Bridging the Gulf
By admin • Dec 23rd, 2008In the end, Saudi Arabia did not grab that brass ring, and by the spring of 2008, its activism was less apparent. Besides the collapse of the 2007 Mecca Agreement, F. Gregory Gause III, a professor of political science at the University of Vermont and author of two books on the Gulf, notes that the Saudi-backed Lebanese Sunni Muslim parties were unable to curb Hezbollah’s military and political activities. Furthermore, Saudi attempts to isolate Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki in Arab circles did not succeed for long.
In addition, Saudi efforts to cajole Washington into doing something serious about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict came to naught. The Saudis reluctantly agreed to attend the 2007 Annapolis conference, after repeated requests by the White House, and promises that the affair would be more than a “photo-op.”
But the Bush administration did little to follow up after the conference, and the Saudis watched with dismay as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict deepened once again.
The kingdom may have turned inwards, but its neighbors are still there. And as the Saudis wait for a new US administration to announce its intentions, from Riyadh’s perspective, there are two major concerns. First, there is Iraq. A year ago, the Saudis were apoplectic about what they saw as Iran’s widening influence there. For them, Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki was an Iranian agent performing Tehran’s bidding.
One Saudi official who declined to be identified offered an historical perspective for the Saudis’ anger. “Most people don’t realize that Iraq and Saudi Arabia had the most extensive relations: in trade, religion, and politics - for hundreds of years,” he says. “So for Saudi Arabia to see that Iran is gaining in Iraq is almost traumatic. They are concerned that the Iranian-supported forces will gain the upper-hand decisively and that there will be a point of no return.”
The Saudis also were dismayed by the dismantling of Iraq’s Sunni Muslim political establishment, which was less a result of the US occupation than of decades of dictatorship. When the brittle Ba’ath regime collapsed, the Sunnis were left disorganized and leaderless.
They also decided only to minimally engage Iraq, and encouraged other Arab states to follow their lead. The kingdom hasn’t yet implemented a three-year-old offer to forgive a large part of Iraq’s estimated $30 billion debt. It haven’t yet invited Iraqi President al-Maliki to the kingdom. And while Saudi allowed Iraq to reopen its embassy there, it hasn’t yet opened its own in Baghdad.
“Having no embassy [in Iraq] doesn’t mean that we don’t have contact with our Iraqi brothers,” says Saudi Foreign Ministry spokesman Osama A. al-Nugali. Riyadh has made a “political decision” to reopen its embassy in Baghdad, he adds, but needed to resolve “technical, administrative and security” issues first.
The one exception has been security, and Iraq’s national security adviser, Mouaffak al-Rubaie, has visited Riyadh often. In September, the kingdom announced that it had signed an extradition treaty with Iraq as a prelude to an exchange of prisoners.
Out of the cold. By mid-2008, the isolation policy saw its first defections. In July, the United Arab Emirates cancelled Iraq’s debt of $7 billion, and named an ambassador to Baghdad. That was soon followed by Jordanian King Abdullah’s ice-breaking visit to the Iraqi capital, with Lebanon’s Prime Minister Fouad Siniora arriving a week afterwards.
The thaw coincided with a decrease in Saudi concerns as the US took what Riyadh viewed as a more activist stance against Iranian interference in Iraq, according to al-Badi, the King Faisal Center scholar. “The United States realizes its own mistakes now … so it is facing Iranian influence in Iraq, and Iraqi groups are facing Iranian influence in Iraq,” he says.
The Saudis also were gratified to see al-Maliki take on the Iranian-supported militia of Moqtada al-Sadr. While they remain suspicious of the Iraqi leader, they are now assessing him with a more open mind. “Saudis do not care if Iraq’s leader is Shi’ite,” says al-Badi, “as long as he acts, both internally and externally, as an Iraqi, and not as a sectarian representative.”
In the Saudi view, Iraq is not yet out of the woods. Further repression of the Sunni Muslim community, armed chaos, or a geographical break-up of Iraq remain possibilities. And as the American military draws down, Riyadh will be watching from the sidelines to see what happens next.
Obviously, Iran is a focus for diplomacy too. Tehran embodies many of Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy concerns, and its pursuit of nuclear weapons is seen as particularly alarming.
But an Israeli or American military strike on Iran would be almost as frightening, since Saudi Arabia believes the Gulf would be on the front line of Iranian retaliation.
Less scary, but still annoying, Iran has been projecting its influence throughout the Arab heartland: in Lebanon through Hezbollah, in Damascus through its alliance with Syria, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and most recently in Iraq.
Unwilling to openly support Washington’s confrontational approach, the Saudis opted for a policy of half-hearted engagement. King Abdullah invited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to perform the hajj last year, and he placed former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani on the dais with him at an interfaith conference in Mecca in June. But by mid-2008, that approach seemed to have run its course because all the Saudis and their Gulf neighbors got was a string of insults from Tehran.
First, an Iranian deputy minister suggested that Gulf Arab states would soon face a “legitimacy crisis” because of their ties to the United States. Then a senior Iranian official claimed in an editorial that Bahrain is an Iranian province and should be reunited to its “motherland.” Iran also provoked its Arab neighbors by opening a maritime office on the disputed island of Abu Musa - which is also claimed by the United Arab Emirates.
