Saudi Arabia gives Israel flight corridor to attack Iran: Regional reasoning
On June 11th the Saudis merely shared with Israel a mutual distrust of Iran. On June 12th the Saudis leveraged this by going public with their plan to grant Israel an open flight corridor for airstrikes on Iran. This means, at least on the surface, that Israel would have an alternate route available if the Americans were not in agreement with an attack.
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This was surprising to people whose only knowledge of Middle Eastern politics is that Arabs and Jews don’t tend to get on well. This move has its foundations in geopolitics, however, and geopolitical thinking tends to trump ethnic friction — even Jew-hating — at a policy level (it doesn’t stop individuals from being difficult about this, however). This announcement is Saudi’s public response to an Iranian statement which came a day prior that they would “inspect” ships in the Strait of Hormuz if ships bound for Iran were messed with. This, of course, was just a veiled threat to close the Strait if Iran feels too pressured. And Iran might be feeling a lot of pressure these days considering Russia’s announcement a day prior they
read onIran trying to steal anti-Israel spotlight from Turkey
As I mentioned in my hasty article about the fallout of the Gaza blockade stunt, Iran is not likely to let the anti-Jewish scoreboard alone at Turkey-31,457 Iran-31,456. I had mentioned Hezbollah as a likely conduit for their publicity garnering impulses, but perhaps that was a bit hasty of me. Hezbollah is, after all, a semi-independent organization which has various power factions of its own pulling in different directions (some of them possibly away from Iran).
Hezbollah’s existence being technically independent of Iran makes Hezbollah a great vehicle of Iranian terror while being very much a tool of political plausible deniability. This is the largest reason the previous Bush administration labelled “state sponsors of terror” to be just as bad as the terrorist groups themselves — because the terrorists generally cater to the sponsoring nation’s foreign policy goals or are, in fact, direct tools of that nation’s policy.
That being the case, however, the whole purpose of having a surrogate militant organization is to not be seen as directly doing bad things yourself. It’s all right and fine for Iran to talk about wanting to murder every Jew on the planet and that the-Holocaust-never-happened-but-it-should, but
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