The third Gulf war
How the latest regional conflict is reshaping the Middle East
Neither Iran, nor Israel, nor the Gulf will ever be quite the same
Photograph: Arash Khamooshi/Polaris/EyevineOF the many wars in the modern Middle East, few have had a more profound impact than those in the Gulf.
The first, in 1991, was the start of America’s unipolar moment.
It assembled a coalition that ejected Saddam Hussein’s occupying forces from Kuwait after just four days of ground fighting.
Miles of scorched Iraqi army vehicles along the so-called “highway of death” left an indelible image of American might.
Gulf monarchs decided to hew ever closer to America for protection.
The second Gulf war, in 2003, ushered in an era of American self-doubt.
Its army toppled Saddam’s regime within weeks, only to find itself bogged down for almost a decade fighting a vicious insurgency.
The spectre of Iraq has hung over every military action since.
George W. Bush hoped the invasion would unleash a democratic wave across the Middle East.
Instead it swept away Iran’s main state rival in the region, clearing the way for a period of Iranian hegemony as its allies cemented their power in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen.
The war that began on February 28th with an American and Israeli attack on Iran can rightly be called the third Gulf war.
It has already drawn in all eight countries that border the Persian Gulf, along with more than half a dozen others.
Early events have been dramatic.
Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, was killed in an Israeli air strike at the war’s outset.
Iranian drones have rained down on the normally placid cities of the Gulf.
Global energy prices have soared.
Many officials expect the fighting to continue for several weeks.
How it will end is difficult to predict, in part because Donald Trump’s goals seem to be ever shifting.
However it ends, though, the third Gulf war will prove no less transformative than its predecessors.
Iran will be diminished.
Gulf states will have to contend with their newfound vulnerability.
Along with America and Israel, they may also have to contend with an enfeebled but persistent threat, not unlike the one Iraq posed in the decade after its defeat in Kuwait.
A high toll
As The Economist went to press, a Washington-based Iranian human-rights group said that 1,114 civilians had been killed, including more than 180 children.
The military death toll is unknown.
Israel has carried out a series of assassinations meant to decapitate the regime.
Along with Mr Khamenei, dozens of other officials have reportedly been killed, among them the defence minister and the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the regime’s praetorian guard.
It is impossible to generalise about how Iranians feel: theirs is a diverse country of 92m people.
There were celebrations the night Mr Khamenei was killed and scenes of mourning the next day.
Some opposition activists argue that Iranians who initially supported a war against the regime are already tiring of it, having endured almost a week of bombardment with no end in sight.
Others argue the opposite: that Iranians fear the war will end too soon, with the regime intact and ready to vent its spleen on its own people.
All of these views could be heard this week in Kapikoy, just across the Iranian border in Turkey.
Jasmine and her partner found seats on a passenger train leaving Tehran on March 1st bound for Turkey.
The train made it as far as Tabriz, some 200km from the border, before stopping.
She waited on board for seven hours before eventually continuing the journey by taxi.
Surrounded by snow-capped mountains on the Turkish side of the border, she recalls the sound of air strikes around Tehran.
“It was terrifying,” she says, through tears. “I just want a normal country.”
Another woman says she hopes to return soon.
“I’m sure in one month I will come back to celebrate our freedom,” she avers.
Others anticipate a different reckoning.
“America and Israel will pay for what they have done,” says an Iranian shopkeeper heading home after a brief trip.
The regime is keen to project an image of stability.
Hours after Mr Khamenei’s death was confirmed a three-man council was named to lead the country, in line with the constitution.
Replacements were named for some of the officials killed in the first wave of Israeli strikes.
Police and paramilitary forces were deployed in the streets, lest anyone heed Mr Trump’s call to mobilise and “take over your government”.
The assembly of experts, a body of 88 regime-approved clerics, began consultations to choose a new supreme leader.
Though they have not announced a decision, there is talk of Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of the late ayatollah, as a likely choice.
It would be a telling one. The elder Mr Khamenei was deeply unpopular, presiding as he did over years of economic crisis, political repression and foreign-policy failures.
His son has never held office and lacks a public profile or religious credentials (he is a mid-ranking cleric, not an ayatollah).
Even some supporters of the regime would resent a hereditary succession: did they really overthrow the monarchy in 1979 simply to install another one?
What the younger Mr Khamenei lacks in legitimacy, he makes up for in behind-the-scenes support.
He spent decades working as his father’s aide, forging close ties with the IRGC.
His selection would signal continuity.
The Guards would remain the locus of power, while the Iranians who have spent years yelling “death to Khamenei” from their balconies would not even have to update their chants.
With its air defences battered, Iran has little ability to fight back against American and Israeli jets.
It has not shot down a single one, whereas both Israel and Qatar have downed Iranian warplanes.
Instead it has relied on missile-and-drone attacks against Israel, the Gulf states and other targets.
Command and control is wobbly: intelligence sources in the region say the regime has given commanders wide latitude to pick their own targets.
There are signs that Iran is already having trouble keeping up its missile fire.
On the first day of the war it launched around 180 missiles at Israel and 250 at the Gulf; by day four, those numbers had fallen to the low dozens.
Several factors might explain the drop-off.
America and Israel are both trying to destroy Iran’s launchers.
The regime may also be husbanding its long-range missiles in the hope of firing a few big barrages that overwhelm its adversaries’ air defences once their stock of interceptors has been depleted.
Flames on oil
The six members of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC), a club of petro-monarchies, have borne the brunt of Iran’s retaliation.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) said on March 4th that Iran had targeted it with 189 missiles and 941 drones in four days.
Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar all report figures in the hundreds; Oman and Saudi Arabia have suffered smaller barrages.
The UAE says it shot down 93% of the incoming projectiles.
Though other Gulf countries do not publish detailed figures, Arab and Western officials say they have fared well.
Interceptor stocks are closely guarded secrets, but two regional military sources claim they can sustain a weeks-long war at Iran’s present rate of fire.
Still, the costs are mounting.
At least seven people have been killed and scores wounded.
Thousands of flights have been cancelled in some of the world’s busiest air-travel hubs.
Iran’s declaration that the Strait of Hormuz was “closed” to shipping and its attacks on oil and gas facilities and tankers have caused havoc in energy markets.
The bill for air-defence interceptors alone has already run into the billions of dollars.
Perhaps the most troubling damage is the hardest to quantify.
Gulf states have long cultivated a reputation for safety and stability, which has made them a magnet for rich expats.
The UAE, in particular, has drawn everyone from Arabs fleeing the Middle East’s many conflicts to Europeans escaping taxes and strict covid-19 restrictions.
When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, both Russians and Ukrainians decamped to Dubai.
Bad news elsewhere was often good news for the Gulf.
Now the bad news has come home.
Many Gulf residents are tense. Some have spent thousands of dollars to hitch rides to Riyadh or Muscat, to get to a functioning airport.
In an inhospitable region, where air-conditioning is essential for much of the year and natural sources of drinking water are scarce, the prospect of wider Iranian attacks is alarming: successful strikes on power plants or desalination facilities could be catastrophic.
The Iranian regime hopes that such fears will lead Gulf monarchs to press Mr Trump for a ceasefire.
After all, they had spent the previous two months urging Mr Trump not to attack.
Yet they have shown more resolve than Iran expected.
Saudi Arabia is furious at strikes on its oil refineries and the American embassy in Riyadh’s gated diplomatic quarter.
There is open talk about whether the kingdom should join the war by launching strikes on Iran’s missiles and drones.
Similar discussions are taking place in the UAE.
Even Qatar, which shares a natural-gas field with Iran and tries to maintain friendly relations, sounds belligerent.
A widening Gulf
Instead of urging Mr Trump to end the war, Gulf rulers are privately advising him to stay the course.
The alternative looks grim.
If America ends the war now, Gulf states will be left with a wounded, hostile regime on their borders.
Not only that, they argue, Iran will have learned a disturbing lesson: that pounding the GCC is an effective way to change America’s behaviour.
Should another war break out, the regime will no doubt hit its neighbours harder and faster.
As ever, it is hard to know whether Mr Trump will listen.
He says he wants “freedom for the people” of Iran, but also to talk to the regime and cut a deal.
The war might be over in two or three days, or last four to five weeks.
He has expressed all of these views, sometimes in a single day.
His lieutenants have tried to set narrower aims.
Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, says the objectives are to destroy Iran’s ballistic-missile programme and its navy; Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, adds its nuclear capabilities to the list.
Military officials rattle off a list of achievements.
America has carried out more than 2,000 strikes across Iran.
They have sunk more than a dozen Iranian naval ships.
On March 4th a submarine torpedoed an Iranian frigate off the coast of Sri Lanka.
If Mr Trump wants anything, it is probably to say he solved a problem that has vexed every president for almost 50 years.
The Islamic Republic spread chaos around the Middle East, by arming and encouraging proxy militias.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden, with the second Gulf war in mind, tried to negotiate with the regime rather than fight it.
Even Mr Trump, in his first term, was hesitant to hit Iran directly: when he ordered the assassination of Qassem Suleimani, an Iranian general, in 2020, it was in Iraq rather than on Iranian soil.
In the new era of open conflict among America, Iran, Israel and the GCC, everyone must confront hard questions.
Start with Iran.
Some hardliners think the lesson of the past few years is simple: the Islamic Republic should emulate North Korea.
Mr Khamenei sought to make it a nuclear-threshold state.
His scientists worked to assemble the components of a nuclear bomb, but he never gave the order to build one.
For hawks in Tehran, that was a fatal mistake.
The only way to deter future American and Israeli attacks, they argue, is with a nuclear weapon.
Building the proverbial “bomb in the basement” is easier said than done, though.
The Islamic Republic has been penetrated at every level by Israeli intelligence (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former president, once said that the head of a unit set up to hunt Israeli agents turned out to be one himself).
Pragmatists will no doubt argue that Iran should cut its losses and make a deal with Mr Trump.
But they would have little confidence that America and Israel would adhere to one.
Gulf states will face their own problems.
Contrary to the unseemly gloating on social media in recent days, the war is unlikely to prove a fatal blow to their reputations.
Cities like Dubai still have much to recommend them as business and tourism hubs.
But they will clearly need to take more responsibility for their defence.
Gulf armies spend tens of billions of dollars buying expensive weapons but show little martial prowess.
Petty feuds between monarchs have slowed efforts to integrate their air defences.
In 2017 three Gulf states imposed an embargo on Qatar; the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the UAE were not on speaking terms before the war in Iran.
Whatever happens in Iran, the GCC will need to get serious about everything from defence to emergency preparedness.
If the Iranian regime survives, there will be a continued threat of drones and attacks on shipping; if it collapses and chaos ensues, the risks will only multiply.
For Israel this is the fourth war to follow the massacre of October 7th 2023, when Hamas, a Palestinian militant group, killed some 1,200 people.
Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who oversaw the assault, hoped to change the face of the Middle East, but this was not the change he had in mind.
Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has spent much of his career lecturing American presidents on the need to confront Iran.
Now he has his moment: his hard-right coalition firmly supports the war, as do nearly all opposition leaders.
Mr Netanyahu hopes a successful outcome will convince voters later this year that he has “changed the map of the Middle East”, as he often boasts, securing his re-election.
The vote must be held by October.
Once the war is over, sources in his Likud party believe he will bring it forward.
He may still struggle.
Although an overwhelming 81% of Israelis support the strikes, only 38% express high trust in Mr Netanyahu, according to a survey from the Institute for National Security Studies, a think-tank.
America and Israel still need to find a way to end the war—and at some point, their goals may diverge.
Some Israelis may want to press ahead until Iran is shattered: watching their main adversary tip into civil war would be an acceptable outcome.
That would be far more troubling to America, as a threat to everything from oil markets to global shipping.
Conversely, if Mr Trump wants to end the war in a few days, Mr Netanyahu will probably be furious.
All these dilemmas overlap. A weakened but hostile Iran would give Gulf states impetus to bolster their own defence, and perhaps bring them into closer alignment with Israel.
If Mr Trump calls time on the war prematurely, meanwhile, the GCC may question the value of its closest alliance: America will have dragged them through a conflict they opposed only to deny them the outcome they sought.
The first Gulf war ended with a big, permanent American military presence in the Gulf.
Outraged by the presence of American troops, a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden grew resolved to strike the United States.
Sometimes, the end of one war sows the seeds of the next.
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario