Why are the rulers of Saudi Arabia losing their cool?

by Ahmed E. Souaiaia
 

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld (left) escorts Prince Bandar Bin Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz (right), the ambassador of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the U.S, through an honor cordon
and into the Pentagon for a meeting on Feb. 5, 2001.
Author: R. D. Ward (source: Wikimedia Commons)

Every time the Gulf States’ rulers justify their support for violent rebels in Syria or the military regime in Egypt by appealing to the unalienable right of peoples to basic rights and representative governance, they legitimize the Arab Spring in the eyes of their own peoples, too.

For more than seventy years, Saudi Arabia has cultivated the image of a state run by level-headed, moderate, wise, deliberate, and cool-headed leaders. Publicly, its diplomats gave the impression that the Kingdom would choose dialogue over confrontation, moderation over extremism, and reconciliation over antagonism. Wikileaks unveiled the true nature of the regime when it revealed that the rulers of Saudi Arabia were in fact leading two lives: one public and another private.

The ruling family of Saudi Arabia used public wealth (generated from sales of public natural resources) and strategic alliances with some western countries to create the Kingdom of virtual moderation. The alliance with the US provided the Kingdom with diplomatic, military, and political covers that have helped it project power and influence far beyond its actual size. Importantly, it was able to cloak its genocidal sectarianism, conceal its abusive treatment of women and foreign workers, and escape any expectation of representative governance.

Considering the actual record of the Kingdom in the area of human rights, civil rights, women rights, labour rights, and free speech, the squeaky clean image it has cultivated is astounding. The fact that Saudi Arabia, where women cannot drive a car or travel on their own and where individuals are executed in the most savage ways in the name of applying religious law (as they see it) is dubbed a moderate country, and Syria (before 2011), where women fly airplanes and serve in some of the highest institutions of governance is dubbed extremist, speaks of troubling cognitive dissonance in the ranks of the so-called democratic west. Today, Syrians are living under the most brutal conditions - but much of that brutality was instigated as part of the services of the Saudi and Qatari ruling families, wealthy individuals, and foundations under their control.

Together, the Arab Spring and Wikileaks revelations shook the Saudi rulers’ confidence in preserving power inside their country and maintaining influence outside of it. But three events have pushed the ruling family of Saudi Arabia to take off the mask of moderation and show its true face. First, the rulers failed to convince the US administration to save Mubarak and later support the military regime. Second, the ruling family failed to goad the US, Britain, and France into launching air strikes to bomb the Syrian military despite agreeing to pay for the cost. Third, Saudi rulers have demonstrated alarm at the slow and measured rapprochement between Iran and the US. This third event is especially important for Saudi rulers because their animosity towards Iran is not about nuclear disarmament but about history and ideology.

Today, the ruling family governs Saudi Arabia the same way the Umayyads governed the Islamic world for nearly one hundred years during the seventh and eighth centuries. In 750 CE, the Abbasids launched a violent revolution that overthrew the Umayyads and killed every male of the ruling Umayyads (except one who escaped to Spain). The Saudis fear a repeat of history and they are committed to reducing Iran’s status to a weak pariah state. That is a tall order given the resilience of governing institutions in Iran.

To achieve the above goals and assuage their paranoia, the ruling family of Saudi Arabia, officially and through vast networks of charitable organizations and wealthy individuals and foundations, has used petro-dollar wealth and takfiri Wahhabism to influence or blackmail other countries. The link between Jihadi Salafism, the dogmatic and ideological foundation of al-Qaeda and its affiliates, and Saudi Arabia is well established. Salafi groups fighting in Syria could not have received the sophisticated weapons and financial support they did without Saudi consent and participation. One would think that a state that can ensure that no woman can drive a car should be capable of making sure that no support is extended to violent takfiris. But to deny Saudi rulers’ support of takfiris fighting in Syria is as credible as denying Saudi support of Afghan Jihadi Salafi groups in the 1970s and 1980s.

The problem is this: Saudi Arabia is now more dangerous than it was prior to 2011.

Before 2011, Saudi support for radical groups was given in coordination with its western allies, especially the US. That coordination was terminated when the US cancelled its ill-advised plans to bomb Syria and when President Obama made the historical phone call to President Rouhani. These two events are related even though they may seem independent of each other.

Although the US’s planned diplomatic rapprochement with Iran is portrayed as being limited to Iran’s nuclear program, the Saudis are worried that resolving the nuclear standoff with Iran will necessarily lead to the normalization of diplomatic relations between Iran and the west in general. If that were to be realized, Saudi Arabia will lose its status as the only “legitimate” regional power and Iran’s oil will start to flow again to Europe and possibly the US, ending the latter’s dependence on Saudi energy.

Moreover, the Saudis fear that if Iran’s diplomatic relations with the west were mended, Iran might play a stronger role in settling regional crises, including the ones in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen. Saudi Arabia, for sectarian and nationalist reasons, has always wanted to isolate Iran and diminish its influence in the region. An Iran-US rapprochement would end that strategy, and that is why the Saudi rulers have lost their cool and started to act like the extreme regime they really are.

Signs of this change were evident in three decisions the Saudi rulers made in the last five weeks or so.

First, after years of the Kingdom campaigning for a seat on the UNSC, the UN General Assembly voted to elect the Kingdom to occupy one of the non-permanent seats. The Saudi foreign ministry issued a statement in which it declared the Kingdom’s refusal to accept the seat, justifying its unprecedented action because of the UNSC’s inability to 1) solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 2) end the Syrian regime’s “slaughter” of Syrians, and 3) make the Middle East a nuclear weapons-free zone.

Second, the Saudi security chief, Bandar Bin Sultan, was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying that the Kingdom will stop coordinating its support to the Syrian opposition with the US government and will act unilaterally in support of the “Syrian people”.

Third, the Saudi rulers refused to meet with the UN special envoy to Syria and declared their intention to sabotage Geneva-2, or at least delay it for one year as they pump more destructive money and weapons into Syria.

These developments indicate that the Saudi ruling family will now openly use terror to achieve its goal of regime change in Syria. But if they do so, the squeaky clean image they have cultivated for seven decades will lead to unmasking the true face of the Kingdom’s rulers.

If the Syrians convene in Geneva and reach a tentative agreement on a road map for a political solution, such a road map will likely include a call to fight terror groups and cut off their support. Russia and the US are likely to formalize such an agreement through the UNSC. This process will then lead to criminalizing any form of support to groups involved in terrorist activities, which will undercut Saudi influence.

It is not in the interest of Saudi Arabia to oppose a political solution and bet on armed groups. There is some indication that the same groups on which the Kingdom relies are also ideologically and dogmatically opposed to the form of governance practiced in Saudi Arabia. It is only a matter of time before the Kingdom faces the threat of terrorism it exports to Syria, Iraq, Libya, and other countries around the world at home. This fact is underscored by the rise in the number of armed attacks on security installations, churches, and public installations in Egypt despite the Saudi rulers’ support for the military regime in that country. In other words, the Kingdom may have control over some Salafi groups, but not all of them. Equally important, even those groups currently under the Kingdom’s control will not remain there should circumstances change, because their alliance is one of convenience.

Despite claims to the contrary, the Arab Spring was a true historical moment. It has profoundly changed the relationship between the masses and the rulers in the Arab world. The ruling family in Saudi Arabia thinks and hopes that the Arab Spring will not sprout in its land. It has. Trying to divert the course of the Arab Spring to other countries Saudi Arabia wishes to weaken (like Syria) or reverse course (as in Egypt) are short term attempts at a solution. In the end, every time the Gulf States’ rulers justify their support for violent rebels in Syria or the military regime in Egypt by appealing to the unalienable right of peoples to basic rights and representative governance, they legitimize the Arab Spring in the eyes of their own peoples, too. When the ruling families excuse the use of crude violence to achieve the goals of the Arab Spring in Syria, they are in effect writing their own destiny: those who rule by the sword die by the sword. That too was the fate of the Umayyads.

These opinions are the author’s, speaking on matters of public interest; not speaking for the university or any other organization with which he is affiliated.

Ahmed E. Souaiaia teaches at the University of Iowa. He is the author of the book, Contesting Justice (State University of New York Press, 2010).

This article first appeared on openDemocracy 4 November 2013.

Iran’s government criticised over nuclear talks

by Peter Symonds

 L-R: Iranian Police Chief Ismail Ahmadi-Moghadam, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the IRGC Hossein Salami, Iranian Defense Minister General Ahmad Vahidi, Military Advisor to the Supreme Leader General Rahim Safavi, and Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Hassan Firouzabadi watch the National Army Day military parade on April 18, 2011.

Photo: UPI/Maryam Rahmanian.

In the aftermath of international talks in Geneva last week on Iran’s nuclear program, open divisions have begun to emerge in Tehran’s ruling circles over the efforts of President Hassan Rouhani to reach a deal with Washington to end the punitive US-led sanctions that have crippled the country’s economy.

Rouhani won June’s presidential election and was installed in August. At the UN last month, he and his ministers engaged in what has been dubbed a “charm offensive,” speaking widely to the US media, business groups and think tanks, and mooting a possible rapprochement. Just before his return to Iran, Rouhani had a 15-minute phone conversation with Barack Obama, the first contact between the presidents of the two countries since the 1979 Iranian revolution ousted the brutal regime of US ally, Shah Reza Pahlavi.

At the Geneva talks last week, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif made a PowerPoint presentation, entitled “Closing an Unnecessary Crisis, and Opening New Horizons,” which outlined the basis for negotiations to end the decade-long US-led confrontation with Iran over its nuclear programs. Details of the discussions have not been made public. The next round of talks between Iran and the P5+1 group (the US, China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany) has been scheduled for November 7-8.

Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, cautiously gave the green light for Rouhani’s diplomatic efforts, which were also endorsed by the Iranian parliament. Nevertheless, elements of the “Principalist” faction have begun to publicly criticise the negotiations.

In a comment entitled “Why is the enemy satisfied?” the editor of the Kayhan newspaper, Hossein Shariatmadari, questioned the secrecy of the talks, saying that it raised “suspicions in public opinion that [Iran’s negotiators] might give an ‘inappropriate’ concession.” He declared: “The unprecedented excitement of [the US] … shows that we have not gained any concessions in return for all the concessions we have given away or promised to give away.”

Other “hardline” newspapers targeted Foreign Minister Zarif and “the New Yorkers circle” of Iranian officials, accusing them of being responsible for “damaging the national interest” in the past. Zarif was educated in the US and was based in New York as Iran’s UN ambassador for five years.

Former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani came under fire for suggesting that the slogan “Death to America” would no longer be appropriate if relations between Tehran and Washington were normalised. General Masoud Jazayeri, a senior commander in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, announced a “Death to America committee” to organise a major anti-US rally on November 4, the anniversary of the takeover of the US Embassy in 1979 by protesters.

Rouhani is closely aligned with Rafsanjani, a billionaire businessman who served as president between 1989 and 1997. Rouhani served as Rafsanjani’s national security adviser, continuing in that role under “reformist” president Mohammad Khatami. Both Rafsanjani and Khatami sought to end the standoff with the US over the country’s nuclear programs as part of a program of pro-market restructuring aimed at opening up the economy to Western investment.

Rafsanjani speaks for layers of private businesses who have not only been hard hit by the international economic sanctions but have been squeezed by state-owned monopolies and particularly the extensive economic empire of the Revolutionary Guards. A Financial Times article last week pointed out: “The Guards have become the country’s commercial powerhouse by taking assets in privatisations as well as big energy and construction projects. It is almost impossible to estimate the force’s total wealth because of its opacity. Nonetheless, some analysts reckon the Guards’ companies and banks generate income of about $US100 billion annually.”

During the presidential election campaign, Rafsanjani bluntly declared that the Guards’ “now control the country’s pulse in the economy, foreign and domestic politics and would not be happy with anything less than the whole country.” Many of the so-called hardliners have close connections to the Guards, whose business interests would likely suffer if foreign investors began to compete after sanctions were lifted.

The US-led sanctions have cut Iran off from international banking and drastically reduced its main export—oil, compounding the country’s economic crisis and opening up divisions in the conservative faction. Political commentator Fereydoun Majlesi told the Wall Street Journal: “Many conservatives are also suffering under the present circumstances. They, too, prefer to enjoy the benefits of the business opportunities provided by normalisation of the Iran-West relations.”

In a speech last week, General Hassan Firouzabadi, second-in-command of Iran’s armed forces and a member of the National Security Council, endorsed Iran’s initiatives in the Geneva talks, saying it was a unique opportunity to end hostilities with the West. “America should seize this chance, which won’t last forever,” he said.

The Iranian bourgeoisie as a whole is deeply fearful that worsening social tensions will produce an eruption of opposition by the working class and rural poor. The latest official statistics reveal that the economy shrank by 5.4 percent over the past year, youth unemployment hit 28 percent and inflation rose to 40 percent. The prices of staple food items soared: rice by 70.4 percent, grain by 79.7 percent, vegetables by 83.7 percent and sugar by 43.2 percent.

According to the Financial Times, the government confronts a budget deficit estimated to be as high as $28 billion. Mahoud Ahmadinejad, the previous president, began the process of reining in public spending by slashing price subsidies on fuel and other basic commodities—a move that was praised by the International Monetary Fund. The subsidies were replaced by limited handouts, which the Rouhani administration is now looking to slash, either directly or indirectly by raising energy prices.

Such a step would rapidly generate opposition. Economics professor Hossein Raghfar told the FT that the subsidies cut had already hit working people hard. “During the past eight years under Ahmadinejad, the poor have increased from 22 percent of the population to more than 40 percent,” he noted.

For the time being, Rouhani appears to have the guarded backing of Supreme Leader Khamenei and a majority of the ruling elite to try to cut a deal with the US to ease the present economic impasse. The new government’s critics have been relatively muted, and protests against the “charm offensive” remain small by Tehran’s standards. But the present general consensus could rapidly fall apart if Rouhani’s overtures are rebuffed, the US fails to offer any significant concessions and the negotiating process drags out, plunging the country into a deeper economic and social crisis.

This article first appeared on World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) on 24 October 2013, and was republished with permission.

The total surveillance state is a nightmare waiting to happen

By Michael Meacher

Why are apparently so few people worried that a state employee can now select on a computer any item in their individual make-up – their address, phone, mobile, email, passport number, credit card number (any of them), any of their logins to a web service, etc. – and can thus access the content of their communications, who they communicate with, the full range of their internet use, their location, and a great deal else? Presumably because there has not yet been a horror story revealing how these powers have been used to abuse people’s lives. But it cannot be long coming. Power corrupts, as we know, and the degree of power which digital technology has now put into the hands of state officials is greater than exists anywhere else in the Western world. Before long the abuse of that power will be exposed, the enormity of its misuse will be revealed, and a national scandal will erupt. But uncannily, for the moment all is quiet.

It is the Snowden files which have blown the truth wide open, but cyberspace remains a mysterious technological vista that few have sought to master. What is surprising is that the facts didn’t emerge sooner. Some 4.9 million Americans had access to classified information, and nearly half a million private contractors in the US had the top secret security clearance which Snowden had. If it hadn’t been Snowden who blew the whistle, it would have been someone else. That itself raises worrying questions. How secure is this ‘secret’ material held by agents of the state, and who else might it leak to? Can we be sure that some other person, for whatever motive, hasn’t taken copies of similar documents to those squirreled away by Snowden and handed them to the Iranians or to jihadists? And if this all-encompassing surveillance can be used, secretly and unnervingly, against the population of that state, what can stop a foreign power (since with hundreds of thousands of technical personnel in the know, the secrets are bound to leak quickly everywhere) using the same device with much more malign purpose both against both that state and its inhabitants?

But of course, as GCHQ is proud to insist, none of this is likely because they always act within the law, as William Hague plaintively and forlornly insisted in the House when the NSA Prism story first broke. If only. Oh yes, the computer operator has to provide a justification for the information he’s seeking, but that’s not too hard when he’s conveniently offered a drop-down menu to prompt his thoughts. Oh yes, all this activity is supposed to be firmly controlled by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA), but actually RIPA is more about facilitating such exercises than curtailing them. RIPA is so poorly drafted (deliberately?) and open to such broad interpretation that it really allows government agencies like GCHQ to do whatever they like. Oh yes, we’re assured by the Home Office that they’re only concerned with the ‘metadata’ (the technical wherewithal of communication systems), but the Snowden documents tell us the truth: “GCHQ policy is to treat it pretty much all the same whether it’s content or metadata”. And oh yes, oh yes, we’re always told that privacy is fully safeguarded – until we discover that the US NSA is spending £0.25bn a year on weakening encryption, and no doubt the UK GCHQ similarly on breaking commercially available security products. Beware the storm that is to come.

Michael Meacher is a Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton (UK)
This article first appeared on Michael Meacher’s weblog on October 5th, 2013

Syria, war and negotiation

by Paul Rogers

Secretary of State John Kerry, right, confers with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov during a meeting Aug. 9, 2013, at the Department of State in Washington, D.C.(photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The unexpected Washington-Moscow diplomacy - made possible by London's parliament - creates space for progress in ending Syria's "double proxy war".

The British parliament's vote on 29 August 2013 against a motion giving effective permission for an early military attack on Syria set off a chain reaction in international decision-making and diplomacy. This took time to become clear, since at first Barack Obama's administration remained committed to action and had strong support from the French president, Francois Hollande. But Obama's decision to consult Congress, explicit concerns from retired senior military on both sides of the Atlantic, and strong public critisism combined to stall the momentum to war, showing that the House of Commons's vote had had an effect.

The Russian offer of a process to dispose of Syria's stock of chemical weapons, following United States secretary of state John Kerry's suggestion at a press conference that this was the only way to avoid intervention, then filled the space that had been opened. The negotiations now underway between Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, mean that for the moment at least, the probability of armed confrontation with Syria is much diminished. The situation remains uncertain, however, and the danger most certainly has not gone away: Bashar al-Assad's regime may prevaricate in a way that brings crisis to the boil, or there may be one of those “AIM” events (accidents, incidents and mavericks) that can rapidly escalate.

In a longer-term perspective, the real question is whether this positive development in one aspect of Syria's war could be the start of more general progress. At first sight this looks unlikely, but there are reasons for a small measure of optimism.

The Russian factor

A key feature of the devastating civil war in Syria - as several columns in this series have argued - is that it is a double proxy war. This is clearest in the way that the Saudis and Qataris support the rebels with funding and armaments, while the Iranians and Hizbollah support Assad. At an even higher level, the Americans and some western European states back the rebels while the Russians back the regime.

Since the evolution of the war in the course of 2011, its proxy nature has bedevilled any chance of externally mediated progress. This context alone makes the chemical-weapons agreement between Kerry and Lavrov a significant change. But whether the initiative can be turned into broad diplomatic pressure on the rebels and the Assad regime may depend on a particular feature of how the conflict has developed in 2012-13 - the rise of extreme Islamist elements among the rebel paramilitaries. These elements have become ever stronger, especially in northern Syria, to the extent of offering the most dedicated and effective opposition to the regime.

This is a major problem for the Obama administration, since its aid to the rebels risks enabling al-Qaida-linked paramilitaries to achieve power in the event of the regime's fall - or at least leaving parts of a post-Assad Syria in the hands of such groups. But the real measure of change, which so far is scarcely recognised, is the new Russian predicament - for the more the Russians sustain a regime that is facing increasingly powerful Islamist opposition, the more this could affect Russia's own domestic security.

Since the Chechen wars of the late 1990s, Russia has faced a continual problem of violent Islamist opposition in the north Caucasus. In recent years this has been centred on a vigorous counter-terrorism operation against the "Caucasus Emirate". A conflict little reported in the western media has seen the Emirate conduct over 2,200 attacks, kill 1,500 Russian state officials and 400 civilians. Its campaign shows few signs of ending.

The host city of the winter Olympics of 2014 is Sochi, a Black Sea city on the western fringe of the north Caucasus. It is intended to provide an international showcase for Russia's president, Vladimir Putin. There are, though, plausible (if unconfirmed) reports of young paramilitaries from the region - from Chechnya and Dagestan in particular - joining some of the Islamist groups to fight in Syria. The possibility of a "blowback" is being taken very seriously.

In short, the United States may be deeply troubled by the prospect of Islamist paramilitaries active in a post-Assad Syria, but Russia has its own worries. The more Moscow supports Assad, the more Islamist propagandists can advance the idea that Russia is equally part of the “far enemy”. Thus, both Obama and Putin have a vested interest in a compromise that could end the war.

The missing link

Even good cooperation between the former cold-war adversaries, however, would leave in place the other ingredients of the double proxy. Iran and Saudi Arabia are in the forefront here. In this respect too, there is some cause for optimism in that Iran's new president, Hassan Rowhani, is willing to engage with the United States. Tehran's calculation is that it is in Iran's interest to end the war by a negotiation which leaves its Hizbollah ally intact and constrains the rise of Sunni Islamists who see Iran as a nation of apostates.

But the position of Qatar and especially Saudi Arabia presents a difficulty to this evolving equation, for their support for Islamist rebels has a strong strategic basis. These states believe that Assad has to be defeated, as part of a wider war to prevent the establishment of a powerful Shi'a crescent stretching from the Mediterranean through southern Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran to the Indian Ocean.

In this complex diplomatic process, the extent of Washington's influence with the Saudis may determine the chance of further advance. It may just be that previous experience, namely Rowhani's involvement in negotiating with the Saudis earlier in his career, may come into play - just as the Kerry-Lavrov relationhip has been important in the chemical-weapons negotiations.

Even taken together, all these factors offer only a small dose of optimism. Yet they cannot be discounted. If they do cohere and are built on, the UK parliament's decision on 29 August could yet be seen as a historic turning-point.

Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He is openDemocracy's international-security editor, and has been writing a weekly column on global security since 28 September 2001; he also writes a monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group. His books include Why We’re Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007), and Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century(Pluto Press, 3rd edition, 2010). He is on twitter at: @ProfPRogers

This article first appeared on openDemocracy 19 September 2013.