OPINION:
Saudi Arabia raised the threat to the peace and stability of the world with its display of more barbarism in the Middle East, executing 47 dissidents on January 2, some on the gallows and some beheaded in the government butcher shop. The execution of a prominent Shia cleric was particularly provocative. The Shiites are an important minority in the Sunni kingdom, and are dominant in the oil fields of southeastern Saudi Arabia.
Religious antagonism and discrimination are insoluble facts of life in the Middle East, and the Wahhabi ultraorthodox Sunnis in Saudi Arabia are particularly troublesome. In fact, some analysts say that Wahhabi Sunni proselytizing throughout the Islamic world is responsible for the current wave of Sunni terrorism, matching Shiite terrorism directed by the mullahs in Iran.
The executions, which led to violence against the Saudi embassy in Tehran, and a break in relations between the Saudis and their allies on one hand, the Sunni Gulf states, and Iran, has provoked fears in Russia and China that the violence will spread. “The conflict is playing out on Arab streets big time,” says Fawaz Gerges, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the London School of Economics. Both governments have urged all parties to cool their anger. So has the United States, but President Obama has reduced American influence in the region.
The eruption of diplomatic and sectarian violence is more evidence of the failure of Mr. Obama’s Middle East policy, or lack of a coherent one. U.S. entreaties to spare the lives of the 47 dissidents, lest their deaths further inflame the region, was quickly scorned. Once considered close allies, the Saudis have drifted away from American influence in the face of Mr. Obama’s attempted romance with Iran. The Sunni states see Iran’s intervention in Syria, in support of the regime of Bashar Assad, of Hezbollah and of Hamas in Gaza, as a lethal threat to their security.
Nimr al-Nimr, the executed cleric, was generally regarded as a peaceful if belligerent opponent of the Saudi regime. His inclusion in the group of slain dissidents was an emphatic statement that the Saudis intend to deal harshly with challenges to the regime. It marks a victory for the hawks in the royal family, and comes when the falling price of oil has cut into the enormous profits of the regime.
The Saudis, second only to China with the use of the noose and the scimitar (the United States ranks eighth in the execution stakes), makes efforts by Secretary of State John Kerry to negotiate an overall settlement to civil war in Syria even more difficult and dubious. The United States has hinted it would join other nations in making major concessions to phase out the Assad regime rather than the original demand that he leave at once. But it is not clear that the allies have the support of the small Syrian moderate opposition, and certainly not of various radical Islamic groups in the conflict. Syria remains at the heart of the Middle East crisis, with an analogy to the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, seen now as a prelude to World War II, being all too ominous.
Mr. Obama insists that he has a strategy for the U.S. role in the conflict. But in addition to being ineffective, he is slowly increasing the American military role. The risk in his incremental approach to joining the struggle invites easier recruiting by both the Islamic State, or ISIS, and al Qaeda, which was touted as graveyard dead with the assassination of Osama bin Laden. The more things change the more they stay the same.
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