request by Israel for visas for representatives of the Kfar Kama village.
Given Iran’s virulent execration of Israel, it is possible that Prince Salman, who has been keeping up this charade for months, just traded any possibility of an easing of the Palestinian-Israel conflict to Iran for undisclosed benefits. We’ll get to that.
(2) SAUDI ARABIA AND HUMAN RIGHTS. Prince Salman dodged a bullet for the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a murder he almost certainly ordered. But the cat is out of the bag: Salman is a psychopath, and everybody now knows it. And up to very recently, he was a vicious authoritarian enforcer: First, he jailed Raif Badawi for 10 years and lashed him 1,000 times for an Internet post advocating greater freedom for Saudi citizens. Then he arrested his sister and half a dozen other women for driving—including legendary Saudi scholar Hatoon Ajwad al-Fassi—and jailed them for more than a year.
Then, suddenly, an about-face. Gone are the muttawiya, the religious police. Gone also was the mandatory niqab veiling. Now men and women are going to restaurants, the theater, and the sports stadiums together.
But Salman has a big problem, and that’s the centuries-old Saudi-Wahhabi pact that says that the Saudis run the state and the Wahhabis run the religion. He may have gone as far as he can go—or he may already have gone too far. If he chances anything more, he may be risking a revolt from the Wahhabi religious establishment. He has already had a series of revolts from the Shia minority, most of whom live in the east on the Gulf shore, right in the middle of Saudi Arabia’s oil production facilities. For the moment he is likely safe, and ARAMCO just had a banner year, so he’s all cashed-up. But Salman, who just had Biden over for a visit, is now playing a game in which he appears to be changing sides. He’s leaning towards China and Russia, not the USA and Israel. That’s very worrying.
Every state in the Middle East has decried Iran’s treatment of its protestors—every single one but Saudi Arabia. It may be that, having reached the limit of how much he can modernize without being overthrown, he’s going to ally with a regime that will certainly fall if it doesn’t.
(3) IRAN IS FACING REGIME CHANGE
Day before yesterday, the Ayatollah Khomenei, as heartless a human being as walks earth, pardoned 22,000 people arrested in the Mahsa Amini protests. That’s in addition to another 80,000 prisoners whose sentences were commuted, as is tradition just before Ramadan (which begins this weekend).
It won’t be enough. The wheel has turned, and even though protests have calmed temporarily, many expect an upsurge in the spring—and Iranians have not gone back to kowtowing to the morality police. In fact, they’re not there. They’ve disappeared from public view. Also largely AWOL are the Basij, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and the Tehran police. Women are walking around Iranian cities without headscarves while Khomeini tries to figure out how to get his vicious son on his throne before he dies—and while the Iranian diaspora tries to broker behind-the-scenes deals bent on temporarily (yeah, right) seating Reza Pahlavi upon the Peacock Throne. Protesters aren’t going to buy a “moderate Islamist” because they no longer believe one exists. They’re not going to go for Khatami, not because he didn’t try to usher in a kinder, gentler form of Islam, but because they don’t want an Islamic state of any description—and Khatami was front and center in the Iranian Revolution that brought them this hell.
But … if Saudi Arabia must freeze its modernization, it might ally with Iran, helping Iran bring its social system just to the level at which Saudi Arabia’s now stands and freeze it there.
This would save the patriarchy in both countries. And nobody should be expecting the patriarchy in Islamic countries—the most complete and successfully maintained patriarchy in history—to go quietly. This abuse of women going on in both countries is not about spirituality: it’s about men having everything and controlling everything. It’s about patriarchy. And these guys are not going down without a fight.