Tag: iran

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.

Reed lectures on “Understanding Iran”

Go here for a series of lectures on Iran, including:

William Beeman,
The “Great Satan” vs. the “Mad Mullahs”:
How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other

Gary Sick
The United States and Iran:
Is a Military Clash Inevitable?

Minoo Moallem
Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister:
Transnational Formations of Islamic Nationalism and Fundamentalism in Iran

Scott Sagan
How to Keep the Bomb from Iran

Darius Rejali
Sickness, War, and Remembrance:
A Visit to Iran

Oren on Iran

Since we discussed the Israeli historian Michael Oren recently, readers might be interested to read his recent scare-mongering piece (along with Yossi Halevi) about Iran in the New Republic, which is not without echoes of Bernard Lewis’ alarmism about Shia millennialism and the neocon pre-emption doctrine. It notably repeats the claims that Arab states will all feel compelled to arm themselves with a bomb, confusing the recent interest in acquiring civilian nuclear technology with the military stuff. Full piece below after the jump — it has a lot of interviews with Israeli defense analysts and provides some insight into their thinking, even if it is rather breathless in constructing Doomsday scenarios about region-wide war.

Also see Kafr al-Hanadwa’s take on a NPR program discussing the Oren’s book, along with Rami Khouri and Fouad Ajami.

Update: More Israeli alarmism by Barry Rubin and a call to Jewish organizations to get tough on Iran.
Continue reading Oren on Iran

Friedman, Iran and more at the Agonist

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarggggghhhhhh. Thomas Friedman has written something that makes sense (well, not sure about the last part about granting student visas). Also at the Agonist, a link-full post on the propaganda effort for a strike on Iran.

(Incidentally The Agonist is a great site that was a direct inspiration for this one. Bookmark it if you haven’t already.)

Some links on the Iranian situation

  • The American Foreign Policy Council launches an ad campaign to help the Bush administration make its case against Iran.
  • The geriatric king of Saudi Arabia warns against the spread of Shi’ism — even though there are probably more Christian evangelists in the Arab world than Shia ones. Pure, irresponsible, bigoted fear-mongering of the kind we’ve come to expect from the al-Saud family.
  • Some analysis of Iran’s internal politics, including attempts to reduce the clout of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad (Iran’s George W. Bush), at OpenDemocracy.
  • Update: I forgot to add this important LAT story that examines the Bush administration’s claims of Iranian armed support for Iraqi Shias and finds them lacking.
  • More of the same on the opposition to Ahmedinejad’s populist saber-rattling by Gary Sick, in an interview with the Council of Foreign Relations. Sick also authored a short analysis of US Persian Gulf policy which I am pasting after the jump. It was originally published on the Gulf2000 project that Sick maintains and is a very interesting read by a top expert in this field.

Continue reading Some links on the Iranian situation

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

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.

100,000 Iraqi refugees in Egypt?

A friend writes:

A new Pentagon report out yesterday describes the continuing disaster in Iraq. One item was on refugee flows. It says that:

“The numbers of refugees fleeing the violence are immense: 700,000 have fled to Jordan; 600,000 to Syria; 100,000 to Egypt; 40,000 to Lebanon, and 54,000 to Iran. Over 3,000 refugees per day are now appearing in Syria and Jordan.”

Renewing my visa at the Mugamaa last month I saw people with bundles of Iraqi passports at the window usually reserved for Palestinian sans papiers.

100,000 Iraqi refugees living in Egypt? I need to get out more. Does anyone know of any research done on the Iraqi community in Egypt?

Link to Pentagon report [PDF], which says:

Refugees. Many Iraqis have fled the country, and the number of refugees continues to rise. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) November 2006 Iraq Displacement Report, for Iraqis living outside Iraq, “the figures in the immediate neighbouring states are still imprecise, but we now estimate that there are up to 700,000 Iraqis in Jordan; at least 600,000 in Syria; at least 100,000 in Egypt; 20,000–40,000 in Lebanon; and 54,000 in Iran. Many of those outside the country fled over the past decade or more, but now some 2,000 a day are arriving in Syria, and an estimated 1,000 a day in Jordan. Most of them do not register with UNHCR.”

Dear America..

Ahmadinejad writes another letter. This time, he writes directly to the American people. I’m sure this will make the rounds of late-night comedy shows, but however much you may mistrust the Iranian regime, the letter’s interesting to read and hardly insane (the only quirky touch is calling us “Noble Americans”).

(P.S. I posted this and then found, through wonkette,  that Fox viewers have already been writing Ahmadinejad lots of replies.)

Nuking Iran?

With recent news of possible major ship deployments in the Persian Gulf and talk a pre- midterm election possible strike against Iran around October 21 (or around the end of Ramadan / beginning of the Eid holidays), it’s rather unnerving to see a major conservative commentator (a former Reagan administration official and WSJ editorial board member) say this:

The neoconservative Bush administration will attack Iran with tactical nuclear weapons, because it is the only way the neocons believe they can rescue their goal of US (and Israeli) hegemony in the Middle East.

There is already talk of retaliation by Iranian attacks on US warships and troops across the Persian Gulf and major Iranian interference with Shia communities in Iraq and Bahrain if this happens — not to mention the possibility of an attack (probably terrorist) on US soil. At least this is what is being talked about in Iran specialist circles.

The recent North Korean nuclear test must have changed the approach to Iran considerably — clearly if you are against Iran developing nuclear weapons (which most estimates say won’t happen for five years to a decade) you would think that the earlier you strike the better. North Korea shows that if I you can develop nuclear weapon, you should and that there’s little that can be done about it — especially if your neighbor/patron is China.

The article has some small factual mistakes and exaggerations — “Our Egyptian puppet sits atop 100 million [sic] Muslims who do not think that Egypt should be a lackey of US hegemony” — but gets the general regional situation quite right. I remain skeptical on whether a tactical nuke would be used, even though the Bush administration’s military doctrine has emphasized the use of tactical nukes for five years now, but I do find something convincing in the argument that the Bush administration, by its own internal (and electoral) logic, has nothing left to do but escalate. It either stands down or muddles along with a recognized failure in Iraq, or ups the ante. Rien ne va plus.