Jamal Khashoggi/Al Arabiya: Tiran, Sanafir, Syria, Yemen and Vision 2030/Dr. John C. Hulsman/Al Arabiya: Is this Iraq’s last and best chance to reform itself?
Everyone is asking about the secret behind the recent enthusiasm and vitality of Saudi foreign policy. The kingdom launched its first airstrike from Khamis Mushait airport over a year ago against Houthi positions in Yemen, declaring Operation Decisive Storm, which is still gaining momentum. Why does Saudi Arabia insist on expelling Iran from Syria at any cost, and possibly from Iraq and Lebanon? Why was Riyadh keen to regain the islands of Tiran and Sanafir now, after they were placed under Egypt’s custody for decades? Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, announced by Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, answers both questions. “We have three areas of strength with no competitors,” he told Al Arabiya TV, citing Islam, the kingdom’s enormous investment capacity, and its geographic location. In a closed meeting with a small group of Saudi writers and religious scholars, the prince explained how the kingdom was the promoter of real moderate Islam, and it was unacceptable that the religion be represented by Iran, Al-Qaeda, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The intellectual war on the latter two will take a larger dimension with support from official and prestigious Islamic institutions in Saudi Arabia. There is no “Saudi Islam,” as alleged by US President Barack Obama, just Islam. This reminds me of a Saudi radio program in the 1960s and 1970s called “Muslims and Enough,” which carried a message of Islamic solidarity formulated and managed by the late King Faisal at a time when the country occupied a privileged position among Muslims as caretaker of moderate Islam. The concept of moderate Islam is mentioned many times in Vision 2030.
Iran
Saudi investment capacity is considered a substitute to its oil-dependence. Prince Salman wants to invest for the benefit of the kingdom and the region. However, this vision will clash with a parallel Iranian project that does not aspire to good neighborliness, mutual benefit, or regional peace and stability.
Saudi Arabia is blessed with this stability, which will enable the success of Vision 2030. This will benefit the whole region. This Iranian vision is executed via militias, weapons-smuggling, conspiracies and coups. It will not be based on participation, but on the suppression of others and subordination to Tehran. We do not do this in Saudi Arabia; instead, we sign contracts and strategic alliances in the light of day with governments, not with secret parties or militias. If the kingdom succeeds in being the main crossing point for trade between Asia, Africa and Europe, it will need neighbors that share the same vision, not Yemen’s Houthis or an Iran-dominated Syria. To that end, agreements have been signed with Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Sudan, Djibouti, and potentially Pakistan, which will revive an old bilateral alliance.
Stability
The most important issue in the prince’s announcements is the need for stability for long-term development, citing the examples of South Korea and Japan, which have been ruled by one party for decades. Saudi Arabia is blessed with this stability, which will enable the success of Vision 2030. This will benefit the whole region, as Saudi prosperity will positively impact that of its neighbors. Similar examples in the region are Dubai, Duqm port in Oman, Lucille economic city in Qatar, and Abu Dhabi. All these examples will be linked in Vision 2030. This will be complemented by King Salman Bridge, which will pass over Tiran island and will be the most important land crossing in the world, as described by the prince. All these sites and future projects will offer hundreds of thousands of jobs for Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians, Africans and Asians, but not Syrians, who are controlled by Iran. Tehran has opted for confrontation rather than being an integral partner such as Turkey. Riyadh is preoccupied with using its army and diplomacy to prevent the collapse of regional security. People aspire to a decent quality of life – all regimes incapable of providing that must leave and not return.
Is this Iraq’s last and best chance to reform itself?
Dr. John C. Hulsman/Al Arabiya/May 04/16
While the US obsesses about the evil that is ISIS, a greater long-term problem, festering for years, has come to a boil in front of the world’s eyes: the obvious collapse of the Iraqi state. This is of far greater strategic consequence than whether and when ISIS can be dislodged from Mosul. For without a functioning Iraq, radicalism is bound to re-emerge, just as ISIS is merely the latest iteration of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), having risen from the ashes, nurtured by Iraqi political dysfunction. Furious with the Iraqi parliament for having three times rejected the political reforms of the well-meaning but weak government of Haider al-Abadi, 5,000 followers of Moqtada al-Sadr stormed the Green Zone in Baghdad, housing the government quarter of the city. Chanting “the cowards run away,” they were unhindered by both the Iraqi army and security services ostensibly guarding the city. The reason for their immediate ire was that the parliament had failed to commence voting on ministerial changes designed to finally make the Iraqi government fit for purpose, providing basic public services, creating jobs, and, most importantly, rooting out the political corruption amongst the rotten-to-the-core political class. Transparency International lists Iraq as presently the 8th most corrupt government, in a world full of them.
The political quota system introduced by Washington following the 2003 invasion is the root of all evil here. Well-meaningly designed to make sure that all of Iraq’s major ethno-religious communities were represented in the central government, for over a decade the leading Iraqi political parties and their militias have divided ministries between themselves, treating them as their personal fiefs. They have used the ministries as a form of patronage, inflating the government payroll from a fat 1 million public employees under Saddam Hussein, to an absolutely unsustainable 7 million today. The Iraqi state, artificially created by the British in the 1920s, has never been able to command the legitimacy of its various far-flung constituencies. This has spawned truly Olympian levels of corruption, as large unfinished projects and ghost workers have destroyed the state’s finances, and together with the marked global decline in energy prices, have landed Baghdad with a whopping budget deficit of fully 25 percent of the GDP. The global oil price decline on its own has slashed the Iraqi government’s revenues by up to a crippling 70 percent. Though Iraqi oil is now being pumped in record amounts, the shortfall cannot be easily made up, as the Iraqi state is economically grinding to a halt.
Reform program
To combat this cancer growing on the Iraqi body politic, Prime Minister Abadi has proposed a reform programme whereby neutral technocrats will take over for the corrupt, party-affiliated ministers. As this is obviously a measure that would severely weaken their power base, it is unsurprising that the political parties in the parliament have proven so reluctant to endorse the popular measures. Of course the underlying problem in Iraq – the political lack of legitimacy of the Iraqi state itself – cannot be so easily legislated away. It is certainly true that the quota system is as the root of the present political crisis, but it was instituted only because the state itself lacked core supporters; as people in the country think of themselves as Sunni, Shiite, and Kurds first (and not Iraqis), it made some political sense to see that their basic loyalties were provided for in Iraqi national politics. This is the snake in the garden, as the Iraqi state, artificially created by the British in the 1920s, has never been able to command the legitimacy of its various far-flung constituencies. The Shiite firebrand leader Moqtada al-Sadr, politically morphing into a champion of good governance and a key ally of Abadi, finally could bear the shenanigans of the Iraqi parliament no longer. Last month he threatened that his supporters would storm the Green zone. While it is unlikely he ordered them into the capital over the past few days, certainly the dramatic increase in the rhetorical temperature over the reforms has brought the crisis to a boil.
Abadi has found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to deal toughly with what amounts to his central political ally. A state of emergency was briefly declared in Baghdad, while the Prime Minister ordered the authorities to arrest and prosecute the Sadrist protestors who had invaded the Green Zone.
While no arrests seem to have been actually made, Sadr got the hint. The demonstrators began leaving at his behest, still demanding all the while the formation of a new cabinet composed of technocrats and fundamental governmental reform. Nobody thinks this is anything but an interlude, the calm before the storm as to whether Abadi’s reform agenda succeeds or his premiership is doomed to failure. What has changed is that with the Sadrist protests, domestic violence in the pursuit of politics is now part of the Iraqi political discourse. The creaking, unloved, Iraqi state seems incapable of renewing itself, and tempers across the political spectrum are becoming ever more frayed. If the Iraqi state fails in this last, best chance to reform itself, its collapse will signal that in Syria and Iraq, the heart of the Arab world, a political black hole will take the place of sane governance into the medium term. And that would amount to a geopolitical tragedy, indeed.
