It's On: Does Bahrain Intervention Signal Start of Iran-Saudi Arabia Conflict?

Saudi Arabia's decision to send troops to help quell protests in its smaller neighbor, Bahrain (and the reported death of some of those troops already), may signal a looming confrontation between the two regional heavy-weights, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Bahrain may be a proxy contest much as the Spanish Civil War in 1936 became a proxy war between Germany and Russia. This bears watching. Josh Marshall, the editor of TPM assesses:

"The world seems to be reeling from one crisis and confrontation with history to another. The unfolding disaster in Japan, understandably, has everyone's attention. And before the earthquake this weekend, the shambling and chaotic situation in Libya had everyone's focus. But something else just happened that while not momentous or dramatic in the moment -- or compared to everything else that's happening -- seems like a very big deal, and an event the implications of which may be vast.

One of the more protracted mass protests in the Arab world over the last two months has been in Bahrain, a small emirate on the coast of the Persian Gulf with close ties to the United States and a Sunni royal family presiding over a majority Shi'a population. The regime has rocked back and forth between violence and accommodation. But over the weekend the Bahraini royal family invited 1000 Saudi troops into the country to help control unrest. (Any number of these verbs might well belong in single quotes.)

There's a lot of context necessary to understand this situation -- a key one is sectarian. Saudi Arabia has a large Shi'a minority and, significantly, it tends to live in the areas where the country's oil is. It is also, to put it mildly, very resistant to political reform. Bahrain, meanwhile, is overwhelmingly Shi'a but is governed by a Sunni minority. Finally, a small minority of the population is ethnically Persian.

What all of this amounts to is that Bahrain has in a more advanced form most of the internal fissures that threaten Saudi Arabia itself. So Saudi Arabia's move into the country must be taken as some measure of the insecurity of the Saudi regime. Indeed, it's not clear to me what the Bahraini 'invitation' really means in this sense. It seems clear that the Bahrainis feel they've lost the ability to control the situation in the country and at some critical level have opted for outside (Sunni) force as the solution to the crisis as opposed to political reform. That is a decision that clearly troubles the United States. But we're at the limits of US power to affect the situation and reading between the lines it's not altogether clear the US administration feels it knows a better solution.

I don't know enough about the politics of the Arabian peninsula to confidently say more than this. But I know enough to recognize this as a very big deal and a sign that the contagion of unrest in the Arab world has fixed itself into not only Bahrain but Saudi Arabia itself in a way that's likely unleash all sorts of unpredictable results. It also seems to escalate a local and internal crisis to one pitting the two regional powers -- Saudi Arabia and Iran -- into a broader confrontation. Remember it was the threat to Saudi Arabia -- both the threat that we perceived and the threat perceived by the Saudis themselves -- that set in motion our intensive military involvement in the region stretching from 1991 all the way to the present day.