Tag Archive | "Gulf States"

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Iran vs. Saudi Arabia in Bahrain?

Posted on 16 May 2011 by hashimilion

The Iranian meddling in Bahrain was temporarily to be put to a hold. However, the prey, albeit small in acreage, is too lucrative to be let go, and Iranian clandestine intervention continues. Bahrain, a small island kingdom in the Gulf, is coveted by Iran, its neighbor across the bay, as it has a lot to covet. Strategically located near the Hormuz straits, through which 20% of the world’s oil passes, with its own production of 40,000 oil barrels a day, and with huge gas reserves, Bahrain is definitely in the sights of the Iranian regime. What makes the Iranian move to indirectly swallow Bahrain a real risk is the fact that 70% of the Bahraini population is Shiite, such as 80% of Iran’s population, and the Bahraini Shiites look up to Iran for guidance, or even instructions.

The Saudi King and other Gulf States rulers read the map correctly and sent troops to protect Bahrain. The demise of the 200-year Bahrain rule of the Sunni dynasty currently headed by King Sheikh Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa’s and its replacement by a Shiite puppet of Iran could be ominous to their own regimes. Saudi Arabia is particularly vulnerable because its rich oilfields border with Bahrain and the local population in this region is mostly Shiite. A successful Shiite takeover of Bahrain could whet the appetite of the Saudi Shiites and their Iranian comrades to follow suit. Therefore, with the invitation of the Bahraini king, 3,500 Saudi soldiers crossed the bridge linking Saudi Arabia with Bahrain to help preserve the Bahraini regime.

The Iranians are far from liking this development, which all of a sudden shuffled their cards. Now, it is no longer tiny Bahrain defending itself from Iranian sponsored subversion — it is Iran versus Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The bar has risen. Saudi Arabia, with a cash chest that would make King Midas envious and with the backing of the U.S, is a formidable rival to Iran.

The Iranian response to the Saudi move was quick. Local media in the northeastern city of Mashhad reported that 700 people gathered outside the Saudi consulate and stoned it to protest the killing of Shiites in Bahrain. If the Saudi government fails to take the hint, additional protests are likely to follow in other Iranian cities, including Tehran.

Saudi Arabia has increased its pressure on the U.S to intervene and prevent the operation of the Iranian nuclear plant in Bushehr. They quoted Dmitry Rogozin the Russian ambassador to NATO who repeated a previous warning sent by Russia that “The virus attack on a Russian-built nuclear reactor in Iran could have triggered a nuclear disaster on the scale of Chernobyl.” Now the concern is increased following the disaster in the Japanese reactors in Fukoshima. Although Fereydoun Abbasi the head of the Atomic Energy Organization, acknowledged that “Even before the earthquake and nuclear contamination crisis in Japan, Iran had accepted Russian experts’ proposal to revise its plans to load fuel into the core of the Bushehr power plant’s reactor,” Saudi Arabia continues with its pressure against Iran, as part of its effort to limit Iranian clandestine involvement in Bahrain.

The rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia is not new. The fervent Shiite Iran and the Sunni Saudi Arabia have long been struggling over the reign of world Muslims. Thus far, with its control of the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia has the upper hand.

The saber rattling continues. Bahrain ousted the Iranian Consul in Manama, and the Iranians retorted in kind. Iran recruited once more Hezbollah, its subcontractor for dirty jobs. During a rally in Beirut, Hezbollah leader Nasrallah criticized Bahrain’s monarchy for bringing in troops from neighboring Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States to quash Shiite protests. Nasrallah said the blood of the people will eventually force their regimes to grant them greater rights.

The Bahraini Foreign Ministry condemned Hezbollah’s criticism of its government, describing it as an intervention in Bahrain’s internal affairs. A statement released by the Bahrain foreign ministry said Nasrallah’s verbal “assault against Bahrain and its people” was aimed at serving foreign interests, a reference to Iran, Hezbollah’s boss. The foreign ministry described Nasrallah as the “representative of a terrorist organization with a known history in destabilizing security in the region.” Apparently, Iran and its allies do not like others to play in what Iran considers its own playground.

Thus far the Iranians are wary not to directly confront the Saudis, and for a reason: For Iran, Saudi Arabia is the last major local power they need to win over; however, it is not a simple task. The Saudis’ big brother is watching — the U.S. The U.S has failed to intervene in Egypt because Egypt is dependent on U.S aid and therefore, it anticipated that the Egyptian response to the U.S lack of active support would be limited to verbal condemnation, if any. However, the terms of reference between the U.S and Saudi Arabia are diametrically different. It is Saudi Arabia that supports the U.S with money, oil and military bases. Therefore, Saudi interests and voices are more likely to be listened to attentively in Washington, D.C.

Nonetheless, the Sunnis in Bahrain have a lot to worry about. The Shiites in Bahrain demand a democratic republic instead of monarchy, and that simple message is certain to find many attentive ears in the U.S and elsewhere. However, democracy in Bahrain with a 70% Shiite majority, means Sunnis out, Shiites in, the U.S and its 5th Fleet harbor out, Iran in, including a control of the oil reserves and a direct threat to Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest producer of oil in fields located next door populated by Shiites.

As absurd as it may sound, it is likely that supporters of full Western style democracy in Bahrain may at the end of the day be supporting theocratic Iran.

A dilemma, Greek for “two premises,” has been likened to the horns at the front end of an angry and charging bull. Both premises are bad options.

If there were ever a decision tantamount to sitting on the horns of the dilemma, the choices the West needs to make are fitting. What would the West choose? Support democracy for approximately 350,000 Shiites in Bahrain, or risk an increased Iranian control of the spigots of the huge oil reserves, with the resulting immediate effect on the world’s economy?

By Haggai Carmon

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Arab Spring Splits Saudi U.S Alliance

Posted on 16 May 2011 by hashimilion

A tectonic shift has occurred in the U.S.-Saudi relationship. Despite significant pressure from the Obama administration to remain on the sidelines, Saudi leaders sent troops into Manama in March to defend Bahrain’s monarchy and quell the unrest that has shaken that country since February. For more than 60 years, Saudi Arabia has been bound by an unwritten bargain: oil for security. Riyadh has often protested but ultimately acquiesced to what it saw as misguided U.S. policies. But American missteps in the region since Sept. 11, an ill-conceived response to the Arab protest movements and an unconscionable refusal to hold Israel accountable for its illegal settlement building have brought this arrangement to an end. As the Saudis recalibrate the partnership, Riyadh intends to pursue a much more assertive foreign policy, at times conflicting with American interests.

The backdrop for this change are the rise of Iranian meddling in the region and the counterproductive policies that the United States has pursued here since Sept. 11. The most significant blunder may have been the invasion of Iraq, which resulted in enormous loss of life and provided Iran an opening to expand its sphere of influence. For years, Iran’s leadership has aimed to foment discord while furthering its geopolitical ambitions. Tehran has long funded Hamas and Hezbollah; recently, its scope of attempted interference has broadened to include the affairs of Arab states from Yemen to Morocco. This month the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, Gen. Hasan Firouzabadi, harshly criticized Riyadh over its intervention in Bahrain, claiming this act would spark massive domestic uprisings.

Such remarks are based more on wishful thinking than fact, but Iran’s efforts to destabilize its neighbors are tireless. As Riyadh fights a cold war with Tehran, Washington has shown itself in recent months to be an unwilling and unreliable partner against this threat. The emerging political reality is a Saudi-led Arab world facing off against the aggression of Iran and its non-state proxies.

Saudi Arabia will not allow the political unrest in the region to destabilize the Arab monarchies — the Gulf states, Jordan and Morocco. In Yemen, the Saudis are insisting on an orderly transition of power and a dignified exit for President Ali Abdullah Saleh (a courtesy that was not extended to Hosni Mubarak, despite the former Egyptian president’s many years as a strong U.S. ally). To facilitate this handover, Riyadh is leading a diplomatic effort under the auspices of the six-country Gulf Cooperation Council. In Iraq, the Saudi government will continue to pursue a hard-line stance against the Maliki government, which it regards as little more than an Iranian puppet. In Lebanon, Saudi Arabia will act to check the growth of Hezbollah and to ensure that this Iranian proxy does not dominate the country’s political life. Regarding the widespread upheaval in Syria, the Saudis will work to ensure that any potential transition to a post-Assad era is as peaceful and as free of Iranian meddling as possible.

Regarding Israel, Riyadh is adamant that a just settlement, based on King Abdullah’s proposed peace plan, be implemented. This includes a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem. The United States has lost all credibility on this issue; after casting the sole vote in the U.N. Security Council against censuring Israel for its illegal settlement building, it can no longer act as an objective mediator. This act was a watershed in U.S.-Saudi relations, guaranteeing that Saudi leaders will not push for further compromise from the Palestinians, despite American pressure.

Saudi Arabia remains strong and stable, lending muscle to its invigorated foreign policy. Spiritually, the kingdom plays a unique role for the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims — more than 1 billion of whom are Sunni — as the birthplace of Islam and home of the two holiest cities. Politically, its leaders enjoy broad domestic support, and a growing nationalism has knitted the historically tribal country more closely together. This is largely why widespread protests, much anticipated by Western media in March, never materialized. As the world’s sole energy superpower and the de facto central banker of the global energy markets, Riyadh is the economic powerhouse of the Middle East, representing 25 percent of the combined gross domestic product of the Arab world. The kingdom has amassed more than $550 billion in foreign reserves and is spending more than $150 billion to improve infrastructure, public education, social services and health care.

To counter the threats posed by Iran and transnational terrorist networks, the Saudi leadership is authorizing more than $100 billion of additional military spending to modernize ground forces, upgrade naval capabilities and more. The kingdom is doubling its number of high-quality combat aircraft and adding 60,000 security personnel to the Interior Ministry forces. Plans are underway to create a “Special Forces Command,” based on the U.S. model, to unify the kingdom’s various special forces if needed for rapid deployment abroad.

Saudi Arabia has the will and the means to meet its expanded global responsibilities. In some issues, such as counterterrorism and efforts to fight money laundering, the Saudis will continue to be a strong U.S. partner. In areas in which Saudi national security or strategic interests are at stake, the kingdom will pursue its own agenda. With Iran working tirelessly to dominate the region, the Muslim Brotherhood rising in Egypt and unrest on nearly every border, there is simply too much at stake for the kingdom to rely on a security policy written in Washington, which has backfired more often than not and spread instability. The special relationship may never be the same, but from this transformation a more stable and secure Middle East can be born.

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Is The Tide Turning Against Arab Freedom?

Posted on 22 April 2011 by hashimilion

Is a counter-revolutionary tide beginning to favour the “strongmen” of the Arab world, whose regimes appeared a couple of months ago to be faltering under the impact of the Arab Awakening?

From Libya to Bahrain and Syria to Yemen, leaders are clinging on to power despite intense pressure from pro-democracy protesters. And the counter-revolution has so far had one undoubted success: the Bahraini monarchy, backed by troops from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, has brutally but effectively crushed the protesters in the island kingdom. Pro-democracy leaders are in jail or have fled abroad. The majority Shia population is being terrorised by arbitrary arrests, torture, killings, disappearances, sackings, and the destruction of its mosques and religious places.

In three other countries despots under heavy assault have varying chances of survival. A month ago in Yemen it seemed likely that President Ali Abdullah Saleh was on his way out, but he still has not gone and has mobilised his own demonstrators, gunmen and security forces. Nevertheless the army has publicly split and the probability is that he will finally depart.

In Syria protests are continuing across the country despite frequent shootings, but President Bashar al-Assad will take a lot of displacing because of his determination to stay, the strength of his security apparatus and the tight grip on power of the minority Allawi community.

In Libya Muammar Gaddafi teetered on the verge of defeat two months ago when rebels had seized the east of the country and there were demonstrations in Tripoli. Since then he has rallied a core of support and the rebels in Benghazi would collapse if they did not have the backing of Nato airpower. Nevertheless he is likely to go simply because Britain, France and the US are committed to his departure.

All this is very different from what happened in Tunisia and Egypt, where the military and political establishments believed they could get rid of the regime but keep the rest of the state intact. This could not be done in Libya or Syria because the regime and the state are too intertwined.

In Yemen the state is too weak to get rid of the leader, while in Bahrain democracy means a revolutionary transfer of power from the minority Sunni to the majority Shia. The counter-revolution has other advantages. Its leaders are no longer being caught by surprise. Defenders of the status quo no longer think their defeat is inevitable and have recovered their nerve. They can draw on the loyalty and self-interest of state employees and on sectarian allegiances.

The attitude of outside powers to the overthrow of the status quo differs from country to country. The US was in two minds over support for Mr Mubarak, but did not condemn the Saudi armed intervention in Bahrain or the subsequent terrorising of the Bahraini Shia. Washington has a very different attitude to Arab autocracies in North Africa and far more strategically important Gulf oil states allied to the US. Unspoken also as a factor in US thinking is the degree to which revolution or counter-revolution will help or hinder America’s traditional enemy in Iran.

Only in Libya has the struggle between rebellion and the state turned into outright war. The rebels have plenty of support, but they still only control a quarter of the population and they remain militarily weak. Their most important card is Nato air strikes and even these have not enabled the anti-Gaddafi forces to advance beyond Ajdabiya or break the siege of Misrata.

The counter-revolution is showing that it has more going for it than seemed likely two months ago. This only appears surprising because well-established authoritarian regimes went down so swiftly in Tunisia and Egypt. Police states have had time to rally their formidable forces of repression, but even this may not be enough to quell newly politicised populations which believe they can end autocratic rule.

By Patrick Cockburn

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Sectarian Bad Blood

Posted on 01 April 2011 by hashimilion

Still recovering from its own bloody sectarian strife, Iraq has been rattled by events in Bahrain, where a mainly Shia protest movement has been quelled by the island kingdom’s ruling Sunni minority, backed by forces from Saudi Arabia and several other Gulf states. After the Saudi troops moved into Manama, Bahrain’s capital, in mid-March, Iraqi members of parliament fired off a string of angry speeches.

Politicians from Iraq’s Shia majority, including a former prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, castigated the Saudi intervention. Some Sunni, Kurdish and Christian members of Iraq’s parliament also condemned the Saudis, but the speaker, Osama el-Nujaifi, who hails from a leading Sunni family in Mosul, Iraq’s strongly Sunni city in the north, decided to close parliament down for ten days. Some Iraqi politicians, including Iyad Allawi, a Shia who leads the main Sunni block in parliament, said that a hiatus was required to stop sectarian tension boiling over in parliament.

But it is still bubbling. Politicians and religious leaders have continued to respond to events in Bahrain along sectarian lines. Muqtada al-Sadr, a populist Iraqi Shia cleric with a big following who leads his movement from a temporary home in Iran, has castigated the intervention too. Members of his political party have called for Bahrain’s embassy in Baghdad to be closed, whereas Haider al-Mulla, a Sunni MP, blames the uprising in Bahrain on Iranian interference and says that Iran’s embassy in Baghdad should be shut.

The prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, a Shia who spent several years in exile in Iran, has also slammed Saudi Arabia, embarrassing his own ministry of foreign affairs by disparaging so powerful a neighbour ahead of a summit of the Arab League planned for May. Far from curbing his language, Mr Maliki later went on to say that the Saudi intervention in Bahrain could lead to a sectarian war in the region.

The authorities in Bahrain have since suspended flights to Iraq, as well as to Iran and Lebanon, where Hizbullah, the Shia party-cum-militia which underpins Lebanon’s current coalition government, has praised Bahrain’s protesters. Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah’s leader, enraged Bahrain’s ruling al-Khalifa family by likening it to Libya’s Qaddafis. This, said Bahrain’s foreign minister, Khalid al-Khalifa, was tantamount to a “terrorist threat”. Hizbullah, he claimed, was training Bahrain’s opposition; the leader of one of Bahrain’s more radical opposition movements, al-Haq, had stopped off in Beirut to meet Hizbullah people on his way back from exile in London to Bahrain. Newspapers in the Gulf say the authorities in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have deported several hundred Lebanese Shia expatriates.

Iraq’s parliament has now reopened but the row has weakened a coalition government that is in any case built on a fragile ethno-sectarian power-sharing agreement. More than a year after elections, no defence or interior minister has been appointed. Iran, it is said, has been promoting its own candidate for the interior ministry, whereas the defence ministry was promised to Mr Allawi’s Sunni-backed block. But Mr Maliki has rejected several of Mr Allawi’s nominees. Although the prime minister has a firm grip on the security services and has been trying to expand his own executive powers, he is looking more isolated as erstwhile allies complain that he has broken the promises he made when he was putting his ruling coalition together.

Mr Sadr has sought to capitalise on Mr Maliki’s weakness by making himself look less sectarian, for instance by holding press conferences alongside Mr Allawi. The Sadrists have also declared themselves in favour of a freer press and have sounded sympathetic towards protesters on the street. If relations with Mr Maliki worsen, the Sadrists may throw their weight wholeheartedly behind the protesters, who have so far been mainly secular. But some of them say they would work with Mr Sadr’s anti-Western religious movement if that would help their cause.

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The Egyptian Revolution and The Gulf States

Posted on 11 February 2011 by hashimilion

It’s no longer a secret that an uprising in the Gulf States is a big possibility, especially since its people have always connected with the cultural and political movements, which emanated from Egypt,  the epicentre of the Arab world.

The current Islamic movement began in Egypt in the 1930s. Intellectuals from all over the Arab world flocked to Egypt in order to come into contact with the new leadership, its ideas and goals, which were later exported  to other parts of the world.

When the free officers revolution in 1952 had manny supports in the Gulf States to the extent that many participated in demonstrators against their authoritarian regimes.

Analysts are aware that the Egyptian revolution will have a major impact on the Arab world, specifically the Gulf States, whose people are anxiously waiting to see the results of this popular revolution.

The Egyptian revolution  has sent a clear message to the world, change is inevitable. No power in the world, no matter how strong it may be can stop the people from achieving their aspirtaions.

Mubarak’s delaying tactics won’t change the reality on the ground, especially since his status as the head of the regime has fallen. Mubarak’s departure signals the collapse of the regime.

The events of the 25th of January were a major historical turning point. Egyptians were liberated from fear. President Mubarak lost his confidence and legitimacy as direct result of the demonstrations.

What has been said about Mubarak’s regime also applies to the Gulf Shiekhdoms, who buy America’s loyalty in order to shore up their power base. These dictators have no other option but to introduce quick and substantial reforms. The changes that have started in Egypt won’t exclude anyone.

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