Martin Chulov: Drones signal end to era of fast jet air supremacy / Simon Tisdall: The world ignored the warning signs, now the Middle East is on the brink

By Dilip -
the west – turning a blind eye for decades to pitiless autocracy, legalised misogyny and religious bigotry – has continued to court Riyadh and its corrupting riches. Here again Trump jumped in, making shockwaves. Not content to cement the Saudi alliance during his first overseas visit as president, Trump made crown prince Mohammed bin Salman his new best friend. When the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered by Saudi agents, Trump turned defence attorney. He is even trying to sell Salman nuclear technology. What would you think, were you in Iran’s shoes?

In the history of modern warfare, “own the skies, win the war” has been a constant maxim. Countries with the best technology and biggest budgets have devoted tens of billions to building modern air forces, confident they will continue to give their militaries primacy in almost any conflict. Tiny, cheap, unmanned aircraft have changed that, especially over the battlefields of the Middle East. In the past three months alone, drones have made quite an impact in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and possibly now Saudi Arabia, where half the country’s oil production - and up to 7% of the world’s global supply – has been taken offline by a blitz that caused no air raid sirens and seems to have eluded the region’s most advanced air warning systems...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/16/middle-east-drones-signal-end-to-era-of-fast-jet-air-supremacy

Simon Tisdall: The world ignored the warning signs – now the Middle East is on the brink
It’s easy and convenient to solely blame Iran, as American and British officials routinely do without conclusive evidence. Rather, it is serial western and regional miscalculations that have drawn us ineluctably into this dread vortex. How can disaster be averted? Who can stop a slide into a wider war that could swiftly engulf regional states from Israel to Saudi Arabia, and drag in US, British and maybe even Russian forces? Clues can be found in the mistakes that led to this point. Answers, if they exist, will only come through informed statesmanship of the sort signally lacking so far.

Mention of which brings us, first, to Trump and Iran. Tehran’s regime has been viewed as a threat by the US since the 1979 revolution. But it was Trump, with his unrivalled ability to make bad situations worse, who ripped up the Iran nuclear deal on 8 May last year, imposed punitive economic sanctions, and sparked the immediate crisis. His enmity has hurt Iran’s citizens – but not the regime. In erring so idiotically, Trump preferred the advice of his discredited former national security adviser, John Bolton, over the personal pleadings of Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron. He also gave short shrift to his chum Boris Johnson, then foreign secretary, who made a last-minute dash to Washington. A damaging rift with Europe over Iran began that day....
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/16/warning-signs-middle-east-donald-trump-hostility-iran-saudi-arabia

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