Across the Middle East today there is taking place a huge struggle for hegemony between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which is also a struggle (about 1400 years old) between the Sunni and the Shi’a versions of Islam. Outside powers continue to be involved, including the United States, Russia and India. The U.S., while still involved politically and militarily, plays a curious role in the basic hegemonic struggle. It is supposedly allied with Saudi Arabia, while the Iranian regime continues to regard the U.S. as “the Great Satan”. I cannot here pursue the paradoxical fact that the alleged ally supports anti-American Sunni Islamists throughout the world (except for those who directly threaten the Saudi state, like al-Qaida and ISIS). At the same time the U.S. and Iran are surreptitiously allied in Iraq and Syria by supporting in both countries Shi’a governments by bombing their Sunni enemies. I am not suggesting that religion is only used to legitimate hard-nosed power politics—there are real differences between the two principal versions of Islam, as there were between Catholics and Protestants during the wars of religion in Europe; there are people whose faith is seriously attached to the religious differences between the two sides. Yet the two antagonistic regimes in the Middle East have a lot in common. The Saudi government supports and is supported by a rigorous Sunni fundamentalism deriving from the 18th-century teaching of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. The Iranian government represents a Shi’a fundamentalism of more recent vintage, which became more radical under the oppressive regime of the Shah. Both states claim to be Islamic, both are ruled by different but essentially similar forms if sharia law. They are also similar in the atrocities they routinely commit.
Some atrocities are routinely committed domestically, some (directly or indirectly) abroad. In 2013, 85% of executions worldwide were inflicted in Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Iran had 369 executions, Saudi Arabia 79. (The US is also on the high list, at 39 executions its closest neighbor on this list is Somalia, at 34. Nice company we keep!) In Saudi Arabia executions are by beheading, usually in public places. They are commonly performed by professional executioners, who cut off the head by a swift stroke of a sword. Under Islamic law the relatives of the murder victim can accept “blood money” compensation or exercise their right to execute the murderer themselves; since they mostly don’t have expertise of the professional they hack away until the head falls away, which is much slower and much more painful. Only adulterers, male or female, are executed by stoning (incidentally, the same penalty is commanded in the Hebrew Bible). The death penalty is imposed for a long list of crimes—not only murder and rape, but apostasy, “false prophesy”, homosexuality and witchcraft. Capital punishment is inflicted in Iran for a very similar list of crimes, but the method of execution is generally hanging. It has been reported that the ropes on Iranian gallows don’t have strong knots which instantly break the neck, so that death is by slow strangulation. Both countries run prisons notorious for torture.
As to atrocities committed abroad, Iranian secret services have been credited for assassinations abroad, such as the notorious massacre at a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. Saudi Arabia has efficient secret services, but I have not read about assassinations outside the country. However, the Wahhabi religious establishment conducts Islamic schools throughout the world that train imams preaching doctrines very similar to those proclaimed by Sunni terrorists (ironically, some of which seek to overthrow the Saudi monarchy). Religious freedom is zero in either country. Irony abounds: The Saudi government supports a center for interreligious dialogue in Vienna (there have been strong calls in Austria for the place to be shut down). Also, the Saudi ambassador to France attended the huge demonstration in Paris that protested the murder of the staff of the newspaper Charlie Hebdo and customers of a kosher supermarket—close to the date when a journalist received the first weekly brutal flogging to which he was sentenced for raising questions about the relation of the Saudi state and the Wahhabi establishment. (What is an Arabic synonym for chutzpah?)
Casting aside the surgical mask of social-scientific value objectivity, let me simply sum up by saying that the regimes in Saudi Arabia and in Iran are roughly equal in their degree of barbarity. [I will stipulate that ISIS is worse than either.]
President Obama seems eager to make some sort of deal with Tehran, but so far not even he has suggested that this would lead to a cordial alliance. But there are moral questions for U.S. foreign policy with regard to Saudi Arabia. There are some tensions between Washington and Riyadh, because the Saudis are nervous about a possible U.S. rapprochement with Iran and annoyed that the U.S. still refuses to move against the Assad regime (a sort of Shi’a franchise), although U.S. bombing of Assad’s enemies in Syria helps him. (I imagine Bashar al-Assad muttering to himself what surely must be an ancient Arabic proverb – “He who bombs my enemies is my friend”.) Any government which claims certain values as guides for its actions must face the fact that there will be cases where political realities necessitate violations of these values. It begins with the etiquette of international relations: It is the duty of a diplomat, if necessary, to engage in polite conversations while having tea with tyrants. The necessity has been formulated by the theory of raison d’etat (or national interest), which was defined in the early 17th century by an advisor to Cardinal Richelieu, the most powerful French minister at the time, as “a mean between what conscience permits and affairs require”. We must assume that Richelieu had a Catholic conscience. Yet he took the side of the Protestant side in the Thirty Years War, because it was in the national interest of France to weaken the power of the Holy Roman Emperor—the Protestants were useful to this purpose. Machiavelli summed up the moral dilemma of raison d’etat when he wrote that a ruler must be willing to risk the eternal salvation of his soul by serving the interest of his state. I think that this is a recurring reality of the actions of states. But the American state, born of a unique synthesis of the Puritan “city upon a hill” and the Enlightenment’s “new order of the centuries”, has a special problem in this matter. Ruthless national interest as the sole basis of foreign policy is repugnant to the national conscience, and since the United States is a democracy, this conscience must be reckoned with: Even if a particular policy is based on clear interests, there had better be some moral justification for it, if it is to be acceptable to the electorate.
During World War II Churchill was asked how, life-long foe of Communism that he was, he could be an ally of Stalin. He replied “I would make an alliance with the devil in order to defeat Hitler”. Sometimes terrible decisions must be made. For whatever historical reasons (perhaps the need to overcome the lawlessness of the frontier?), Americans have a particular faith in the rule of law. They are enthusiastic legislators (every aspect of life must be regulated by legal rules) and litigators (at the slightest provocation they go to court). Every self-respecting profession must have a code of ethics, every club meeting must follow Robert’s Rules of Order. Correct process replaces common sense and moral judgment. A number of American colleges have instituted rules by which every move in a sexual encounter must be explicitly agreed to by each partner (…may I touch your breast now? …may I unzip your trousers?). We now know that even American torturers want detailed legal rules for each of their practices ( …waterboarding is permissible if the following eight conditions prevail…). Thus legal codification is to mitigate the terror of decision. At the end of the day, this is a futile exercise. Some decisions have to be made without explicit rules. There are both religious and secular ways to fortify the will to make such a leap into the dark. One may trust God or one’s lonely conscience—whether to make an erotic move, to suppress one’s revulsion as one sips tea with the tyrant, or to force a captive terrorist to tell where the ticking atomic weapon is hidden.