Читать книгу Global Issues 2021 Edition - Группа авторов - Страница 40

Meanwhile, Iran’s preference to avoid a military confrontation has been evident in the care it has taken not to kill or wound any Americans in the region and by denying responsibility for the most aggressive incidents. The Trump administration also has kept its responses to those incidents below the threshold of war.

In June 2019, when Tehran acknowledged downing the unmanned U.S. surveillance drone, Iranian officials pointed out that they had refrained from shooting down an accompanying U.S. Navy P-8 maritime patrol aircraft carrying 35 crew members.⁶² After Trump cancelled retaliatory airstrikes on Iran, he launched a nonlethal cyberattack that wiped out Iran’s database for tracking ship traffic in the Persian Gulf. It was Trump’s answer to suspected Iranian attacks in May, which Iran denied, that damaged several foreign tankers in and around the Persian Gulf.

After the attack on Saudi oil facilities, Trump resisted hawkish lawmakers’ calls to retaliate militarily against Iran, mounting instead another cyberattack on Iran’s “propaganda” infrastructure, U.S. officials said. “You can do damage without killing people or blowing things up; it adds an option to the toolkit that we didn’t have before, and our willingness to use it is important,” said James Lewis, a cyber expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a centrist Washington think tank.⁶³

Iran also appears to be exhibiting similar caution with Saudi Arabia. When two explosions ripped gaping holes in an Iranian oil tanker sailing off the kingdom’s Red Sea coast on Oct. 11, 2019, the state-run National Iranian Oil Co. that owns the ship initially claimed the Saudis had fired two missiles at the tanker, raising fears of Iranian retaliation. But later, the company said the origin of the explosions was unclear.⁶⁴

Saudi Arabian Defense Ministry spokesman Turki bin Saleh al-Malki displays pieces of what he said were Iranian cruise missiles and drones recovered from a September 2019 attack that targeted the Saudi oil infrastructure. Iran has denied involvement.

FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP via Getty Images

Rouhani and Zarif now say a foreign government carried out the tanker attack, but they have stopped short of naming the government. “All this shows that Iran wants to de-escalate the tension,” said Imad K. Harb, the head of research at the Arab Center, an independent Washington think tank that focuses on Middle East issues.⁶⁵

Apparently, Saudi Arabia—which has been sobered by Trump’s lack of military response to the attack on its oil facilities—also wants to reduce tensions. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, reportedly asked Iraq’s prime minister to see if Iran’s leaders would be willing to de-escalate tensions.⁶⁶ “The political and peaceful solution is much better than the military one,” Prince Mohammed told CBS’ “60 Minutes” in September 2019.⁶⁷

Some Arab affairs analysts say the best way to reduce regional tensions is for Iran and Saudi Arabia to negotiate maritime security in the Persian Gulf and an end to the war in Yemen. One aspect of that conflict appeared to be resolved in November, when separatists in Southern Yemen, backed by the United Arab Emirates, signed a peace agreement with the ousted Saudi-backed Yemeni government, which had made the southern port city of Aden its interim seat. In August, the separatists seized Aden in a move that split the Saudi-led Arab coalition fighting the Houthis and opened a fresh front in Yemen’s civil war. Prince Mohammed said the peace agreement, which gives the separatists and other southern groups half the seats in any new Yemeni cabinet, opens the way for a broader peace accord between the Saudi-backed government and the Houthis.⁶⁸

But in the wake of the September attack on the kingdom’s oil facilities, distrust remains a major hurdle to any Saudi-Iranian reconciliation. “Efforts at de-escalation must emanate from the party that began the escalation and launched attacks, not the kingdom,” an official Saudi statement said.