What's That Smell? What's Burning?

I've been devoting a bit of extra time lately to the endless hot mess also known as the Middle East. To put it simply, hash is not being settled.

If there's a term for the Muslim world these days it has to be SNAFU. Situation Normal, All F#@ked Up.  Remember Gulf War I, Operation Desert Storm? That kicked off in August, 1990, getting the west sucked in. Before that there were other, more localized wars. Israel's various wars with its neighbours. The Iran-Iraq war that ran from 1980 to 1988. For a variety of reasons those folks just cannot get along and, with that in mind, we decided 27 years ago that we'd take a shot at it too. Guess who's still there, still at it? EVERYBODY, including us. Now the Russians are back in and China has feelers into the region, the new Silk Road stuff, aka the Belt and Road initiative.

The Saudis are more worrisome than ever. There's been a "reverse" palace coup with the crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman, rounding up his cousins and putting them under arrest for corruption. This is the same, non-corrupt, bin Salman who, while on holiday, spied a yacht belonging to, I believe, an Italian guy and bought it from him on the spot for about $450-million, telling the former owner to clear out that same day.

The Saud I most closely follow is prince Bandar bin Sultan, agitator extraordinaire, former ambassador to the US and close personal friend of the Bush family who sometimes called him "Bandar Bush." Bandar was also implicated in the British Aerospace bribery scandal surrounding years of sales of jet fighters to Syria.

That mess in Syria? That looks like a lot of it might have been Bandar's doing. He was not happy when Obama rejected his demand (not request, demand) that the US send a large ground force into Syria to topple Assad.  Bandar threatened to raise, train and equip his own Sunni army in the deserts of Jordan which, it's thought, manifested in the Islamist jihadi group, al Nusra. Some have tied Bandar to ISIS as well.

Shortly before he retired as head of MI6 in 2004, Sir Richard Dearlove received a courtesy call from Bandar. During the small talk, prince Bandar dropped a bombshell on Sir Richard.


Prince Bandar told him: "The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally 'God help the Shia'. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them."

There is no doubt about the accuracy of the quote by Prince Bandar, secretary-general of the Saudi National Security Council from 2005 and head of General Intelligence between 2012 and 2014, the crucial two years when al-Qa'ida-type jihadis took over the Sunni-armed opposition in Iraq and Syria. Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute last week, Dearlove, who headed MI6 from 1999 to 2004, emphasised the significance of Prince Bandar's words, saying that they constituted "a chilling comment that I remember very well indeed".

He does not doubt that substantial and sustained funding from private donors in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to which the authorities may have turned a blind eye, has played a central role in the Isis surge into Sunni areas of Iraq. He said: "Such things simply do not happen spontaneously." This sounds realistic since the tribal and communal leadership in Sunni majority provinces is much beholden to Saudi and Gulf paymasters, and would be unlikely to cooperate with Isis without their consent.

And, in case you're a bit confused, there is only one Saudi Arabia and, yes, it's the same one that the current government, like the previous government, considers Canada's ally.  Go figure, eh?

Things change. Bandar appears to be under lock and key. Crown prince Salman says he's going to reform Saudi Arabia including getting rid of radical Wahhabism. He's also planning to get the family out of the oil business. 

One thing that hasn't changed is that he's still out to get Iran and the Shia. 

The CBC's Michael Coren is just one of a variety of journalists and foreign policy types who have been recently warning that the next big Middle Eastern war is looming and it will be ugly.

The next war in the north [Lebanon] will likely involve prolonged artillery attacks followed by massive infantry and tank infiltration. It will not be pretty. And it's likely to happen sooner rather than later, and directly or indirectly involve Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and even Russia.

There are several factors to consider. First, in September, IDF's Northern Command conducted its largest military exercise in 20 years, involving tens of thousands of troops, tanks, aircraft and even the navy. Such planning takes an incredibly large amount of time and the manoeuvres themselves are extraordinarily costly.

The imagined enemy was Hezbollah. Israel has also attacked Syrian positions several times in recent months, partly to remind Damascus who is the boss of the block, but also to test how they will respond. Syria has always regarded Lebanon as a virtual province and Israel is determined to teach it — and Hezbollah — a lesson, and to reassert its authority.

Second, the Sunni superpower of Saudi Arabia is in an increasingly hot war with the Shia world and in particular, Iran. Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman is heir to the throne and while young, he is the effective ruler of the country. He's economically progressive, internationally connected and determined to modernize the country and also have it throw its weight around.

The civil war in Yemen, for example, is now almost three years old and had led to the deaths of at least 5,000 civilians, many of them children. Saudi Arabia backs the government, in particular with its air force, while Iran supports the Houthi rebels.

Coren's take seems feasible and it's more or less consistent with the recently expressed views of others how an Israeli war on Lebanon would end, assuming that it did end? What of the Sunnis and the Shia? Saudi Arabia versus Iran. What of Assad's Syria and a rehabilitated Shiite regime in Baghdad? How do the combatants keep one war from bleeding into another? What of Russia and China? And if prince Salman is really intent on wiping out radical Sunni Islamism, how will he deal with the jihadis after he turns on them?

It strikes me that the Middle East is on the verge of slipping from SNAFU into full contact FUBAR.