Time to talk peace

There is a time to keep silence and a time to speak, said Ecclesiastes the Preacher, as surely as there is a time of war and a time of peace. He might have added there is also a time for quiet, subtle diplomacy. That time is now.

Following the attack last weekend by 18 assorted combat drones and ground to ground missiles on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq complex and Khourais oilfields, Aramco lost half its oil production capacity in a matter of minutes. Some has been restored, but the damage will not be made good fully for months.

It was a devastating strike, its impact psychological as well as physical. How on earth had the drones and rockets got through? They were low level, and low tech. In the ensuing cycle of claim counter-claim, a number of key details are still to be clarified.

First, Houthi rebel forces in Yemen claimed they had done it. Saudi Arabia, and Secretary of State of Mike Pompeo blamed Iran. They even went so far to say the missiles had been launched from Iranian territory – extremely unlikely in the circumstances. President Trump repeated that US weaponry and forces were “locked and loaded” – but how and where and to what end was left extremely vague, even by his rhetorical standards.

If it came to action Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javid Zarif has warned “all-out war” would be waged by his country. He said President Trump was being suckered into war by the deceits of his advisers.

For his part, Trump said he would await further evidence from the Saudi government, and suggested further sanctions on Tehran. Saudi Arabia displayed what it said were remains of Iranian-built cruise ground missiles and bits of drones and their ordnance. They said the projectiles could not have been launched from Yemen.

The suggestion that the operations was mounted by pro-Iranian forces in the ungoverned spaces of the southern Iraqi desert seems right. Kuwait forces reported aerial activity from the north west at the time. The area is known to host local militias allied to Hezbollah and Iran and elements of Islamic State forces.

The presence of hostile forces across a wide swathe of territory up to the Syrian border is a headache. So too is the evidence that they have the technical ability to attack important Saudi infrastructure unchallenged and almost completely undetected. This is the essence of what is known as “sub-sophisticated warfare technology”. The missiles could fly literally and metaphorically beneath the radar. The first thing the Saudis need to do is mend their defences.

Houthi and Iranian use of drones has gone through a huge change over the past two years – now being used to carry out attacks on major installations and even pinpoint assassinations of prominent Yemeni government and military leaders. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia can talk about the need to confront Iran militarily – but the record of its own and UAE forces in four years of bloody war in Yemen is not encouraging. Iran has a strength in depth socially as well as militarily that the Saudis would find hard to match.

In the circumstances, Trump’s language has been markedly unwarlike. He sacked his aggressive national security adviser John Bolton who seemed to believe that the ills of the Middle East could be resolved by war on Iran, as surely as Cato the Roman senator believed Carthage had to be destroyed.

Trump wants to avoid another open-ended and messy war across the Middle East. A war with Iran would last years. It would likely scupper his chances of re-election next year – as surely as the hostage crisis in the first year of the Islamic revolution in Iran, 1980, sank Jimmy Carter’s chances of re-election.

With Trump, it goes further – and it is an element in his thinking for which he is given very little credit. Wars must be for national survival and national self-interest. In present circumstances an offensive against Iran would be neither. It is rather America First because of its pre-eminence in oil production – thanks to fracking and shale oil. China and India need Middle East crude more.

Trump seems instinctively to understand something that neither George W Bush nor Tony Blair appreciated fully. War is an instrument of last resort, a desperate measure for national survival, and to turn circumstances irreversibly in your favour. The long, ragged, ill thought-out campaigns in Afghanistan post-2001 and Iraq post-2003, failed in this. Even Obama’s in-out approach to war in Afghanistan, announcing reinforcements and withdrawal of US troops at the same time, seemed muddled.

The language and threats to “double down” on sanctions, cancelling US support for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA, sound combative enough, to be sure. But there are signs of a real diplomatic objective. Trump would like to renegotiate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to make it tighter on inspection schedules and timetables, and to include the whole ball game of development of intermediate and long-range missiles.

One conspiracy theory doing the rounds of the bazaars and souks this week is that the attack on Saudi Arabia was instigated by ultras in Iran’s Council of Guidance and the Revolutionary Guard Corps to stymie any chance of any form of American-Iranian talks.

This month’s opening of the UN General Assembly should provide an ideal opportunity for some sort of dialogue to get under way. Let’s hope that somewhere in Manhattan there is a sufficiency of quiet and discreet backstairs furnishings and fittings for it to proceed.

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