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But comparison to the short-lived flowering of protests 40 years ago
in Czechoslovakia is turning out to be apt in another way. For all the
attention the Mideast protests have received, their most notable
impact on the region thus far hasn't been an upswell of democracy. It
has been a dramatic spike in tensions between two geopolitical titans,
Iran and Saudi Arabia.
This new Middle East cold war comes complete with its own spy-
versus-spy intrigues, disinformation campaigns, shadowy proxy
forces, supercharged state rhetoric—and very high stakes.
"The cold war is a reality," says one senior Saudi official. "Iran is
looking to expand its influence. This instability over the last few
months means that we don't have the luxury of sitting back and
watching events unfold."
On March 14, the Saudis rolled tanks and troops across a causeway
into the island kingdom of Bahrain. The ruling family there, long a
close Saudi ally, appealed for assistance in dealing with increasingly
large protests. Iran soon rattled its own sabers. Iranian
parliamentarian Ruhollah Hosseinian urged the Islamic Republic to
put its military forces on high alert, reported the website for Press
TV, the state-run English-language news agency. "I believe that the
Iranian government should not be reluctant to prepare the country's
military forces at a time that Saudi Arabia has dispatched its troops to
Bahrain," he was quoted as saying.
The intensified wrangling across the Persian—or, as the Saudis insist,
the Arabian—Gulf has strained relations between the U.S. and
important Arab allies, helped to push oil prices into triple digits and
tempered U.S. support for some of the popular democracy
movements in the Arab world. Indeed, the first casualty of the Gulf
showdown has been two of the liveliest democracy movements in
countries right on the fault line, Bahrain and the turbulent frontier
state of Yemen. But many worry that the toll could wind up much

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