Truthdig
Here Are Six Policies Obama Wants Saudi Arabia to Change (Video)
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/here_are_6_policies_obama_wants_saudi_ar
abia_to_change_video_20160419/
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Posted on Apr 19, 2016
By Juan Cole
This post originally ran on Truthdig contributor Juan Cole's
website(http://www.juancole.com/2016/04/5-policies-obama-wants-saudi-arabia-
to-change.html) .
After his critical comments in an interview in The Atlantic last month,
Barack Obama's visit to Saudi Arabia is going to be
awkward(http://www.albawaba.com/news/us-president-obama-expected-visit-saudi
-address-shaky-diplomatic-ties-830736 ) , as DPA rightly says. The
president accused the Gulf states of always trying to push the US into war
for the accomplishment of their purposes but then acting like free riders
thereafter. (This comment likely refers to Libya, where Obama felt as
though the Arab League and Western Europe just sloughed off after the US did
the heavy lifting). He advised the Saudis and their close allies to get
over themselves and come to a cold peace with Iran. He said his decision
not to bomb Syria in fall of 2013 was a declaration of independence from
Riyadh.
He has also blamed Saudi Arabia for spreading around its intolerant, Wahhabi
version of Islam, a very minority version of the religion that is
puritanical and dislikes outsiders. (Probably only 40% of Saudis are
Wahhabis, hence maybe 9 million of the kingdom's 22 million citizens. There
aren't really any Wahhabis elsewhere outside Qatar and Sharjah, though
millions of people have become Salafis, i.e. Sunnis who come close to
Wahhabism but don't want to leave their Sunni traditions entirely. So there
are 1.5 billion Muslims, and most of them are not Puritanical or xenophobic
and most of them are fine with women driving and disapprove of the full face
veil (a lot of Muslim women don't cover their heads at all). But it should
also be noted that there is no statistical relationship between Wahhabism
and extremism (most Wahhabis are not extremists andy more than most Shiites
or Sunnis are).
Obama's annoyance with Riyadh has some justification, given the muscular
Wahhabism it has been flexing in recent years. Here are the top 5 policies
Saudi Arabia should rethink if it wants a less turbulent neighborhood:
1. Saudi Arabia should wind down its air war on Yemen. It was launched to
punish the Houthi rebels for taking over Sanaa, the capital. Houthis are
Zaidi Shiites and have a feud with Wahhabi Saudi Arabia because they resent
being proselytized by the latter. Some of the feud is also tribal. Saudi
Arabia sees the Houthis as nothing more than Iranian puppets, but that is
daft. They may have received minor amounts of Iranian aid. But they aren't
the Iranian kind of Shiites (they don't have ayatollahs and they respect the
Sunni caliphs). What is going on in Yemen has almost nothing to do with
Iran. It is about the discontents of the tribes of Saadeh in the north at
having been marginalized and having been subjected to a Wahhabi conversion
campaign. The Houthis over reached in launching their rebellion, and they
have thrown the country into turmoil and derailed the constitutional
process. But they can't be defeated from the air, and indiscriminate Saudi
bombing is doing more harm than good. By the way, Saudi Arabia dragged the
US into this struggle, with the US military helping choose bombing targets
and offering logistical support.
2. Saudi Arabia should rethink its intervention in Syria. It is delivering
medium weapons such as t.o.w. anti-tank weapons (courtesy the CIA) and maybe
manpad anti-aircraft weapons to the most hard line Salafi groups in Syria
aside from the al-Qaeda offshoots. A group like Jaysh al-Islam (Army of
Islam) or Ahrar al-Sham (Freemen of Syria) can never hope to attract the
allegiance of most Syrians (most are secular-minded and a good 40% belong to
religious and ethnic minorities who would be massacred by the hard line
Salafis.) Syria is too multi-cultural for the Saudi model to do more than
cause enormous trouble there. Riyadh in the past has been pragmatic and
willing to back secular liberals, and it should do that in Syria. Some of
its Syrian allies, like the Freemen of Syria, are openly allied with
al-Qaeda, which is not a good look for the kingdom. A Salafi Syria will just
go on generating violence, given that the minorities would never accept it,
nor would the majority of Sunnis. And now that Russia has so forcefully
intervened, the hopes for a Salafi Syria have anyway receded to the realm of
the almost impossible. All Saudi Arabia can do now play spoiler and keep
the pot boiling to disrupt the pax Russica with ongoing mindless violence.
The Freemen of Syria and the Army of Islam have broken the ceasefire
repeatedly and the former has taken towns back from the regime during the
cessation of hostilities in open alliance with al-Qaeda (the Nusra Front).
Obama should read the Saudis the riot act over all this.
And why is he letting them give out the CIA-provided T.O.W. tank-killers?
Isn't it obvious that weaponry will go to the hard line Salafis?
3. Obama should encourage the Saudis to go further in the direction of
rethinking their campaign to have the Muslim Brotherhood declared terrorists
and destroyed. First, it is an impractical plan. Second, it has undone all
the progress that was made after 2011 in reconciling the secular-minded with
the fundamentalists, such that both were willing to contest elections
together and serve in government together. Now, with Saudi encouragement,
Egypt has cracked down hard on the Brotherhood, disenfranchising millions of
Egyptians. Ironically, many of the small guerrilla bands the Saudis support
in Syria have their origins in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.
4. Saudi Arabia needs to come into the 21st century and stop its frenetic
rate of executions and its punishing of online dissent with life-crushing
lashes. The Saudi government isn't going to fall because some blogger has
doubts about God. And if that is all it would take to cause the government
to fall, then it deserves to.
5. Riyadh, as President Obama advised, needs to reconcile itself with the
Iran deal made by the UN Security Council, and with Iran's reemergence as a
country with which the region and the world does business. King Abdullah
used to have the Iranian politicians, even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, over to
Riyadh, and the two countries consulted one another frankly despite
differences. King Salman and his crew seem to want a fight, whether proxy
or direct. It is not a fight they will win, and negotiating with Iran would
be a more successful strategy.
6. Saudi Arabia has to be more transparent about its government's
relationship to the Salafi Jihadis who pulled off 9/11. The Saudi
government was not behind 9/11 or in the know about it. Saudi Arabia has
enormous investments in US stocks and other financial instruments, and it
was obvious that something like an attack on the World Trade Center would
tank the stock market and wipe out the value of their holdings. Only
transparency about any contacts the kingdom had with al-Qaeda (especially if
those were innocuous) can lift the building cloud. President Obama will
veto a congressional attempt to lift Saudi Arabia's immunity from civil
lawsuits by ordinary Americans. But the next president may not block a
future such measure. In the Middle East you stay out of trouble by keeping
your head down. In the US you are a sitting duck if you do keep your head
down- it is loudness and activity that protects you politically.
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Truthdig
Here Are Six Policies Obama Wants Saudi Arabia to Change (Video)
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/here_are_6_policies_obama_wants_saudi_ar
abia_to_change_video_20160419/
FacebookTwitterMoreEmail
Posted on Apr 19, 2016
By Juan Cole
This post originally ran on Truthdig contributor Juan Cole's
website(http://www.juancole.com/2016/04/5-policies-obama-wants-saudi-arabia-
to-change.html) .
After his critical comments in an interview in The Atlantic last month,
Barack Obama's visit to Saudi Arabia is going to be
awkward(http://www.albawaba.com/news/us-president-obama-expected-visit-saudi
-address-shaky-diplomatic-ties-830736 ) , as DPA rightly says. The
president accused the Gulf states of always trying to push the US into war
for the accomplishment of their purposes but then acting like free riders
thereafter. (This comment likely refers to Libya, where Obama felt as
though the Arab League and Western Europe just sloughed off after the US did
the heavy lifting). He advised the Saudis and their close allies to get
over themselves and come to a cold peace with Iran. He said his decision
not to bomb Syria in fall of 2013 was a declaration of independence from
Riyadh.
He has also blamed Saudi Arabia for spreading around its intolerant, Wahhabi
version of Islam, a very minority version of the religion that is
puritanical and dislikes outsiders. (Probably only 40% of Saudis are
Wahhabis, hence maybe 9 million of the kingdom's 22 million citizens. There
aren't really any Wahhabis elsewhere outside Qatar and Sharjah, though
millions of people have become Salafis, i.e. Sunnis who come close to
Wahhabism but don't want to leave their Sunni traditions entirely. So there
are 1.5 billion Muslims, and most of them are not Puritanical or xenophobic
and most of them are fine with women driving and disapprove of the full face
veil (a lot of Muslim women don't cover their heads at all). But it should
also be noted that there is no statistical relationship between Wahhabism
and extremism (most Wahhabis are not extremists andy more than most Shiites
or Sunnis are).
Obama's annoyance with Riyadh has some justification, given the muscular
Wahhabism it has been flexing in recent years. Here are the top 5 policies
Saudi Arabia should rethink if it wants a less turbulent neighborhood:
1. Saudi Arabia should wind down its air war on Yemen. It was launched to
punish the Houthi rebels for taking over Sanaa, the capital. Houthis are
Zaidi Shiites and have a feud with Wahhabi Saudi Arabia because they resent
being proselytized by the latter. Some of the feud is also tribal. Saudi
Arabia sees the Houthis as nothing more than Iranian puppets, but that is
daft. They may have received minor amounts of Iranian aid. But they aren't
the Iranian kind of Shiites (they don't have ayatollahs and they respect the
Sunni caliphs). What is going on in Yemen has almost nothing to do with
Iran. It is about the discontents of the tribes of Saadeh in the north at
having been marginalized and having been subjected to a Wahhabi conversion
campaign. The Houthis over reached in launching their rebellion, and they
have thrown the country into turmoil and derailed the constitutional
process. But they can't be defeated from the air, and indiscriminate Saudi
bombing is doing more harm than good. By the way, Saudi Arabia dragged the
US into this struggle, with the US military helping choose bombing targets
and offering logistical support.
2. Saudi Arabia should rethink its intervention in Syria. It is delivering
medium weapons such as t.o.w. anti-tank weapons (courtesy the CIA) and maybe
manpad anti-aircraft weapons to the most hard line Salafi groups in Syria
aside from the al-Qaeda offshoots. A group like Jaysh al-Islam (Army of
Islam) or Ahrar al-Sham (Freemen of Syria) can never hope to attract the
allegiance of most Syrians (most are secular-minded and a good 40% belong to
religious and ethnic minorities who would be massacred by the hard line
Salafis.) Syria is too multi-cultural for the Saudi model to do more than
cause enormous trouble there. Riyadh in the past has been pragmatic and
willing to back secular liberals, and it should do that in Syria. Some of
its Syrian allies, like the Freemen of Syria, are openly allied with
al-Qaeda, which is not a good look for the kingdom. A Salafi Syria will just
go on generating violence, given that the minorities would never accept it,
nor would the majority of Sunnis. And now that Russia has so forcefully
intervened, the hopes for a Salafi Syria have anyway receded to the realm of
the almost impossible. All Saudi Arabia can do now play spoiler and keep
the pot boiling to disrupt the pax Russica with ongoing mindless violence.
The Freemen of Syria and the Army of Islam have broken the ceasefire
repeatedly and the former has taken towns back from the regime during the
cessation of hostilities in open alliance with al-Qaeda (the Nusra Front).
Obama should read the Saudis the riot act over all this.
And why is he letting them give out the CIA-provided T.O.W. tank-killers?
Isn't it obvious that weaponry will go to the hard line Salafis?
3. Obama should encourage the Saudis to go further in the direction of
rethinking their campaign to have the Muslim Brotherhood declared terrorists
and destroyed. First, it is an impractical plan. Second, it has undone all
the progress that was made after 2011 in reconciling the secular-minded with
the fundamentalists, such that both were willing to contest elections
together and serve in government together. Now, with Saudi encouragement,
Egypt has cracked down hard on the Brotherhood, disenfranchising millions of
Egyptians. Ironically, many of the small guerrilla bands the Saudis support
in Syria have their origins in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.
4. Saudi Arabia needs to come into the 21st century and stop its frenetic
rate of executions and its punishing of online dissent with life-crushing
lashes. The Saudi government isn't going to fall because some blogger has
doubts about God. And if that is all it would take to cause the government
to fall, then it deserves to.
5. Riyadh, as President Obama advised, needs to reconcile itself with the
Iran deal made by the UN Security Council, and with Iran's reemergence as a
country with which the region and the world does business. King Abdullah
used to have the Iranian politicians, even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, over to
Riyadh, and the two countries consulted one another frankly despite
differences. King Salman and his crew seem to want a fight, whether proxy
or direct. It is not a fight they will win, and negotiating with Iran would
be a more successful strategy.
6. Saudi Arabia has to be more transparent about its government's
relationship to the Salafi Jihadis who pulled off 9/11. The Saudi
government was not behind 9/11 or in the know about it. Saudi Arabia has
enormous investments in US stocks and other financial instruments, and it
was obvious that something like an attack on the World Trade Center would
tank the stock market and wipe out the value of their holdings. Only
transparency about any contacts the kingdom had with al-Qaeda (especially if
those were innocuous) can lift the building cloud. President Obama will
veto a congressional attempt to lift Saudi Arabia's immunity from civil
lawsuits by ordinary Americans. But the next president may not block a
future such measure. In the Middle East you stay out of trouble by keeping
your head down. In the US you are a sitting duck if you do keep your head
down- it is loudness and activity that protects you politically.
