Why saudi arabia perceives iran as a threat

The unstable state of power stabilised in 2003 following the Iraq war, and after that, the US army distanced itself from the region’s woes. (Bahgat 421-423) This paper will look at the reasons as to why Saudi Arabia sees Iran as a threat to its security, peace, and stability. The Islamic republic animus directed at Saudi Arabia is majorly due to a lot of factors that include historical factors, different ideologies, and geopolitical factors as well. In 1943, Ayatollah Khomeini released his first political polemic which he named the unveiling of secrets. It is in this book that he clearly states his antagonist stand with the issue of Iranian Shi’a reformers; he achieves the intended effect by comparing them to savages.

(Kroenig 76) And for Iran’s mullahs, Saudi Arabia is the recent manifestation of the same Saudi–Wahhabi forces which, in the early nineteenth century, repeatedly attacked the Shi’a holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, destroying shrines dedicated to imams Ali and Hussein, two of Shiism’s most revered figures, and killing thousands. (Kroenig 76). Consequently, for Iran’s clerical class, the very existence of the modern Saudi state is an affront to the Khomeinist ideal (Kroenig 76). Just as religion foster the ideological foundation of the Islamic Republic, so have Iran’s clerics long coveted the cradle of Islam, control of which would bolster their legitimacy as well as the currency of Khomeini’s vision for a transnational Shi’a theocracy. (Dassa 111-118) As Iran expert Vali Nasr notes, Khomeini viewed ‘control of the [Saudi] kingdom as an essential stepping-stone to his goal of claiming Muslim world leadership for himself and his movement.

Following the Iran-backed Houthi rebels’ 2014 capture of Yemen’s capital, Alireza Zakani, a confidant of the Supreme Leader, boasted that ‘three Arab capitals [Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad] have already fallen into Iran’s hands and belong to the Iranian Islamic Revolution, and Sana’a is the fourth’. (Mabon) For Riyadh, Iranian penetration into Yemen, a country that former US deputy national security advisor Juan Zarate described as the Arabian Peninsula’s ‘soft underbelly,’ was the last straw. Saudi Arabia had already fought the Houthi militias to a stalemate in 2009–10. (Shfrinson 167-201) They were a formidable opponent then; how much stronger would they be equipped with Iranian arms and trained by Hezbollah? The thought of allowing the Lebanese militia, whose capabilities exceed those of most Arab armies and which, as Iran’s most important instrument of regional power projection, moulded both Iraq’s PMUs and Syria’s Shi’a militias into deadly fighting forces, to transform the Houthis into a new Hezbollah on the kingdom’s southern border was intolerable.

Saudi Arabia’s leaders decided to act to preempt this outcome. The Saudi Arabia way of worship is slightly flexible although the values are pretty much the same. (Dassa 111-118) Iran holds a great command of the Shia community which is a part of the Islamic family, and a majority of its nationals follow the same. This is a branch of Muslim sort of, and there are two sides to it, the other being majorly in Saudi Arabia. The Sunni are the other half of the people following the Islamic faith, and they can be found in Saudi Arabia which is technically within the strongholds of another community. (Zuhur, 112) These two communities have never seen eye to eye even though they practice the same faith and so the confrontation still exists.