Iran is dangerous—but Saudi Arabia is even worse
Saudi Arabia’s decision to execute Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr Al-Nimr was designed to provoke Iran into an expansion of military engagement. That’s an unsettling strategy–but true nonetheless.
The initial reaction to the kingdom’s decision was relatively minor—a few Molotov cocktails were lobbed at its embassy in Tehran. But a chain reaction of diplomatic fallout has unfolded over the past few days. Saudi Arabia severed all diplomatic relations with Iran; oil allies Bahrain, Sudan and Djibouti quickly followed suit. Perhaps more surprisingly, other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) allies like Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates opted for the less drastic measure of recalling their ambassadors.
Each act of incitement, however, including Saudi Arabia’s allegedly deliberate targeting of the Iranian embassy in Sana’a, Yemen, is further indication of Riyadh’s desperation to demonize Tehran in the court of world opinion. It is an exercise in futility, and one that casts doubt over the kingdom’s own stability and sensibility. The United States’ longtime ally is losing its iron-fisted grip over both its people and the region. This fact, coupled with Saudi Arabia’s staggering arsenal and unprincipled ruling ideology, makes the kingdom incredibly dangerous–arguably more so than infamous Axis of Evil member Iran.
Each act of incitement is an exercise in futility and one which casts doubt over the kingdom’s own stability and sensibility. Saudi Arabia contends that its provocations of Iran are a principled and urgent rejoinder to a dangerous sectarian rival. But the reality is that the kingdom seeks to distract the international community from its own significant internal weaknesses.
Saudi Arabia is in dire economic straits. In 2015, it ran a budget deficit approaching $100 billion, and it is on track for an $80 billion dollar shortfall this year. Riyadh’s decision to boost oil production to enervate competitors like Iran and shale oil producers has driven the price of crude oil down sharply, wrecking its own financial profile. (Last year at this time, a barrel of oil sold for $78; today it sells for roughly half the price.) For a country with an oil sector that comprises 75% of its budget revenues, this loss of income has a serious impact. The kingdom has announced unprecedented austerity measures, including a value-added tax, and has raised the price of gas in the country by 50%.
During the precarious negotiations of the P5+1 nuclear deal, Saudi Arabia told anyone who would listen that Iran was unreliable, untrustworthy, and inherently bellicose. Much to Riyadh’s chagrin, however, Iran has complied with major provisions of the agreement, as with its recent shipment of 25,000 pounds of enriched uranium to Russia. Last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) 12-year investigation ended with the conclusion that Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program, if it existed at all, ended in 2009, expediting the lifting of sanctions on Tehran.
While Saudi Arabia persists in its campaign to paint Iran as an aggressive, expansionist regional force, the kingdom has increased its own military expenditure considerably: $11 billion in ships, $1.3 billion in bombs and munitions last year. Riyadh’s defense budget is in fact five times that of Iran, and the GCC as a whole maintains a 10:1 ratio of military expenditure over its Persian counterpart. The accumulation of such a large arsenal in a tinderbox locale raises serious questions about who, exactly, is the main destabilizing force in the region.
The accumulation of such a large arsenal in a tinderbox leads to serious questions about who exactly is the region’s destabilizing force. Stability is the last excuse of the autocrat. The Saudis have expended tremendous resources persuading their Western allies that the steadiness of an authoritarian monarchy trumps democracy, let alone civil liberties and human rights. Yet current changes to the line of succession are challenging that narrative. A paradigm shift of leadership beckons as King Salman, the son of the kingdom’s founder, Abdulaziz Al-Saud, looks to incorporate a next generation of Saudi royalty. The king’s nephew, Mohammed bin Nayef, is the crown prince and presumptive heir to the throne. But it is Salman’s own son, Mohammed, deputy crown prince and the world’s youngest defense minister at age 30, who is seen as the country’s eminence grise and successor to his father’s title.
However, Mohammed bin Salman is widely regarded as impulsive and woefully inexperienced. The failure of Saudi policy against the Iranian-supported Houthi rebellion in Yemen lies at his feet. It is hardly a coincidence that on the same day Riyadh executed Sheik Al-Nimr, it unilaterally withdrew from a fragile ceasefire in Yemen. Western allies and regional acolytes alike nervously consider whether Saudi Arabia will be vulnerable to more campaigns of folly or even a palace coup, depending on who next ascends the leadership hierarchy.
If stability is something the Saudis market to its Western allies, it is religious access that the country promotes to the Muslim world. The House of Saud has enjoyed and exploited its moniker of Guardian of the Holy Sites. This status has tamped down criticism by many who fear being denied entry to Mecca for the annual religious obligation of the Hajj.
This is not to say discontent has been quashed in the Muslim world. Increasingly, dissenters have argued that Saudi Arabia has become a liability to Islam. Without the presumption of legitimacy from the Muslim world, the credibility of the Saudi regime stands on shifting sands. The “Vegasization” of Mecca, with its tall, garish buildings and luxury hotels dwarfing the Grand Mosque; the demolition of historically and religiously important sites in the city; and the debacle surrounding yet another stampede during the Hajj have all caused many Muslims to question whether staying silent on Saudi misfeasance is worth the consequences. Without the presumption of legitimacy from the Muslim world, the credibility of the Saudi regime stands on shifting sands.
Needless to say, the kingdom’s not-so-subtle implosion has important ramifications for the region. Interestingly, it may have even overplayed its hand with the Obama Administration. In response to the execution of Sheikh Al-Nimr and the ensuing diplomatic downward spiral, the White House has called for both sides to exercise restraint—an interestingly neutral tack when dealing with America’s professed central strategic ally and another it does not have diplomatic relations with.
This balanced response indicates a potentially major recalibration in American thinking regarding the Persian Gulf and the two major countries that straddle a geostrategic waterway. It also suggests that after 36 years, Washington is no longer interested in placing all of its regional strategic eggs in one basket, especially when stronger, more stable alternatives are readily available. The erosion of reliability and judgment displayed of late by the House of Saud exposes it as a royal family either unwilling or unable to put its house in order. And in one of the world’s most volatile regions, that is the most provocative act of all.
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There’s a good reason Americans are horrible at science
The United States of America has arguably done more to advance science in the modern world than any other country on earth. From the nimble ingenuity of Silicon Valley to the ascendency of US military technology, this nation has impeccable high-tech bona fides. Many of the world’s top engineering schools are located on American soil, and we are even hanging onto our supremacy in medical research—though our lead is slipping quickly. If countries were students, America would have an A+ in science. We would win the egghead olympiad and do pretty well in the robotics competition. We might even get a place on the Asia-dominated mathlete team if every single European country decided to bow out because, I’m guessing, Europe is too cool for something as nerdy as mathletics.
Despite America’s outstanding science credentials, the population at large is not science savvy.
Surprisingly, despite America’s outstanding science credentials, the population at large is not science savvy. About a third of Americans think that there is no sound evidence for the existence of evolution or benefits of universal vaccination. Our leaders and wanna-be leaders say that evolution is a myth, vaccinescause autism, and a snowball constitutes proof that climate change isn’t a problem. It is tempting to blame such benightedness on lack of education, but Republican hopeful Ben Carson is a Yale-educated former neurosurgeon, and he apparently believes that Darwin’s scientific muse was old Beelzebub himself. Ted Stevens, the former senator from Alaska who famously stated that the internet is “not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes,” was educated at Harvard. In fact, there is good evidence that scientific literacy is no protection against climate change denial.
Dan Kahan and colleagues published a study in 2012 showing that survey respondents with the highest level of scientific literacy were the best equipped to argue whichever position on global warming suited their personal interests. They didn’t try to understand and analyze available climate data; instead, they cherry-picked whatever information supported their preconceived notions. In the words of Vin Scully, they used statistics much like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination.
Perhaps this isn’t so surprising when you consider how “scientific literacy” was defined in Kahan’s study. The investigators used indicators designed by the National Science Foundation, asking questions such as, “Are electrons smaller than atoms?”; “Do antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria?”; or “Does the Earth go around the Sun or the Sun around the Earth?”
Anyone with a high school education should, in theory, be able to come up with the correct answers. It is disappointing that Americans fail to clear such a low bar, managing only to answer two thirds of such questions correctly. The bigger issue, however, is whether we ought to call someone who gets those questions right “scientifically literate.” Scientific literacy has little to do with memorizing information and a lot to do with a rational approach to problems.
Scientific literacy has little to do with memorizing information and a lot to do with a rational approach to problems.
There is no compelling reason to believe that knowledge of the structure of the solar system correlates with a true understanding of science. We learn that earth orbits the sun in the same way we learn that Jesus’ mother was a virgin or that we should never wear white before Memorial Day. We accept it because someone we trust told us that it’s true. I believe that time stops at the speed of light not because I have any understanding of Einstein’s math, but because my physics teacher told me so. If he had told me something straight out of a superhero comic book, like that 95% of the universe is made up of some hypothetical invisible substance called “dark matter,” I probably would have believed that too.
There are a number of problems with teaching science as a collection of facts. First, facts change. Before oxygen was discovered, the theoretical existence of phlogiston made sense. For a brief, heady moment in 1989, it looked like cold fusion (paywall) was going to change the world. In the field of medical science, “facts” are even more wobbly. For example, it has been estimated that fewer than 10% of published high profile cancer studies are reproducible (the word “reproducible” here is a euphemism for “not total poppycock”). To make things worse, there are millions of pages of lower quality medical science churned out every year, which means that only the passage of time will determine which “facts” are true and which aren’t. To get a sense of the sheer magnitude of the flood of questionable data, try searching in Google for “vitamin D” along with any disease that comes to mind. You will find a study suggesting that vitamin D may be a treatment for your disease of choice. Twenty years ago, vitamin E was the cure-all, and it took two decades for expensive and definitive studies to show that it not only didn’t prevent cancer and heart disease, but it may actually worsen heart failure. Sometime around 2025, we will start to get some reliable information about vitamin D. Meanwhile, anyone willing to cherry-pick from the flood of online “facts” can prove to themselves that vitamin D will cure their disease, that climate change isn’t really happening, and that vaccines are a menace.
Another problem with teaching scientific facts instead of scientific process is that it encourages people to dig in their heels about what they think they know. For instance, when I was growing up, it was widely accepted that stomach ulcers were caused by stress. An Australian gastroenterologist advanced a nutty theory that ulcers were caused by weird, corkscrew-shaped bacteria that hide out in the stomach lining, and by the time I entered medical school, the evidence for his theory was nigh irrefutable. Still, many doctors refused to believe it, and for a while, I did too. It wasn’t until much later, after I had been trained to think like a scientist, that I realized that I was no different from someone who rejected carbon-dating evidence about the age of dinosaur bones. I didn’t want to let go of my cherished beliefs about stress and ulcers, and so I refused to truly consider the evidence. The true moral of the story is that the Australian with the nutty theory won a Nobel Prize, but my own personal coda is that I never rejected out-of-hand a theory that challenged my preconceived notions again.
We should teach our children that science is not a collection of immutable facts.
A third problem with emphasizing information over process is that the interpretation of data requires critical thinking. For instance, did you know that people with small hands live longer than people with big hands? If this finding were published in a newspaper, the headline would read something like, “Big Hands Shorten Life Expectancy!” The correlation is, of course, spurious; women have smaller hands than men and also tend to live longer. Our schools don’t train people to be vigilant about avoiding errors such as confounding correlation and causation, however, nor do they do a good job of rooting out confirmation bias or teaching the basics of statistics and probabilities. All of this leads to the propagation of a lot of nonsense in the press and internet, and it leaves people vulnerable to the flood of “facts.”
It’s not possible for everyone—or anyone—to be sufficiently well trained in science to analyze data from multiple fields and come up with sound, independent interpretations. I spent decades in medical research, but I will never understand particle physics, and I’ve forgotten almost everything I ever learned about inorganic chemistry. It is possible, however, to learn enough about the powers and limitations of the scientific method to intelligently determine which claims made by scientists are likely to be true and which deserve skepticism. As a starting point, we could teach our children that the theories and technologies that have been tested the most times, by the largest number of independent observers, over the greatest number of years, are the most likely to be reliable. If someone is going to choose areas of science to reject, evolution and vaccines are terrible choices. We should also teach our children about the ways in which data can be misinterpreted and manipulated, and how much bias plays a role in how information is presented. Most importantly, if we want future generations to be truly scientifically literate, we should teach our children that science is not a collection of immutable facts but a method for temporarily setting aside some of our ubiquitous human frailties, our biases and irrationality, our longing to confirm our most comforting beliefs, our mental laziness. Facts can be used in the way a drunk uses a lamppost, for support. Science illuminates the universe.
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