Tag: Saudi Arabia

Khouri on Arab security services and foreign policy

A very cautiously written, but important column by Rami Khouri: When Arab security chiefs conduct foreign policy

Two intriguing meetings took place this past week in the Arab world. In Egypt, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with the intelligence services directors of four Arab states – Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Just days later, Arab heads of state met in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for their annual Arab League summit.
Which of the two meetings was more significant and signaled the tone, content, and direction of Arab state policies? Was this a natural interplay between three separate factors – United States foreign policy, Arab security systems, and Arab leaderships? Or did the three converge into a single trend, where US foreign policy blended with Arab security policy? 
The Arab summit was a routine event that reissued a historic, but five-year-old peace offer to Israel. Rice’s meeting with the intelligence chiefs was a novelty that deserves more scrutiny, for both its current meaning and for its future implications. 
Whatever the nature of Rice’s meeting with the Arab intelligence chiefs, it seems like the sort of noteworthy development that Arab governments should explain to their own Arab citizens. As the Iraq situation shows with gruesome daily regularity, security is a core imperative for Arab citizens and their states. Citizens need to know that they can leave their homes in the morning and have a good chance of returning alive at night. States, societies, and governments need to know that theirs are orderly, secure, stable communities that can aspire to achieving their full potential and even some prosperity.

Continue reading Khouri on Arab security services and foreign policy

New Saudi succession rules: there’s a regime that has it together

As my friend Hugh Miles notes in this Telegraph piece, something of a landmark constitutional change has taken place in Saudi Arabia:

Saudi Arabia has significantly reduced the powers of its absolute monarchy by quietly removing the king’s authority to choose his own successor.

This landmark constitutional reform, enacted by royal order last October but only disclosed this week, fundamentally changes the way the desert kingdom – which controls 25 per cent of the world’s oil – is governed.

Until now, the king alone has selected his successor, known as the crown prince, from among the sons and grandsons of King Abdul-Aziz, the founding leader of Saudi Arabia, better known as Ibn Saud.

In future, a committee consisting of senior members of the royal family, called the Bay’ah Council, will vote for the crown prince from three candidates named by the king.

The council is empowered to reject the king’s choice and can even impose a crown prince against the monarch’s will. It can also declare the king or crown prince incapable of ruling.

The nitty gritty of the changes can be found here and an explanation by Prince Turki al-Faisal was delivered at St. Antony’s College last week.

What’s interesting about this is that there now seems a clear succession mechanism — one of course that is still extremely restricted and undemocratic, but that has the advantage of being clear. Contrast that with the utter confusion over Egypt’s own succession system — the refusal of President Mubarak to appoint a vice-president in 25 years and the uncertainty about whether Gamal Mubarak, Omar Suleiman, or someone else altogether will succeed Mubarak.

I usually hate to praise the Saudis, but here as in so many other respects, they’re doing things a lot more professionally than the Egyptians. Just consider how Saudi Arabia has completely eclipsed Egypt as a regional mediator, and how it actually seems to have a foreign policy of its own. There’s been much grumbling about this in the Egyptian press lately. Salama Ahmed Salama, one of the most respected establishment columnists, recently noted in a column on Iran that:

During the Cold War, the Arabs were not the sheep blindly following US policy that they have become. They developed independent foreign policies that were based on Arab interests. Today, the Arabs’ problems are growing and reveal an total inability to manage their internal problems. The Arabs are in such an impasse that they are accusing Iran of having expansionist ambitions.

. . .

Arab policies, notably the foreign policy of Egypt, seems to be magnetically attracted to the US. This is evident from the confusion of Egyptian diplomacy. [Egypt] accused Iran of being behind the murder of its ambassador, Ehab al-Sherif, in Baghdad. Then, it denied that it had made these accusations only to later withdraw that denial — even though it is obvious that it was Sunni followers of al-Zarqawi who were behind the assassination.

The rest of the column (from about a week ago) went on to suggest that closer Arab relations with Iran would be positive, if only to shake off the “vicious circle of American hegemony over the region.” But even if there were criticism of Arab states, it was really aimed at Egypt. One only needs to take at the recent Saudi initiatives to deal directly with the Iranians to see that Saudi policy is a lot more independent. The conclusion: Saudi may be a pretty twisted country, but its regime has its act together. You can’t really say that about Egypt.

I was talking about this phenomenon with an Egyptian friend a couple of nights ago and he despaired: before the 1952 Free Officers’ coup, he said, Egypt was a country with money and clout. By 1969 Nasser had spent it all. We’ve been beggars ever since.

Saddam is dead, long live SADDAM

I have an op-ed about US strategy in the Middle East and the growing Sunni-Shia divide over at TomPaine.com. Let me know what you think.

Later today I will post a hyperlinked version here.

Update: The New Saddam

Making a renewed appearance in the State of the Union address this year was Iran. Bush set out an agenda that puts the U.S. on a path of confrontation with Iran—the latest installment in the haphazard collection of ideological fads that passes as Middle East policy in Washington these days.

Having made a mess of Iraq, continuing to refuse to play a constructive and even-handed role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and having gotten bored with democracy promotion, the Bush administration now appears to be fanning the flames of sectarian strife region-wide. Since September 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior administration officials have made trips to the Middle East to rally the support of what Rice has described as the “moderate mainstream� Arab states against Iran. This group has now been formalized as the “GCC + 2,� meaning the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Oman) as well as Egypt and Jordan.

I suggest that this new coalition be renamed to something less technocratic: the Sunni Arab-Dominated Dictatorships Against the Mullahs, or SADDAM. I have to confess I was inspired by historical precedent. In the 1980s, some of you may remember, there was another Saddam who proved rather useful against Iran. Saddam invaded Iran without provocation, sparking an eight-year-long war that was one of the 20th century’s deadliest. Along the way, the U.S. and the Arab states listed above provided much in funding, weapons and turning a blind eye when Saddam got carried away and used chemical weapons against Kurds (it did not raise that much of a fuss when he used them against Iranians, either).
Continue reading Saddam is dead, long live SADDAM

HRW: Saudi persecuting Ahmadis

HRW has sent an open letter to King Abdullah of “mainstream moderate” Saudi Arabia urging to put an end to a campaign of persecution against Ahmadis:

Your Majesty,

We write to urge you to put an immediate end to Saudi Arabias nationwide campaign to round up followers of the Ahmadi faith who have committed no crime. The campaign appears organized and designed to detain and deport all Ahmadis in Saudi Arabia because of their religious belief.

Saudi Arabia has so far arrested 56 non-Saudi followers of the Ahmadi faith, including infants and young children, and deported at least 8 to India and Pakistan. All of those arrested face deportation as soon as a flight becomes available. All but two are legally in the country, mostly long-term residents of Saudi Arabia, and have not been charged with a crime. Many other Ahmadis in Saudi Arabia, a small community of foreign workers in the country primarily from India and Pakistan, are reportedly in hiding or have left the country voluntarily for their own safety.

WaPo: “Lost in the Middle East”

The Washington Post takes the time to point the obvious and gets in some good old fashioned Hozz-bashing:

The new strategy explains a series of reversals of U.S. policy that otherwise would be baffling. In addition to embracing the Middle East peacemaker role that it has shunned for six years, the administration has decided to seek $98 million in funding for Palestinian security forces — the same forces it rightly condemned in the past as hopelessly corrupt and compromised by involvement in terrorism. Those forces haven’t changed, but since they are nominally loyal to “mainstream” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and serve as a check on the power of the “extremist” Hamas, they are on the right side of Ms. Rice’s new divide.

So is Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a thuggish autocrat who was on the wrong side of Ms. Rice’s previous Mideast divide between pro-democracy forces and defenders of the illiberal status quo. In past visits to Cairo, Ms. Rice sparred with Mr. Mubarak’s foreign minister over the imprisonment of democratic opposition leaders such as Ayman Nour and the failure to fulfill promises of political reform. On Monday, she opened her Cairo news conference by declaring that “the relationship with Egypt is an important strategic relationship, one that we value greatly.” There was no mention of Mr. Nour or democracy.

They should also mention that this US egging on of a Sunni-Shia conflict is the most irresponsible thing since… well, since the invasion of Iraq. My feeling is that while some Arab governments are at least partly encouraging this worldview to justify their backing of US policy — see Sandmonkey’s reflections on anti-Shia diatribes in the Egyptian press lately — the main force behind this is the Bush administration, which against all common sense seems bent on escalating tensions with Iran. If some kind of regional conflict pitting Shia against Sunnis emerges, than the US will bear a great deal of the responsibility for having started it, and this will not be forgotten by the region’s inhabitants.

Over the last five years, major Arab states like Saudi Arabia and Egypt had made some overtures to Iran and both sides were keen to improve relations. Trade with Iran has also increased over the last few years. Now talks of reopening embassies are over.

This is not dismiss the problem posed by Iran’s nuclear program, but between Iran having nuclear weapons and a region-wide second fitna, I know what I’d choose.

The plot thickens…

Two must-reads if you’re following the al-Turki / Obaid story, from the WSJ and the Washington Times.

From the first:

Despite the continuing high oil prices, for once U.S. difficulties with Saudi Arabia do not appear to be dominated by immediate energy concerns. The main challenge appears to be to steer Riyadh between a near holy confrontation with Shia Iran and an equally destabilizing alliance with radical Sunnis. As an experienced and well-liked envoy, Prince Turki will be hard to replace.

One early danger is that the kingdom is close to acquiring nuclear weapons rather than continuing to rely on the longstanding security guarantees and understanding of successive administrations in Washington. Last month a Saudi official privately warned the kingdom would not tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran. Pakistan (for bombs) and perhaps North Korea (for rockets) are potential allies. There are already credible reports of facilities in the desert that the Saudis claim are oil-related, although there are no pipelines in sight. Also, North Korean personnel have been spotted at military facilities.

And the second:

Of the 77,000 active members of the insurgency, the “jihadis” number about 17,000, of which some 5,000 are from North Africa, Sudan, Yemen, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
The remaining 60,000 are members of the former military or Saddam’s paramilitary Fedayeen forces. The officer corps of the insurgency has “command and control facilities in Syria as well as bases in strategic locations, where Sunnis constitute the majority of the urban population.”
Given the centuries-old tribal, familial and religious ties between Iraq’s Sunnis and Saudi Arabia, the assessment concludes that “Saudi Arabia has a special responsibility to ensure the continued welfare and security of Sunnis in Iraq.”
Its recommendations to the Saudi government included a comprehensive strategy that would include overt and covert components to deal with the worst-case scenario of full-blown civil war.
It also calls on the government to communicate the assessment to the United States; make it clear to Iran that if its covert activities did not stop the Saudi leadership would counter them; and extend an invitation to the highest Iraqi Shi’ite leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to reassure the Shi’ite community.

But it’s really worth reading both fully — there are some fun anecdotes in there too.

al-Yamama

The Guardian has an interesting backgrounder on the Saudi arms deal / Wafic Said / Maggie affair.

Update: Blair tries to explain why he is blocking the UK government’s inquiry into the BAE/Saudi scandal.

The prime minister, speaking to reporters in Brussels, said that allowing the inquiry to continue risked doing “immense damage” to UK interests. Britain has been accused of caving in to pressure from Saudi Arabia to stop the investigation into a multi-billion dollar defence deal with Riyadh. Shares in BAE have surged on the news.

Mr Blair appeared to concede that the threat to thousands of jobs from losing a prospective Saudi jet fighter contract had played a part in his thinking.

The prime minister’s official spokesman did not deny this was the case. However, he insisted that Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, decided to end the inquiry on security grounds and because of uncertainty over whether the case would lead to a prosecution.

Call me a Saudi-basher if you will — I’ll gladly accept the title if you mean the al-Saud family — but it’s getting rather tiring seeing both Arab and Western governments being corrupted by Saudi Arabia’s wasteful spending.

America’s Kingdom

Qahwa Sada has three guest posts about Bob Vitalis’ new book, America’s Kingdom, which I’ve just ordered and am very much looking forward to read during the holidays. One is by Vitalis himself, explaining what he was trying to do, which is not so much a history of ARAMCO as much as an intellectual attack on the idea of American exceptionalism and the blind spot Americans have in considering their country as just another imperalist state, not so different from the European imperialist states after all. Unfortunately, the two other contributors — Toby Jones and Gregory Gause — love the book, so there’s not that much debate. But I guess it means it’s really going to be quite an important book for Middle Eastern Studies and the study of American foreign policy and its relationship with the oil industry.