Reuters: Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah’s disdain for Iran leaps from U.S. embassy cables. “May God prevent us from falling victim to their evil,” he told U.S. officials, according to a cable released by WikiLeaks. According to another, he told his own diplomats he wanted Washington to “cut off the head of the snake”.
On the other side of the Gulf, Iran’s contempt for Saudi Arabia crackles through a report on its hardline Mashregh website. The kingdom’s ruling family, it said, was “drowning in corruption and prostitutes”.
Into this toxic environment steps Iran’s newly inaugurated President Hassan Rouhani, promising to improve what may well be the single most venomous and destructive relationship in the entire Middle East.
It is almost impossible to overstate the hatred between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shi’ite Iran, which has fuelled a decade of violence across the region.
In Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, the two sides back sectarian proxy forces that are either at daggers drawn or openly at war in conflicts killing thousands each month.
In Syria, each accuses the other of responsibility for a bloodbath, with Iran supporting President Bashar al-Assad and Saudi Arabia funding the rebels trying to overthrow him. In Iraq, sectarian violence is at its worst since 2008.
Riyadh accuses Tehran of fomenting trouble in Bahrain and even Saudi Arabia itself. Tehran accuses Riyadh of plotting its destruction with Washington.
Nevertheless, Rouhani, a comparative moderate after the firebrand Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, says he wants to make friends with Saudi Arabia. Encouragingly, he brings personal experience negotiating with Riyadh.
“God willing, I hope that we will have very good relations with neighbors, particularly with Saudi Arabia during the next government,” Rouhani said at a June press conference.
Still, few believe he can draw the poison out of the Cold War-style rivalry at the heart of the Middle East.
COCA-COLA VS. PEPSI
Both countries have vested interests in talking to each other: Saudi Arabia wants Iran to end what it sees as meddling in Arab countries – supporting Shi’ites or their allies in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain, Yemen and Saudi Arabia itself.
Tehran wants Riyadh to stop urging military action against its atomic sites and helping Western sanctions by increasing oil supplies to make up for embargoed Iranian crude.
Both Rouhani and King Abdullah have shown willingness to make peace in the past.
As head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council in 1998, Rouhani sat up all night with Abdullah’s late brother, the former interior minister Prince Nayef, to negotiate a security agreement with the kingdom after years of friction.
In signing that deal, King Abdullah chose to overlook Saudi and U.S. suspicions that Tehran was behind the 1996 bombing of an American barracks in the Saudi city of al-Khobar. Iran put aside memories of the 1987 Muslim pilgrimage, when hundreds of its pilgrims were killed in clashes with Saudi security forces.
“King Abdullah has known Rouhani for some time. I think they have a decent relationship. Much better than his relationship with Ahmadinejad. They will have some ability to communicate with a degree of respect,” said Robert Jordan, U.S. ambassador to Riyadh from 2001-03.
But while that history may indicate more of an openness on both sides to cooperation, analysts and regional officials and diplomats see little chance of rapprochement.
