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The Folly of Using War to “Send a Message”

If the Saudis wanted to "send a message" that their new leadership is foolish and eager to do stupid and costly things, they have succeeded.
Mazrak Camp, north-west Yemen

This line from Jeremy Bowen’s report on Yemen for the BBC stood out to me:

But for Saudi Arabia, sending a message to Iran is at least as important as trying to bend the Houthis to their will.

I don’t doubt that the Saudis want to “send a message” to Iran that they are hostile to Iranian influence, but it’s not clear how launching a reckless military intervention in a country where Iran had minimal influence was going to deliver the message they wanted sent. The war on Yemen hasn’t done any harm to Iran, whose influence there has been grossly exaggerated from the start, and the war has given Iran an occasion to denounce the Saudis for a policy in Yemen that has had genuinely appalling effects. If the Saudis wanted to “send a message” that their new leadership is foolish and eager to do stupid and costly things, they have succeeded. If the war was supposed to intimidate Iran’s government, I’m not sure how fighting a war that highlights Saudi incompetence and limitations accomplishes that.

Many governments make the mistake of thinking that they can “send a message” to their rivals by offering a show of “strength,” but the message that is received is almost always not the one that the government intended to send. In many cases, the “message” that the rival receives is far closer to the opposite of the “message” the government’s leadership wanted to convey. Instead of impressing them with a show of “strength,” the government demonstrates its poor judgment and short-sightedness. Instead of deterring the rival from hostile acts, the supposed show of “strength” ends up inviting more of them. Using war to “send a message” to a rival state is foolish, and it frequently comes back to haunt the government that tries it.

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