The New Middle East (44 page)

Saudi Arabia has a local population of 20 million people. Keeping them happy is a lot more expensive than buying off the tiny Qatari population.
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If other energy sources in other parts of the world prove successful it will produce a slump in the present price. The bottom won’t fall out of the market, because Saudi oil will still be needed by countries without alternatives. The developing world is still developing and the engine of that growth will still need oil. But China, North America and parts of South America and Europe may all have new energy sources as alternatives to those offered by the Gulf. And that, says Dr Aviezer Tucker from the University of Texas Energy Institute, will force change on the Gulf nations.

There was a period when the oil price was ten dollars a barrel and these regimes did survive ten dollars a barrel. If it goes down to twenty dollars a barrel they may survive that as well, but the problem is the population is already used to the standard of living that comes with getting a hundred dollars a barrel. Will they be able to adjust back? I don’t know.

Saudi Arabia’s spending threatens to outgrow its income. Its present break-even price is $100 a barrel, and that break-even price keeps rising.
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If the Saudis have less cash to throw around they will have to cut back on the funding they pump into Salafist groups around the Middle East that sometimes turn into Global Jihadists. It has been one of the great contradictions of US foreign policy that it has formed one of its closest alliances with a country with whose value system it has absolutely nothing in common. The only thing they have shared is the love of oil, but for different reasons. For the Americans oil means they can keep their society energised, creative and innovative. For the Saudi elite it means they don’t have to work for a living and can hold on to cultural traditions that have more in common with the Taliban’s in Afghanistan than the people walking the streets below the swank penthouse suites they own in major Western capitals. If America can sate itself at home, it will not need to hang out with the gauche Saudi princes.

The restrictions imposed by the self-appointed custodians of Saudi culture are an anachronism in the New Middle East. The US was quick to demand that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt showed a ‘commitment to religious tolerance’ while its Saudi ally strictly prohibits the public practice of faith by all non-muslims. The Saudi leadership is not only busy suppressing protests by its disenfranchised minority Shia communities in the Eastern Province; it also has to deal with widespread resentment and frustration from large sections of its young population who want to see change. They talk about it incessantly online, which is the only public forum they have. By 2013 more of its population were using Twitter than in any other country in the world.
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They express the same frustrations as the young people who rose up in 2011, though with all the subsidies floating around, ‘bread’ is missing from the list. What they want most of all is for their voices to be heard and listened to.

All of the ordinary people I met in the Arab world during the uprisings believed that the US does not understand them and does not try hard enough to understand them. Conversely, many of them would have jumped at the chance to live the American way of life, and that’s because American soft power has done much of the heavy lifting in the Middle East while the hard power was busy going around breaking things. America has entered the post-Arab Spring era in better shape than any other foreign player in the region, but it does need to quickly recalibrate.

Israel is happy to see the Arab nations preoccupied with their own internal tribulations, as long as American power can help to keep them contained. The Arab world has long considered Israel to be America’s spoilt child, but during Barack Obama’s first term Israel’s leadership savaged the hand that feeds it. Obama would ‘only be human if he felt that returning to the fight he had with Netanyahu was an opportunity to get a bit of his own back’, a Western diplomat told me. Perhaps, but either way America cannot afford to make the same mistakes as Israel. If it wants to remain a force throughout the region it needs a comprehensive strategy that, in the post-Arab Spring era, needs to be seen to be built on more than just childcare. It needs to be a tailored individualistic approach towards all the key countries of the New Middle East.

But American inaction throughout the Arab Spring may have been a signal that it is ready to retreat from areas and issues it no longer feels are part of its core interests in the region. That might mean that America goes first from three to two pillars of policy.

It would arm Israel so that it can maintain military superiority over its neighbours, but otherwise disengage from even pretending to try to sort out the Israeli–Palestinian Peace process, unless the Israelis try to have their cake and eat it by seeking to absorb all the Palestinian land without making full citizens of the Palestinian people.

And the US would stay firm friends with the Saudis in return for a stable oil supply.

Everything in between and around may largely be allowed to work itself out. America will seek to support the transitions in these B-team Middle Eastern nations, which would include Egypt, with aid and via international institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The gamble will be that as long as these countries build up their economies and create a wide middle class there is no reason for them to breed radicalism and threaten America. ‘I think at least it will be easier to deal with the Obama administration than the Republicans,’ Amr Darrag had told me hopefully. ‘Once we have a stable state the US will see that we just care about the interests of our country and we are practising democratic values. When they see we are not turning the country into another Afghanistan or Iran or whatever model the West does not like, I think something similar to what’s happening with Turkey will take place.’ Though long before they were ousted President Obama made it clear he didn’t trust the Ikhwan-led Egypt: ‘I don’t think that we would consider them an ally, but we don’t consider them an enemy. They’re a new government that is trying to find its way . . . So I think it’s still a work in progress.’
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Two years after the young revolutionaries were spluttering in the gutters from the American-made tear gas sold to the Mubarak regime, the US sold the new Muslim Brotherhood-led government another 140,000 canisters. But that did not mean the US has failed to adapt to the post-Mubarak era. The sale was allowed to go ahead on the condition that all information about the canister’s country of origin was removed.
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The youth of Egypt were still going to get tear-gassed, but their fury would be directed only at the people firing the canisters, not the people who shipped them over. That, perhaps, was the embodiment of the use of ‘smart power’, which had been promised from the State Department at the start of the first four years of the Obama era.
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Whatever new policy emerges for the Arab world from the second Obama administration, other than in the Gulf it is likely to be one with a light touch.

Over time that may grow lighter still. The new sources of energy being found in shale rock formations should dramatically ease US dependency on the Gulf states. It is a potential game changer in terms of the loss of political influence that the oil-producing nations would have over the Western world. But that prospect, if it were to be realised, is a decade or so away. It won’t fundamentally change the priorities of the Obama administration, nor the immediate ones that come afterwards. In the future perhaps only Israel will remain in the A team.

In the meantime the Obama administration may have just reached the point where it simply thinks the returns are no longer worth the risks of making big investments in much of the Middle East. The president damaged his own reputation trying to re-engage with old enemies and chivvying along old friends. He got nothing in return. Stepping back from the Middle East is a policy that would be understandable, though it is also one that risks rebounding at some stage if America is too hands-off.

Whatever the foreign policy, or probably foreign policies, are for the Middle East, they will not be simple and linear. In her last meeting with reporters before she stepped down from her post as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton articulated this point more broadly, but it was particularly relevant for the New Middle East. On 31 January 2013 she said:

I’ve come to think of it like this: [President] Truman and [Secretary of State] Acheson were building the Parthenon with classical geometry and clear lines. The pillars were a handful of big institutions and alliances dominated by major powers. And that structure delivered unprecedented peace and prosperity. But time takes its toll, even on the greatest edifice. And we do need a new architecture for this new world; more Frank Gehry than formal Greek. Think of it. Now, some of his work at first might appear haphazard, but in fact, it’s highly intentional and sophisticated. Where once a few strong columns could hold up the weight of the world, today we need a dynamic mix of materials and structures.
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But building something new is hard work and costly; it requires both commitment and a sense that all that effort is going to be worth it.

‘I think we are in a period when there is a kind of fatigue with spending all our time and energy on a part of the world that doesn’t seem to be very responsive to us,’ said Professor Quandt of the University of Virginia.

So you are going to see more attention paid to Asia inevitably and less to the Middle East, and I think Syria is an example of that. The disinclination to get involved in what is a geostrategically important but very complicated place is a sign of a different attitude. You may see John McCain and a few others going around optimistically wanting to go in and do something in Syria, but if you look at the detail of what they say, even they don’t want to do an Iraq all over again. The lessons from Iraq are being learned day by day as we reflect on what did we get out of that trillion-dollar effort, and if anybody wants to replicate that in Syria, then as Bob Gates said as he left the Pentagon they should ‘have their head examined’. And that is the dominant mood, it’s certainly going to be [Secretary of Defense Chuck] Hagel’s view, it’s going to be Kerry’s view, that unless there is a very, very strong compelling American national interest to get involved militarily in the Middle East, we are not going to do it. We may do covert things, we may do economic aid, we may do drones and God knows what, but what we are not going to do is ‘boots on the ground’.

6

Iraq: SNAFU

It started for me mid-morning on a quiet street, much like any other, in 2003 in central Baghdad. Two things about it were unusual. It was deserted and there was a large American tank parked by the side of the road with its barrel pointing straight at me. All I had was a dirty white tablecloth I had snatched a few minutes earlier from a restaurant in the Hotel Palestine. I think I may have overdone the waving as I walked gingerly towards the enormous beast that loomed before me. And then the spell was broken.

‘How ya doing?’ the young Marine said to me. ‘Fine,’ I replied, and that was it: I had been ‘liberated’. The American occupation of Iraq had begun. It was 9 April 2003. The American army was driving into the heart of Baghdad and was moments away from dragging down the soon-to-be-famous statue of Saddam Hussein. His was the first of the old Arab regimes to be overthrown.

Saddam was a dictator’s dictator. He had everything in spades. The brutal clarity, the utter ruthlessness, territorial ambitions, personal cruelty, and a couple of sons as bad as he was. He had his friends murdered, his sons-in-law killed, and he used poison gas on his own people. He launched one of the twentieth century’s longest, bloodiest and most pointless wars, against Iran, that left more than a million people dead. It was an immense war that pitted the region’s leading Sunni strongman against his Shia equivalent.

Saddam Hussein was a centre of gravity in the Middle East. When he was removed it changed the orbit of everything else. It produced what the Sunni King Abdullah of Jordan said was a new ‘crescent’ of Shiite movements arching through the region.
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The removal of Saddam Hussein tipped the regional power balance towards his old arch-enemy, Shia Iran. The entire region began to feel the impact of the regime’s collapse and Iraq became the battleground for a sectarian war between Shia and Sunni Islam. The Shia won.

The day before the American-led invasion, Iraq was in the Sunni sphere of influence. By the time the Americans left it was on the Shia side. Iraq under Saddam was a threat to the Gulf states because he coveted their resources. He was loathed by the Saudis, but they did not consider his government to be a blasphemy in the way they did the Shia theocracy in Iran. Iraq was the buffer between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Gulf states saw Saddam as a pitbull which, while dangerous, if pointed in the right direction contained their pre-eminent enemy. But the battle in Iraq between Sunni and Shia forces saw the rise of the country’s Shia, and thus a new and powerful ally for Iran. When the Arab revolts began eight years later Saudi Arabia and Qatar were ready to sacrifice the people of Syria to bleed Iran and win the rematch. The Gulf states wanted to counter what they saw as Iran’s new friend in Baghdad by helping to oust its old friend in Damascus. America’s painful experience in Iraq was the defining force behind how it reacted to the two civil wars that broke out during the Arab Spring.