Sabre-rattling US helpless over North Korea:
Saudis present demands to Qatar :
‘Grievances’ and ‘demands’ to be fulfilled:
Weekly ‘terror’ attacks are now shaking Europe and the United States as much as embattled Iraq and Afghanistan. The ‘shock & awe’ that President George Bush Jr. hoped his enormous firepower would cause in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 1990s’ Gulf Wars is now coming home to roost.
Meanwhile, as the retreating Islamist State (IS) flattened Mosul’s treasured, 850-year-old, Al-Nuri Mosque, US fighter planes last week shot down a Syrian fighter as well as three drones in a dangerous game of brinkmanship that could precipitate confrontation with Russia. And all the US could do about obstinate North Korea was to again appeal to China last week to put more pressure on Pyongyang. But even South Korea, Washington’s close ally, now insists on dialogue with the North rather than military or other coercion.
Last week, too, Europe experienced minor incidents involving attempts to either crash vehicles into pedestrians on busy city streets or explode bombs in crowded urban stations. President Immanuel Macron’s newly victorious government plans to introduce a tough counter-insurgency security law to replace the current state of emergency. Emergency rule was hurriedly clamped down by the previous government last year after a series of Islamist terror attacks on Paris and other French cities.
The international problem that seems to be coming to a head currently is the crisis between Qatar and a Saudi-led small group of Gulf kingdoms grouped in the United Arab Emirates. Having virtually besieged Qatar, including cutting all food supplies, the Saudi-led small coalition on Friday presented Qatar with a list of ‘grievances’ and ‘demands’ to be fulfilled with a ten-day ‘deadline’.
Will Qatar concede these forcibly imposed terms – presuming it can without giving away its independence as an oil-rich, progressive Arab state?
After Saudi Arabia and the UAE suddenly clamped severe economic and political sanctions against their tiny neighbour in early June, Egypt and just four other impoverished, Saudi aid-dependent, small states (including The Maldives) have joined in this so-called ‘boycott’ of Qatar. One of the boycotters is an eastern Libyan warlord dependent on Saudi arms.
The much-awaited ‘demands’ were reportedly sent to Doha by Riyadh on Friday and news sources reported that the Qatari government had said it was ‘studying’ them.
The effect of the demands will be the assertion of political and diplomatic dominance of Saudi Arabia over what had become one of the less authoritarian and doctrinaire states in the region.
Riyadh and its UAE allies, along with Egypt are demanding a major shift in Qatar’s foreign policy. Specifically, they want Doha to end its evolving ties with close neighbour Iran and, also, break off supportive links with moderate Islamic movements in the Arab region like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Hamas in the Palestinian Gaza Strip. Both these movement, ironically, were democratically elected to power in their countries, but the Muslim Brotherhood government in Cairo was overturned by an Army coup under current President Al Sisi.
Hamas, which recently adopted a new landmark policy manifesto that implicitly recognised the state of Israel, has long been vilified by Israel and the Western powers as a ‘terrorist’ group. This label has enabled Israel to avoid re-entering negotiations with the Palestinian leadership on the grounds that the Gaza-based part of that leadership – Hamas – was a ‘terror’ group committed to Israel’s destruction.
It was at a quiet meeting in Doha, Qatar, barely two months ago, that the Hamas leadership – no doubt listening to advice from its Qatari and other friends – dropped its original commitment to the destruction of the Israeli state.
Hamas had clung to the old Palestinian dream of a secular state of Palestine that would have brought together Jews, Muslims, Christians, and other minorities in to a multi-cultural nation-state.
Realists on all sides today know that, in the long term, the viable political configuration can only be a two-state or federated state one.
Such moderation of Hamas’ stance toward Israel would have been anathema to Tel Aviv since the Zionist state habitually avoided actual negotiations on ending its occupation of Palestine precisely on such excuses of Palestinian and Arab hostility to Israel. In Egypt and elsewhere in Arab societies, the century-old Muslim Brotherhood movement has long been seen as a disruptive social movement that wanted to reform archaic Arab monarchical systems.
The other demands put forward by the Saudis include: closure of the Doha-based Al Jazeera media network and its affiliates; halting the development of a Turkish military base in the country; reducing diplomatic ties with Iran; and, cutting ties to ‘extremist’ organizations (Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood).
Qatar, itself an Arab tribal monarchy headed by the (now oil-rich) Al Thani clan, was one of the Gulf emirates leaning toward liberalising of the political system. At the same, Qatar’s geographical position led Doha to maintain friendly relations with Iran, just across the Strait of Hormuz. Qatar, along with Oman, also close to Iran, shares a swathe of seabed in the Persian Gulf with Iran that contains one of the world largest remaining reservoirs of natural gas. Qatar is currently the world’s largest supplier of gas.
The ultra-conservative Saudi regime which sees itself as the dominant Arab power, detests Iran’s challenge to its dominance not least because the Saudis are Sunni (influenced by the narrowly fundamentalist Wahabbi sect) while Iran is the world’s sole Shia state. Shi’ism is known as a more liberal counter to the rigid religious fundamentalism emanating from Saudi-supported Wahabbi sect.
Unlike most West Asian Arab states, Iran is a republic with a limited, Parliamentary-type, political system and, today, is probably the most stable-society in the whole region.
As its economy begins to boom with the relaxing of UN sanctions, Iran, with the largest population and market in the region, powered by both oil-wealth as well as other economic resources, can easily overtake Saudi Arabia as the main regional power. Along with Qatar and Oman, Kuwait is another small Gulf kingdom that is close enough to Iran to maintain friendship with the Saudi rival. Today, Kuwait is functioning as the main intermediary between the Saudis and Qatar in dealing with the current crisis. Like Qatar, Kuwait has a substantial Shia population.
The United States of America, despite President Donald Trump’s simplistic desire to just go where the most money, cannot let go of Qatar despite Washington’s own unease with Dohar’s links with socially radical groups in the Arab world and with Iran. Qatar hosts America’s largest military bases in West Asia, accommodating some 12,000 US troops. The regional headquarters of the US Central Command, which coordinates all US military operations from Afghanistan to Syria, is based in Qatar.
For the past three weeks, Qatar, one of the world’s richest and smallest countries, has been beset by sanctions only a weak state would suffer without resorting to force to survive.
Qatar despite its wealth, has a tiny population (Qataris are barely 300,000) and a very small territory and cannot maintain significant armed forces. Its 90+ modern main battle tanks, for example, are no match for the more than 1,000 MBTs possessed by the Saudi army. Nor can its tiny airforce, mainly equipped with helicopters, match the more than 300 modern fighter jets possessed by the Saudis and its UAE allies.
While the closure of its sole land border – that with the Saudi Arabia - has immediately halted all food supplies and land communications, Qatar, being a peninsular jutting into the Persian Gulf, has access to sea routes. More importantly, Iran and Oman have already begun supplying Qatar by sea.
Turkey, perhaps the economically most modern and powerful Islamic society (although not a religious state), has also sided with Qatar.
It is likely that Qatar oil wealth and the resilience of its well educated citizenry, along with the international solidarity it is receiving from local and external powers, will held it weather this virtual siege by its Arab neighbours.
The ineptness of the Saudi monarchy is exposed by its handling of this geo-political stand-off. If there were genuinely serious issues between Riyadh and Doha, why did not the Saudis and their allies first resort to negotiations and raise these issues? And even after this unilateral resort political and economic coercion, the Saudis did not have any political proposals ready to engage with Doha.
The demands themselves seem arbitrary and not those that any sovereign state is likely to concede.