The decisions that Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi moved swiftly to take as soon as the attack on the Saudi East-West pipeline occurred can mean only one thing: that he is a man who feels the responsibility of his position and acts accordingly.
He moved to issue a decision removing a number of security officers in Maysan governorate, from which the attacking drones were launched. The decision came after the site from which the drones had been launched was identified, and it covered a number of the security officers at that very site.
This was not the only decision. Alongside it came another, to close three border crossings between Iraq and Iran. This was done because it was thought that the drones that attacked the Saudi pipeline, which links Jubail in the far east on the Arabian Gulf with Yanbu in the far west on the Red Sea, might have come through those three crossings.
That decision, too, reflected a sense of responsibility at the Iraqi national level, because Iraq is an independent country with sovereignty, and because this requires that nothing enter through its border crossings, drones or otherwise, that could harm Iraqis or the neighboring territory of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Then, alongside the two decisions, came a third: the opening of an investigation to determine where the drones that attacked the pipeline came from, how they were launched, precisely from which site, and who launched them. These are all questions that certainly have answers, but the problem is that the investigator does not yet know them. This is what the Iraqi prime minister called for, in an effort to reach the truth.
Nothing is stranger than Iran formally requesting to take part in the investigation, and the Iraqi authorities agreeing to it. In agreeing to this strange request, they must surely have been pointing toward Iran and saying, in effect: you kill the victim and then walk in his funeral procession.
I do not want anyone to say that using this phrase amounts to accusing Iran without evidence. The truth is that evidence is available, and it is found in what forensic science tells us about crimes committed at the individual level, where the saying goes: look for whoever benefits from the crime.
By this logic, there is no greater beneficiary of the attacks on the pipeline than Iran. Of course, the matter is not without other beneficiaries, but Iran's conduct in the region makes it the beneficiary of the attacks and places responsibility for their occurrence at its door, or makes it the number-one beneficiary, if other beneficiaries or other benefiting parties may be said to exist alongside it.
And if we want stronger evidence that a particular party is the beneficiary behind the attacks, there is no stronger evidence than the coincidence of the Houthi attacks from Yemen in the south with the drone attacks from Iraq in the north. The hand driving both is one and the same. The militia that launched the drones from the Land of the Two Rivers was nothing more than an instrument that was used, and the Houthi group was nothing more than another instrument.
I have confidence in the seriousness of the Iraqi prime minister, and the basis for that confidence is that from his first day in office he showed a serious desire regarding two matters: first, preventing neighboring states from being targeted from Iraqi territory; second, seeking to have the principle of exclusive state control over weapons applied in his country, so that his government alone possesses and uses weapons, as any normal government does in any normal country.
Two groups have responded to him on the issue of exclusive state control over weapons: the Sadrist movement and the Imam Ali Brigades. There is no alternative to the remaining groups following them, because the continued presence of weapons in the hands of one or more groups outside the state's control is an abnormal situation that cannot stand and cannot continue, whether it lasts for a short time or a long one. But more important is that al-Zaidi should find those who will support his desire from within Iraq, among ordinary Iraqis, and, in parallel, from outside Iraq, among Arab governments that have an interest in Baghdad freeing itself from the abnormal Iranian political influence within it.
The Saudi government must surely have shown considerable political wisdom by giving the Iraqi prime minister enough time to deal with the matter, and then by not allowing any party to draw it into a battle whose timing Riyadh does not determine for itself.
As for the Houthi group, if it has won a round by reaching Bab al-Mandab, war is fought in rounds, not in a single round. It has reached there before and then withdrawn, and it knows that its fate will ultimately be determined by the Yemeni people themselves, who will not accept that a group should rise above a state with a history like Yemen's. The people of Yemen will take the matter into their own hands, and if this does not happen tomorrow, it will happen the day after. A group will not triumph over a state, because that is the lesson of history, which spares no country, and there is no difference here between whether that country is Iraq or Yemen.
