Saudis v. Iranians: War of Attrition

Spengler argues that the civil wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine should be viewed as proxy wars between Iran and Saudi Arabia:

“There are two sorts of rat/The hungry and the fat,” wrote Heinrich Heine. The fault line between hungry Iranians and the fat Saudis may take precedence over the civilization divide between Muslims and the West, at least for the time being. That is why the Israelis have rediscovered the 2003 Saudi peace plan. The Saudi kingdom has threatened to intervene on the side of the beleaguered Sunnis of Iraq, and Iran (through Hezbollah) is seeking to overthrow the Saudi-allied government of Lebanon, as well as dominate the rejectionist wing of the Palestinians.

He seems to think the mullahs of Iran have a shorter future than most realize:

Iran, I warned on September 13, 2005, is running short of oil and soldiers (Demographics and Iran’s imperial design). Its oil exports could fall to zero within only 10 years, according to new studies reviewed in the December 11 Business Week. Iran’s circumstances appear far more pressing than I believed a year ago, when the consensus estimate gave Iran another 20 years’ worth of oil exports. Apart from oil, Iran exports only dried fruit, pistachio nuts, carpets, caviar and, more recently, prostitutes (Jihads and whores, November 21).

Iran covets the oil reserves of southeastern Iraq, southern Azerbaijan, and northwestern Saudi Arabia. With 30% youth unemployment, 10% inflation, epidemic prostitution and drug addiction, Iran’s fraying social fabric depends on an oil-derived government dole. Within a generation it will have half as many men of military age, and four times as many pensioners. As currently configured, Iran faces economic and demographic collapse eventually. If, as Business Week reports, Iran’s oil exports are falling by one-seventh each year, the reckoning might come sooner rather than later. The theocratic regime is a wounded and dangerous beast, prone to hunt outside its own preserve.

Saudi Arabia’s quasi-official threat of intervention in Iraq should be read in this light.

Spengler concludes that if Iran is not that close to obtaining a deployable nuclear weapon, then the West’s strategy should be to encourage a Saudi-Iranian war of attrition to grind them both down (not unlike the US strategy toward Iraq and Iran in the 1980s):

As Diana West wrote in her December 1 TownHall column, “Imagine: Sunni Saudi Arabia vs Shi’ite Iran – and nary an American soldier ordered to pull his PC [politically correct] punches in the crossfire.” More precisely, Iran has sufficient influence among the Palestinians to ensure that Hamas rejects a Palestinian national-unity government, leaving Israel no one with whom to negotiate, and a relatively free hand for the occasional raid. Jerusalem can stretch one hand in peace toward the Saudis, and hammer Iran’s ally Hamas with the other.

His geostrategic strategy makes some sense, though his prognostications of Iran’s impending collapse seem far-fetched.