by Thomas W. Lippman
To understand why Israel and Hamas keep fighting, and why Secretary of State John Kerry was unable to forge a permanent peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, it helps to do some homework. Read Volume 8 of the State Department’s “Foreign Relations of the United States” series [...]]]>
by Thomas W. Lippman
To understand why Israel and Hamas keep fighting, and why Secretary of State John Kerry was unable to forge a permanent peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, it helps to do some homework. Read Volume 8 of the State Department’s “Foreign Relations of the United States” series for 1977-80, the years of Jimmy Carter.
It is a 1,303-page compilation of declassified documents—presidential letters, intelligence assessments, memoranda of conversation—covering the 20 months of intense Middle East diplomacy between Carter’s inauguration in January 1977 to his decision to convene the famous trilateral summit at Camp David. The principal characters are Carter, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, but much of the heavy lifting is done by their foreign affairs ministers, Moshe Dayan of Israel, Ismail Fahmy of Egypt, and Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, along with their professional staffs.
What the documents show is that despite herculean efforts, especially by Carter himself, and huge investments of time, diplomacy failed. Sadat undertook his daring trip to Jerusalem in November 1977 and Carter summoned the other two to Camp David because only extraordinary, game-changing gambles produced any real movement on the intractable issues the negotiators faced. Suspicion ran deep, antagonisms were entrenched, and history was implacable, especially for the Israelis. Not even the combined weight of the United States and Soviet Union could bring the Israelis and Egyptians—to say nothing of the Syrians—to the comprehensive, once-and-for-all regional solution that all professed to want.
The fate of the West Bank, which Israel referred to as Judea and Samaria, defied every formula offered for resolving it, just as it does today. As for Gaza, it was a stepchild of the negotiations throughout—nobody really wanted it. And while everyone agreed that peace must be based on US Security Council Resolution 242—the “land for peace” formula adopted after the 1967 war—the negotiators spent endless hours arguing about what that resolution required.
Resolution 242, which even today provides the theoretical framework upon which negotiations between Israel and the Arabs would be based, stipulated the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and recognized “the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.” It also called for the “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict,” but it did not say “all territories” or even “the territories.” Israel said any withdrawal from the lands it captured in 1967 was negotiable and would not necessarily apply to all of them—the Sinai Peninsula, which belonged to Egypt, the Gaza Strip, which had been under Egyptian administration, Syria’s Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which from 1948 to 1967 had been part of Jordan. The Arabs naturally argued that since 242 declared the acquisition of territory by war inadmissible, the resolution obviously applied to all the occupied lands.
Another major stumbling block at the time was the refusal of Israel, supported by the United States, to have any dealings with anyone associated with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which it regarded as a group of terrorists decided to Israel’s destruction. Israel’s view was that before 1967 the West Bank belonged to Jordan, and its inhabitants were citizens of Jordan, and therefore its future would be negotiated with Jordan alone. The problem with that was that an Arab summit conference had stripped Jordan of its claim to the West Bank and declared the PLO to be the “sole legitimate representative” of the Palestinian people.
And then there was the composition of the delegations that would negotiate at Geneva. Syria’s Hafez Assad, father of the current president, fearful that Sadat would strike a separate peace with Israel and abandon the other Arabs, wanted a single, unified Arab delegation. That was unacceptable to Sadat, who understood that nothing would be accomplished if every Arab participant had a de facto veto over decisions by the others.
Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who understood that Sadat was impatient but the Israelis were not, told Carter that “the priority of Israel’s policy now seems to be to make a fairly attractive offer to Egypt in order to tempt Sadat into a separate deal. This would allow Israel to put off movement on the Syrian front and to avoid the Palestinian-West Bank issues altogether.”
He was right about Israel’s negotiating strategy. Begin’s Likud Party was elected in the spring of 1977 on a platform that called for keeping the West Bank and encouraging Jewish settlements there. The Labor Party, which had run Israel since statehood in 1948, had been somewhat more forthcoming about the possibility of territorial compromise, but Begin was a hard-line Zionist who believed in Israel’s right to all the land from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River.
In the quest for the Holy Grail of Geneva, everyone traveled extensively in an endless summer of fruitless haggling over how to proceed. These were negotiations about negotiating, arguments of stupefying legalistic tedium about who would participate, under what circumstances, and what the agenda would be. Would there be a single Arab delegation, or several? If single, would there then be “working groups” for specific country-by-country issues? What would Israel accept on the subject of Palestinian refugees? Who would speak for the Palestinians? Would Jordan participate? Would Syria? What would be the role of the Soviet Union, co-chairman of the proposed conference? Should there be agreement beforehand on a “declaration of principles?” Would the specific language of 242 be the basic reference point, or would it be somehow modified? Would Geneva be a ceremonial event, at which agreements already reached would be signed, or the forum for the hard work of negotiating? If Israel were somehow to agree to pull out of the West Bank, who should take over now that Jordan had been stripped of its claim?
Carter, who had stunned everyone in March by volunteering the view that peace would require the establishment of a “homeland” for the Palestinians, soon concluded that Israel’s positions were the biggest obstacle to peace and let his feelings show in public—stirring anger in the American Jewish community and anxiety among his political advisers. Camp David was a last-ditch, high-stakes shot at a breakthrough.
Some of the roadblocks on the path to peace were removed at Camp David and in the subsequent negotiations over the peace between Israel and Egypt, a treaty that left the Palestinian issue unresolved and was achieved only when the United States and Egypt gave up on Geneva. Other issues, such as Israel’s refusal to negotiate with the PLO, were resolved years later, at Oslo.
The Arabs argue today that one of Israel’s greatest issues, the refusal of Arab nations other than Egypt or Jordan to recognize it or accept its existence, was resolved when all members of Arab League endorsed a plan offered by Saudi Arabia to offer peace and recognition in exchange for Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines. But Israel is no more inclined to accept that formula today than it would have been in 1977; after all, Hamas and Hezbollah are not members of the Arab League and not parties to that offer, and are supported in their intransigence by Iran. Even if Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party abandoned the “Greater Israel” policy of Begin’s time, anxieties about security would still prompt Israel to demand substantial revisions in the 1967 lines, as well as demilitarization of Palestine, including Gaza. If the proposed “two-state solution” is still viable—if it ever was viable—it is hard to see how Gaza could be part of it if Israel believes Hamas workers resume digging tunnels under the border from which they could attack Israelis.
At the end of 2011, according to the Foundation for Middle East Peace, there were 328,423 Israeli settlers in the West Bank. If future negotiations about the future of Palestine are to include Gaza as well as the West Bank, it is hard to see how Gaza’s status can be resolved until the question of those West Bank settlers has been resolved as part of some overall agreement. A far-reaching deal that would end the Gaza conflict by including it as part of a Palestinian state and linking it to the West Bank by some kind of corridor—as envisioned at the time of Oslo—seems far in the future. The Gazans would live better lives if Israel were to allow them greater access to the outside world, but they will still be living in a stateless limbo.
Photo: Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat with US President Jimmy Carter at Camp David in 1978.
]]>by Thomas Lippman
Has King Abdullah backed away from his longstanding refusal to have anything to do with an Iraqi government that includes Nouri al-Maliki? Reporters who were in Jeddah when Abdullah met with Secretary of State John F. Kerry Friday seemed to think so, based on a background briefing by the [...]]]>
by Thomas Lippman
Has King Abdullah backed away from his longstanding refusal to have anything to do with an Iraqi government that includes Nouri al-Maliki? Reporters who were in Jeddah when Abdullah met with Secretary of State John F. Kerry Friday seemed to think so, based on a background briefing by the ubiquitous “senior official.”
Abdullah reportedly said that he would urge Iraq’s Sunni Muslims to join a new, more inclusive government in Baghdad to help save the country from itself by fending off the radical Sunni Muslim forces known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria [ISIS]. These militants have overrun much of northern Iraq and are marching toward the capital. According to the senior official, Abdullah did not specifically say that any new government would have to exclude Maliki, whom he loathes and mistrusts, an apparent softening of his adamant position.
“It was clear,” the senior official told reporters after the Kerry-Abdullah meeting, “that the two shared a view that all of Iraq’s community should be participating on an urgent basis in the political process to allow it to move forward and that each—both the Secretary and King Abdullah in their conversations with Iraqi leaders—would convey that message directly to them.”
That could signal a willingness to recognize a new government headed by Maliki, but it could also mean the opposite – since Maliki is unlikely to be able to form a government that would have substantial Sunni representation, what Abdullah really wants is a government headed by someone else.
There is no doubt that the Saudi leadership regards ISIS as a threat to regional stability and a menace to themselves, but the king has long believed that Maliki is the cause of the problem in Iraq and cannot be part of the solution. In his view, Maliki is an Iranian agent whose exclusion of Sunni Muslims from positions of power is what motivates the ISIS rebels. Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, restated that view the day before Kerry met the king.
“Maliki is the one to blame,” he said, according to the Saudi Press Agency, because he “stirred up the sectarian fight” and encouraged sectarian militias to fight each other.
Prince Saud himself met with Kerry on Friday, along with the foreign ministers of Jordan and United Arab Emirates, and gave no indication that King Abdullah was reconsidering his position. On the contrary, a “senior official” told reporters, the Saudi position was “exactly” the same as what the kingdom has said publicly, which is that Maliki must go. “They talked about their concerns about the lack of inclusivity of the current leadership. That’s obviously a reference to Maliki, so…”
Because Saudi Arabia has supported a Sunni insurgency against the Iran-supported government in Syria, many analysts in the Gulf of suspect Saudi Arabia of also encouraging the ISIS uprising in Iraq. In both countries, Saudi Arabia would gain through the downfall of regimes aligned with Riyadh’s arch-rival, Iran, a Shiite state that supports Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad. King Abdullah’s belief that Maliki is an Iranian agent can only be reinforced by news reports this weekend that Iran is preparing to return to Iraq warplanes that it had refused to give back after defecting Iraqi pilots flew them there during the 1991 Gulf war.
Saudi Arabia has a nominal ambassador to the Maliki government, but he lives in Amman; the kingdom does not have an embassy in Baghdad, has offered no economic or military support to the Maliki government, and has not encouraged Saudis to do business in Iraq. Iraq does have an embassy in Riyadh. Diplomats who have served there say King Abdullah’s senior advisers all recognize that his refusal to engage with Iraq has been counter-productive because it has left the field of influence to Iran, but they have been unable to persuade the king to soften his position. He believes that Maliki lied to him when he pledged, upon taking office eight years ago, to run an inclusive government that would give a sense of dignity and responsibility to Iraq’s formerly dominant Sunnis, whose power vaporized with the fall of Saddam Hussein and the U.S.-orchestrated purge that followed.
The question facing King Abdullah now is whether the ISIS threat is sufficiently dangerous to Saudi Arabia to persuade him to accept a new Baghdad government run by Maliki, and cooperate with it – and possibly with Iran directly – to thwart the rebellion and preserve the unity of the Iraqi state.
The militias grouped under the ISIS name are ruthless, well-financed, and now quite well armed with U.S.-made weapons seized from the fleeing Iraqi army. Even so, they present no direct military threat to Saudi Arabia, which is not their primary target. What Riyadh fears is that radical jihadists, Saudi and otherwise, who have joined ISIS’s ranks will infiltrate Saudi Arabia and attempt to destabilize the kingdom through terrorism and guerrilla attacks. The Saudis, like the ISIS fighters, are Sunni Muslims, but to the extent that ISIS has an ideology it derives from that of al-Qaeda, which originated as a Saudi movement dedicated to bringing down the al-Saud monarchy.
On Thursday, King Abdullah ordered Saudi security forces to take “necessary measures” to defend the kingdom against ISIS. Whether “necessary measures” might mean acceptance of Nouri al-Maliki’s role on Iraq is not yet clear.
This article was first published by LobeLog and was reprinted here with permission. Follow LobeLog on Twitter and like us on Facebook
Photo: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry meets with Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on June 27, 2014. Credit: State Department photo/ Public Domain
]]>by Thomas W. Lippman
Americans have short memories. In all the furor over the exchange of five senior Taliban leaders for an U.S. prisoner in Afghanistan, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, I haven’t heard anyone other than a writer for National Review Online bring up the name of Bobby Garwood.
Garwood was [...]]]>
by Thomas W. Lippman
Americans have short memories. In all the furor over the exchange of five senior Taliban leaders for an U.S. prisoner in Afghanistan, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, I haven’t heard anyone other than a writer for National Review Online bring up the name of Bobby Garwood.
Garwood was a private first class in the Marine Corps who disappeared from his duty station near Danang in 1965, during the Vietnam War. Did he desert and go over to the enemy? Was he captured and held against his will? Nobody knew at the time, and even now, several books and movies later, the case will still get you an argument.
Bergdahl’s story most closely resembles that of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held prisoner for years by Hamas. The Israelis made the excruciating decision to buy his freedom by trading 1,027 prisoners of their own, hundreds of whom had been convicted in court of crimes against Israeli citizens — unlike the five Taliban leaders traded by the U.S., who had not been convicted of anything. Garwood’s story is different from Bergdahl’s, but the tale is useful in understanding the complexities and nuances of the prisoner issue: What really happened? What were his intentions at the time? Once he was among the enemy, did he collaborate or resist? What was his country’s obligation to him?
Under the terms of the Paris Agreement between the United States and North Vietnam, which ended U.S. military engagement in Vietnam in 1973, all of the hundreds of Americans held prisoner by the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong — including a Navy pilot named John McCain — were to be released. They were duly turned over to the U.S. Air Force in three groups. I went to Hanoi to witness one of those exchanges, and it was easy to see that the Americans remained tense and apprehensive, not to say confused, until they were aboard the plane. After the last handover President Nixon told the nation that Hanoi had complied with the Paris Agreement — all Americans known to be held were on their way home. Garwood was not among them, and in fact was not listed by the Pentagon as a prisoner.
After an extensive investigation, the Pentagon was unable to determine exactly what had happened to him, or whether he had made propaganda broadcasts for the north, as some troops asserted; therefore he was listed at the time as “missing.” An exhaustive review of the case said that a Marine Corps “screening board” had enough information to reclassify him as a deserter but decided not to do so until he had an opportunity to defend himself if he was ever returned to the United States. “This recommendation by the USMC POW screening board clearly demonstrates that the USMC was more concerned with protecting Garwood than with prosecuting him, as they should have been, until his return and all facts disclosed,” the review concluded. Sound familiar today?
Some veterans’ groups, and wives of missing air crew members who could not accept the reality that their husbands had certainly died when their planes went down, refused to believe that all captive Americans had been released. Goaded by political opportunists, including H. Ross Perot, they claimed for years that North Vietnam had held some prisoners back as bargaining chips. There was never any truth, or logic, to this – as was established years later by a special U.S. Senate investigating committee co-chaired by McCain and another Vietnam veteran, John F. Kerry — but the story periodically got new life because somebody reported spotting a young Caucasian man in North Vietnam. Most of those sightings were of the same individual, Bobby Garwood.
There were a handful of American soldiers and Marines who chose to stay in Vietnam and did not want to come back. Many had finished their terms of duty and married Vietnamese women, or gotten caught in the Cholon culture of drugs and gambling. (Remember Christopher Walken’s Oscar-winning performance as Nick in “The Deer Hunter”?) Garwood was not one of those dropouts; he went or was taken to North Vietnam four years after he disappeared from his motor pool, and in the 1970s was living more or less openly in Hanoi, where visitors sometimes spotted him. In 1979 he passed a note to a Finnish diplomat in a Hanoi café, saying he wanted to come home. Vietnam swiftly turned him over.
Garwood was court martialed at Camp Lejeune, N.C., in an 11-month proceeding that produced more than 3,000 pages of trial transcript. He was acquitted in February 1981 of desertion and refusal to fight, but convicted of communicating with the enemy and assaulting an American POW in a detention camp. He did not go to prison; he was dishonorably discharged and ordered to “forfeit all pay and allowances,” as they say in the military.
The whole truth may never be known, lost in time and the fog of war. As with Bergdahl, some of Garwood’s fellow Marines maintained that he had simply deserted and demanded that he be punished. Garwood always maintained that he did not desert, he got lost, perhaps on a laundry run or perhaps, as some suggested, on his way to a brothel. Those who want the whole story might read one of the books about him, Conversations With the Enemy, by two former Washington Star reporters. One of the authors was Winston Groom, author of “Forrest Gump.” At least there wasn’t much ambiguity about Forrest’s record in Vietnam.
Photo: A screen cap from a Taliban-released video capturing the moment Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was released into U.S. custody.
]]>by Thomas W. Lippman
An Arabic-speaking friend who has been doing business in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf for decades and seems to know everyone there invited me to lunch the other day. He wanted to know if I could make sense of developments in Saudi Arabia over the past six months.
[...]]]>by Thomas W. Lippman
An Arabic-speaking friend who has been doing business in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf for decades and seems to know everyone there invited me to lunch the other day. He wanted to know if I could make sense of developments in Saudi Arabia over the past six months.
I almost laughed — he knows more before he gets out of bed in the morning than I ever will. But it was a measure of the collective bafflement of people whose business it is to know what is going on in the kingdom that my friend turned to me. His was the sixth such request I had fielded recently. The others were from diplomats at two foreign embassies, representatives of an international industrial conglomerate and a giant oil company, and an Obama administration official who has access to classified material.
It was flattering to be sought out by such people, who normally would be sources for me rather than the other way around. I would have liked to help them if I knew the answers, but the conversation was not reassuring. All this highlights how much Saudi Arabia, traditionally cautious and understated, has thrown knowledgeable people into confusion by its actions and decisions over the past several months. It is no secret that the leaders of Saudi Arabia have been upset with the United States over several policy differences in the past year; it’s less clear if the Saudi leaders understand how difficult it has become for their friends outside the kingdom to discern where they want to go and how they plan to get there.
The fundamental objectives of Saudi strategic policy are well known: contain Iran, put an end to the Assad regime in Syria, stamp out the Muslim Brotherhood, fight Islamic extremism, forge coherence out of the squabbles within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and encourage the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. What’s harder to discern is how the kingdom’s actions and decisions over the past six months have advanced this agenda.
This period of turbulence seems to have begun with the decision last November to reject the seat on the United Nations Security Council that the kingdom had sought for years. The Saudis said the U.N. had failed in its duty to stop the carnage of Syria’s civil war and to bring about a negotiated settlement between the Palestinians and Israel. It is true that those conflicts remain unresolved, but it was and is hard to see how Saudi Arabia’s decision made any difference. The Syrian war had been going on for some time, and the plight of the Palestinians dates to 1948; were the Saudis unaware of that while they were avidly pursuing the seat they rejected?
In the months since then, Saudi-watchers have been confronted with one surprising development after another. These include, in no particular order:
This list is not complete, but it is instructive. People outside Saudi Arabia who try to follow the kingdom’s affairs, and I include myself among them, should remind ourselves at all times how little we really know. This is not a country where the king and senior princes have to explain themselves, and they usually don’t. Even when they do, their explanations may or may not be the whole truth. It’s not as if a committee of the legislature could subpoena them. What all these pieces add up to may become clear over time — or maybe not. Meanwhile we should be wary of drawing conclusions.
]]>by Tom Lippman*
The Middle East’s seemingly endless conflicts are diverting attention and resources from a graver long-term threat that threatens the whole region, the growing scarcity of water, and the situation will get worse before it gets better — if it ever does get better. Years of war, careless water supply [...]]]>
by Tom Lippman*
The Middle East’s seemingly endless conflicts are diverting attention and resources from a graver long-term threat that threatens the whole region, the growing scarcity of water, and the situation will get worse before it gets better — if it ever does get better. Years of war, careless water supply management, unchecked population growth, ill-advised agricultural policies, and subsidies that encourage consumption have turned a basically arid part of the world into a voracious consumer of water. The trajectory is not sustainable.
Those were the gloomy if unsurprising conclusions of a three-day conference on the subject in Istanbul last week. From Libya to Iraq to Yemen, too many people and too many animals have stretched water resources beyond their limits. Some countries where the urgency is greatest, including Syria and Yemen, are the least equipped to stave off serious water crises.
Jordan, always short of water, has been overwhelmed by a flood of refugees from Syria. Iraq, which once had ample water, has lost critical water supplies to war and to dams built by Turkey upstream on the Tigris and Euphrates. Egypt has twice as many people as it did 50 years ago, with no additional water resources. The isolated Gaza strip has been grappling with a water crisis for years. And Yemen’s scarce water supply is being gobbled up by the unchecked production of qat, a high-water crop with no nutritional value. Chewing the mildly narcotic qat leaf is Yemen’s national pastime.
“If you give them more water, they’ll just grow more qat,” one gloomy conference participant said.
Not all the news is bad. Stable countries with lots of money, led by Saudi Arabia, are making notable progress in supply, management and consumer education. Elsewhere, however, the prognosis is grim. No one predicted an outbreak of “water wars,” or armed conflict over water supply, a specter that has often been evoked but has never materialized. But at some point in the not too distant future, water shortages could provoke mass migrations, human hardship, crop failures and some form of “triage” among populations as governments are forced to allocate supplies, said conferees, who cannot be named due to conference rules.
It’s not as if all this has gone unnoticed. The Middle East’s water issue has been the subject of news articles, analyses by groups such as the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, and studies by think tanks and humanitarian groups for years. The Istanbul conference of scientists, policy analysts and academics from eight countries — conducted on an island in the Sea of Marmara under the title “High and Dry: Addressing the Middle East Water Challenge” by the Hollings Center and the Prince Muhammad Bin Fahd Strategic Studies Program at the University of Central Florida — is the latest of many such gatherings. But little has come of them because the region has never been stable enough, long enough, to make possible some comprehensive, multilateral solution.
According to analyses by the World Bank, the U.S. State Department and others, a majority of the countries defined as “water-poor” — those with access to less than 1,000 cubic meters per person per year — are in the Middle East and North Africa. The State Department also predicts that climate change will add to the problem by bringing “consistently lower levels of rainfall.”
No government or international agency can increase rainfall or snow runoff, but the Istanbul conferees heard that the example of Saudi Arabia — the world’s largest country without a river — shows that a lot can be done in countries with deep pockets and enough time to focus on this issue.
Saudi Arabia reorganized its government in the 1990s to centralize water planning and management. Most of the country’s water for personal and household use is supplied by massive desalination plants. The decision to build them, starting in the 1970s, was an obvious one for the kingdom, but the plants are expensive to construct and operate, leaving them beyond the financial reach of a country like Yemen.
Saudi Arabia meanwhile leads the region in the recapture and reuse of wastewater. Under a new regulation from last year, for example, its giant dairy farms are required to operate on recycled water purchased from the National Water Company rather than on groundwater as in the past. Once the world’s fifth- or sixth-largest exporter of wheat — the production of which requires massive amounts of water — Saudi Arabia has banned the cultivation of wheat as of 2016 and is refocusing its agriculture on greenhouse production of vegetables and fruit. Growing animal fodder crops such as alfalfa has been banned; owners of livestock are required to purchase imported fodder, conference participants said. Plagued by leaks in distribution pipes that drained off as much as 25 percent of the water it had, Saudi Arabia privatized its distribution network and encouraged foreign engineering and management companies to participate.
Saudi Arabia has raised the price of water for businesses and institutions, but it has not yet ended the subsidies for households that make water so cheap; there is little incentive to limit consumption. Doing so would be politically risky in a country where subsidies for water, gasoline, and electricity are expected by a population that has no vote or other influence over the government.
Egypt, by far the most populous country in the region, has a different consumer attitude problem. Egyptians have taken the availability of water for granted since completion of the Aswan High Dam in 1970. As a result, they use waster casually in the home and pump more irrigation water than is necessary onto their fields. But Egypt’s biggest concern now is Ethiopia’s plan to construct a giant hydroelectric dam on the headwaters of the Nile, reducing the flow and the amount of water stored in Lake Nasser, behind the Aswan Dam. Asked recently if negotiations over Nile water allocations were taking place between Egypt and the upstream countries, Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy replied, “No. I wish there were.”
Participants in Istanbul agreed that there is no single remedy for the water crisis. The available fixes range from the simple and obvious, such as consumer education and the installation of low-flow bathroom fixtures, to the aspirational, such as the development of desalination plants powered by solar energy, which are thus affordable. As usual with such events, the organizers will prepare a paper outlining recommendations. The fact is, however, that solutions, even if available, will be hard to implement until the shooting stops, refugees are resettled, and governments are sufficiently stable to address them. That won’t be soon.
*Any republication of this article must be authorized with IPS consent and sourced back to the original source link at www.lobelog.com.
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Photo: Much of the Middle East is seen in this night-time image photographed by one of NASA’s Expedition 31 crew members aboard the International Space Station as it flew some 240 miles above the Mediterranean Sea on June 4, 2012. The Nile River Delta is easily recognizable in center frame, and city lights make it easy to see both Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt near the Delta. Two Russian spacecraft — a Soyuz (left) and a Progress — appear in the frame while they are docked to the station.
]]>by Thomas W. Lippman
It was like a movie in which different characters see the same events in completely different ways.
At one of those Washington think-tank panel discussions the other day, senior U.S. national security and military officials insisted that the American commitment to security and stability in the [...]]]>
by Thomas W. Lippman
It was like a movie in which different characters see the same events in completely different ways.
At one of those Washington think-tank panel discussions the other day, senior U.S. national security and military officials insisted that the American commitment to security and stability in the Persian Gulf is iron-clad and will not change. The U.S Navy’s Fifth Fleet and the 35,000 soldiers and sailors in the region are staying, they said, and Iran will not acquire or develop nuclear weapons. They reminded the audience that President Barack Obama, his secretaries of state and defense, and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have told all this to Gulf Arab leaders over and over, most recently during the president’s visit to Saudi Arabia in March.
“We are present in a major and significant way,” one senior Pentagon official said at this gathering, organized by the Atlantic Council. “We are not leaving and we are not inattentive.”
The next morning, different panelists, assembled by the Middle East Policy Council, acknowledged that the message had been delivered unequivocally and often, and agreed that Obama and the others were no doubt sincere. Unfortunately, they said, Gulf Arab leaders don’t believe it.
“They think we don’t have the will to uphold our principles,” said Mark T. Kimmitt, a former senior official of both the State and Defense departments. “It’s not about our strength on the ground. It’s about our willingness to use it.” Given the record of the past few years, he said, “There’s not a lot of reason for the Gulf Arabs to be happy.”
“There are deep structural sources of anxiety” about the United States among leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, said Colin Kahl, a deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East in Obama’s first term. First among these, he said, is “the widespread perception that the United States is simply politically exhausted” after more than a decade of war and has no appetite for further involvement. Witnessing the U.S. troop drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said, “They wonder when the U.S. will begin to draw down in the Gulf.” The GCC leaders were taken aback, he said, by the strong popular opposition among Americans to military intervention in Syria, and drew their own conclusions.
Michael Gfoeller, former deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia, said the Saudis and others have been disconcerted by the way the United States and its partners have conducted nuclear negotiations with Iran without input from them. In their view, he said, Washington is proceeding “with almost no input from us and yet we are going to be the front line of what we think is going to be a nuclear armed Iran…They think that when we don’t consult with them it’s a sign that we don’t take their national security seriously.”
These panelists said it was useful that President Obama went to see King Abdullah and other senior princes in Riyadh, but not sufficient to overcome the doubts that have been built up about U.S. staying power. Ford Fraker, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, said that a week ago he asked Prince Muqrin, now second in line to the Saudi throne, how he assessed the Obama-Abdullah meeting. Muqrin, who speaks fluent English, “looked at me and said, ‘We did have the opportunity to clarify a number of important issues,’ and that’s all he said,” Fraker reported.
The two forums amounted to a fascinating but also baffling conversation about a topic that has been a focus of analysis in Washington and the Gulf states for months. The United States and its allies in the region have compelling interests in common — combating al-Qaeda and its affiliates, seeking a solution in Syria, ensuring the free flow of oil through the Gulf, stabilizing Yemen and Iraq, and countering what they see as the malign activities of Iran in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Bahrain. The Gulf states buy American weapons, depend on the United States for military training and assistance with cyber-security issues, and share intelligence about terrorist financing. And these relationships have been in place for many years. Why, then, have the Gulf leaders, and particularly the Saudis, been so vocally unhappy about U.S. policy?
The first answer participants gave was the nuclear negotiations with Iran, from which they are excluded. In the view especially of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, panelists said, these negotiations are dangerous either way: if they fail, nothing will prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, but if they succeed, sanctions will be lifted, Iranian oil exports will surge, and Iran will be free to pursue its quest for regional hegemony. Moreover, in the Gulf view, if the negotiations succeed, the United States will have another incentive to reduce its military commitments in the Gulf.
Gulf Arab leaders, panelists said, are well aware of the constraints that are curtailing Pentagon spending. Cuts will have to be made somewhere, and they see their region as a target, especially if the United States reaches some accommodation with Iran.
The Gulf leaders were shocked by the alacrity with which Washington turned its back on Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak after demonstrations against him broke out in 2011. They think “Maybe the United States won’t be a reliable ally for them,” Kahl said. These doubts have been stoked, he and other panelists said, by all the talk about growing U.S. oil output in the fracking boom, and the possibility that the United States will feel itself safely insulated from developments in the Gulf.
Despite assurances from Washington to the contrary, panelists said, the Saudis and Emiratis believe that the United States is focused exclusively on the nuclear issue in its negotiations with Iran, ignoring other troubling aspects of Iranian policy. Kahl said it’s actually a good idea to confine the current negotiations to the nuclear issue because Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani does not control the other Iranian activities that so trouble its neighbors. Those matters are under the jurisdiction of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Kahl said, and it would be counterproductive to bring the IRGC into the nuclear discussions.
In a separate commentary published during the same week as the panel discussions, Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote that, “One Saudi businessman complained to me recently that there was no discernible U.S. global strategy, and that its absence makes it impossible for Saudi Arabia to construct any strategy at all. The quandary is common among many U.S. allies, and it raises fundamental questions about U.S. commitments abroad. Is there anything for which U.S. allies can rely on the United States, and under what circumstances might it change? Equally confounding, how can America’s friends make themselves vital to the United States if the United States has no clear understanding and ordering of its own interests?”
In some ways, however, as several of the panelists noted, it is not just the United States that seems to be groping for an effective regional strategy. The six monarchies that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council have deep policy differences among themselves, about Iran, about Syria, and about the dangers of religious extremism. Oman, for example, hosted the secret diplomacy that led to the nuclear negotiations with Iran, and is reportedly planning a $1 billion natural gas pipeline link to the Islamic Republic. And on Saturday, the Washington Post reported that the United States has identified Kuwait as the major source of funding for jihadist groups fighting in Syria — groups that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are trying to defeat. If Alterman’s Saudi friend is having difficulty discerning a comprehensive U.S. strategy in the region, perhaps it’s not surprising.
Several of the panelists said that the key to assuaging the anxiety among GCC leaders is more and closer consultation, more often. It’s well and good for the president and cabinet members and officers from the U.S. Central Command to go to the region from time to time, they said, but the Gulf leaders want to see the deputy assistant secretaries and other policy worker bees out there more often. To some extent they made the Gulf leaders sound like spoiled children demanding mommy’s full attention right this minute.
Photo: President Barack Obama meets with King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia during a bilateral meeting at Rawdat Khuraim in Saudi Arabia, March 28, 2014. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
]]>by Thomas W. Lippman
It might be a mistake to jump to conclusions about the removal of Prince Bandar bin Sultan from his post as chief of Saudi Arabian intelligence. When it comes to senior jobs held by the royals, the Kingdom’s decision-making process is entirely opaque and there is no way [...]]]>
by Thomas W. Lippman
It might be a mistake to jump to conclusions about the removal of Prince Bandar bin Sultan from his post as chief of Saudi Arabian intelligence. When it comes to senior jobs held by the royals, the Kingdom’s decision-making process is entirely opaque and there is no way to know at this point whether the flamboyant former ambassador to the United States was pushed out or bailed out.
A terse announcement by the official Saudi Press Agency on Tuesday said King Abdullah relieved Bandar of his duties “upon his request.” That’s what the SPA almost always says; sometimes it’s true, sometimes not, but the people involved in such high-level decisions never explain them to the outside world.
In Bandar’s case it might even be true. At the age of 65 he is relatively youthful among senior Saudi princes, but he has nursed various ailments for years and recently was absent from his post for months, reportedly recuperating in Morocco after surgery in the United States.
The standard narrative about Bandar for some time has been that he fell from the king’s favor because he failed to carry out his most urgent mission: to bring about the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, an outcome to which King Abdullah is committed. Bandar, who for years was a powerhouse in Washington, was unable to forge a common strategy on Syria with the United States, which is seeking the same outcome. He was unable to unite the disparate Syrian rebel groups or curb the influence among them of radical jihadis. And on a visit to Moscow last summer, of which no details were ever made public, he apparently failed to persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin to back off from his support of Assad. In February Bandar was relieved of responsibility for Syria, replaced by Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the powerful minister of interior, who had made the rounds in Washington a few weeks earlier.
Whether Mohammed can salvage the operation in Syria, where the military trend has clearly been in the government’s favor lately, remains open to doubt, despite assertions from the Saudis and the United States that they got back on the same page when President Barack Obama visited Riyadh last month.
Iran’s Fars News Agency, reporting that Bandar had been “sacked,” appended to its article a photograph of Bandar crossed out by a big red X. “In September,” the Fars article said, 17 Saudi princes “in a letter to King Abdullah protested at Bandar Bin Sultan’s failure in coaxing the US into a war on Syria to topple President Bashar al-Assad’s government.” Could be, but Fars and other Iranian news organs regularly report unsupported nonsense about Saudi Arabia if they think it makes the Saudis look bad.
Bandar apparently retains at least for now his position as head of Saudi Arabia’s National Security Council, although his responsibilities in that post have always been murky. Even if Bandar is in the king’s doghouse, this latest development does not necessarily mean that he is permanently excluded from the inner circles of power. After all, he was appointed to the intelligence job in 2012 after the king dismissed his predecessor, Prince Muqrin bin Abul Aziz. Muqrin not only survived that apparent display of kingly displeasure, he recently was elevated to the position of “deputy crown prince,” putting him second in the line of succession after Abdullah. Even Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz, a half-brother of Abdullah who distanced himself from the royal family decades ago by supporting Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and other Arab nationalists, was politically rehabilitated by King Abdullah a few years ago.
As of now, only two things are knowable with certainty about this latest move: Bandar is out as intelligence chief, and has been succeeded by an obscure deputy, Yousef al-Adrisi, who has stayed so far out of the public eye that a Google search turned up little beyond Wednesday’s announcement. The Saudi Foreign Ministry issued a statement last year saying he had been promoted to the rank of “general staff” upon the recommendation of Prince Bandar. He may be well known in the CIA and other foreign intelligence agencies, but his public profile is the polar opposite of Bandar’s. It will likely be many months before it becomes possible to assess his performance or to know the degree to which, as a non-royal, he has genuine authority over intelligence operations.
]]>by Thomas W. Lippman
The rulers of Saudi Arabia are becoming masters of a diplomatic style best described as sulking in the tent. If a country or organization is not performing in a way that suits them, they issue a petulant statement and walk away. It’s easier than constructive engagement, but far [...]]]>
by Thomas W. Lippman
The rulers of Saudi Arabia are becoming masters of a diplomatic style best described as sulking in the tent. If a country or organization is not performing in a way that suits them, they issue a petulant statement and walk away. It’s easier than constructive engagement, but far less effective, as the Saudis are — or ought to be — learning.
A longstanding example is their refusal to do business with the government of Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq. Riyadh backed a rival candidate in Iraq’s election, and never accepted the outcome. The Saudis have no embassy in Iraq — two years ago they appointed an ambassador for the first time in 20 years but he was officially “nonresident,” living outside the country — and minimal economic investment. The result is that they forfeited the field of influence in Baghdad to the country they consider the greatest threat, Iran, even as they accuse Maliki of being an agent of Iranian ambitions.
Then came the decision to turn down a seat on the United Nations Security Council, a seat the Saudis had sought for years. The Saudis said they did it to protest the Security Council’s inability to deliver an Arab-Israeli peace settlement acceptable to the Palestinians, and its inability to halt the civil war in Syria. But nobody heard that tree when it fell in the forest. If there is any evidence that the Security Council or its individual members has adopted policies more to Riyadh’s liking as a result of this theatrical but futile gesture, it has not come to light. Meanwhile, the Saudis forfeited any chance they might have had to influence the Security Council from the inside. Jordan replaced Saudi Arabia, and life went on as before.
Now the Saudis, along with Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, have announced the withdrawal of their ambassador from neighboring Qatar. The three released a long, murky statement that basically accused Qatar of failing to implement an agreement among the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members to work together to ensure their security, to refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs, and to halt support for “hostile media.” That was a clear reference to Al Jazeera, the popular satellite news channel financed by Qatar’s ruling family, which among other things provides a forum for the popular preacher Youssef al-Qaradawi, a vocal critic of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The Saudis, who support the military government that took over in Egypt last year, have made no secret of their displeasure with Qatar’s backing of the previous government, which was headed by the Muslim Brotherhood and President Mohamed Morsi. The military government in Cairo joined Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain in withdrawing its ambassador from Doha, a hollow gesture since he had already left.
On Friday, Saudi Arabia formally designated the Brotherhood, many of whose members have found refuge in Qatar as Egypt cracked down on them, a terrorist organization. The Saudis’ quarrel with the Brotherhood is not about religious issues; their problem is the popularity of the Brotherhood as a political organization, which by its nature poses a threat to the al-Saud regime.
For Saudi Arabia, the public breakdown of comity within the GCC represents a sharp policy reversal. Just three months ago, at a GCC summit meeting, Saudi Arabia was promoting the idea of a formal political union among the six members. That plan was shot down by Oman, not by Qatar, but it is highly unlikely that Qatar would have supported it had it come to a vote. Although dwarfed by Saudi Arabia in size, Qatar has been playing an outsize role in regional affairs that is often out of synch with Riyadh, in Syria as well as in Egypt, and Doha would not have welcomed the inevitable Saudi dominance of a closer, formal union.
The Saudis might ask themselves how their diplomacy over the past three years or so has advanced their objectives. They wanted a friendly government in Iraq that would resist Iranian encroachment. They wanted the U.N. Security Council to turn up the heat on Israel in favor of the Palestinians. They demanded an end to the civil war in Syria even as they supported rebels fighting to oust President Bashar al-Assad. And they espoused a political union of the GCC members. None of those goals appears within reach, nor is it apparent that Riyadh, having withdrawn from the diplomatic arena, has a Plan B for achieving any of them. Perhaps some new strategy will emerge after President Obama visits Riyadh later this month.
The GCC was not created to be a defense organization; it was created to promote political and economic solidarity among the Gulf monarchies. That objective has long been unrealistic as the members went their own way on everything from energy policy to relations with Iran. Now it appears to be entirely out of reach.
For the United States, the diplomatic spat within the GCC might seem to be a minor concern, except that Washington has been pumping advanced weapons into the member states in a longstanding effort to form an effective regional security force that would confront Iranian ambitions. Recognizing that the members would never agree on a joint military command, U.S. defense officials have promoted a policy of providing compatible equipment and communications systems that in the event of a direct threat could all function in coordination with each other and with the U.S. Central Command. Those efforts will continue, regardless of the tensions among the GCC’s leaders.
]]>by Thomas Lippman
For the United States, Saudi Arabia, other supporters of the rebels in Syria, and for the rebels themselves, this has been a month of fast-paced, intense diplomatic and political activity. It is tempting after so much time and so many deaths to dismiss all the events [...]]]>
by Thomas Lippman
For the United States, Saudi Arabia, other supporters of the rebels in Syria, and for the rebels themselves, this has been a month of fast-paced, intense diplomatic and political activity. It is tempting after so much time and so many deaths to dismiss all the events since mid-January as the inconclusive comings and goings of people who simply don’t know what to do about the intractable conflict, but it’s also possible to add it all up and see the possibility of an emerging new energy, cohesion, and perhaps more effective action.
At the very least, the events and consultations since mid-January seem to have put the United States and Saudi Arabia back on the same page.
A useful point to begin this review is the visit to Washington in mid-January of Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, Saudi Arabia’s minister of interior and the most powerful man in the country other than the king. Nayef, who is respected in Washington for his leadership of Saudi Arabia’s struggle against an al-Qaeda uprising a decade ago, saw everyone in the U.S. national security establishment, plus key members of Congress. Not much was said publicly about the outcome, but within a couple of weeks events began to unfold rapidly.
On Feb. 3, a few days before Prince Muhammad left for Washington, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia issued a royal decree making it a crime, punishable by prison time, for any Saudi citizen to fight in a foreign conflict. This reflected Riyadh’s concern about the hundreds of young Saudis who have joined extremist rebel groups in Syria and could some day return to make trouble at home. It also was aimed at deflecting criticism from Washington, where some officials have said Riyadh was not doing enough to cut off the flow of fighters.
That same day, Feb. 3, the White House confirmed reports that Obama will visit Saudi Arabia in late March. This has been a difficult year for U.S.-Saudi relations due to disagreements over Iran’s nuclear program and policy toward Egypt, as well as over Syria. Obama’s planned visit is clearly intended to smooth over some of these differences; the conversations would have been more difficult still if the issue of Saudis going to Syria to fight with the jihadi extremists were still on the table.
On Feb. 12, according to the Saudi embassy, Prince Muhammad met with Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and with Under Secretary Wendy Sherman. She holds the administration’s Iran nuclear portfolio and has strongly defended its interim agreement with Tehran, a deal that caused heartburn in Riyadh. While in Washington, Muhammad also met with CIA officials and with the intelligence chiefs of Turkey, Qatar, Jordan and other supporters of the rebels, according to press reports.
Then the pace of events accelerated.
On Feb. 12, King Abdullah II of Jordan, whose country is straining under the burden of supporting Syrian refugees, met with Vice President Joe Biden to discuss “ongoing efforts to bring about a political transition and an end to the conflict in Syria,” the White House said. Two days later, Abdullah conferred with Obama.
On Feb. 15, the UN-brokered peace talks in Geneva ended, predictably, in failure. Secretary of State John Kerry put the blame squarely on the Assad regime’s intransigence, but regardless of who was responsible, that avenue now appears to have come to a dead end.
The next day, the Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army — that is, the non-extremist rebels whom Washington and presumably Riyadh support — announced that Gen. Salam Idriss, the overall military commander who had been increasingly criticized as ineffective, was being replaced. His successor, backed by the Saudis, is Brig. Gen. Abdul-Illah Bashir al-Noeimi. It is too early to know whether he will be able to enlist the support of all the often-divided rebel factions, who are battling extremist forces aligned with al-Qaeda as well as the Syrian army.
Back in Washington, the White House announced on Feb. 18 that Robert Malley, a veteran Middle East hand from the Clinton administration, would return to the National Security Council. His assignment is to manage relations with the often-fractious allies of the Arab Gulf states, a group that includes Saudi Arabia.
A day later, Feb. 19, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal broke the news that Prince Muhammad bin Nayef had taken over as boss of the kingdom’s effort to arm and strengthen the Free Syrian Army and other non-extremist groups. The Post’s Karen de Young reported the next day that the intelligence chiefs, at their Washington gathering a week earlier, had agreed on how to define which rebel groups were eligible for new aid, and on new arms shipments to them. Muhammad, a firm if low-key operative, replaced the mercurial Prince Bandar bin Sultan, whose personal charisma had evidently not impressed the rebels.
That same day, Feb. 19, Deputy Secretary Burns delivered a speech that was widely depicted as a preview of what Obama will say to King Abdullah next month: the United States is committed to its strategic partnership with the Arab Gulf states, and will not be bamboozled into a permanent agreement with Iran that would leave Tehran with any path to nuclear weapons. Telling the Saudis what they want to hear, Burns said that in Syria, “the simple truth is that there can be no stability and no resolution to the crisis without a transition to a new leadership.” That is, Bashar al-Assad must go, as the Saudis and Obama himself have long demanded, and Riyadh should not interpret the agreement by which Syria is due to give up its chemical weapons as U.S. acquiescence in Assad’s legitimacy.
Meanwhile, of course, Syrians are dying by the thousands as the government continues to bomb civilian areas, and there is no end in sight. Even if Assad steps down, Burns said, the United States has “no illusions” about “the very difficult day after — or, more likely, the very difficult years after.”
Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah are still supporting Assad. It is possible that he could survive to preside over some rump state. But it does appear that the working program of those who want to get rid of him is, at least, less messy and disorganized than it was a month ago.
*This post was revised on Feb. 25 to make an adjustment to the sequence of events.
Photo: Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud (left) with Prince Mohammed bin Nayef bin Abdul Azi
]]>via IPS News
If you are confused or baffled by Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy moves over the past month or so, you are hardly alone. It appears the Saudis themselves don’t know quite what to make of the various situations in which they find themselves.
The kingdom’s [...]]]>
via IPS News
If you are confused or baffled by Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy moves over the past month or so, you are hardly alone. It appears the Saudis themselves don’t know quite what to make of the various situations in which they find themselves.
The kingdom’s stated objectives are well known: to get rid of the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, curtail Iran’s nuclear ambitions, put a halt to what they see as Iranian troublemaking around the region, and forge a political union among the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council. None of those goals is within reach under present circumstances — Oman publicly rejected the GCC political union proposal and said it would leave the group if it were accepted — and it is difficult to perceive how Saudi Arabia’s recent tactical moves are going to bring them any closer. At the same time, through intemperate rhetoric and pointless gestures such as rejecting a seat on the UN Security Council that they had long sought, they risk undermining their longstanding security partnership with the United States, the only country strong enough to protect the al-Saud rulers from potential predators around them.
“It’s an ad hoc, shoot from the hip policy that has no strategic vision,” one well-connected analyst observed the other day.
Syria is the biggest and most immediate problem, but hardly the only one. Riyadh’s firm refusal to do business with the al-Maliki government in Iraq has had the effect of making Iraq more dependent on Iran rather than less — the very outcome to which the Saudis say they object. A strong, prosperous Iraq could again be the buffer between Saudi Arabia and Iran that it was under Saddam Hussein, but the Saudis are doing nothing to help Iraq rebuild. They have left that field to Iran.
In another seeming contradiction, Saudi Arabia has been a shrill critic of the interim nuclear agreement between the West and Iran. But at the recent GCC summit conference, the Saudis signed off on a statement from the group endorsing that deal. “The Supreme Council welcomed the interim agreement which was signed by the P 5 +1 with Iran on November 24, 2013 in Geneva,” the official communiqué from that meeting said, “as a preliminary step towards a comprehensive and lasting solution to the Iranian nuclear program that would put an end to concerns on the international and regional level about this program, and enhance the region’s security and stability…” That is pretty much the rationale expressed by the United States and the other members of the negotiating group, a rationale the Saudis have rejected.
In Syria, the Saudis have put themselves in an extremely delicate position. They are all in on the ouster of Assad, and yet after three years of conflict the Syrian leader appears to be gaining strength against the fragmented forces of the rebellion.
Riyadh wants to engineer Assad’s departure, mostly because of his alliance with Iran and Hezbollah, without delivering Syria into the hands of Islamic extremists and jihadists who would impose strict Islamic law on the country and then turn their attention to their neighbors. That is a delicate balance that may not be achievable by remote control from Riyadh.
“It seems that any group, however extreme in its Islamism, is an acceptable party for Saudi support, be it private or public, as long as it does not refer itself as an al-Qaeda offshoot,” observed Jean Francois Seznec, a scholar with wide knowledge of Gulf affairs. In an article written for the Norwegian foreign ministry, Seznec said that the Islamist forces Saudi Arabia is supporting may not be affiliated with al-Qaeda but still “promote a rabid anti-Shi’a and anti-Christian ideology, turning the rest of the world against them and by association against the moderate opposition, and thereby limiting the Saudis’ ability to unite the opposition.”
It may be possible that the groups, backed by enough money from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states and private contributors, can forge themselves into a coherent rebel force that would decisively turn the tide against Assad and then form an inclusive government in Damascus. But given that Assad has his own wealthy supporter, Iran, that seems to be a long shot. Saudi Arabia’s real problem, as Seznec noted, is that despite the billions it has spent on weapons acquisition over decades, it lacks the military power to do anything on its own in Syria. The Kingdom has no force-projection capability, and thus must rely on proxies with dubious credentials.
In a recent interview in TIME, Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif seemed to relish taunting Saudi Arabia about the dangerous game it is playing in Syria. “We are satisfied, totally satisfied, convinced that there is no military solution in Syria and that there is a need to find a political solution in Syria,” he said. “If you want to prevent a void, the types of consequences that we are talking about, I mean if you want to avoid extremism in this region, if you want to prevent a Syria becoming a breeding ground for extremists who will use Syria basically as a staging ground to attack other countries — be it Lebanon, be it Iraq, be it Jordan, Saudi Arabia, even Turkey — these countries are going to be susceptible to a wave of extremism that will find its origins in Syria and the continuation of this tragedy in Syria can only provide the best breeding ground for extremists who use this basically as a justification, as a recruiting climate in order to wage the same type of activity in other parts of this region.” He had a point.
An article in the current issue of Masarat, a journal published by the King Faisal Research Center in Riyadh, said the unwillingness of the U.S. and other western nations to take the field against Assad has left Saudi Arabia with no choice but to adopt more assertive policies and take on wider responsibility for regional stability.
“The Kingdom and its regional allies will increase their support to the Syrian rebels and prevent the collapse of collateral nations like Lebanon and Jordan,” the article said. It called for the creation of a regional security alliance — led, of course, by Saudi Arabia. “It is absolutely vital that a Saudi-led regional project succeed in Syria. The only way the Arab world can make progress is through a collective security framework initially made up of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and the GCC partner nations.” (Note the omission of Iraq from that wish list.)
The article did not mention that those “GCC partner nations” have never been willing to enter any collective security arrangement that would be dominated by the Saudis, or that Egypt, which has its hands full at home, is in no position to take on new commitments elsewhere. And even if those proposed partners signed on, how long would it take them to put together an operation that could save Syria?
It appears that the Masarat article reflects official thinking because Prince Mohammed Bin Nawaf Bin Abdulaziz, a grandson of the founding king who is the ambassador to Britain, said much the same thing in a column published by the New York Times.
“We believe that many of the West’s policies on both Iran and Syria risk the stability and security of the Middle East. This is a dangerous gamble, about which we cannot remain silent, and will not stand idly by,” the column said.
The west might cut deals with Assad and with the Iranians, the ambassador wrote, but deals with odious and dangerous regimes such as those are strategically dangerous and morally unacceptable. Because of its wealth and its position in Islam, the ambassador said, Saudi Arabia has “enormous responsibilities” throughout the region. “We will act to fulfill these responsibilities, with or without the support of our Western partners.”
Negotiations aimed at stabilizing Syria are scheduled to begin under United Nations auspices on Jan. 22. If they fail to halt the bloodshed, which seems a safe bet, the rebels will expect Saudi Arabia to deliver on its promise. As Americans like to say, good luck with that.
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