rhetorical heat on the Islamic Republic for its nuclear program, but remain conflicted on the possible use of American military force to stop it.
Last week, a senior Saudi joined Bahraini and UAE officials in speaking up about the dangers seen from Iran. The comments make clear that the three countries all agree that Iran’s nuclear program is a threat to them. But they do not agree on what should be done if diplomacy does not work.
The latest comments came from Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal, who for a long time headed Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service and more recently, if briefly, was the Saudi ambassador to Washington.
The Bahraini and UAE officials who spoke up earlier were their countries’ current ambassadors to Washington.
Turki’s remarks were milder than those of the Bahraini and UAE envoys. Turki spoke of the threat of Iran’s nuclear program, as the others did. But Turki came down hard against military action. In that regard, Turki clashed with his Arab neighbors.
Turki said a war over Iran’s nuclear program would be “calamitous and not just catastrophic.” He said a resort to war to solve the problem “is to attempt to harvest apples by cutting down the tree,” in other words, a gross over-reaction.
But Turki didn’t have anything good to say about Iran and its nuclear program. “Everybody recognizes that they [Iran] have not lived up to the requirements” of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
“They have to come clean on whatever it is that remains as question marks to the world community, and not just the United States and the West,” he said.
“The Iranians have to be aware of the explosive nature … of pursuing their present course of enrichment,” Turki said, adding that “a nuclear Iran is a major international danger.”
He spoke in Washington, presumably as Americans were the primary intended audience for his words.
Bahrain and the UAE earlier raised the flag of an Iranian nuclear audience, but they also opened the door to American military action. So Turki was clearly letting it be known that he did not accept military action while agreeing with them that Iran was a threat.
Back in July, UAE Ambassador to the US Yousef Al-Otaiba opened the issue by telling an American audience he would accept war to stop Iran’s nuclear program.
“There will be consequences” from a military attack, he said. “There will be a backlash and there will be problems with people protesting and rioting and very unhappy that there is an outside force attacking a Muslim country. That is going to happened no matter what.…
“If you are asking me, ‘Am I willing to live with that versus living with a nuclear Iran?’ my answer is still the same: We cannot live with a nuclear Iran. I am willing to absorb what takes place.”
Three months later, Bahrain’s ambassador to the United States, Houda Nonoo, told The Washington Times in an interview that her country sees a nuclear Iran as a threat. “If Iran has [a nuclear weapons] capability, nobody is going to be able to stop them” from doing what they want, she said.
When asked about military action to stop an Iranian nuclear program, she ducked the issue, saying, “That’s the million-dollar question.”
So the UAE has come down in favor of military action, Saudi Arabia in opposition and Bahrain avoiding a position. Yet to be heard from are the other three Persian Gulf Arab states: Kuwait, Qatar and Oman.