The Obama administration’s Middle East policy has become a casualty of spiraling violence in the region, most recently in Yemen, where intervention by a Saudi-led coalition risks escalating a civil war into a sectarian firestorm that could quickly spread to other countries.
The big winners are not only Iran but also America’s top-priority targets: the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State, al Qaeda and their allies, who have been aided in their efforts to portray themselves as champions of Sunni Arabs by the Obama administration’s perceived tilt toward Tehran in pursuit of a nuclear deal.
Meanwhile, President Obama and other administration officials have been engaged in a high-profile fight with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the Iran deal, which has thrown U.S. relations with its closest ally in the region into its own crisis.
The assault on Yemen’s Houthis by Saudi Arabia and its allies was a reaction to the lack of a comprehensive U.S. policy in the region that has enabled Iran to gain influence at the expense of its Arab neighbors, Derek Harvey, a retired Army colonel and director of the Global Initiative for Civil Society and Conflict at the University of South Florida, told the Washington Examiner.
“We’ve created a security vacuum in the region,” he said.
“In places like Yemen, the United States depended on a too-narrow counter-terrorism approach rather than an integrated military assistance, political and diplomatic approach informed by a deeper understanding of the social and cultural factors and drivers of conflict.”
As a result, countries in the region are going it alone. Egypt, the largest and most powerful Arab country, plans to join Saudi Arabia in an expected ground invasion of Yemen after having unilaterally launched airstrikes in Libya to fight Sunni extremists aligned with the Islamic State after terrorist attacks against Egyptians working there.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, president of NATO ally Turkey, issued a rare condemnation of Iran at a news conference supporting the Saudi-led coalition.
“Iran is trying to dominate the region,” he said. “Could this be allowed? This has begun annoying us, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries. This is really not tolerable, and Iran has to see this.”
Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey are all Sunni-dominated countries, as are the other allies in the coalition, creating a risk that the intervention in Yemen’s civil war against the Iranian-backed Houthis — who follow a form of Shia Islam — could spark sectarian tensions across the region.
Those tensions already are a factor in Syria’s three-way civil war among the Iran-backed government of President Bashar Assad, Western-supported rebels and the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State and al Qaeda. The tensions also are on display in fighting in Iraq, especially since the introduction of Iranian-backed Shia militias who have been accused of sectarian cleansing against Sunnis.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners Kuwait and Bahrain also have significant Shia populations that have chafed under Sunni rule. In Bahrain, the Shia are a majority.
In that environment, the United States, as a secular republic, could be seen as a neutral arbiter. That’s what the administration has tried to do, but not effectively, according to critics.
“It’s obvious that the relationship with Israel is diminishing to a degree and … it’s moving more toward an Iranian-dominated relationship to create a balance of power. You’re seeing that happen right now,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn., told CNN on Friday.
“While in a textbook that might be interesting, what you’re not seeing from Iran’s standpoint is a change in behavior. You’re seeing just the opposite, as a matter of fact. what you’re seeing is them being more in the face of the Sunni population. ”
In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, Harvey and other regional experts said the weak U.S. response to Iran’s challenge in the region has set back U.S. interests, especially in Iraq, and hurt efforts to fight the Islamic State because Sunni Arabs continue to see the extremist group as a hedge against Tehran.
The same dynamic was developing among Sunnis in Yemen, which is one of the reasons why the Saudis — who also are fighting both al Qaeda and the Islamic State —organized a military operation to beat back the Houthis.
“It points to the weakness of the administration’s strategy of embracing Iran as a potential ally,” said Jim Phillips, a Middle East expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
