This famous line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1798 poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" pretty much sums up the Arabian Peninsula: while it is gifted with a fabulous hydrocarbon endowment worth trillions of dollars, it has almost no water and relies on nearly 450 desalination plants to stop everyone from going thirsty.
About 100 million people live in the countries belonging to the Gulf Cooperation Council – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman – all now under Iranian attack. Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE are, for all practical purposes, completely dependent on the desalination plants, particularly for metropolises such as Dubai. Saudi Arabia, and especially its capital, Riyadh, also relies on them.
Take the Jubail desalination plant, located on the Persian Gulf coast of Saudi Arabia. It supplies Riyadh, via a roughly 500-kilometre-long pipeline system, with more than 90 per cent of its drinking water. If this plant, its pipelines, or associated power infrastructure were seriously damaged or destroyed, Riyadh would have to evacuate within a week.
Any direct attack on them by Iran would be considered a massive escalation, so perhaps it is a step too far for Tehran. Still, they don’t have many other options to prevail. Its only options are to hunker down, in the hope that a long-lasting conflict becomes economically too painful for its enemies, or go after so-called soft targets like energy sites, airports and water installations. Let’s hope the Islamic Republic, feeling cornered and fighting for its survival, doesn’t take this last step because, while oil is essential, water is irreplaceable.
So far, "Operation Epic Fury" has been a stunning aerial success, but have Trump and America the willpower and the military power to fight a prolonged war against a desperate regime fighting for its very survival? Or will they, after having bombed the place back into the stone-age, pull out again, as they did in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan?
