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
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...
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....
