ABSTRACT
The Middle East has been making news for decades – mostly bad news. From Arab-Israeli wars, hostage taking, Islamic revolutionary upheavals, jihad against the Soviet Union, more wars, to the scourge of sectarian warfare, the region appears to be in ongoing turmoil. In his seminal work, Over-Stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East, Nazih Ayubi examined the range of social, political, and economic pressures facing modern states in the region, concluding that the Arab states tend to shift further towards authoritarianism to compensate for their weakness. The Iraqi invasion of Iran's southern territories in 1980 sought two distinct objectives: giving Iraq greater access to waterways to the Persian Gulf, and weakening Iran's hostile new regime. The blurred line between hard-power calculations and ideological concerns raises questions about the most appropriate conceptual framework to make sense of the Saudi behavior.
