The New Middle East (37 page)

‘It was a mistake to assume it wasn’t complex before,’ Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer told me. After he retired from the State Department in 2006 he wrote speeches for the then Senator Barack Obama and advised him on the Middle East as he ran for the White House, and was one of the architects of Obama’s policy of engagement and persuasion with hostile foreign powers.

It may have looked like one size fits all before, but in effect you had a policy in the Middle East totally dominated by three partners, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel. And everybody else kind of fit in or didn’t fit in. In some respects I think Obama, whether he has articulated it or not, is looking to maintain that as things change. So it’s a moving sidewalk and you can’t just remain stationary but it’s hard in all three places.

It is hard because all three of America’s partners in the region, which have for decades been the three pillars of US foreign policy here, have been, are being or will be radically changed by the forces unleashed by the uprisings. In the coming years each time that Secretary of State John Kerry gets back to Washington after a trip to the Middle East he will often find the place he has just left has changed again while he was still in mid-air.

Decades of pent-up energy burst out into the open in 2011. It is going to take years for things to calm down. Versions of the sudden sense of shock that the US administration had in those early days will be felt again and again. Just propping up the three pillars of its policy – Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia – and dealing with the occasional young pretender may mean it will take some time before it can build anything new on top.

‘The Obama administration was presented with a historic watershed of the like you see only every two to three decades,’ said Anne-Marie Slaughter.

At least in 1989 you had a year’s warning. In Egypt you had two weeks. It required overturning thirty years of a deep relationship pretty much overnight. If you had said when Obama came into office or even at Christmas 2010: ‘Hey look, in two months you’re going to be abandoning Hosni Mubarak! . . .’ I think actually they reacted very fast, they corrected course remarkably quickly, and then in Libya they made the right decision. In Bahrain it was much more complicated and the Saudis were much more involved and it was much less clear to us what we could do.

The answer to that question was nothing. While much had changed in the Middle East, America’s allies in the Gulf were determined that some things would not.

If American foreign policy was caught in the headlights, foreign policy in the Gulf went into a blind panic in the first few months of the revolts. The Saudis in particular don’t take kindly to movements built around people power. Public protest in the country is illegal.
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The speed with which the first two dictators were deposed horrified them and prompted their intervention in Bahrain when the House of Saud started catching the draught from the region’s winds of change. ‘[The Saudis] led a counter-revolution against the Arab Spring uprisings domestically and in their own close sphere of influence like Bahrain, and to some extent also in Abu Dhabi and the UAE, where you have also a Muslim Brotherhood-like movement in the northern Emirates,’ says Princeton’s Professor Bernard Haykel.

The protests in Bahrain centred on the Pearl Roundabout in the capital Manama. The demonstrators camped out there for a month until the Sunni King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa’s security services, backed by Saudi troops, used what the UN called a ‘shocking’ level of force to clear them out.
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Most controversially, it even jailed doctors who had treated the injured protesters at the country’s main public hospital, though they were later cleared on appeal.
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This wasn’t the end of the wider protests though, which continued on and off for years afterwards. Nor was it the end of the state clamping down on the demonstrators who came largely from the majority Shia population.

In that speech at the State Department on 19 May 2011 when President Obama gave his initial considered assessment of the events in the Middle East and North Africa, he said: ‘a new generation has emerged. And their voices tell us that change cannot be denied.’ He reeled off where these cries for freedom could be heard – ‘In Cairo . . . In Sanaa . . . In Benghazi . . . In Damascus’ – and went on to take a swipe at Iran. He also talked about the rights of women and religious minorities. He spoke about the Israeli–Palestinian peace process and the regional economy. And he offered a rebuke against the events at Pearl Roundabout, saying: ‘we have insisted both publicly and privately that mass arrests and brute force are at odds with the universal rights of Bahrain’s citizens . . . you can’t have a real dialogue when parts of the peaceful opposition are in jail.’
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In fact he addressed all of the key issues and nations of the region, bar one. Two words were missing from his speech. They were ‘Saudi Arabia’. Professor Haykel told me:

The Saudis were against the toppling of Mubarak and were taken aback by it. They were particularly upset by the fact that President Obama abandoned Mubarak because they conceive of politics in terms of personal relationships and loyalty and they saw Obama as being disloyal to Mubarak. I think Obama realised fairly quickly that Bahrain was a red line and it was off limits to an independent American policy.

President Obama wasn’t breaking new ground with his lack of action, as a report written for members of the US Congress pointed out: ‘U.S. comments and action with regard to Bahrain may be regarded by Saudi officials as indicators of U.S. commitment to maintaining relationships that have long prioritized government-to-government cooperation over people-to-people ties and human rights and democracy.’
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However Obama
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breaking with his own previously held position.

In the months running up to the invasion of Iraq, then Illinois State Senator Obama spoke out against this clash between American values and American foreign policy. He asked the man he would eventually replace: ‘You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality.’
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Those words rang hollow by the time the now President Obama had a chance to do just that. In 2011 nothing was done to stop his ‘so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis’ helping to suppress dissent in Bahrain. Bahrain is the home of the US Navy’s 5th Fleet, America’s key deterrent against Iranian ambitions to influence affairs in the oil-rich Gulf region.

To be fair, the White House didn’t try to hide these policy contradictions either. ‘We don’t make decisions about questions like intervention based on consistency or precedent,’ said a spokesman when he was quizzed over the variance between the Obama administration’s actions in Libya, Syria and Bahrain after the uprisings. ‘We make them based on how we can best advance our interests in the region.’
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While the Obama administration worked out what those interests now were, as the New Middle East formed, the Gulf states took the chance to catch their breath. They had been petrified by the pace of change in Tunisia and Egypt and they feared that the wave of revolts was unstoppable. Libya reassured them, because Gaddafi proved that not all authoritarian regimes just collapsed overnight. Then the Saudis were actively encouraged by the US to take the public lead in the transition in Yemen. Through the Gulf Cooperation Council, the GCC, they ended both the 33-year rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, and the year-long, often bloody revolt against him. Yemen avoided a civil war, though the chaos allowed al-Qaeda to strengthen its hold on the south of the country, the young protesters did not get their political reform, and Saleh continued to interfere from the sidelines. However, their own nerves now steadied, the Saudis paused and surveyed the new political landscape. They rather liked what they saw. To take advantage of it they first exploited the absent influence of some of the dictators they’d been at first so loath to lose.

Within weeks of Mubarak’s overthrow the institution that had symbolised much of what was wrong with the Arab world during his rule was suddenly in danger of losing its hard-won reputation for being utterly useless in a crisis. The Arab League was making decisions. What wasn’t immediately obvious was how much the revolutions had changed the power balance in the grouping, shifting it towards the GCC. This is a political and economic alliance made up of Sunni-led nations: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. The first two of these countries dominate the rest. Their mutual antagonism is driven by their competition for influence within the GCC and the wider region. The biggest problem they all face is their restless Shia populations. There are 2 million Shia in the GCC states. They are a majority in Bahrain and range from between 10 and 30 per cent in the other five states.
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When the Libyans rose up and Gaddafi began his violent crackdown there was a push from the British and the French for a no-fly zone. President Obama didn’t think that went far enough and told his colleagues: ‘I want to call everyone’s bluff up in New York . . . we’re not going to support this resolution for a no-fly zone, we’re going to redo it and authorise the use of “all necessary measures to protect civilians”.’
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It upped the ante considerably, but Russia and China didn’t block the resolution, partly because the move had the unprecedented backing of the Arab League.
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As Gaddafi had already turned his back on the Arab world it was perhaps not surprising to them that the League turned its back on him. Russia and China realised too late that the real cause was a shift in power within the grouping away from the previously dominant members who were busy dealing with the Arab revolts and towards the Gulf. Ambassador Barbara Bodine told me:

The traditional powers in the Arab League were suddenly out of the game, and what we saw was the GCC states kind of do an invasion of the body snatchers. They have taken over the Arab League because there was a power vacuum. The Qataris had been playing in political issues for quite some time and for a while everyone giggled – ‘Little Qatar running around trying to solve Sudan and Lebanon and everything else, isn’t that funny?’ But they kept at it and what we didn’t notice was that they were actually quite serious about it, there was a learning curve. With the Arab Spring a lot of that crystallised.

In November 2009 Qatar’s enthusiasm in the realm of foreign policy ambitions was being derided in the US State Department: ‘Over the next 36 months . . . Qatar will also continue to pursue its classic vulnerable small-state policies aimed either at pleasing as many players as possible or – where competing demands make this impossible – at containing and counter-balancing irritation caused by these policies.’
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It proved quite a busy thirty-six months for the Qataris, who saw the Arab Spring as their chance to step up to the big league. By the end of 2012 money from Doha had bankrolled the Libyan revolution and was co-funding the Syrian one. And the government had loaned billions of dollars to the new Islamist governments in Egypt and Tunisia.

In the past, Qatari foreign policy had seemed to be about keeping itself out of trouble with the rest of the region. Its willingness to curry favour with anyone and everyone led the then Senator John Kerry to remark in April 2009 that ‘Qatar . . . can’t continue to be an American ally on Monday that sends money to Hamas on Tuesday.’
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The same year a secret State Department cable said that when it came to cooperating with the US over terrorist financing Qatar was ‘the worst in the region . . . they have been hesitant to act against known terrorists out of concern for appearing to be aligned with the U.S. and provoking reprisals.’
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The rise of Islamists to power in Tunisia and Egypt, and the potential for that to happen also in Libya and Syria, seems to have spurred Qatar into thinking they could now reshape the Middle East. Saudi Arabia saw the revolts as a threat. Qatar saw them as an opportunity, because with its native population enjoying a per capita income of around US$400,000 a year it wasn’t expecting any blowback at home.
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Instead the Qatari leadership’s hope was that once the episode played out, they would have long-term grateful friends in some of the most important Arab states. But they started to get carried away with themselves. They infuriated many of their Arab League colleagues by stifling debate and forcing through policies during closed-door sessions.
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