What Would a Saudi-Iran War Look Like? Don’t look now, but it is already here

• By Thomas E. Ricks
• July 26, 2016 | http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/07/26/what-would-a-saudi-iran-war-look-like-dont-look-now-but-it-is-already-here-2/

Best Defense is in summer reruns. Here is an item that originally ran on January 11, 2016.
By Michael Knights
Best Defense guest columnist
When asked to address the question of what a Saudi-Iran war would look like, my first instinct is to ask the reader to look around because it is already happening. As the futurist William Gibson noted, “the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Already, Saudi Arabia and Iran are killing each other’s proxies, and indirectly are killing each other’s advisors and troops, in Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia’s Shiite Eastern Province.
The future is likely to look similar. The existing pattern will intensify, eventually spill over in a short, sharp direct clash, and then sink back down again to the level of proxy wars in other people’s territories.