Why is Iran Striking the Arab Gulf Countries?
There’s no effective way to start this article. One could narrate the historic animosity of the Islamic Revolution to the US and Israel; its aid to resistance movements throughout the region; and how the fight between the “reformists” and “hardliners” in Iran are centered on Iran’s regional standing. Instead, I turn to a quote from Dr. Fatima Smadi’s Hamas and Iran: From Marj al-Zuhour to the Al-Aqsa Flood regarding the first meetings between the IRGC and Hamas movement leaders during their deportation to South Lebanon’s Marj al-Zuhour in a 1992-1993:
“‘The Iranians,’ [Mujtaba] Abtahi1 says—he keeps a photographic archive from that period—’dealt with educated leadership. The Marj al-Zuhour camp included 20 university professors, more than 60 engineers, and 25 doctors, from different age groups. They saw frankness and boldness in expressing positions, even those that ran contrary to the Iranian view.’
Abtahi, one of the first to arrive at Marj al-Zuhour, was surprised by what the martyr Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi (may God have mercy on him), who headed the media committee in the deportees’ camp, told him: ‘Stay where you are and do not come any closer.’
‘I remember their caution—they believed we were unbelievers and polytheists, and they thought we worshipped Imam Ali; some of them were even unwilling to extend a hand to greet me. But later we formed a bond of brotherhood.’
After the initial meeting between Abtahi and the deportees had been tense, they began competing with one another to host him in their tents.”2
For Arabs and westerners alike, our knowledge of Iran is constrained by propaganda, often sectarian and imperialist in nature. Generalizations, sectarian misconceptions, and simplified understandings of Iran are common worldwide. With regards to anti-Iran stances in that era, years of war between Iran and Iraq - an attritional war fueled by the US and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to degrade both countries’ capabilities - contributed to a negative widespread Arab stance against Iran and its leadership. Nevertheless, Iranian support to Hamas and other resistance movements fighting Israel in the region has been largely unwavering, and continued contact between the leadership of Hamas and Iran has nullified the often sectarian misconceptions painted against Iran as seen above. This will be my introduction, serving as a warning against simplified understandings of Iran and its people; a slippery slope I hope to not fall into.
The importance of understanding Iran aside, the post-October 7th period is characterized by Israel realizing that it can not only genocide the Palestinians of Gaza and get away with it; it can wage a war against an entire region. Netanyahu’s allusions to a “super-Sparta” only underscore that Zionism has reached a stage where it deems itself as capable of overturning an entire region by its sheer military power. Previously, Zionism imagined itself as a “super-Athens” of sorts; a regional hub where normalization and hi-tech endeavors with the West and Arab gulf countries would cement its continued existence in the region while slowly eating up Palestinian land and subjecting the Palestinians of Gaza to a blockade and “mowing the lawn” campaigns aimed at degrading the capacity of Palestinian resistance.
US Bases in the Arab Gulf Countries:
In order to understand why Iran is bombing the Arab Gulf countries, we need to link the aforementioned disjointed facts with a little bit of history. Previously, the US used Al-Dhahran air base in Saudi Arabia intermittently and Bahrain hosted the US Navy’s Middle East Force since 1948 – the year of the Nakba and the visit of the USS Rendova in Bahrain, marking the rise of the US as a superpower in the post-WW2 global order. During the visit of the USS Rendova, Bahraini notables rejected a tea party onboard the ship in protest of the US recognizing the Zionist entity. In the contemporary timeline, the Arab Gulf countries have hosted permanent bases for US troops since Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991. Backed by fatwa3 of ulema4 like Ibn al-Bazz and Ibn Uthaymin, the sheikhs of the Gulf reasoned that Saddam’s regime was not a Muslim regime; it was, in fact, a regime marked by infidelity and ruled by a tyrant. Therefore, relying on the US to fight Saddam became religiously acceptable as it was not used against a “brotherly Muslim ruler.”
However, these bases have continued to act as central nodes in the US’s aid to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the two aggressions against Iran, comprising the Arab security umbrella of Israel and the US. In a 2017 lecture by Dr. Khaled Odetallah, he describes the history Al-Udeid base, the largest American base located in Qatar, as a central logistics hub and a forward headquarters of the US army’s CENTCOM, tracing it to the legacy of the Invasion of Iraq in 2003; the British use of al-Habanniyeh airbase during the times of the Kingdom of Iraq as a “policing measure” to quell anti-colonial uprisings across the region; and the primitive use of air warfare during Italy’s invasion of Libya in 1910-1911. In this context, the British tradition of treating air warfare as a standard counterinsurgency policing measure became the norm again due to two primary factors: the normalization of death during the genocide of Gaza, and the proliferation of cheap and disposable drone technology during our era.
How did we reach a stage where the Arab political gravity is centered in the GCC countries? The Oil Boom of the 1970s and the eruption of the Lebanese Civil War resulted in Bahrain taking Lebanon’s place as the offshore financial and economic hub of the region as the rise in Gulf capital was recycled into banking and real-estate that created a shared interest between the national bourgeoisie of Arab states and the oil-rent Gulf Arab economies.5 This, of course, is coupled with the reduced standing of Egypt in its post-Camp David period. In the 1990s and the onset of the new millennium, the UAE took Bahrain’s place to this day. This shifted to Gulf countries eventually overtaking large swathes of Egypt’s economic sectors, for example, as Adam Hanieh notes in Lineages of Revolt. Neoliberalism in the Arab region was only possible due to the inflows of Gulf capital and the proliferation of defeat of every sovereign state project. Today, Iranian strikes on GCC countries and US bases assumes a dual nature: one prong is aimed at depleting the US military infrastructure in the region, and therefore the US capacity to wage war on Iran, the other works to create political and economic pressure necessary to stop the war as it threatens an entire socio-economic paradigm built by the US and Israel since the collapse of the USSR.
12 Day War: Revisited