Foreign Policy In Focus

The international community largely supports the U.S. and Saudi Arabia on Syria: hope for peace, but failing that, throw more money at the conflict.

At a joint news conference last week in Riyadh, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal stressed the importance of a peaceful, democratic transition in Syria and renewed pressure on Syrian President Bashar Assad to step down, with both men declaring that the Syrian president has “lost his legitimacy” as a ruler of the Syrian people.

Teaming with Saudi Arabia to denounce Assad’s regime and promote democracy is a rather questionable choice, as John Glaser of Antiwar.com observes:  “You really have to swim through a lot of cognitive dissonance to understand how the secretary of state of the world’s only empire and the foreign minister of the Middle East’s worst dictatorship can stand united on bringing democracy to Syria.” And truly, Faisal’s statement that Saudi Arabia cannot “bring [itself] to remain quiet in front of this carnage” and “morally” has “a duty to protect” these citizens seems overly saccharine for the world’s largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups.

Moreover, while both men stated the “urgent” need for a peaceful transition, neither seems to see a problem with simultaneously funding and arming the opposition in the meantime. Only a week before his conference in Riyadh, Kerry revealed that an additional $60 million of non-lethal aid, such as food and medical supplies, would be provided to the Syrian opposition. And Saudi Arabia (along with its nearby ally Qatar) has been not-so-discreetly funneling arms to the opposition for some six months at least.

In fact, the international community largely seems to support the stance presented by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia: hope for peace, but failing that, throw more money into fueling the conflict.

Britain has already petitioned the EU to lift its embargo on the arms trade to Syria, and recently announced it will be sending armored vehicles and other “non-lethal” equipment to the opposition in addition to providing training for rebel groups. Turkey has also supported this stance, joining Britain in petitioning to have the arms embargo lifted on Syria. Not to mention, it is through Turkey that the arms provided by Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been able to make it across the border.

Joining these countries, the Arab League—after its decision to reinstate Syria’s membership in the League with a representative from the Syrian National Coalition, the main umbrella organization for the opposition—called arming Syrian rebels “logical.” Whereas the Arab League previously advocated a political resolution to the conflict, it overturned this decision and now condones the arming of the Syrian opposition by its member states.

On the other side of the conflict, whereas both Iran and Russia support peaceful talks between the regime and opposition (without the precondition that Assad step down), both countries throughout the conflict have reportedly been supplying Assad with weapons shipments.

Countries such as Canada and Germany seem to be the only remaining voices of reason in the international funding mania. Canada, in response to Kerry’s announcement to pledge further aid to Syria, called such funding “too risky,” adding that “the answer to the crisis in Syria is not more violence.” Germany also chimed in, stating that support should be shown for the opposition in a “responsible” way and that the EU’s decision not to lift its embargo was “wise and right.”

Kerry, for his part, seems undisturbed by the risk arming the rebels presents. When Anne Gearan of The Washington Post asked Kerry whether the arms already being funneled into the country could fall into the wrong hands, Kerry replied that while “there is no guarantee that one weapon or another might not at some point in time fall into the wrong hands … there is a very clear ability now in the Syrian opposition to make certain that what goes to the moderate, legitimate opposition is, in fact, getting to them.”

Kerry’s rather long-winded answer simply confirms that the opposition has no ability to prevent arms from reaching extremists.

And this is no hypothetical. At least some of these arms have already fallen into the hands of hard-line Islamists, but in the midst of this international arming frenzy, few seem to be overly concerned by it—least of all those doing the arming.

Leslie Garvey is a contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus and Focal Points.

Major media outlets once again sit on a big story at an administration's request.

Cross-posted from the Arabist.

The Washington Post, among “several” other unnamed news outlets, has reportedly known of a US airstrip in Saudi Arabia that, aside from the apparent distinction of being the first new US base opened on Saudi soil since the 2003 troop withdrawals, was the airstrip that participated in the 2011 raid(s) that killed Anwar al-Awlaki.

According to the Post, it and those outlets have sat on the information for a year at the administration’s request for fear it would jeopardize the base’s security and the secrecy of US combat operations in Yemen, which are also supported by the Saudi Air Force. It is also notable that the US has set up this while still retaining its heaviest aerial assets (which are reserved for contingencies against the Islamic Republic of Iran) in the region in Qatar, so this is solely an anti-AQAP program that’s been set up.

One of the outlets — not the Post — was going to break the self-observed gag order on the basing details, so the details have begun to emerge, which for presumptive CIA Director John Brennan is hardly pleasant news since his Senate confirmation hearings have begun and there is much talk of him throwing a wet towel on the campaign. However, as Matt Appuzo points out, this is not the first we’ve heard of this base. “In addition to Seychelles and Ethiopia, the senior U.S. military official said the United States got permission to fly armed drones from Djibouti, and confirmed the construction of a new airstrip in Saudi Arabia” was what Fox News reported in 2011, citing a Washington Post report on the expansion of drone efforts worldwide, though the remarks quoted above came from Fox’s own source. 

Considering how contentious US basing in the Kingdom was when it began in the 1990s (and, we thought, largely came to an end in the 2000s except for the two military training/modernization programs run for the Saudi military and National Guard), one really has to marvel at how this White House earned the accolade of “transparency” in its first term with actions such as these. It’s worth noting that while detailed explanations — but not material evidence or witnesses — have been offered for targeting him as an active AQAP member, there have been no such specifics with regards to the death of his 16-year old son, Abdulrahman, who was killed in an operation against another target few days later — though unlike his father, he had not been deliberately targeted (the operation was targeting an Egyptian national). Bad parenting has even been offered as an explanation — well, justification — by one official for the son’s death once it became clear he was a minor and therefore not subject to the “signature strikes” that treat all adult males in the targeted areas as militant until proven innocent. (NB: Brennan convinced Obama to maintain this policy and have the CIA “tighten its targeting standards,” according to the Daily Beast.)

But if we are talking in terms of leaks, then yes, this has been a very “Sunshine Week” for the Administration. Since I’m on the subject of drones — though as Gregory D. Johnson points out drones are not the only weapons the US deploys in the Yemeni and Pakistani highlands — there have been some important new stories out about the US’s national counterterrorism strategy here in the Middle East:

1. The black sites legacy of the Bush Administration detailed in a new OSI report, though as OSI itself notes, “it appears that the Obama administration did not end extraordinary rendition,” though it has been much-scaled back. Both Eli Lake and Jeremy Scahill have been to Somalia in the past two years to report on these alleged CIA black sites and the local prisons that feed into them. However, it is clear that the administration has shied away from the sites in favor of drone operations.

2. Not a leak, but Micah Zenko’s discussion of outgoing SecDef Leon Panetta’s recent remarks on drones is still illuminating into the debate that goes on at these levels.

3. A leaked white paper released by NBC’s Michael Isikoff — perhaps from a White House source not happy with John Brennan (finally) moving (back) to the CIA in Obama’s second term? — that providers more detail on the speeches given by Brennan and others about the criteria for putting people, including US citizens, in the sights. Again, this isn’t the official policy document, but as a white paper signed off on by lawyers within the Administration, it is as good as we are going to get bar the Times or the Post releasing audiotape of a “Terror Tuesday” briefing. Glenn Greenwald details the implications in greater detail here.

Should President Obama hold Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah's hand like George W. Bush did?

A reference to “personal” relationship appears five times in the headline story “In Arab Spring, Obama Finds a Sharp Test” by Helene Cooper and Robert Worth in the September 25 edition of the New York Times and there is an additional reference to the President’s alleged “impersonal style.” It seems, the report says, that much of the quandary the U.S. finds itself in the Middle East derives from the fact that Obama “has not built many personal relationships with foreign leaders.” One piece of evidence cited is that he was not on good enough terms with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

Reading all this, my mind quickly went back to late April 2005 when the Times reported, “Mr. Bush even held the crown prince's hand, a traditional Saudi sign of friendship, as he guided Abdullah up the steps through a bed of bluebonnets to his office, the very picture of Saudi-American interdependence.”

The Cooper-Worth story cites an unnamed U.S. diplomat in Bahrain as saying that had Obama cultivated a closer relationship with the Saudi monarch “he might have bought time for negotiations” between the Bahraini authorities and the opposition. “Instead, the Saudis gave virtually no warning when their forces rolled across the causeway linking Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, and the ensuing crackdown destroyed all hopes for a peaceful resolution.”

I suspect the word “virtually” is important here because Washington was warned in advance by Riyadh. In any case, if U.S. intelligence agencies remained unaware as the Saudis rounded up troops from other Gulf monarchies for the invasion of Bahrain, their powers of observation are woefully inadequate.

Can the success of the Saudis and their Bahrain cohorts and much of the problems that have arisen in the region be even remotely traced to Obama’s alleged “character trait” and “impersonal style”? A dubious proposition at best. There is, however, another matter the Cooper-Worth history reveals that is of great importance: the inadequacies of major media reporting while events like the brutal crackdown in the gulf was transpiring.

“On March 14, White House officials awoke to a nasty surprise: the Saudis had led a military incursion into Bahrain, followed by a crackdown in which the security forces cleared Pearl Square in the capital, Manama, by force,” wrote Cooper-Worth. Sure. “The moves were widely condemned, but Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton offered only veiled criticisms, calling for “calm and restraint on all sides” and ‘political dialogue’,” they continued.

“The reasons for Mr. Obama’s reticence were clear: Bahrain sits just off the Saudi coast, and the Saudis were never going to allow a sudden flowering of democracy next door, especially in light of the island’s sectarian makeup,” wrote Cooper-Worth. “Bahrain’s people are mostly Shiite, and they have long been seen as a cat’s paw for Iranian influence by the Sunni rulers of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. In addition, the United States maintains a naval base in Bahrain that is seen as a bulwark against Iran, crucial for maintaining the flow of oil from the region.”

“We realized that the possibility of anything happening in Saudi Arabia was one that couldn’t become a reality,” William M. Daley, President Obama’s chief of staff at the time,” told the Times reporters. “For the global economy, this couldn’t happen. Yes, it was treated differently from Egypt. It was a different situation.”

The problem is that neither the Times nor any of the other Western mass media told the story that way at the time. Why? Go back to the story about the hand-holding stroll through the garden at Bush's Texas address.

The April 25, Times Story by Richard Stevenson noted that while many things were discussed at the Crawford ranch, “the focus was on oil prices.”

“Officials from both sides emerged from the meeting to say there was agreement on the value of Saudi Arabia's signaling to global markets that it would push down prices over the long run as demand for energy increased,” the report said. “American officials said they hoped the Saudi policy might put immediate downward pressure on oil prices, even though the expansion plan has been public for weeks.”

“The crown prince arrived at the Bush ranch late Monday morning from Dallas, where he had met Sunday with Vice President Dick Cheney, who was briefed on the Saudi production plan,” read  the Times story. “Reflecting the importance of the meeting to the administration, Mr. Bush was joined for the meeting here by Mr. Cheney; Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; Mr. Hadley; Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff; and Fran Townsend, the White House's homeland security adviser.”

What the Saudis got or requested in return for the never-stated-explicit promise to increase oil production is unclear but the report said “the two sides cited progress on a variety of fronts” and “Saudi officials said only technicalities remained in negotiating a trade deal with the United States, a big step toward Saudi Arabia's goal of joining the World Trade Organization. The two governments agreed to work toward making it easier for Saudi students and military officers to study and train in the United States.”

Saudi Arabia became a full WTO member December 11, 2005.

Unnamed Arab officials told Cooper and Worth that Obama is “a cool, cerebral man who discounts the importance of personal chemistry in politics.” “You can’t fix these problems by remote control,” said one Arab diplomat with long experience in Washington. “He doesn’t have friends who are world leaders. He doesn’t believe in patting anybody on the back, nicknames.”

More likely what they really meant is that Obama doesn’t get it on too well with despots. He seems to have hit it off quite well with the likes of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio da Silva and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

As the UN General Assembly session was getting underway, Cooper and Worth wrote, “In many ways, Mr. Obama’s remarks at the State Department two weeks ago — and the ones he will make before the General Assembly on Tuesday morning, when he addresses the anti-American protests — reflected hard lessons the president had learned over almost two years of political turmoil in the Arab world: bold words and support for democratic aspirations are not enough to engender good will in this region, especially not when hampered by America’s own national security interests.”

Or the price of oil.

For that U.S. Presidents have for decades shown a willingness to hold hands with just about anyone.

President Obama is no anti-imperialist. And our country’s standing and reputation in the international community is being ill-served by the continuing drone attacks that take the lives of innocent women, men and children. The same can be said for framing the one-sided framing of the Israel-Palestine conflict the way the President did in his UN address September 25. Ditto for the continued suggestion that tyranny should be met with stern outside interference in Libya or Syria but not Saudi Arabia or Bahrain. The cause of Washington’s problems in the Islamic world is not personality but policy.

Carl Bloice, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, is a columnist for the Black Commentator. He also serves on its editorial board.

"On the one hand, it's deeply worrying that the government is seeking to create a surveillance culture that encompasses spying on all digital media.

"On the other, that same government would struggle to arrange a children's party if provided with a clown, a bouncy castle, some children and an unlimited supply of jelly."
-- the satirist Daily Mash on new British online surveillance laws

On the one hand, a Wahhabi fatwa against Twitter. On the other, a princely stake from an Al Saud in the platform.

And on the other *other* hand, a growing campaign across the region to censor -- and censure -- dissent from social media users that is no laughing matter.

Social media is certainty shaking up the Kingdom. Hamza Kashgari was arrested for "blasphemous" tweets -- whose supporters now assert that, so desperate were the Saudi authorities to make an example of him, they pressured Malaysian officials into arresting and extraditing him while he was traveling around Malaysia, and then lying abut this by claiming they had detained him at an airport.

In addition to the aforementioned fatwa, at least three Saudi journalists have been arrested and detained for their role in participating in or covering Shia demonstrations in the eastern part of the country. As Toby C. Jones noted, the Shia demonizing campaign of spring 2011 had as much to do with fear of losing influence in Bahrain -- and perhaps more so -- as it did with fear of having to make concessions to the country's Shia citizens and rein in the Wahhabi establishment:

In Saudi Arabia, in dozens of places, hundreds of protesters routinely assembled, calling for relatively minor concessions, including greater religious tolerance and the release of Shiite political prisoners. But confronted by the sweeping changes underway across the region, officials claimed that the protests at home and especially in Bahrain, if they were allowed to succeed, would lead to a catastrophe -- a democratic state next door controlled by a Shiite majority, one they insisted would take marching orders from Tehran.

Given the heavy-handedness of the Saudi authorities, online anonymity is a safer way to organize than congregating in a town square. But the net is heavily monitored nonetheless, and stepping out into the sun rarely ends well. "March 11—the intended Day of Rage—came and went without mass protest," Madawi Al-Rasheed wrote last month, and in the process of turnout and crackdown, at least one Saudi YouTuber was disappeared by the authorities.

The newest social media "subversive" stirring controversy in Saudi Araia is @Mujtahidd, who is exposing many unwelcome details about the lives of the rich and powerful in Saudi Arabia, such as the jetsetting Prince Abdul Aziz bin Fahd and Deputy Minister of Defense Khalid bin Sultan. Those he has tweeted about find themselves deluged with angry questions about their alleged extravagances, such as “did your new estate in Riyadh cost the state 12 billion riyals?” or accused of pocketing billions of riyals from arms deals and construction contracts. @Mujtahidd asserts that endemic graft is costing the country 500 billion riyals annually. @Mujtahidd’s moralizing anti-corruption drive has apparently struck a chord among 290,000 followers in digging up old scandals and warning of new ones involving the House of Saud.

Media monitoring, as practiced by governments in Libya, Bahrain, Egypt, Syria and Iran (to name a few), is not so much enforced by datacenters, wiretaps and informants but by searches of TV stations by police, days in a holding cell and the warrant officer's truncheon. The technology, of course, plays an increasingly vital role, not least because it makes it so much easier to prepare a mound of "evidence" to the prosecution's satisfaction. Sultan Al Qassemi notes, governments and their supporters are becoming more social media savvy too: despite clerical criticism of the internet, the Twitterverse exploded with criticism of Kashgari from self-described "devout" Muslims.

Criticism of Gulf states' human rights records or military policies has proven to be dangerous for social media users in the UAE -- where several bloggers have been detained on charges of "sedition" and "blasphemy" for daring to report on activists and criticizing members of the royal family -- and Oman. The same goes for the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority has arrested several reporters and bloggers who've criticized corruption in the government. Ironically, arrests such as these seem to be among the few tasks that Tel Aviv and Washington implicitly trust Ramallah with.

In Iraq, a new law that has been proposed lock internet users away for life they were proven to have "compromis[ed] the independence of the state or its unity, integrity, safety, or any of its high economic, political, social, military, or security interests" or "implement programs or ideas which are disruptive to public order." Considering that around only 2.5% of the population has ready internet access, this law demonstrates just how unpleasant Iraqi bloggers -- as both independent observers of daily life and fixers for foreign media in Iraq -- have become to the government (defenders of the law will cry havoc over a Baathist apologist on WordPress to make their case). Reports from Iraqi citizens on decaying infrastructure, missed opportunities, officials' power trips and sectarian violence are not exactly civil society efforts conducive to cementing what to many Iraqis appears an oligarchy of parliamentarians and police generals. And to the west in Syria - where Western "retail" surveillance technology has been popping up from the U.S. and Germany - censorship is and has long been the norm, especially now that the demonstrations of 2011 have led to open war among the regime and anti-government militias.

This is the other side of cyber-security, the more immediate one than all the industrial sabotage malware or avionics-compromising logic bombs. Censorship of dissent through cyberspace "has a broader meaning in non-democracies: For them, the worst-case scenario is not collapsing power plants, but collapsing political power.”

Cross-posted from the Arabist

The National reports that the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia has “issued a fatwa against Twitter, demanding that ‘real Muslims’ avoid it, calling it a ‘platform for trading accusations and for promoting lies’.”

The pretext for this condemnation of social media is the case of the Saudi journalist Hamza Kashgari, who was extradited from Malaysia to the Kingdom after tweeting about the Prophet Muhammad in a manner that the religious authorities deemed blasphemous. If the Saudis wish to make an example, he will be facing blasphemy charges, and possibly death, rather than a lesser (though still absurd) sentencing that would end in him paying a fine. There’s also talk of taking action against anyone who retweeted his messages.

But considering that thousands of Twitter users called attention to Kashgari’s tweets, literally demanding his head, it’s ironic that the Grand Mufti says Muslims should stay off Twitter, since clearly, many Salafis are using, and policing it.

And, as The National notes, it’s even more ironic that the Grand Mufti’s issuing a ban since Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the King’s nephew and reputedly the richest man in Saudi Arabia, purchased 3.6% of Twitter’s stock for US$300 million this past December.

The fact that the Grand Mufti wants Twitter gone while a prince wants to buy its shares up nicely illustrates the uneasy dual monarchy that has defined clerical-royal relationship since the 18th century. The monarchy set up in 1923 is actually a dual monarchy because the royal family must maintain the approval of the Wahhabi ulema to rule, and there are those who question this “right” — one of the first crises of the Saudi state occurred when the monarchy and ulema, fearing the Ikhwan tribal militias who had won control of the Hejaz for them, turned on the militiamen. The House of Saud procured the British machine guns, the clergy produced a justificatory edict for the crackdown.

As Toby C. Jones notes, “the ulema’s support for the regime is not unconditional. They remain controversial, provocative and confrontational.” Oil wealth and investment portfolios allow Saudi princes to study at Sandhurst and hobnob with French socialites, but they also subsidize the religious-dominated educational system and the social welfare net, which the Saudis have been working to expand in the wake of the Arab Spring, that help hold society together on the al-Sauds’ behalf.

“The rebel in you” Kashgari refers to with respect to the Prophet Muhammad is precisely the sort of Islamic value that the Saudi status quo cannot handle — hence the sharp responses from the government against anyone urging reform, including Salafis and secularists. The Sahwas — former Islamist radicals who have become “partners” of the establishment — are the closest thing to a political opposition Saudi Arabia has. Their presence is limited by the government and they must be careful not to push too far in the Islamist direction that Osama bin Laden fell in with. One prominent Sahwa spiritual leader has argued in the past that “sovereignty belongs to God alone,” which is indeed “a challenge both to the idea that Saudi citizens should enjoy more participation in governance as well as to the royal family itself.”

Hamza Kashgari’s case is one of free speech. The religious establishment, wanting to remain the arbiter of social norms in the Kingdom and hold onto the power it has accrued, is hoping to denigrate a medium that they fear because of its prominent — though exaggerated — role in the “Arab Spring.” They can’t reconcile themselves to globe-spanning electronic mediums that might lead their congregations to start thinking thought crimes. A chilling message has been sent already through the extradition from Malaysia; it will depend on the royal family if the intended message stops with a fine, or with Kashgari’s execution.