Ibrahim al-Marashi and Tanya Goudsouzian
From Riyadh to Abu Dhabi, from Baghdad to Beirut, previously contained disputes now collide, creating a sprawling theatre of war that threatens to envelop the entire region. For the first time, the Gulf states are fully drawn in and this conflagration, ignited by US and Israeli strikes on Iran and Tehran’s sweeping retaliatory campaigns, could become the Middle East’s own Great War in which multiple conflicts converge and the regional order is irreversibly reconfigured.
To understand how unprecedented this is, it helps to look back. The region’s conflicts in the 20th century, though brutal, were far more conventional. The Arab-Israeli wars between 1948 and 1973 saw Egypt, Jordan and Syria facing off against Israel in largely state-on-state combat, with clear frontlines and armies. The Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) unfolded as a gruelling, attritional struggle, marked by trench warfare, mass casualties and prolonged stalemate, emerging as the longest conventional war in the 20thcentury. Iran’s then newly formed Islamic Republic fought that war alone, with no international allies, while the USSR, the US and France, along with all the Gulf states aided Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Later, the Gulf Wars of 1991 and 2003 pitted Iraq against the US-led coalitions, relying on firepower and technologically advanced militaries. These conflicts were primarily battles between nation-states with defined combatants.
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