Page 479 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

476 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

acknowledged this fact by maintaining at Tehran their largest embassy in the
Middle East, twice as large in terms of personnel as the embassies at Ankara
and Cairo, and with the biggest contingent of KGB and GRU officers. While
the latter may have played little part in precipitating the collapse of the

governmental authority in Persia in the latter part of 1978, there can be no
doubt of the large benefits the Russians may expect to derive from that
collapse, and conversely, of the grim harvest of troubles the Western world

may expect to reap in consequence. The Russians are just as well placed to
bring pressure to bear upon the Gulf region from its southern approaches, their
obvious base of operations being Aden and the Hadramaut. From there they
can proceed, under cover of reactivating the guerrilla war in Dhufar, to sow the

seeds of subversion in a wide arc through Oman to the shores of the Gulf. It is a
most promising line of advance, especially as the Russians now have the naval
and air power to support a campaign of this nature fought by their South

Yemeni auxiliaries. They may equally elect to initiate or encourage seditious
activities, or soi-disant ‘national liberation movements’, within the Gulf states,
where radical political elements of all shades, including Marxist-Leninist, are
to be found, not least among the extremist factions in the Palestinian emigre
communities. The clandestine running of arms to dissidents to raise rebellions

has been a commonplace of political life in eastern Arabia since the Second
World War, and there is no reason why the Russians should be any less
successful at the activity than the Saudis, Iraqis, Egyptians and South

Yemenis have been. Should the Russians decide to intervene more forcefully in
any insurrection which may occur in one of the Gulf states, they have at their
disposal a highly effective instrument, viz. naval power, the means by which
dominion over Arabia’s coasts and seas has been asserted and sustained down

the centuries.
paraphrasing Palmerstom ^Russia^101* S P°Sltion in the summer of 1979 by
Arabiaand Persia-' a pursues the same system of strategy against
the Gulf and to t’ake h TI T™ the Red Sea and wants to do the same down
present tke shuat onl both *rabla and Persia on each of their flanks.’ Yet to

one thing the actual 1,SU° KeraJ terms would be an over-simplification. For
*
inscrutable and an” * °f the S°Viet Union toward" the Gulf ™
a host of considers r temr? t0 d‘v‘ne them depends upon the interpretation of
coXxion whh A K°nS,?e 8feater Part 0{ which have little or no direct
dte nronresTn?R r ia an uthe Gulf For another’ “ would be wrong to view

vears as a eh ,ussla ,n the Middle East over the past sixty, or even thirty,
h-res r ti ^hr°nlcle of uninterrupted successes, or as the preordained and
is e u ment of some grand design. The necessity to compress histori-
materia in an endeavour to achieve succinctness in the present narrative

may ave pro uced an impression of the ineluctability of this progress; but
such an impression would be a misleading one. While there is undoubtedly a
consistent central theme in Soviet policy towards the region, the Soviet Union