Saturday, November 4, was an extraordinary day: it witnessed three developments which, taken together, suggest a major escalation in the armed conflict in West Asia is in the offing, even as the region is already groaning under the violence of bloody wars in Syria, Yemen and Iraq, in which half a million people have been killed and several million have been displaced.
Saudi Arabia is at the heart of all these developments. First, in a dramatic coup within the royal family, engineered by King Salman and his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 11 princes have been detained, along with