Simon Sebag Montefiore, in the Times, on the so-called Mecca Pact between Suadi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan. As the US becomes an unreliable partner, and Iran threatens, other countries outside the traditional Middle East are drawn in.
The pact is aimed at the two Middle Eastern powers who are regarded as dangerous threats — most immediately, a rampaging but wounded Iran, which is bombarding the US allies Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. The Iranians regard their Arab neighbours with imperious disdain — Ayatollah Khomeini called the Saudis “the camelgrazers of Riyadh and barbarians of Najd” — while the present leaders have long plotted to destroy the “family states” of the Gulf, “even before we get to destroy Israel”. The feeling is mutual: as soon as the Iranians were vulnerable after the fall of the Shah, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, funded by the Saudis….
Iran’s tyranny is battered, its economy shattered, the blood barely dry from its slaughter of 40,000 protesters in January, and it has lost vassals — Hamas decimated, Hezbollah weakened, Syria fallen — but has been preparing for this war for decades, which its Shia theology, apocalyptic Mahdism, murderous tyranny, mosaic strategy, geographical assets and anti-western resistance radicalism qualify it to fight.
The pact is also aimed at Israel, which, since October 7, will no longer tolerate local threats on its borders. Spectacular in tactics and technology but exhausted in strategy and war-weary, it is overstretched and struggling to bank its early gains because of the poisonous antics of extremist firestarters in its shambolic government.
But despite diplomatic froideur in Europe, Israel has new alliances. That with the UAE through the Abraham Accords has deepened; as has the link with Greece. Israel and India are bonding over their horror at Pakistan’s new prominence….
The Middle East is strategically essential to any world power for all sorts of reasons — geographical and geological as well as its multiethnic, multi-sectarian composition and the way its states were formed after the world wars. But behind the fray of the Third Gulf war, something else is happening. The Middle East itself is ceasing to be a distinct theatre.
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