Saudi Arabia’s fragile monarchy

S P SETH

The recent death of 90-year old Saudi king Abdullah added another dimension to an already volatile Middle Eastern powder keg. The old king was considered adept at managing multiple issues impacting on the monarchy and the country during the worst period for the region, arising out of the so-called Arab Spring that erupted early in this decade. The new King Salman, 79, is promising a continuation of the old policies. He is said to have health problems, some even suggesting that he has some form of early dementia. The next in line, Crown Prince Muqrin at 69, is rather young which tells something about the aging of the Saudi monarchy. The founder of the Ibn Saud dynasty King Abdulaziz, who died in 1953, fathered 45 sons and a good number of daughters from 22 wives but the daughters don’t count. Of his 45 sons, only five are said to have ascended the throne so far. Which leaves a lot of scope for intrigue and infighting in the vast royal household, so far kept out of public scrutiny. But that might not last.

Even as this process of succession rolls on into the future, all the royal hopefuls will be pretty old; some of them reaching their use-by-date even before their time comes. In other words, the kingdom is entering a period of even greater uncertainty. It is not just the complexity of the royal household that is problematic, the monarchy is also underpinned by a pact of sorts with the clerical establishment and tribal leaders designed to keep the kingdom under wraps from political, social and cultural challenges. In other words, it is, more or less, frozen in time, with no institutional and popular consensual process for its periodic renewal. Which means that its longevity can only be ensured by systemic oppression now and into the future. And this is a recipe for eventual disaster.   

As it is, Saudi Arabia has too much on its plate. One of its singular features has been to largely support the continuation of the status quo at home and in its neighborhood with friendly and trusted authoritarian regimes. Indeed, one important reason for emerging tensions in the US-Saudi relations early in the decade was Riyadh’s displeasure at Washington’s indifference to Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak’s fate when he was overthrown and put in jail during the revolutionary fervent of the Arab Spring. Even though the successor Muslim Brotherhood regime was much more Islamic in ideology the Saudi monarchy was deeply unhappy, as it tended to upset not only the Egyptian political landscape but was also regionally disruptive.

And when the Sisi-led coup overthrew the elected Brotherhood government inviting US displeasure, including temporarily withholding some aid, Saudi Arabia came to its rescue with a $12 billion aid line. The Sisi government is determined to crush all opposition, throwing most of the top leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood into jail with long prison sentences and death sentences for many of its supporters. But it has the support of the Saudi monarchy, willing to bankroll the new/old order. Indeed, the Sisi government has freed Hosni Mubarak’s two sons from jail and Mubarak should also be a free man soon. It would please the Saudi regime to see their old friend rehabilitated, with Arab Spring increasingly becoming a distant memory.

However, things haven’t gone all the way for the aging Saudi monarchy. For instance, they haven’t been able to bring down the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria they detest with a passion despite all the money and military aid committed by Riyadh to the rebels in Syria. Indeed it has contributed to creating a bigger monster in the so-called Islamic caliphate proclaimed by the ISIL. Besides posing a security threat to the Saudi regime, it has put up its own claim as the ‘legitimate’ leader and guardian of the Islamic world with its so-called caliphate. The situation in Syria and Iraq is now so toxic that the Saudis cannot count on their old methods of throwing money and weapons at their favoured proxies to deliver desired results.

Which brings us to Saudi Arabia’s ongoing strategic and sectarian rivalry with Iran, of which the Iranian-supported Assad regime is a by-product. The rivalry with Iran, though, goes back to the Iranian revolution in 1979, which brought into power the clerical Shia regime regarded with apprehension in the majority Sunni Arab world. The US, Saudi Arabia’s top strategic ally, shared this hostility to the new Iranian regime, and was to keen roll back and/or overthrow Iran’s new clerical political order. And they found in the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein a willing collaborator. Supported with Gulf money and US arms, he started the Iran-Iraq war of the eighties. The war was fought to a stalemate, with Iran suffering huge casualties. Saddam failed to deliver. Instead he became a threat to the Gulf region by invading Kuwait. Which led to the first Gulf War with Saddam-led Iraq comprehensively defeated by the US. In the second Gulf War started by George Bush as part of his global war on terror, the invasion of Iraq went disastrously wrong over time, creating conditions contributing to the emergence of the so-called Islamic caliphate.

Such are the incongruities of the Middle Eastern strategic landscape that the US and Iran now have a shared interest in destroying ISIL. As earlier noted, Saudi Arabia made its own unintended contribution to ISIL’s rise out of all the money and weapons it supplied to rebels with some, if not much of it, making its way to this overarching enemy. Riyadh recognizes this new danger, thus now becoming part of the US-led coalition against the ISIL. But its hostility to Iran is so entrenched that the two countries are unlikely to come together to face, what looks like, a common threat. Saudi Arabia is also not taking kindly to any US endorsement of Iran’s positive role against ISIL. 

Even in the midst of such a dire threat from the so-called Islamic caliphate Riyadh still espouses the overthrow of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus by arming the anti-Assad rebels, though it is problematic how to vet who is who in the complex web of rebels, radical Islamists, ISIL, al-Nusra front and any number of other militant groups on the ground. And this is mainly because Saudi Arabia regards the Bashar regime as an Iranian proxy in the region. Coincidentally, it shares with Israel a determination to oppose Iran’s nuclear programme that might give it even additional leverage to work its influence in the Gulf and the region.

If this were not enough, Houthi rebels of Shia persuasion, believed to have Iranian support, have overthrown the Yemeni government and taken over in the capital. The situation in Yemen is so complex with an interplay of Houthis, al Qaeda in Yemen, with US using drones targeting al Qaeda leadership, and a separatist movement in parts of the country. And this is all happening right close to Saudi borders. Saudi Arabia’s new King Salman will need all the wisdom and expertise to insulate the country and its aging monarchy from all its internal and external challenges.

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact" sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au

 US failure in Afghanistan

S P SETH

Now that the US-led Afghan operations are winding down substantially with about 13,000 troops still to remain in a largely advisory and training role, there is no doubt that the west has failed disastrously even after 13 years of high intensity warfare in a country where the enemy was anywhere and everywhere; but with nowhere near the military capability and weaponry wielded and used by the allied forces. It raises an important question, which is:  why is it that the US-led operations in Afghanistan failed so miserably? After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US linked to the al Qaida organization in Afghanistan under the leadership of Osama bin Laden, the US launched the global war on terrorism with Afghanistan as its epicenter where al Qaeda was based under the protection of its Taliban regime. Not surprisingly, with the deployment of massive US military power the al Qaeda in Afghanistan was soon in disarray and retreat, and the Taliban leadership running for cover finally found a home of sorts in Pakistan. The US was able to install Hamid Karzai as the country’s president. The process was given some legitimacy through a constitution and follow up elections that returned Karzai, though the whole process was flawed and rigged by the Karzai administration. And this has continued to this day, though there is now a new president of the country.

From this flowed much of the country’s manifold problems. The new government appointed its own provincial and local administrative agencies and officials. And with so much money available from the central coffers filled by foreign ‘development’ funds, there was lot more scope for corruption at all levels from top to bottom. With new government, new funds and new powers, there was lot of misuse in all sorts of ways to pursue old vendettas against tribal, regional and sectarian enemies, some of them ending up in Guantanamo Bay reported to the Americans by their local enemies as top notch terrorists. The corruption became so rife that some American contractors too became enmeshed, and the projects they and their local collaborators were entrusted with often remained either half-finished or simply vanished along with the funds allocated for them. In other words, it was a free for all and there was nothing much to show by way of real development benefitting the people.

And the beneficiary of this, in a perverse sort of way, were the Taliban not because they were popular, indeed their own administration was pretty horrific, but because the new order—rather disorder—was making them look not so bad. And they started to gain ground in some regions. The counter-insurgency operations against them were designed to achieve three objectives: protecting the population, improving governance and developing the country. In neither of these areas, there was any significant advance, thus facilitating or forcing local elements to either make peace with the Taliban, or be coopted into their game plan. In other words, even though the Taliban might have lain low for a while after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, they were never out. And this was greatly helped when its leadership was able to operate from across the border in Pakistan under the quiet patronage of the Pakistani military intelligence services, ISI.

It would appear, however, that Pakistan was not aware precisely of what was cooking in the al Qaeda pot just across the border in Afghanistan when the 9/11 happened. But after it happened Pakistan was sucked into the US anti-terror campaign, trying to strike a balance between maintaining ties with the Taliban leadership in its backyard and, at the same time, cooperating with the US and ending up as a vast base for US operations. Which brought it into conflict with the tribal leaders and jihadist elements operating from Waziristan. In the midst of all these currents and cross currents of rebel and terrorist activities there emerged the TTP and other associated militant groups lunging into some of the settled areas and almost succeeded in carving out, what looked like, a mini-Islamic state as a base for further incursions against the Pakistani state. Which led the army into large scale military operations successfully launched against these forces.

At the same time, the situation in North Waziristan was becoming increasingly worrisome, engaging the army into large-scale operations against such elements. In other words, Pakistan’s ambiguous, though quietly supportive relationship with the Taliban leadership in Pakistan hemmed it in with some confusion about its medium and long-term strategy. While it went after the TTP, it continued to support some other militant groups with much of the same Islamic agenda as the former. The upshot of it all has been that this has generally aided the Taliban in Afghanistan, with border crossings back and forth between Pakistan and Afghanistan and its top leadership sheltering in Pakistan. It must be said though that it has done immense harm to Pakistan by turning its body politic and society upside down. At the same time, it harmed the allied forces’ operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan, thus contributing to their failure in Afghanistan.

Another contributing factor for the US and NATO failure has been that many Afghans saw them as a foreign invading force, which Taliban played to the hilt in their propaganda. Adding to this was a lack of knowledge and understanding of the Afghan society by the US and NATO forces with its intricate mix of tribal traditions, sectarian and regional divide and so on. In the absence of such understanding and knowledge it was not surprising that they thought it their mission to impose western values and governance on a society that had its own code of honour, tribal hierarchy and no real tradition of governance from a central power structure, as with Karzai as the country’s president.

Therefore, there was an inbuilt contradiction between the western system the Afghans were offered and their own way of managing their affairs. And their experience of British invasion twice in the 19^th century was enshrined in the Afghan psyche as an example of foreign intervention, which in any case didn’t go well for the British. It should have been a salutary lesson for the US and NATO but they apparently ignored it, as part of their general lack of interest in Afghan history and tradition. And as they exit Afghanistan, keeping a presence of about 13,000 troops down from about 140,000 at the peak of the military operations, the prospects for Afghanistan do not look bright, to put it mildly. 

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au 

Israeli occupation: an Orwellian nightmare

S P SETH

Israel is in a class by itself. Its actions, however grotesque and devoid of basic humanity, do not seem to evoke enough international outrage. It was, therefore, not surprising that the proposed bill, recently approved by the cabinet, to designate Israel as the “nation state” of the Jewish people didn’t evoke much critical response internationally. The proposed bill, when passed, will reduce the country’s about 2 million Arab citizens living in Israel proper into second-class citizens, having to prove their loyalty time and again to the Jewish state. Apart from other things, this is clearly in contravention of the Israeli boast that it is the only democratic state in the Middle East. Israeli minorities are already in effect second-class citizens. But the proposed bill would have the effect, more of less, of formalizing their second-class status in law. For instance, its provisions such as the elimination of Arabic as an official language, and to make Jewish religious law to take precedence, might turn it into a virtual theocracy.

This is part of a continuing process of making irreversible the exclusionary character of an expanding Jewish state, with its creeping annexation of West Bank and East Jerusalem, with Gaza Strip as its outer enclave subject to periodic raids and blockade. Indeed, Israel’ new President Reuven (Ruvi) Rivlin doesn’t have any time and patience for those who advocate a Palestinian state. According to David Remnick of the New Yorker, “ [the new President] is ardently opposed to the establishment of a Palestinian state. He is instead a proponent of Greater Israel, one Jewish state from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean Sea.” And: “He professes to be mystified that anyone should object to the continued construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.” Ruvi’s view is that: “It can’t be ‘occupied territory’ if the land is your own.”

With such views at the highest level of the Israeli government, and this includes Prime Minister Netanyahu though he might not now openly expound or support Greater Israel, the tragedy of the Palestinian people condemned to Israeli occupation and all that follows from it, appears to be never-ending. It is, therefore, odd that President Ruvi simultaneously supports the civil rights of the Palestinians, as portrayed in Remnick’s article, while dismissing the existence of their homeland.

It is this sort of self-righteousness that tends to elevate every Israeli act of violence as a morally defensive measure. For Instance, take the case of the recent killing by two Palestinian youth of five Jews in a Jerusalem synagogue and their subsequent death in shooting by Israeli security forces. The retribution for the Israelis killed in the synagogue attacks didn’t end with the two young killers shot dead on spot. Such punishment would need to be exemplary, in the Israeli view, and carry even greater deterrence by punishing their family and relatives by demolishing their homes. According to the Sydney Morning Herald correspondent, Ruth Pollard, who met the 70-year old father of the one of the young men who was shot on the spot, he had no clue that his son and his cousin would be involved in the killing of five Israelis in a synagogue. He said, “My son was not religious, he did not go to the mosque to pray-- I cannot believe my child would do such a thing.”

Having agonized and reflected over it for some days, Mohamed Abu Jamal, father of Ghassan, one of the killers at the synagogue, had an explanation of sorts which goes to the heart of all the violence and counter-violence which plagues Palestine. According to Abu Jamal, “When an external force [Israeli policy] exerts such pressure on a person and makes it impossible for him to live, to earn his daily bread, when you increase the psychological pressure on people, when you add the Gaza war and all those who we saw die, you can feel such despair.” He added, “All of this combined with his financial difficulties led to this moment... they [the Netanyahu government] forced him into a corner, he was suffocating.”

Continuing, the father said, “ Even now they are still pushing, they have yet to return the bodies of my son or his cousin. They cannot commit a crime when they are already dead, so why is the [Israeli] choosing to punish us?”, including ordering the demolition of our houses. While crying quietly, Abu Jamal says plaintively, “I believe in peace. I believe in a two-state solution for my people but I also believe in dignity for my people, and there is no dignity here.” This, in a nutshell, is the genesis of the Palestinian question.

But as David Shulman writes in the New York Review of Books, “One has to bear in mind that Israelis live in a largely mythic world… in which Israelis are by definition innocent victims of dark, irrational forces operating against them, heroic death in war always makes sense, and violent coercion is the option both of necessity and of choice.” And he quotes the Hebrew proverb that says, “If force doesn’t work, use more force.” Israel is a great practitioner of this precept, making any peaceful settlement of the Palestinian issue virtually impossible. We have seen the use of force time and again and more recently in Gaza on an industrial scale killing more than 2000 Palestinians and destroying its infrastructure, heaping even more misery on this Palestinian enclave that is already blockaded by Israel from all sides. The periodic bombing of Gaza is amusingly called the ‘mowing’ of grass, making death and destruction a routine but ‘necessary’ chore.

Such blatant violence on the Palestinians, including the death of a Palestinian cabinet minister in a peaceful protest, is only part of the story. A much more insidious exercise of control and coercion of the civilian population is revealed in a September 12 letter by a group of 43 officers and soldiers from Unit 8200, “the cream of Israeli intelligence”. In their letter to to the Israeli prime minister and the chief of staff, they said that they were refusing to serve and do the things that their conscience apparently doesn’t permit. They said, (as quoted by David Shulman in his article) “The Palestinian population under military rule is completely exposed to espionage and surveillance by Israeli intelligence… There’s no distinction between Palestinians who are, and are not, involved in violence. Information that is collected and stored harms innocent people. It is used for political persecution and to create divisions within Palestinian society by recruiting collaborators and driving parts of Palestinian society against itself…. “

It went on, “Intelligence [thus collected] allows for continued control over millions of people through thorough and intrusive supervision and invasion of most areas of life.”

In other words, all of Palestine is a vast jail that might have been envisioned by George Orwell. But, who cares: it is only Palestine and in any case, as Israel would say, ‘they are just terrorists’.

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au

Iran: will there be a nuclear deal?

S P SETH

The good news is that the November 20 deadline for working out a long-term nuclear deal between Iran and the 5-plus-1 powers that include the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (US, UK, France, China and Russia) and Germany has been extended for 7 months to June 30 next year. The bad news, though, is that there are still serious gaps between the two sides, with the US and other dialogue partners wanting to curb Iran’s nuclear capability to suddenly “breakout” into making an atomic bomb. How and weather these gaps will be bridged during the extended period will be a difficult, if not an improbable, exercise. The opening premise of the negotiations in which Iran is considered a culprit of sorts pursuing a nuclear weapons programme in contravention of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), is seriously challenged by Tehran. Iran maintains that its nuclear research and technology programme is for peaceful purposes as per the NPT charter. The one-year interim agreement signed last year, which virtually froze Iran’s nuclear programme , was a stopgap arrangement to curtail Iran’s nuclear capability until a long-term arrangement was worked out. In return, Iran was given, limited, relief from some of the sanctions imposed on it.

The US intelligence on Iran’s nuclear capability didn’t detect that Tehran was working on a nuclear bomb, which enraged Israel. It is quite clear that, despite all the sanctions it has suffered and is suffering for many years, Iran insists that it will not give away its ‘peaceful’ nuclear programme as it is a matter of national sovereignty. Even if it were to accept low level of enrichment capability at 10 per cent or below, an unlikely prospect, it still wouldn’t be acceptable to the  Zionist lobby in the US which, with Israel, has a veto of sorts when it comes to Iran’s nuclear programme. They are unlikely to let it get through, with threats of more sanctions. For them, the only real solution is the dismantling/destruction of Iran’s nuclear capability because Tehran cannot be trusted to abide by any agreement.  

Israel is simply dead set on stopping Iran from a nuclear path, peaceful or otherwise. It believes that Tehran will use its nuclear capability against Israel. Therefore, it has sought to subvert it by all sorts of subterfuges. For instance, it infected the programme with a computer virus targeted at Iran’s nuclear centrifuges to enrich uranium, possibly with US help/involvement. In the process, it was reported to have, at the time, ruined almost one-fifth of the centrifuges thus seriously complicating and slowing the programme. But Iran apparently was able to fix up the damage. Israel has also been reportedly behind the killing of some of Iran’s nuclear scientists. Israel had reportedly tried hard to persuade the Bush administration to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities but it didn’t succeed as they were already bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, and didn’t have the stomach to buy into another adventure with all sorts of unpredictable consequences. Israel would have liked to do it on its own but wanted US help and backing that was not forthcoming. The US, however, made it clear that all options, including military action, were on the table if Iran acquired nuclear weapons. But Israel is not satisfied with such assurances. One thing, though, is clear. Whether or not Iran’s nuclear programme is legitimate, Israel certainly doesn’t have any political/moral case to oppose it, being the first to introduce nuclear weapons in the region and is said to have an arsenal of a few hundred bombs.

Israel is not the only regional country strongly opposed to Iran’s nuclear programme. Among the Arab countries, Saudi Arabia is in the vanguard of such opposition, though it doesn’t seem coordinated with Israel. It is rather part of the larger sectarian conflict in the Muslim world between the Sunnis and Shias and the attendant geopolitical rivalry. Iran is believed to have ambitions to destabilize the Arab world and establish its dominance. One way to do would be to stir up and support Shias in Arab countries, like in Bahrain with a majority Shia population ruled by a Sunni monarch, in the restive Saudi oil producing eastern province with Shia majority, and in Yemen. Iran’s nuclear status apparently would enhance its regional position and might further stir up the Shias in Arab countries, with direct or indirect support from Iran. Saudi Arabia and its Gulf partners are, therefore, strongly opposed to any US nuclear deal with Iran.

Of course, the US has no intention of facilitating an Iranian nuclear programme. That is why there are so many obstacles to doing a deal. It has to be so foolproof that Iran wouldn’t be able to “breakout” into making a bomb through its existing nuclear facilities. Hence, the need for the US to keep Iran’s capability to enrich uranium to the lowest possible level and to keep its nuclear facilities under strict and widest scrutiny and surveillance. While Iran is willing to accept reasonable curbs and be transparent about its programme, it is not willing to let international inspectors from IAEA or wherever roaming anywhere and everywhere to demand instant inspections and interview its scientists. In return for accepting curbs on its nuclear programme, Iran wants economic sanctions lifted substantially, if not completely. The US, on the other hand, would like any lifting of sanctions to be limited both in scope and time to Iran’s compliance to Washington’s satisfaction, thus keeping it on life support. It is, therefore, not difficult to see what a maze the nuclear dialogue is between Iran and its six dialogue partners, particularly the US and UK, France and Germany.

However, the last year’s interim agreement was a breakthrough of sorts between Iran and the US, though a limited one. John Kerry admitted that some progress was made in recent negotiations but not enough to clinch a deal. Serious gaps remain in their respective position. The extended time schedule is meant to iron out and bridge those gaps, which is a big task. One thing, though, is clear that without Iran’s constructive involvement, the Middle Eastern region is likely to remain volatile, even more so after the run away success of the Islamic State (of Iraq and Levant). There is considerable scope for the US and Iran for cooperation against the IS, and some of it is already happening informally in Iraq. Indeed, John Kerry described recent recent Iranian aerial sorties against the IS as “positive.”

Although Saudi Arabia remains opposed to Iranian involvement and/or any cooperation between it and the US, Riyadh wouldn’t be unaware of the serious threat IS poses to the Saudi regime by seeking to destabilize and/or overthrow the monarchy. The threat would probably have to be more concrete before Riyadh would consider any opening with Iran. However, for Iran to become part of the Middle Eastern geopolitical solution against IS and a range of other issues, a deal with Iran on its nuclear programme is imperative.

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au