Term Paper

Global Politics
Semester IV

Global Terrorism
Islamic and Non-State Terrorism

The Middle Eastern Quagmire

Vidushi 1212
B.A. Hons. Political Science
Hindu College
The Middle Eastern Quagmire

Keywords Abstract
Proxy Serving as the coup de grâce for Saudi-Iranian rancor, the 1979
Warfare Revolution confronted the Persian Gulf and the rest of the world with
Terrorism a moment of truth from where in a trice, stemmed, polarising
Middle East polemics about the prospective bipartite struggle for puissance
between Riyadh and Tehran. While perused by many through a
sectarian lens, in sooth, this avant-garde Islamic bipolarity is rooted
in realpolitik, impelled by hegemonic and belligerent aspirations of
the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Iran. This frenzy over Islamic
paramountcy has several geopolitical and geoeconomic expos with
the most minacious manifestations being proxy warfare escorted by
terrorism.

The Sunni Arab monarchy and the Shia Persian theocracy engage in
retaliatory deterrence and passive deterrence apropos proxy terror
warfare. Retaliatory deterrence aims at dissuading adversaries with
military superiority like the USA, EU, and Russia from taking direct
military action in the region whilst passive deterrence strategy is
designed to prevent foreign involvement in states like Syria,
Lebanon, and Iraq where Riyadh and Tehran are deeply invested.

This paper seeks to examine how the fertile fields of the Arabian
Peninsula have been leveraged by the megalomaniacs, Saudi Arabia
and Iran, also the resolute nemesis of one another, to unleash a
cataclysm through their proxy terror groups further advancing what
many experts surmise as ‘Cold War 2.0’.
Introduction

Ever since the attenuation of imperial control over the Arabian Peninsula, the tiny islands of
hope for democracy and sovereignty were anon inundated by a sea of regional and global
belligerence. With the ebbing leverage possessed by the erstwhile dominant actors in the
Middle East and North Africa (in geopolitical parlance, MENA) region– the USA and Russia,
by the, Iran and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia emerged as the hegemonic duo in the region.

This “new” Middle East cold war shares important structural similarities with the 1950s and
1960s conflicts that Malcolm Kerr famously dubbed “the Arab cold war.” (Ferr, 1965) The
power of the major protagonists in the Arab cold war was measured in their ability to affect
domestic political struggles in neighbouring states where weak regimes had trouble controlling
their own societies and local players sought regional allies against their own domestic
opponents.

The Arab Spring that became a tactical gambit for Riyadh and Tehran, has left behind an arc
of instability spanning across the littoral zones of the MENA region ranging from outrightly
failed states to states afflicted with devastating civil wars1. The precarious status quo of such
states is a paragon of Islamic extremism. (Bayat, 2017) Such unconstitutional and
unconventional proxy warfare unfolding in the region have witnessed the rise of several Islamic
Jihadist factions– ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), Boko Haram, Hezbollah, Houthis,
Hamas, AQAP (Al Qaeda in Arabian the Peninsula), Muslim Brotherhood and several other
militias, testing international norms whilst paradoxically eliciting chilling complacency from
the international community. (Gatnash, 2021)

While sectarianism fuelled strife is one of the overriding theories in explaining the framework
of regional politics across the Arabian Peninsula, but it would be perhaps myopic to consider
it as the only factor underlying the cracks and crevices in the region. 2 Applying such a focus
distort analytical focus, oversimplify regional dynamics, and cause Iran and Saudi Arabia’s
motives to be misunderstood. Amidst this balance of power, the sectarian fault line has been
trespassed by the twain in seeking effective patronage of regional allies through transnational

1
Council on Foreign Relations, www.cfr.org
2
The RAND Centre for Middle East Public Policy
ideological and political connections, something that Tehran and Riyadh have championed
unlike any in the region. (Lynch, 2016) Coupled with sectarianism, the contending camps have
emerged as the archetypes of proxy warfare that has unleashed cataclysmic humanitarian
crisis.3

Image courtesy: Etsy

The rise of ISIL in Syria and Iraq, Houthis in Yemen, Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon and
Gaza, Libyan militias, has turned the Middle Eastern battlefield into a carnage with alarming
humanitarian yardsticks. While some states like Egypt and Tunisia came up with comforting
indicators, the dismaying trends in Syria, Yemen, Gaza, has pushed these states on the verge
of an outright catastrophe. While these non-state clients and allies of the new cold war get
sermons from their patrons, they have their own agendas as well, deeply embedded in their
domestic contexts. For instance, ISIL, backed by the KSA against Shiite dominant, Bashar
Al’Assad’s government, has its own geopolitical agenda at play i.e., to establish a Caliphate
and Islamic rule across the Levant region (earlier, they ambitiously, perhaps euphemism,
claimed such supremacy over the world). In Gaza, Hamas backed by Iran sought to protect to
Palestinian people against the Israeli time immemorial occupation, its ulterior motive is to gain
predominance in the Gaza Strip and West Bank which puts it at loggerheads with the UN-
recognised Palestinian Authority.

3
Foreign Affairs Magazine, www.foreignaffairs.com
State Vacuum: Mapping Post-Statist Geopolitics in Middle East

It is axiomatic that as the state recedes in power and control non-state actors become more
important in a country’s domestic politics (Gause, 2014). That has certainly been the case in
the new Middle East cold war. The frailty of authority across the Levant region synchronous
with the pervasion of non-state actors into the political labyrinthine is a paragon of this. The
centrifugal forces of rival beliefs, tribes and ethnicities — empowered by unintended
consequences of the Arab Spring — are pulling apart a region defined by European colonial
powers a century ago and defended by Arab autocrats ever since.4

Image courtesy: Council on Foreign Relations

The modus operandi of such terror groups has blurred the contours of Sykes Picot, leaving
behind state vacuum across the region. A state vacuum can be understood, using an analogy
from physics, as a state in which control has vanished without being replaced. It is in that sense
a “state in reverse”: everything that an ideal state is not. This state of being would imply state
collapse: a state in which “the complete order breaks down and a war of all against all emerges.”
(Gaub, 2017) One of the world's most persistent power voids was south-eastern Europe, the
Balkans. The relation of that region to the rest of the world was startlingly similar to that of the

4
Middle East Programme, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Middle East. It belonged neither to the East nor the West, and was peripheral to great-power
gravitational pulls. For a long time, too, it was a buffer, keeping major powers at bay by its
very existence. (Lengyel, 1953) Robin Wright, a journalist and scholar at the Woodrow Wilson
International Centre for Scholars, argues that “the map of the modern Middle East, a political
and economic pivot in the international order, is in tatters.” Wright also warns that competing
groups and ideologies are pulling the region apart: “A different map would be a strategic game
changer for just about everybody, potentially reconfiguring alliances, security challenges, trade
and energy flows for much of the world, too.”5 Similarly, Parag Khanna, a senior fellow at the
New America Foundation, argues, “Nowhere is a rethinking of “the state” more necessary than
in the Middle East.” He contends that “The Arab world will not be resurrected to its old glory
until its map is redrawn to resemble a collection of autonomous national oases linked by Silk
Roads of commerce.”6 Lt. Colonel Joel Rayburn, writing from the Hoover Institution, points
out that the alternative may not be new states but rather simply collapse. “If watching the fall
or near-fall of half a dozen regimes in the Arab Spring has taught us anything, it should be that
the Arab states that appeared serenely stable to outsiders for the past half century were more
brittle than we have understood,” warning darkly, “This conflict could very well touch us all,
perhaps becoming an engine of jihad that spews forth attackers bent on bombing western
embassies and cities or disrupting Persian Gulf oil markets long before the fire burns out.”7

Image courtesy: The Atlantic

5
Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars
6
New America Foundation
7
Hoover Institution
This discourse touches upon a cardinal pulse: Will the tottering political systems produce a
novel order in the region with perhaps, a greater role for non-state terror groups steered by
Tehran and Riyadh? This stands true if we take the case of Yemen where the Houthi rebels
ever since the fall of Sana’a, have taken over the political apparatus. Implcitly, there are
gainsaying trends in Syria where the autocrat Assad’s position is unflinched.

Power voids are dangerous diplomatic earthquake zones, where the lack of stability of the
foundations usually leads to great tectonic changes. What can we learn from the fate of that
region, and how can that lesson be applied to the Middle East?

Praxis of Proxy Warfare: An Ominous Precedent

The idea of using proxies against adversaries has been familiar to strategic thinkers and
practitioners for centuries. (Bryjka, 2020) During the Middle Eastern Cold War, regional
interstate armed conflicts and civil wars in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza inter alia
others have been inspired, fuelled and controlled by Iran and the KSA pursuing their own
strategic interests. This has witnessed the erosion of statehood, internationalisation of internal
conflicts, privatisation of violence, militarisation of non-state agents and actors and cross-
border percolation of militia groups.8

The strategy of war by proxy is the art of influencing the course and outcome of conflicts in
accordance with the interests of the third party by supporting proxy force(s) without the need
for direct military intervention; all the more pertinent in the nuclear era where the cost of “total
war” is beyond imagination. (Rabinovich, 2014) Tehran and Riyadh have championed this
through the aiding and abetting of the ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthi, Libya and several other
militias in the region to advance their geopolitical and geostrategic ends.

Very often, such Islamist militants leverage such tactical support to advance their own political
agendas. The result is a shift in the character of these wars from internationalised conflicts of
an ideological nature to regionalised interventions motivated by inter- and intra-state
competition for power and resources.

8
War on the Rocks
The Struggle for Syria

Syria’s prime location and muscle make it the strategic center of the Middle East. Post
independence, Syria reeled from more than a half-dozen coups between 1949 and 1970, when
the Assad dynasty seized full control. (Wright, 2013) The status quo in Syria is such that Iran
is backing the Assad regime through its proxies– primarily, Hamas and Hezbollah whilst the
Saudis are backing a regime change by fuelling the Kurdish and other rebels, consolidated as
the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and a more radical and fundamentalist, the terror
organisation Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL). (Worth, 2015) These militant organisations have turned
the land of Euphrates into a graveyard.

Image courtesy: The International Institute for Strategic Studies

The role of ISIS in the Syrian civil war transcends its apparent role assigned to it by the Saudis
i.e., to initiate a coup d’etat against the Assad regime. It has now started advancing more
grandiose goals of establishing a Caliphate as the head of the Islamic order that it seeks to push
across the world.9 It has actualised such goals through fanatical instruments, the ugliest form
being beheading of anglophonic individuals that defy its preachings and to send a message to
the western world, its chief nemesis.

9
The Middle East Forum
The Yemenese Yelp

Yemen is a country long rived by northern rebellion and southern separatists. The ongoing
conflict is torn between the Saudi coalition that backs the internationally recognised
government and the terror faction of Iran-backed Shiite rebels Houthi ever since the latter took
control of the country’s capital Sana’a in 2014. The Houthis violent means of operating peaked
at the height of the civil and today, it follows an erratic patterns of highs and ebbs ranging from
dormant behaviour intervened by hyperactivity when turmoil surfaces in Gaza, where its
secondary focus lies.

Conclusion

The geopolitical labyrinthine of the Middle East enmeshed with terror proxies has set out a
menacing precedent. Blinded by belligerent aspirations, Iran and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
have ravaged the prospects of democracy and sovereignty that were sparked during the Arab
Spring. The mayhem wrecked by terror proxy powers have produced a wide spectrum of
changes ranging from an absolute regime change to civil war with alarming humanitarian
indicators. The result is, the map of the modern Middle East, a political and economic pivot in
the international order, is in tatters. (Wright, 2013) A different map would be a strategic game
changer for just about everybody, potentially reconfiguring alliances, security challenges, trade
and energy flows for much of the world, too.
References
Bayat, A. (2017). Revolution Without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring.

Bryjka, F. (2020). Operational control over non-state proxie. Security & Defense Quarterly.

Ferr, M. (1965). The Arab Cold War, 1958-64: A Study of Ideology . American Political
Science Review .

Gatnash, I. E.-B. (2021). The Middle East Crisis Factory: Tyranny, Resilience and Resistance.

Gaub, F. (2017). State Vacuums and Non State Actors in Middle East and North Afruca. In L.
Kamel, The Frailty of Authority (pp. 51-64).

Gause, F. G. (2014). Beyond Sectarianism: The New Middle East Cold War. Brookings.

Lengyel, E. (1953). The Middle East Power Vacuum. The Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science.

Lynch, M. (2016). The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East.

Rabinovich, I. (2014). THE END OF SYKES-PICOT? Brookings.

Worth, R. F. (2015). A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS.

Wright, R. (2013). Imagining a Remapped Middle East. The New York Times.