Beirushima: What Lebanon Needs to Survive

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An  from October last year (seen by Reuters at the end of July) concluded that the amount of ammonium nitrate left in the port warehouse by the time of the explosion constituted just one-fifth of the 2,754 tons seized by the authorities in 2013. The question the FBI did not ask was where the bulk of that shipment had gone. Arab Digest’s own from July 20 suggests the likely destination: the regime forces of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. Sources claim that Assad’s ally Hezbollah moved the ammonium nitrate into Syria over the years.

Buttressing our analysis is the fact that no insurance claim has ever emerged from the supposed destination, Mozambique, for the undelivered fertilizer. The Israelis, we postulate, in hitting a Hezbollah weapons cache in the harbor, unintentionally triggered the blast.

No Concrete Evidence

A new  published by Human Rights Watch (HRW) links to over 100 documents related to the Rhosus and its cargo, some of which have not been previously published. Once again, more questions than answers are forthcoming, including over such key issues as whether the ammonium nitrate was really ever, as has been  intended for Mozambique:

“The widely reported narrative regarding the arrival of the Rhosus, a Moldovan-flagged ship, in the port of Beirut in November 2013 carrying 2,750 tonnes of high-density ammonium nitrate is as follows: the ship’s cargo was ultimately bound for Mozambique; it entered Beirut’s port to load seismic equipment it was then meant to deliver to Jordan before traveling onward to Mozambique; the ship’s owner was a Russian national, Igor Grechushkin; and the owner of the ammonium nitrate on board, Savaro Limited, was a chemical trading company in the United Kingdom. Upon examination, however, it is not clear that any of these assertions are true.”

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The HRW report goes on to mention three possible reasons for the blast: that the explosion was caused when welding sparks caused a fire in hangar 12, igniting the ammonium nitrate; that the explosion was caused by an Israeli airstrike; or that the explosion was an intentional act by Hezbollah. The hypothesis that the explosion might have been caused by an Israeli attack that was not an airstrike is not one that is under official consideration, although in June, investigative judge Tarek Bitar  that he was “80 percent certain” that the blast was not caused by an Israeli missile.

In July, we described how an Arab Digest member recalled the events of that day:

“Shortly after 6 pm, we heard a jet flying at low level from the west and an explosion from the direction of the port. A couple of minutes later came the deeper sound of a surface-to-surface missile followed by another explosion. The ground then shook violently — this turned out later to be the ammonium nitrate detonating — and we watched in disbelief the plume of smoke and debris soaring into the sky. The blast reached us a few seconds later, throwing us off our feet from the terrace into the flat and blowing in all the glass.”

For our member, it was a fortunate escape: bruised and cut, and astonished to find that, in the midst of the badly damaged flat, the internet was still working.

Inconclusive Conclusion

Now, a year on, there are still pressing questions about what caused the blast and who is responsible, questions that the suffering people of Lebanon deserve to have answers to. The second, and by far the most destructive explosion, occurred when a warehouse containing ammonium nitrate caught fire. A common explanation put about at the time was that the explosion had been caused by careless workers. But no concrete evidence has been brought forward to support that claim.

France had declared that it would conduct a major investigation. However, a  French judge could  conclusively “whether the explosion was the result of an intentional security operation or whether it was the result of negligence in storing the ammonium nitrate and shortcomings that led to the devastating explosion.” According to Reuters, the FBI had arrived at the same inconclusive conclusion.

The French report raised the possibility of an attack — “an intentional security operation” — together with the claim that the explosion was an accident caused by negligence. The equivocation and failure to find answers didn’t prevent the French from patronizingly . As the French ambassador in Beirut put it, “To all this country’s leaders, I want to say that your individual and collective responsibility is considerable, be brave enough to take action, and France will help you.”

The first Lebanese judge investigating the blast was  in mid-February after he had attempted to charge cabinet ministers and the prime minister in office at the time of the explosion. A second judge has made virtually no headway against entrenched political elites whose central goal is to protect themselves and their fiefdoms while evading responsibility and the truth.

On July 14,  called for the removal of immunity for senior politicians as well as government and military personnel: “The protesters’ demand is simple: let justice take its course. We stand with these families in calling on Lebanese authorities to immediately lift all immunities granted to officials, regardless of their role or position. Any failure to do so is an obstruction of justice, and violates the rights of victims and families to truth, justice and reparations.”

Despite pleas and protests by the families of the victims, justice is unlikely to be allowed to take its course. The judiciary itself is deeply compromised and beholden to numerous sectarian, business and political factions, a malignant legacy of Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war. As an article on  forensically elucidates, “the corruptibility of the judicial system is no accident. Instead, the convoluted structure of the judiciary complements the structure of the rest of the political system — in that it facilitates impunity at the highest levels and protects those who have retained power in the aftermath of Lebanon’s civil war.”

Speculations Abound

In the absence of an independent investigation, with all the foot-dragging and obfuscation it entails, speculation abounds about what caused the explosion. There are those, including our member, who believe that what happened on August 4, 2020, was the unintended consequence of an Israeli attack on a Hezbollah weapons dump in the port. The cache was located adjacent to the warehouse holding the ammonium nitrate. The first blast, with its eerie resemblance to fireworks going off, set off the fire that caused the major blast which leveled the port and damaged much of Beirut.

The Arab Digest member, who is familiar with both the Israeli air force tactics and their consequences, is convinced it was a missile strike: “We compared notes with a friend who had observed the jet banking away from the attack and another friend who actually saw the surface-to-surface missile flash past her office window.” The member says that, according to detailed work done by Lebanese citizen activists in the wake of the attack, the ammonium nitrate aboard the Rhosus had landed in Beirut under a cover story in 2013. 

The shipment was subsequently seized by port authorities. The supposition put forward by the activists is that it was then trucked to Syria by Hezbollah to provide the regime forces of Bashar al-Assad with the raw material for the improvised barrel bombs they began dropping on opposition-held cities having run short of conventional ammunition. The member quoted expert sources who estimated that over several years, the original 2,750 tons had been reduced to about 400 tons at the time of the blast, which is in line with the FBI’s findings.

Richard Silverstein, who describes himself as a writer who “focusses on the excesses of the Israeli national security state,” wrote in his , Tikun Olam, just after the blast:

“A confidential highly-informed Israeli source has told me that Israel caused the massive explosion at the Beirut port earlier today which killed over 100 and injured thousands. … The source received this information from an Israeli official having special knowledge concerning the matter.

Israel targeted a Hezbollah weapons depot at the port and planned to destroy it with an explosive device. Tragically, Israeli intelligence did not perform due diligence on its target. Thus they did not know (or if they did know, they didn’t care) that there were 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate stored in a next-door warehouse.”

Tikun Olam referred to of then-President Donald Trump who, in a hastily arranged press conference, said he had met with some of his “great generals” and “they seem to think it was an attack. It was a bomb of some kind.” His comments caused consternation at the Pentagon, with Silverstein arguing that Trump had let slip “highly classified information,” i.e., that the Israelis had informed Washington that they were going to carry out an attack on a Hezbollah weapons cache.

Silverstein, though a , is viewed by some experts as a useful source on Israeli defense information that would otherwise be censored by the authorities. When contacted by Arab Digest, Silverstein thought it “not likely” that the Israelis would have used a fighter jet to carry out the alleged strike. He thought it too obvious and reckless. He pointed to the modus operandi used against Iranian targets where explosives were placed and then detonated remotely as a more likely approach. He said his source had not mentioned anything about using a fighter jet. “It might have been triggered by a drone,” Silverstein suggested.

But Silverstein was certain of the attack itself: It was carried out by the Israelis. His source, he said, had been contacted by a cabinet minister in the Netanyahu government (the “Israeli official having special knowledge”) shortly after the explosion. Silverstein told Arab Digest that he was “totally confident about the source.”

True Narrative

Should this version, or variations on it, be the true narrative, it is understandable why Hezbollah and Israel would not want it to see the light of day. Less understandable and puzzling is why major news outlets have not touched the story when it was presented to them by reputable sources. Part of the answer may lie in the fact that the sources, either for professional or personal security concerns, have not wanted to go on the record.

A truly independent investigation might answer the questions and uncover the truth. But for the Lebanese people, battered by an economic crisis and stalked by the COVID-19 pandemic, finding out what happened that terrible day in Beirut must join a disheartening queue. In a country that has for too long been abused by its political elites and used by foreign powers for their own purposes, seeking answers is a long and arduous task with little hope at its end that justice will be served.

*[This article was originally published by , a partner organization of 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Is Football Still a Bastion of White Supremacy?

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In the Gulf, the lucrative rights to World Cup packages are now being awarded. In Kuwait, ITL World has been appointed the sales agent. The company’s CEO, Siddeek Ahmed, could hardly his delight at being able to offer “fans a unique opportunity to purchase ticket-inclusive hospitality packages” for the World Cup. In addition to game tickets, the packages include flights, accommodation, transport and “leisure” programs. According to Arabian Business, the deals for the main venue, the 80,000-seat Lusail Stadium, will run from $14,350 to $74,200. That buys you all 10 matches hosted there, including the quarter-final, semi-final and final. If you are not short on cash, you can pick up a 40-seat suite at the stadium for just .

In Dubai, Expat Sport Tourism DMCC  the rights, with its website urging football fans to be a part of history to see the first World Cup held in the Arab world. “From the pinnacle in high end corporate experiences to individual hospitality solutions for football fans, we can cater for all those wishing to be part of FIFA World Cup 2022” is how the firm put it.

Not Everyone Is Happy

With an estimated 1.5 million fans heading to Qatar next year, Dubai, with its well-established tourism and entertainment sectors, sees itself as ideally placed to cash in on the World Cup bonanza. Yet others in the United Arab Emirates are less welcoming.

Mohammed al-Hammadi is the president of the Emirates Journalists Association and editor-in-chief of the newspaper  based in Abu Dhabi. Among the core values listed on the paper’s website are “apply best practice in line with the journalism codes” and “be an objective and trustworthy information tool.”

Hammadi is a strong proponent of normalization. He spoke at a  in October 2020, after the UAE and Bahrain had announced their plan to normalize relations with Israel. The event was organized by a pro-Israeli think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). Hammadi said he believed in both peace and advancing the rights of Palestinians, but people like him who “speak in favor of peace are stigmatized … and find themselves falling under attack.” He added that the word normalizing “has a very negative connotation in our region.”

In June, he drew the ire of African journalists with a ham-fisted attempt to have them join a coordinated media attack on the World Cup in Qatar. They adopted a  denouncing efforts to “use Africa and its institutions as political football in order to settle scores in a political dispute.” The statement said:

“While journalists in the East African region struggle to preserve their independence and freedom from rogue government and commercial interests that threaten the integrity of journalists, an outside actor is behind attempts to manipulate, divert and involve journalists in an issue completely outside the scope and powers of journalists and their unions.

In the same way that journalists and their unions in East Africa are calling, confronting and protesting against governments for their interference in the work of journalists and the curtailment of their freedoms, all foreign powers that have a negative and false agenda must be condemned and publicly challenged as a matter of principle and consistency.”

Twelve days later, the website Emirates Leaks, what it called “reliable sources,” alleged that Hammadi had attempted to pressure the heads of the journalism unions of Norway and Finland. According to the site, he wanted them to influence journalism unions in Asia and Africa to “coordinate attacks against Qatar and tarnish its image before hosting the World Cup.”

His efforts occasioned a  on June 23 in the European Parliament from Fulvio Martusciello. The Italian MEP accused the head of the Emirates Journalists Association of leading a smear campaign against Qatar: “Al Hammadi asked the Finnish and Norwegian Journalists Federations to exercise influence on journalists unions that he supports financially to engage in the Abu Dhabi campaign and offend Qatar. He also tried to offer them financial bribes and expensive gifts in return for achieving Abu Dhabi’s inflammatory goals.”

So, while Dubai can barely contain its World Cup excitement, Abu Dhabi appears set to continue its anti-Qatar campaign. Imagine for a moment that the UAE was a football side and its two big stars had separate agendas and were playing only for themselves. That is not a winning formula and it’s something a good manager, like England’s Gareth Southgate, would quickly sort out.

*[This article was originally published by , a partner organization of 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Saudi Arabia’s System of Injustice

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Bidali, who blogs under the name Noah, has been a  of the treatment of migrant workers in Qatar, a small Gulf state that is hosting the 2022 FIFA World Cup. “A week before his arrest, Bidali gave a presentation to a large group of civil society organizations and trade unions about his experience of working in Qatar,” Amnesty noted.

Migrant Workers in Qatar

For Qatar, his story draws unwelcome attention to the treatment of migrant workers in the run-up to the World Cup. The Qataris had won praise for scrapping the notorious kafala sponsor system, which ties workers to their employers with terms similar to those of indentured laborers or, as some critics say, to .

In August 2020, the government announced that included a minimum wage. The changes to labor law were hailed as a landmark in a region with an appalling record of mistreatment of migrant workers. Had the amendments been fully implemented, the conditions for migrant workers would have improved significantly. But more than a year and a half after the reforms were introduced, it is clear that little has changed for many migrants in Qatar.

An Al Jazeera in March 2021 revealed that “the majority of those interviewed experienced delays in the process as well as threats, harassment and exploitation by the sponsor, with some of the workers ending up in prison and eventually deported.” The report cited the case of a migrant from the Philippines who worked at a food stall. When she told her boss she wanted to leave and get a new job, she faced threats and harassment. Her ID was canceled and she had a court case brought against her, none of which should have happened with the new laws in place. “I thought the new laws were there to help us. All I did was try and seek a better job. I don’t think I’ve committed a crime to be facing these problems,” she said.

Writing About Rights

Bidali’s problems arose as a result of his blogs, which challenge the rosy narrative projected by the government. In a post , “Minimum Wage, Maximum Adjustment,” he writes:

“‘Peanuts.’ That’s the first thing that comes to Simon’s mind when I ask him about the changes to the minimum wage. A security guard from Kenya, toiling in Msheireb Downtown Doha, a slave to the elements for the better part of 12 hours a day. He earns [in a month] QR1250 (USD340). Paid a recruitment agent QR4400 (USD1200) to get the job, and spent a further QR1100 on related expenses. ‘There’s no difference for us (security guards). What they should have done is stipulate the specifics, like working hours, working conditions… things like that. When you take away the food and housing allowance, compensation for the work we do isn’t considered at all. We work so hard. Long commutes, long hours on-site, sweating like crazy with this heat, stress, fatigue… we don’t even eat properly.’”

Bidali writes the following in a , “The Privilege of a Normal Life”:

“Qatar, like all [Gulf Cooperation Council] countries, makes it virtually impossible for the spouses and partners of low-income migrant workers to accompany them for the duration of their contract. Over an extended period of time devoid of affection and intimacy, desire manifests, ever so intense. The situation isn’t made any easier when you look around and all you see are other couples of privileged nationalities, strolling side by side, holding hands, or having a meal together, enjoying each other’s company. After a magical day or night out, they retreat to their homes, where they enjoy the luxury of privacy.”

In other blogs, he writes of the crowded and unsanitary dormitories that workers, despite some improvements, are still forced to endure.

Amnesty told that since his arrest, the migrant rights activist has been allowed one short phone call to his mother. He said to her he is being held in solitary confinement, which Amnesty described as “incredibly worrying.” He is being held in an unknown place, and there are fears that he may be subjected to torture.

Claims by Qatari Authorities

The treatment of Bidali by Qatari authorities stands in stark contrast to their claims of change in the Gulf state. In 2020, Yousuf Mohamed Al Othman Fakhroo, the labor minister, said Qatar is “committed to creating a modern and dynamic labour market.” He added that the reforms “mark a major milestone in this journey and will benefit workers, employers and the nation alike.” That thought was echoed at the time by the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), Sharan Burrow, who  the changes as “a new dawn for migrant workers.” Both the ITUC and FIFA, world football’s governing body, had pushed hard for the reforms, using the World Cup as leverage.

Last week, Amnesty provided Arab Digest with the following statement:

“Three weeks after his arrest, we still have very little information on Malcolm Bidali’s fate. Despite our appeals and those of Malcolm’s mother, the government has continued to refuse to disclose his whereabouts or to explain the real reason for the ongoing detention of this courageous activist who risked his own safety to try to improve life for all migrant workers in the country. … If he is detained solely on the basis of his legitimate human rights work he must be released immediately and unconditionally, and at an absolute minimum he should be granted access to a lawyer. Such practice by the Qatar authorities sends a clear signal that it will not tolerate migrant workers speaking out and claiming their rights, and can spread fear amongst activists and other workers.”

The ITUC and FIFA have not commented publicly on the detention and disappearance of Malcolm Bidali. For weeks, the government had only his arrest and that he was being investigated for “violating Qatar’s security laws and regulations.” He has since been “charged with receiving payment to spread disinformation in the country,” Al Jazeera .

*[This article was originally published by , a partner organization of 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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On April 25, in a nationally televised  with the journalist Abdullah al-Mudaifer, bin Salman detailed his thinking behind the new laws:

“If you want tourists to come here … If you aim to attract 100 million tourists to create three million jobs, and you say that you are following something new other than common laws and international norms, then those tourists will not come to you. If you want to double foreign investments, as if we have done, from five million to 17 million, and you tell investors to invest in your country that is running on an unknown system that their lawyers do not know how to navigate nor know how those regulations are applied and enforced, then those investors will just cut their losses and not invest all together.”

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The laws, and the justification for introducing them, are the culmination of the campaign by the crown prince to wrench the power and control of the judiciary from the religious elite. That conquest is now complete. In the interview, bin Salman adopted the stance of a religious scholar, determining which hadiths — the sayings of the prophet — should be followed and which should be either challenged or ignored. “The government, where Sharia is concerned,” he told al-Mudaifer, “has to implement Quran regulations and teachings in mutawater hadiths, and to look into the veracity and reliability of ahad hadiths, and to disregard ‘khabar’ hadiths entirely, unless if a clear benefit is derived from it for humanity.”

He posited, too, that while jurisprudence remains rooted in the Quran, holding to the interpretations and edicts of Muhammed bin Abdulwahhab — the 18^th-century theologian and founder of the harshly austere version of Islam that has come to be called Wahhabism — can be dispensed with: “If Sheikh Muhammad bin Abdulwahhab were with us today and he found us committed blindly to his texts and closing our minds to interpretation and jurisprudence while deifying and sanctifying him he would be the first to object to this.”

Neither Compassionate nor Fair

The centuries-long alliance between the House of Saud and Wahhabism was sundered in a sentence, an intolerant version of Islam replaced with tolerance, jurisprudence liberated from the shackles of a hidebound theology. It’s what the crown prince likes to call a return to “moderate” Islam. Or so he would have his kingdom and the world believe. But the legal system that bin Salman has appropriated to his own purposes is neither compassionate nor fair. One repressive system has been replaced by another.

Abdulrahman al-Sadhan is a 37-year-old humanitarian aid worker. He was arrested at his Red Crescent office in Riyadh in 2018 and disappeared into the kingdom’s vast and labyrinthine prison system. In nearly three years, his family had only one brief phone call from him. Then, according to his sister Areej, the family received a second call: “we were overjoyed to hear his voice on Feb. 22, and even more elated when he told us he would soon be released,” she wrote in a  article. But the joy was short-lived. On April 5, the Specialized Criminal Court that deals with terrorism offenses sentenced Abdulrahman to 20 years, with a 20-year travel ban to follow upon his release. His crime was that he had anonymously tweeted criticisms of repression in the kingdom.

The rights group  the travesty of a court process that Abdulrahman was put through. This is a description of just one of the proceedings: “On 22 March 2021, another secret hearing took place. The lawyer was informed of it at the last moment and when he attended the court, the hearing was over. The Public Prosecutor presented his objections to the defense’s response during the hearing. His father was unable to attend this hearing as he was not informed of it despite the fact that he was confirmed as a legal guardian.”

The rights organization ALQYST  that during his detention Abdulrahman was “subjected to severe torture and sexual harassment including, but not limited to, electric shocks, beatings that caused broken bones, flogging, suspension in stress positions, death threats, insults, verbal humiliation and solitary confinement.”

Disappearing Into the System

Others who have fallen into Mohammed bin Salman’s legal system include the moderate cleric Salman al-Odah, detained in 2017. He was brought before the Specialized Criminal Court in 2018 with the public prosecutor declaring he was seeking the death penalty. On December 30 last year, his son  that in denying his father medical treatment, the authorities were carrying out “a slow killing.”

The conservative cleric Sulaiman al-Dowaish disappeared in 2016, the day after he had tweeted criticisms of the crown prince. According to another  based in Geneva, the cleric was brought before Mohammed bin Salman in chains. The prince “forced Dowaish onto his knees and began to personally assault him — punching him in the chest and throat, and berating him about his tweets. Dowaish, bleeding excessively from his mouth, lost consciousness.” Aside from a phone call in 2018, the family has heard nothing since and fear that he is dead.

In his interview, bin Salman told al-Mudaifer: “Extremism in all things is wrong, and our Prophet PBUH talked in one of his hadiths about a day when extremists will surface and he ordered them killed when they do so. … Being an extremist in anything, whether in religion or our culture or our Arabhood, is a serious matter.”&�Բ�����;The threat is as naked as it is explicit. In Mohammed bin Salman’s world of justice, an extremist is anyone who criticizes him or calls for curbs on the repressive police state he has enforced on the kingdom.

Abdulrahman al-Sadhan has filed an appeal, but his family has been denied any visits or phone calls. Their hope is that international pressure, and particularly an intervention from the Biden administration, will lead to his release. Other families of the incarcerated and the disappeared, who number in the thousands, cling to the same hope.

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Ali al-Ahmed, a Washington-based critic of the regime, a video — which has not been independently verified — of what appears to be soldiers burning and stamping on a picture of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). In the tweet, Ahmed says he was “told this video was behind executing the 3 Saudi soldiers.”

Biden’s Policy Shift on Yemen Rings Alarm Bells in Riyadh

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Given the opacity of the Saudi regime, the soldiers could have been executed for any number of reasons, such as being involved in the illicit sale of weapons to Houthi rebels in Yemen (the trial and executions were carried out in the military’s Southern Command close to the Yemeni border). Or it may have been a case of lèse-majesté — the burning of the photograph — that enraged MBS.

If it is the latter, it gives further credence to the image of an unstable and violence-prone leader, whom the CIA blames for  the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Try as he might, Mohammed bin Salman cannot put that one crime behind him. He was angered that Khashoggi — at one time a close associate of senior members of the ruling family — had departed from the kingdom and had the temerity to criticize the prince in columns he wrote for The Washington Post.

Throwing Critics in Prison

Western businessmen and politicians, anxious to do business with Saudi Arabia, could set aside many of the actions of this unruly and impulsive prince. These include the Saudi-led war in Yemen, which MBS thought he would win in a few weeks but has now entered its seventh year; the blockade of Qatar in June 2017, which did not end until January 2021; the seizure and forced  of the then-Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri, in November 2017; and the  and detention of more than 400 Saudi businessmen and senior members of the royal family, some of whom were allegedly tortured and only released when they signed over companies and surrendered millions of dollars in a mafia-style shakedown.

Even the imprisonment of Loujain al-Hathloul, a Saudi women’s rights activist, caused barely a flicker of concern in Western boardrooms and corridors of political power. Hathloul and her family allege that since her arrest in May 2018, she was  in detention and subjected to electrocution, flogging, sexual abuse and waterboarding in secret prisons before she was finally brought to trial. Among those responsible for the torture, she claims, was Saud al-Qahtani, a confidante of the crown prince who was heavily implicated in the Khashoggi murder. Hathloul was finally  but under strict conditions in February of this year. The allegations of torture were never investigated by Saudi authorities.

The arrival of Joe Biden in the White House took away the  that his predecessor had provided to the crown prince. In February, President Biden a declassified CIA report on the killing of Khashoggi. He has also withheld arms sales to the Saudis to pressure MBS to end the war in Yemen. Biden has also signaled that human rights issues — having been kicked into the long grass by Donald Trump, the former US president — are now back on the agenda. Thousands of political prisoners are languishing in the Saudi prison system. This includes the scholar and author , against whom the public prosecutor is seeking the death penalty, and the  Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, who in March was sentenced to 20 years in prison after being convicted of writing anonymous tweets critical of the regime.

PR Will Not His Image

Biden’s stance on Saudi Arabia is a for MBS, but just how much of a problem remains to be seen. Biden is, after all, a pragmatist who may, in the end, not exact much of a price on the human rights front before waving through the weapons deal. But with every step MBS takes to rehabilitate his image and rebrand the kingdom as a modern, open society where “moderate Islam” flourishes, he is shadowed by a remarkable and doggedly courageous woman: Hatice Cengiz, the fiancé of the murdered Jamal Khashoggi.

When MBS attempted to use the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) to purchase Newcastle United, a football club in the UK, Cengiz was there to  the takeover bid. It failed, to the great chagrin of the crown prince. When more recently he dangled a $100-million purse to secure the heavyweight fight between Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury for the kingdom, Cengiz used The Telegraph  to express her anger. “I cannot believe after all this time, and all the evidence showing his guilt, that the Saudi Crown Prince is still being considered as a ‘host’ for such world sporting events, which he is using for political reasons and to clean his image,” she said in a statement. 

Indications are that Saudi Arabia will host the fight, but MBS may have to pull even more than $100 million out of the PIF to do so. But sports events and expensive PR campaigns will not take away the stain of the killing of Khashoggi. To rehabilitate his image, MBS would have to give justice to Hathloul, drop the charges and release Odah, end the unjust incarceration of Sadhan and release thousands of other prisoners of conscience. Mohammed bin Salman would have to take responsibility for his actions and acknowledge his crimes — which he cannot do. 

What he can and will do is to play for time and hope that Trump or one of his lackeys returns to the White House in 2025.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post What Will It Take for MBS to Rehabilitate His Image? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

He has now spent more than 10 years in Jau Prison, notorious for its ill-treatment of inmates. Khawaja was granted political asylum in Denmark in 1991, later receiving citizenship, but he returned to Bahrain in 1999 during a period of political relaxation and reform. On January 22 this year, more than 100 organizations to the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, calling for her government to “renew and strengthen efforts to ensure his immediate and unconditional release so he can be reunited with his family and receive much needed medical treatment and torture rehabilitation in Denmark.”

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The letter provides graphic details of the treatment meted out to Khawaja from the moment of his arrest. While blindfolded and chained to his hospital bed, he was tortured by security officers immediately after major surgery to his broken jaw, which “forced the doctor to ask the security officers to stop as it would undo the surgical work.”

Throughout his imprisonment, he has conducted hunger strikes to protest prison conditions, the curtailment of his family’s visiting rights and phone calls, and the removal from his cell of all his reading material. He has declined medical treatment when he can in protest at being strip-searched, blindfolded, and hand and leg cuffed before being seen by medical staff. 

The letter to Frederiksen notes that in a recent call, Khawaja stated that “prison authorities are arbitrarily denying him proper medical treatment and refusing to refer him to specialists for surgeries he requires.” The letter adds: “[D]enying a prisoner adequate medical care violates the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, known as the Nelson Mandela Rules.”

A Reset in Bahrain?

With US President Joe Biden now in the White House — and  emanating from his new administration that human rights, utterly disregarded by his disgraced predecessor, are now on the front foot — the Bahraini government may want to have a reset on its own awful human rights record and its treatment of political prisoners.

Among those pressing for the reset is the New Jersey Democratic Congressman Tom Malinowski. He was unceremoniously  out of Bahrain in 2014 when he was the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor under the Obama administration. Malinowski had had the temerity to meet with the head of the opposition Al Wefaq political society, Sheikh Ali Salman, a move the Bahraini regime deemed was “counter to conventional diplomatic norms.”

Sheikh Salman was subsequently arrested and, in 2018,  to life in prison on charges related to the Gulf feud with Qatar that were transparently bogus. Al Wefaq was outlawed in 2017.

Malinowski may well find a bipartisan ally in Republican Florida Senator Marco Rubio. The senator is on record calling for an end to repression in Bahrain. As he argued in a  to then-President Donald Trump in September 2019 (co-signed by the Democratic senators Chris Murphy and Ron Widen): “Bahrain is a strategic ally in an important region and, critically, Bahrain hosts the United States Fifth Fleet. It is precisely for these reasons that we are so concerned by the government of Bahrain’s concerted efforts to silence peaceful opposition and quash free expression.”

Rubio specifically mentioned Khawaja by name, noting that he and others have been jailed for peaceful protest: “These prisoners are merely representative of the thousands of others who remain locked away for exercising their right to free expression.”

As Biden settles into office, Middle East dictators are nervous. The US president has sent a clear message that the pass Donald Trump gave them to crush dissent with impunity is well and truly canceled. As they strategize on how best to deal with the new norm, sending positive messages will not go amiss.

One such message would be to release Abdulhadi al-Khawaja and the other political prisoners held in Jau simply for calling for the right to speak freely and openly without fear of consequence.

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How Will Joe Biden Approach Iran?

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The fact that Joe Biden is bringing many of Barack Obama’s staff back to the White House, in particular Wendy Sherman as deputy secretary of state, is what may have buoyed the Qatari foreign minister’s optimism about a renewed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Sherman was the lead US negotiator for the initial nuclear deal with Iran. Her new boss at the State Department will be Antony Blinken, a  of President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the agreement. Biden’s designated national security adviser is . Both men are on record as wanting to bring America back into a JCPOA 2.0.

Obama 3

Though Oman played a key role in negotiations with the Iranians in the first deal, other Gulf states (Saudi Arabia and the UAE) were left out of the loop, which only added to their anxiety that the Americans were being played for suckers by Tehran. This time around, it is to be hoped (in what has been called by some analysts “Obama 3”) that lessons have been learned and there will be consultation with the GCC as new negotiations with Iran get underway.

If that happens, the Bloomberg interviewer asked, would the Qataris be interested in playing a lead role as facilitators this time around? Sheikh Mohammed replied that “we want the accomplishment, we want to see the deal happening. … If Qatar will be asked by the stakeholders to play a role in this, we will be welcoming this idea.” He affirmed that Qatar will support anyone conducting the negotiations because Doha has good relations with both Washington and Tehran: “Iran is our neighbor … they stood with us during the crisis.”

That fact alone may give the Qataris the inside track should the Americans choose to use them as a bridge to the Iranians. And it would be a role that the Saudis, in their efforts to curry favor with the Biden administration while wanting to appear to stand up strongly to Iran, may find useful as well.

Saudi Foreign Affairs Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud has already staked out the kingdom’s position. In an he gave just ahead of the rapprochement with Qatar, he said Saudi Arabia was “in favor of dialogue with Iran” as well as “in favor of dialogue between the United States and Iran.” He went on to argue that the Trump administration had been open to dialogue but that it was “Iran that closed the doors to that dialogue.” That, it could be argued, is somewhat disingenuous, since Trump had adamantly refused, as a means of getting the Iranians to the table, to ease sanctions. Indeed, in the waning months of his presidency, he had ramped them .

Prince Faisal, though he called for talks, was clear that there must be “real dialogue” that “addresses significant issues of concern — not just nuclear non-proliferation … but also ballistic missiles and, most importantly, the destabilizing activity … Without addressing Iran’s malign role and Iran’s funding of armed groups and terrorist organizations in the region and its attempts to impose its will by force on other states,” Prince Faisal said, “we are not going to have progress.” In a message intended for the incoming president’s ears, he concluded: “I sincerely hope that the Biden administration will take that into account when it formulates its policy in the region, and I believe they will.”

Time for War

Meanwhile, a conservative Israeli think tank, the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS), has just released a  that says, forget about dialogue — it’s time for Israel to go to war with Iran. That sentiment is rooted in the author’s belief that the Iranians are hell-bent on securing nuclear weapons. Professor Efraim Inbar, the JISS president, writes that “Iran-Israel relations are essentially a zero-sum game, leaving Israel little choice but to act upon its existential instincts.” Noting numerous strikes by the Israel Defense Forces on Hezbollah in Syria and on Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, he argues that Israel is already at war: “Indeed, Israel has decided to wage a low-profile limited war, ‘the campaign between wars,’ to obstruct Iranian attempts to transform Syria and Iraq into missile launching pads.”

Iran, Professor Inbar argues, will play a game of “talk and build” pretending to be serious about meaningful negotiations while building its nuclear capability — a point John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and others from the Trump administration have consistently made. “Essentially,” Inbar writes, “inconclusive talks preserve a status quo, a tense standoff in which Iran can go on uninhibited with its nuclear program. Indeed, bargaining, at which Iranians excel, and temporary concessions postpone diplomatic and economic pressures and, most importantly, preventive military strikes.” His solution is to suggest Israel “strike to pre-empt the return of Iran to the negotiating table.”

And, despite the Abraham Accords, he doesn’t put much stock in Israel’s new friendships in the Gulf. To the contrary, he worries that “as Iran becomes more powerful in the region and the US security umbrella becomes less reliable, reorienting their foreign policy towards Tehran might become more attractive.”

Granted, it is unlikely that Benjamin Netanyahu — preoccupied with keeping his political career alive as a way of avoiding prison — will seize on the professor’s bellicose strategy. That will be a relief, no doubt, to the Gulf states. The last thing they need is a war unleashed by their new Israeli friends right on the doorstep. Still, it points to the huge difficulties President Biden faces in attempting to revive the nuclear deal. His political foes and the right-wing media in America will move quickly to paint him as Tehran’s patsy. Regardless, the first step is to get the Iranians and the Americans around the table. Doha may be just about the best place to do that.

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Saudi Arabia’s Mission to Correct “Distorted Narrative”

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Should your place of work be a little further away, that will be taken care of too as “high-speed transit and autonomous mobility solutions will ensure that no journey will be longer than 20 minutes.” A glossy  details the glories of The Line.

Walk The Line

In his January 10 announcement of the megaproject, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman declared, “We need to transform the concept of a conventional city into that of a futuristic one.” The Line is the vision of NEOM taking shape, itself the brainchild of the crown prince, a centerpiece of Vision 2030 — his ambitious restructuring of Saudi society and the economy. The city will be home to 1 million people and, according to the crown prince, will create 380,000 jobs and add $48 billion to the kingdom’s GDP.

And if The Line sounds like a title to a Hollywood blockbuster, one starring a dashing young prince who pursues with vigor, courage and insight a vision for a future that will benefit his people and indeed all of humankind, well, that’s the storyline that his pricey PR advisers hope the world will buy. Every blockbuster requires a villain, and Mohammed bin Salman has found his in the global threats caused by climate change, that “By 2050, one billion people will have to relocate due to rising CO2 emissions and sea levels. 90 per cent of people breathe polluted air.”

The man who charged headlong into war in Yemen, who seized the Lebanese prime minister and forced him  live on live TV, who arrested senior royals and members of the Saudi business elite in a  masquerading as a corruption investigation, who  of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the imprisonment and torture of women activists has a new line in the works. No longer the warrior prince who thought he would have a quick win against the Houthis, nor the mafia don presiding over murder and protection rackets, nor the tough guy cracking down hard on anyone who stood in his way: No, the new Mohammed bin Salman is a thoughtful environmental visionary.

He now asks all the right questions: “Why should we sacrifice nature for the sake of development? Why should seven million people die every year because of pollution? Why should we lose one million people every year due to traffic accidents? And why should we accept wasting years of our lives commuting.” The Line, intones the prince “is a civilizational revolution that puts humans first.” This recasting as a green warrior comes at a useful time. Bin Salman is keen to get out of President-elect Joe Biden’s bad books. And Biden, unlike the current inhabitant of the White House, does take the threat of climate change seriously.

With the next edition of the Future Investment Initiative, the crown prince’s effort to encourage foreign direct investment into the kingdom — happening in Riyadh in two weeks’ time and coming hard on the heels of the resolution of the Gulf feud, perfectly captured by the warm  bin Salman gave the Qatari emir — the makeover would seem to be moving along very nicely indeed.

Green Blockbuster

Skeptics will note that the figures blithely thrown about by the prince may or may not be rooted in reality or hard data; a quick Google search throws up the figure of 7 million (if not ) deaths from pollution each year, but 380,000 jobs sounds like something of a stretch. The war in Yemen grinds on, and the Democrats, who now control all three branches of government in the United States, have made it clear they intend to hold the  for the many atrocities inflicted on civilians in their air war against the Houthis in Yemen.

Several senators and members of Congress  are determined not to let the murder of Jamal Khashoggi simply slip out of sight. And, to the outrage of people everywhere, , whose only crime was to pursue the rights of women, was sentenced to six years in jail, with her allegations of torture in detention ignored by the court that sentenced her. It seems that the plotline of Mohammed bin Salman as a green warrior still has some serious question marks hanging over it.

Returning to the movie theme, these days, an  is defined as anything above $100 million. The crown prince is going to sink between $100 billion and $200 billion from the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund into building The Line. It’s his proof of commitment to the war on climate change, a war in which he casts himself in a leading role. As far as blockbusters go, that’s a lot of dosh by anybody’s measure. The critics will have to wait and see whether or not it is money well spent.

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As reported by , “The sanctions target Turkey’s Presidency of Defense Industries, the country’s military procurement agency, its chief Ismail Demir and three other senior officials. The penalties block any assets the four officials may have in U.S. jurisdictions and bar their entry into the U.S. They also include a ban on most export licenses, loans and credits to the agency.”

Long Anticipated

The decision, long anticipated — and long resisted by President Donald Trump — came about because of Ankara’s refusal to back down from the purchase of the Russian S-400 missile defense system. Turkey announced back in 2017 it was going ahead with the deal, after feeling it had been rebuffed in its efforts to acquire the US Patriot system at what it considered a fair price and by the  to allow for a transfer of the system’s technology.

Tied into the politics swirling around the S-400 is the F-35, the stealth fighter jet the sale of which to the United Arab Emirates has caused ripples of anxiety in Israel. And given the ambitions of and mutual animosities between Mohammed bin Zayed, the Abu Dhabi crown prince and de facto UAE ruler, and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, there are, without doubt, similar feelings of anxiety in Ankara, though for different reasons.

The Americans took the sale of 100 F-35s to Turkey off the table because of concerns that the presence of the S-400 would potentially enable the Russians to acquire in-depth knowledge of the stealth fighter. In July last year, the White House released a statement that said, in part, that “Turkey’s decision to purchase Russian S-400 air defense systems renders its continued involvement with the F-35 impossible. The F-35 cannot coexist with a Russian intelligence-collection platform that will be used to learn about its advanced capabilities.”

It was a decision that President Trump, eyeing the half a billion dollars the deal was worth, only . “It’s not fair,” he said. And he groused: “Turkey is very good with us, very good, and we are now telling Turkey that because you have really been forced to buy another missile system, we’re not going to sell you the F-35 fighter jets. It’s a very tough situation that they’re in, and it’s a very tough situation that we’ve been placed in, the United States.”

Trump, it hardly needs to be said, blamed the Obama administration, claiming his predecessor had blocked the sale. As ever with this president, that’s not true. (For readers who are interested in the actual story, the defense and security site War on the Rocks provides a blow by blow account which can be found )

More in Sorrow

Though Erdoğan and Trump have had a good relationship, the US president has no time now for anything other than his increasingly pathetic and forlorn crusade to stay in the White House. He couldn’t be bothered to veto the bipartisan decision to invoke sanctions on Turkey. It was left to the outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to try to paper over the cracks. In a  couched in a tone of “more in sorrow, than in anger,” Pompeo said: “Turkey is a valued ally and an important regional security partner for the United States,” adding that “we seek to continue our decades-long history of productive defense-sector co-operation by removing the obstacle of Turkey’s S-400 possession as soon as possible.”

The Turks were having none of it. And from them, there was plenty of anger and no sorrow. Calling the decision “inexplicable,” the Turkish Foreign Ministry delivered a blunt : “We call on the United States to revise the unjust sanctions (and) to turn back from this grave mistake as soon as possible. Turkey is ready to tackle the issue through dialogue and diplomacy in a manner worthy of the spirit of alliance. (The sanctions) will inevitably negatively impact our relations, and (Turkey) will retaliate in a manner and time it sees appropriate.”

Purring like the proverbial Cheshire cat was Vladimir Putin. The sanctions, though  than might have been anticipated, play well to his strategy of pulling a NATO member, one with the second-largest standing army in the pact, closer to Moscow. Building on initiatives in Syria where Russian and Turkish forces are jointly policing a shaky ceasefire and on the deal the two countries  in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, the Russian president has further strengthened his hand.

Faced with an already challenging Middle East portfolio, it is yet another Trumpian mess that the incoming president, Joe Biden, and his pick as secretary of state Antony Blinken, will have to contend with.

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They speak about that which was previously forbidden: concerts with pop stars from the West, movie theaters, cultural exhibitions and sporting events such as the World Wrestling Entertainment  at the Mohammed Abdu Arena in Riyadh in February and the just-concluded inaugural Aramco  golf tournament, all with mixed audiences of men and women. And, of course, seeing women driving — a right that was granted in June 2018.

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The relaxation of the male guardianship system in August of this year has also been hailed as a  for women. At the time, the decision was celebrated by Princess Reema bint Bandar Al Saud, the Saudi ambassador in Washington. Gathering together a group of female employees in the embassy, she said: “You have unalienable rights now, the right to your own identity, to move, dream, work.”

Correcting the Narrative

Speaking on November 19, the ambassador the importance of gender equity and women’s advancement as a cornerstone of Vision 2030, Mohammed bin Salman’s ambitious and audacious program of economic and social transformation. She also took up a theme often expressed by Saudi authorities: Hers was a country “too often misunderstood, our remarkable progress, reform and change too often overlooked.” She added, “We need to do a better job of correcting an inaccurate and distorted narrative.”

That was what the G20 summit was designed to do — to shift the narrative away from the negative. But COVID-19 intervened, and what was to have been a glittering showcase of Saudi innovation, creative drive and women’s empowerment became a flat Zoom reality. The opportunity to press the flesh and wow their guests with trips to sites like the $500-billion futuristic Neom city now under construction morphed into a dull screen of faces. Still, there was one moment of technical wizardry projecting a group photo of G20 leaders onto the walls of the historic ruins of the city of Diriyah on the outskirts of Riyadh.

But haunting that moment was another image, cast onto the Louvre museum in Paris. It was of three women activists detained in Saudi prisons: Loujain al-Hathloul, Nassima al-Sadah and Samar Badawi. Their plight and the plight of other women prisoners is the subject of a just-released  by Baroness Helena Kennedy, QC. She cites multiple Saudi and international laws and agreements that have been violated during the arrests and detention of the women. She details credible allegations of torture and names two individuals very close to the Saudi crown prince either directly engaged in or presiding over torture. The torture, the report says, included beatings, electric shock, sexual assault and threats to rape and kill family members.

The two named individuals are Saud al-Qahtani, implicated in the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in October 2018, and Mohammed bin Salman’s younger brother and the former ambassador in Washington, Khalid bin Salman. Al-Qahtani escaped prosecution in Saudi Arabia for the killing of Khashoggi but remains on the US sanctions list he was put on shortly after the murder; in July, his name was added to the UK sanctions list.

Khalid bin Salman, while serving as ambassador to the US, reportedly encouraged Jamal Khashoggi in the belief that he could return safely to Saudi Arabia. Prince Khalid left the United States shortly after details of the killing began to emerge. He returned briefly, then quit his post. In February 2019, he was appointed deputy defense minister. His older brother, the crown prince, is defense minister. As Helena Kennedy’s report states:

“Al-Qahtani personally tortured Loujain on a number of occasions. Al-Qahtani’s involvement is also attested to by the former female inmate of Dhabhan, who stated that one of the Women’s Rights Activists had told her that Saud Al-Qahtani was present at the unofficial facility for much of the time she was there, directed a number of both individual and group torture sessions, threatened her with rape, and sexually abused her. She also told the former inmate that she had witnessed Saud Al-Qahtani sexually assaulting several other Women’s Rights Activists in their rooms, including Loujain Al-Hathloul and Eman Al-Nafjan.

Additionally, the former female inmate of Dhabhan reports that Khalid bin Salman was occasionally present at the unofficial facility, and would sometimes attend interrogations. One of the Women’s Rights Activists told her that he would threaten rape and murder when overseeing interrogations, and would boast about his position and power, saying ‘do you know who I am? I am Prince Khalid bin Salman, I am the ambassador to the US, and I can do anything I like to you’, or words to that effect.”

These are very serious allegations. However, they are not proven and the Saudi authorities have consistently denied the claims. But rather than have an independent investigation, the authorities have chosen to take the view that those detained and the manner of their detention are internal issues for the Saudi courts to deal with. It’s a position they took in  eight individuals and sentencing them to between seven and 20 years in jail for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Saud al-Qahtani was not among those charged.

“People Have Not Been Fair”

In an  with the BBC’s Lyse Doucet, Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi minister of state for foreign affairs, said, “Our judiciary is independent and we do not allow people to lecture us or tell us what we should or shouldn’t do.” The minister claimed that Loujain al-Hathloul was not detained for her women’s rights activism but because she was being investigated as a national security risk. In 2018, Mohammed bin Salman called her a spy and said he would produce evidence “the next day” to prove it, but no such evidence has emerged.

Al-Jubeir also complained, as has Princess Reema, that Riyadh is a victim of unwarranted criticism: “I think that people have not been fair when it comes to dealing with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” he told Doucet. “I think they always look for the negative part of it rather than the positive part of it.”

Had US President Donald Trump secured reelection earlier this month, telling that “positive part” would have been less challenging. As it was, with the Saudis attempting to focus the summit on the global battle against COVID-19, Trump made a  via Zoom to extol his administration’s efforts at combating the pandemic and then left to play a round of golf. Joe Biden  Saudi Arabia as a “pariah” state in 2019, stating in October that his administration would “reassess our relationship with the Kingdom, end US support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and make sure America does not check its values at the door to sell arms or buy oil.”

The Saudis are hoping that was just electioneering talk. Speaking to  in a virtual interview on the sidelines of the G20 summit, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, the Saudi foreign minister, said: “I’m confident that a Biden administration would continue to pursue policies that are in the interest of regional stability.” The foreign minister is likely correct in that assessment. But with the current abysmal state of human rights in the kingdom, it is far less likely that the Biden White House will buy into the positive narrative of reform and change Princess Reema has been deployed to sell in Washington.

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Had Prince Bandar’s been the only recent voice of a senior ruling family member on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, then it could be said that such a move was well and truly underway. However, like Bandar, another former Saudi ambassador and intelligence head had given interviews in English to both Arabian Business and to CNBC. His comments, however, have received little analysis.

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Whereas Prince Bandar had castigated the Palestinian leadership for failing to grasp numerous opportunities — “they always bet on the losing side” was one of his more pungent denunciations — Prince Turki bin Faisal did not follow the same path. He chose to reiterate Saudi government support for the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative that called for recognition of the state of Israel by all Arab countries in return for the withdrawal of occupation forces and settler communities from the West Bank, recognition of a border on the 1967 Green Line and East Jerusalem as the capital of an independent Palestine.

Where the Kingdom Stands

Speaking to  on September 26, Prince Turki was unequivocal: “Government officials have expressed the view that the kingdom is committed to the Arab Peace Initiative and will not change that position until there is a sovereign Palestinian state with its capital as East Jerusalem. We have not moved from that position in spite of what Mr. Netanyahu is throwing in, either through innuendo or smirk, smirk, winks at, particularly, Western media. … This is where the kingdom stands on this issue.”

He made no mention of Jared Kushner’s Peace to Prosperity plan that would see much of the West Bank, including the Jordan Valley, annexed by Israel with Palestinians left with non-contiguous pockets of land, without East Jerusalem as a capital and a very constrained and encumbered semi-state beholden to the Israelis for its survival. In other words, the Swiss-cheese effect that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long privately presented as his ultimate solution to the Palestinian question is realized with the Kushner deal.

Turki did, however, comment favorably on a Joe Biden presidency, saying that the former vice president “is not ignorant of the value of the relationship, he knows the kingdom and recognizes the importance of this relationship.”&�Բ�����;In endorsing Biden, the prince took a sly, though unstated, dig at the ignorance of President Donald Trump and his attitude that the Saudis are a , useful for weapons sales and little else unless that be to normalize relations with Israel.

He had been less diplomatic in the with CNBC’s Hadley Gamble on September 23. Gamble had asked him if his father, King Faisal, would have been disappointed with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain’s recognition of Israel without a two-state solution for the Palestinians being first arrived at. “Most definitely,” he replied, “that’s my personal view knowing his commitment to getting a quid pro quo between Israel and Arab countries.” He noted the oil sanctions that Faisal had invoked in 1973 during the Ramadan War was to “force the United States to be an honest broker between Israel and the Arab world. I must say that President Trump is not such an honest broker, so yes, I think the late king would have been disappointed.” Prince Turki carefully sidestepped a question about splits in the ruling family over Palestine while noting that the Arab Peace Initiative has been “reaffirmed by King Salman many times, most recently in cabinet meetings last week and the week before.”

Astute Game

Gardner, in his piece about Bandar’s attack on the Palestinian leadership, writes: “Such words, said a Saudi official close to the ruling family, would not have been aired on Saudi-owned television without the prior approval of both King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman.” He is entirely correct in that statement, and the same is true for Prince Turki. He, too, could only have spoken so frankly with the knowledge that his comments had prior approval. So what is going on here with these very different takes on the Israel-Palestine conflict from two royal greybeards who have, thus far, survived the several purges Mohammed bin Salman has inflicted on the ruling family?

A clear indication that Turki al Faisal was on secure ground were the comments by the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, as part of a lengthy he gave to the Washington Institute on October 15. Prince Faisal averred that the kingdom was committed to the process of finding a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict and part of the process was “an eventual normalization with Israel as envisioned by the Arab Peace Plan.” Regarding Bandar’s attack on the leadership he said: “That’s Prince Bandar’s opinion. I believe that the Palestinian leaders genuinely want what’s best for their people.”

Take it all as a sign that in this, at least, the often headstrong Saudi crown prince is playing a more astute game: on the one hand supporting the Trump line on Palestine and normalization while on the other implacably rejecting it. Maybe, Mohammed bin Salman seems to be saying, we are for it but then maybe we are not. If so, it is an eerie echo of what President Trump  when asked if the crown prince had ordered the killing of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi: “It could very well be that the crown prince had knowledge of this tragic event — maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”

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The company signed a partnership deal in late 2016 with Kosmos Energy to acquire what it described as “a significant working interest, including operatorship, of Kosmos’ exploration blocks in Mauritania and Senegal.” BP’s working interest in Mauritania amounts to 62%, with Kosmos holding 28% and the Mauritanian Society of Hydrocarbons and Mining Heritage the remaining 10%.

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BP says it is committed to  and promised a variety of programs to train Mauritanians, create jobs, contract local companies and build third-party spending with those companies. It has made further commitments to health and education projects, social development, capability building and livelihood and economic development.

Basket of Worries

But with the  by a combination of COVID-19 and unusually warm winters in Europe, the bright hopes for Tortue Ahmeyim are already starting to fade. The initial goal of a staggered launch in three phases in 2020 to bring the field to full capacity by 2025 has been shelved. Phase one is now pushed back to the first half of 2023, with the Middle East Economic Survey (MEES) quoting Kosmos CEO  in May as saying that a final investment decision on phases two and three will not now be considered “until post-2023 when we’ve got Phase 1 onstream.” The goal of reaching full capacity is pushed back toward the end of the decade.

What may be more unsettling for the government of President Mohamed Ould Ghazouani was BP’s announcement in the summer that it will slash oil and gas output by 40% over the next decade. That was followed by the 14 September release of the company’s that presented scenarios where peak oil demand had already passed or would pass by the middle of the decade. It is important to note that, presenting the Outlook, BP’s chief economist, Spencer Dale, underlined that “The role of the Energy Outlook is not to predict or forecast how the ‎energy system is likely to change over time. We can’t predict the future; all the scenarios ‎discussed in this year’s Outlook will be wrong.” That may be cold comfort to President Ould Ghazouani.

The hard fact is that early ebullience about the potential of the Tortue Ahmeyim project by its consortium backers has now been replaced with an abundance of caution and with brakes strongly applied. So much so that James Cockayne, of MEES, : “The likelihood of these developments ever seeing the light of day, at least under BP’s stewardship, needs to be considered anew in the light of the latest far-reaching strategy shift from the UK major.” His gloomy conclusion was that “Mauritania’s hopes of gas riches appear to be hanging by a thread.”

The president has another issue weighing heavy in his basket of worries, and that is the question of normalization with Israel. Commentators have anticipated that Mauritania would join the UAE and Bahrain in , especially as Tel Aviv and Nouakchott had diplomatic relations from 1999 to 2009. In 2009, Mauritania froze relations in protest at Israeli attacks on Gaza.

The UAE’s Mohammed bin Zayed, the Abu Dhabi crown prince and de facto ruler, has been the driving force in Arab normalization with Israel. With Ould Ghazouani in attendance in Abu Dhabi, in February bin Zayed announced  in aid. For a country with a GDP that the World Bank estimated in 2018 stood at just over $5 billion, that sort of largesse buys a lot of influence.

Normalization Bandwagon

But the president is well aware of the strong sentiment within the country for the Palestinian cause. Tewassoul, the opposition Islamist party, was instrumental in 2009 in bringing protesters onto the streets of the capital demanding an end to diplomatic links with the Israelis. The party also backed the candidacy of Sidi Mohamed Ould Boubacar in last year’s presidential election. Ould Boubacar took 18 % of the vote, while another candidate and leader of the anti-slavery movement, Biran Dah Abeid, scored a similar percentage. Ould Ghazouani won with 52%, with the opposition  the election as rigged.

Although Mauritania officially outlawed slavery in 1981, the practice continues, with approximately 90,000 out of a population of 4.6 million enslaved. That situation caused US President Donald Trump’s administration to  Mauritania’s preferred trade status under the African Growth and Opportunity Act. Justifying his decision, Trump cited the fact that “Mauritania has made insufficient progress toward combating forced labor, specifically, the scourge of hereditary slavery.”

It may be that if he wins reelection, Trump will revisit that decision and offer to drop the revocation as a carrot to bring Mauritania onto the normalization bandwagon. That would, of course, do nothing to hasten the end of slavery. As Human Rights Watch (HRW) notes in its , the Mauritanian government is doing precious little itself: “According to the 2019 US State Department Trafficking in Persons Report, Mauritania investigated four cases, prosecuted one alleged trafficker, but did not convict any.” HRW also detailed numerous human rights abuses, the stifling of free speech and the harassment and arrest of opposition politicians and activists, including the anti-slavery movement leader and presidential candidate Biran Dah Abeid.

There is no doubt that the promise of economic gain that Tortue Ahmeyim represents could go some way toward steering Mauritania onto a modernizing path. Though the 2019 presidential election was challenged by the opposition, it did represent the first peaceful transition in the country’s long history of military coups after gaining independence from France in 1960. That, coupled with the windfall the gas field could bring, is a step in the right direction. But if the Tortue Ahmeyim project falters, so too will Mauritania’s chances for a better future.

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Russia’s state-controlled  reported that what it called a “source” had said that the Turks had declined to evacuate five observation posts in Syria’s Idlib province. According to the source, “After the Turkish side refused to withdraw the Turkish observation points and insisted on keeping them, it was decided to reduce the number of Turkish forces present in Idlib and to withdraw heavy weapons from the area.”

A Coming Catastrophe

Whether that is the case has yet to be confirmed. However, it was enough for the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) to issue a : “Turkey may have agreed to cede control of Southern Idlib to pro-Assad forces in a meeting with Russia September 16. If the reports of a deal are true, a pro-Assad offensive is likely imminent.”

The ISW buttresses its argument by noting that Turkey had already withdrawn hundreds of its forces from southern Idlib on September 8. Turkey’s claim that the withdrawal is the result of rising tensions with Greece over hydrocarbon reserves in the eastern Mediterranean were treated with skepticism by the ISW: “Turkey may have used its dispute with Greece as cover for action consistent with an impending deal with Russia in Idlib.”

This may, indeed, be the “political negotiations” that Cavusoglu was speaking of. If so, and if an assault on what remains of Idlib in rebel hands is imminent, then it signals likely catastrophe for civilians trapped between advancing Assad forces and jihadist militias. Were the US not in the middle of a presidential race and were the incumbent in the White House not so inclined to call for the complete withdrawal of US forces from Syria (only to change his mind when presented with the outcomes of such a move), then there would be grounds for more hope for the civilian population of Idlib.

But such is not the case. And beyond President Donald Trump’s  that, as he expressed it, “People said to me, ‘Why are you staying in Syria?’ Because I kept the oil, which frankly we should have done in Iraq,” uncertainty about just what America’s intentions in Syria are remains very much in play. It is a factor that other external players, that is the Russians, the Turks and Iran, can all exploit as they seek to advance their strategic efforts at the expense of the Syrian people.

Old Enemies

It is a situation that has left the 500 or so US troops still in Syria and their allies, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), in a vulnerable and exposed place, a point the Pentagon clearly gets, even if the commander-in-chief doesn’t.  of Bradley fighting vehicles to Eastern Syria on September 19, a Pentagon spokesperson stated: “These actions are a clear demonstration of US resolve to defend Coalition forces in the [Eastern Syria Security Area], and to ensure that they are able to continue their Defeat-ISIS mission without interference. The Defense Department has previously deployed Bradleys to northeast Syria pursuant to these goals.”

That deployment reflects a growing concern that, as documented by ISW and others, the Islamic State (IS) is resurging in Syria. Its recent attacks have been aimed at tribal elders who support the SDF and at efforts to develop governance capabilities that benefit civilians by removing festering grievances that the jihadists seek to exploit.

For their part, the Russians, playing on fears that the SDF Kurdish leadership has concerning an abrupt American withdrawal, may strive to build on pushing the Kurds to seek some sort of rapprochement with Damascus, thus hastening a US departure. In that regard, it is worth noting that the Russians were crucial to a  last year that saw the Kurds cede territory to Assad forces and withdraw rather than face a Turkish offensive in northern Syria.

Meanwhile, the ISW’s Jennifer Cafarella  that a sudden withdrawal without a strategic endgame plays straight into the hands of not just Russia and Iran; it emboldens a rising IS and empowers the jihadist ideology it shares with America’s oldest enemy in its war on terror, al- Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda has played a long game, happy for IS to take the brunt of the West’s military response. Cafarella says that while a global coalition led by America came together to defeat the caliphate (and force ISI into a guerrilla insurgency), the same cannot be said for al-Qaeda. “We have not been able to reach the same level of understanding with our allies and partners and that is in part because Al Qaeda is playing this much more sophisticated political game that in the long run, I do very much worry, could outflank us.”

*[This article was originally published by .]

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The UAE and Israel: Not So Big a Deal

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Meanwhile, as the Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas steadfastly refuse to come to the table, the Israelis continue to nibble and bite their way through East Jerusalem and Area C, the 61% of the West Bank under full Israeli control. From East Jerusalem comes a report that a mosque in the neighborhood of Silwan, built in 2012, , with residents there being given 21 days to challenge the order. The demolition order is part of a larger effort that has seen the acceleration of the destruction of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and the West Bank during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Area C

As a  published on 10 September by the UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs noted, “The period from March to August 2020 saw the demolition or confiscation of 389 Palestinian-owned structures in the West Bank, on average, 65 per month, the highest average destruction rate in four years.” The report goes on to outline the destruction of “water, hygiene or sanitation assets, and structures used for agriculture, among others, undermining the access of many to livelihoods and services,” thus making life even more difficult for the Palestinians living in Area C.

In 2015,  released a report funded by the UK’s Department for International Development. (Earlier this month, the Johnson government merged the department with the Foreign Office). Reading the report five years on is a salutary reminder of how far the British government has traveled in its attitude toward Israel and the Palestinians. The report states that “Area C is fundamental to the contiguity of the West Bank and the viability of Palestine and its economy,” that is, essential to the realization of a proper Palestinian state.

It notes: “Since the occupation began, planning has severely restricted Palestinian development opportunities, while permitting the extensive growth of Israeli settlements and the infrastructure to support them. This has denied the Palestinian Authority vital economic resources and contributed to a situation where villages in Area C are dependent on donors for basic services, and are at risk of having property demolished.”

Area C is largely rural and home to dozens of Palestinian villages, with a population cited by the UN-Habitat report as being between 150,000 and 300,000. There are also some 130 illegal settlements and outposts that now house close to 400,000 Israeli settlers. The 2015 UN report noted Israel’s “formal obligation under international law to take care of the needs of the Palestinian communities in Area C.” The authority supposed to do so is Israel’s Civil Administration in the West Bank.

How telling, then, that its head, Brigadier General Ghassan Alian, was able to  to the Knesset recently about the numerous “successes” of his administration in demolishing Palestinian homes while restricting the number of  EU projects designed to assist Palestinians in Area C from 75 in 2015 to just 12 in 2019.

The authorities say that the Palestinians are building homes without securing the necessary permits, using that as the reason to pull them down. But 98% of applications by Palestinians are  by the Civil Administration. The vast majority of settler applications (on illegally occupied land) are uniformly waved through. One Likud deputy spoke of “the main battle, the main campaign over the Land of Israel in Area C … Our demand, which is also derived from the [Oslo] agreements, is a demand for all of Area C.”

Benny Gantz, Benjamin Netanyahu’s fellow in Israel’s marriage-of-convenience government, sensing the current prime minister’s vulnerability — settler groups are enraged that Netanyahu has postponed annexation in the West Bank as a price for recognition by the United Arab Emirates — has reportedly called for the building of  in Area C. In so doing, he is wooing the right-wing and settler elements in anticipation of yet another election that could come either in December or in March 2021.

Kushner Plan

Under , Israel would get 30% of Area C only if it agrees not to expand existing settlements or create new ones. The Palestinians would receive 30% as part of a commitment, the plan argues, toward the establishment of a Palestinian state. Without a deal, the Israelis continue to gobble up land and destroy houses, something that will be dramatically accelerated should the Gantz initiative proceed.

So when the president’s son-in-law talks of “a situation where there is land that could become a Palestinian state. It is possible to connect it, but the land that Israeli settlers are in right now is land that Israel controls, and the odds of them ever giving it up is unlikely,” he is not making an empty threat. Palestinian land and homes are being taken away day in day out, and Gantz, for political purposes, wants to escalate the process.

Ordinary Palestinians, acquaintances and colleagues of this writer are utterly fed up with the Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas and would agree that, as Kushner says, the elite around Abbas is fattening its bank accounts while doing nothing for the people. Privately, they might well nod their heads when he says: “The reason why they [the PA] never accomplished anything was because both parties were getting what they wanted. Every time a negotiation failed, Israel took more land and the Palestinians got more money from the international community.”

As Netanyahu and Trump bask in the afterglow of the historic 15 September signing of the normalization deal with the UAE and Bahrain in Washington, it is worth noting that had the Emiratis been serious, as they say they still are, about the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, they would have played a different hand. If they had wanted a contiguous Palestinian state with the 1967 border and East Jerusalem as its capital, they would, at the very least, have demanded an end to further settler encroachments and the destruction of mosques and homes. That they didn’t says the writing is on the wall for all to see: The Palestinians must take the Kushner deal or face losing what little they have left.

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The president’s son-in-law called the deal an “historic breakthrough” that augured well for peace. Already sensing, perhaps, that the expected avalanche of Arab states moving to normalize relations was not happening as anticipated he nonetheless enthused: “So, not just in the Middle East, are now countries who weren’t thinking of normalising relations with Israel, thinking of forming a relationship and doing things they wouldn’t have thought to do a couple of weeks ago.”

Israel and the UAE: The Myth of Normalizing Abnormalities

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Kushner also claimed: “There’s a lot of envy in the region that the United Arab Emirates took this step and we now have access to Israeli agriculture technology, security business. The opportunity in tourism. And so a lot of people would like to follow that now.”

Friends of Convenience

Parsing those two statements, does Kushner really think that it was only “a couple of weeks ago” that MENA countries were thinking of their relations with Israel? And does he think that describing those who have not immediately jumped aboard as displaying “a lot of envy” is the way to get them to do so? Kushner displays arrogance, ignorance and the patronizing attitude with which the Trump White House views Arabs: easily exploitable as malleable friends of convenience and eager purchasers of weapons.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had already come away  from Bahrain and Oman, two Gulf Cooperation Council states that were expected, given the precarious shape of their finances, to follow immediately in the footsteps of the UAE. He also struck out in Sudan. The Saudis had allowed the El Al flight to cross their territory — another first — but despite Kushner  on his way back from Abu Dhabi, they were not rushing to join the historic breakthrough either.

Indeed, abandoning the Palestinians so utterly on a thin promise from Benjamin Netanyahu to suspend (note: not end) West Bank annexation is proving too distasteful for many Arab leaders to stomach, even though  some of them have been prepared privately to go along with Kushner’s concoction of a so-called deal of the century designed to give the Israelis virtually everything they want while denying the Palestinians a viable, territorially contiguous and independent state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Part of the deal with the Emiratis was supposed to be the of F-35 fighter jets, long sought after by Mohammed bin Zayed, the Abu Dhabi crown prince, deputy supreme commander of the armed forces and de facto UAE ruler. Much to his chagrin, Israel invoked what is known as its qualitative military edge (QME). The QME is designed to ensure that whatever weaponry the US sells to Arab states, none of it will challenge Israel’s military supremacy. The Israelis have two combat-ready  of F-35s.

And while Kushner and Israel made much of the deal signifying a common front against the Iranian threat, it is a simple fact that despite sanctions, the UAE, and Dubai in particular, do a lot of business with the Islamic Republic of Iran and has done so for decades. Trump’s “maximum pressure” tactics have not altered in any significant way that hard reality.

Big Gestures

Amongst other big gestures, Kushner and the Israelis Mohammed bin Zayed to Washington in September to sign the deal and to celebrate what he sees — and Trump will claim — as history in the making. With the election heading into its final weeks, it will be sold as a diplomatic triumph for the president, intended to appeal to his evangelical base, hence the overblown title. Whether the Abu Dhabi crown prince will go along with such a blatant electioneering ploy remains to be seen.

The deal does deserve to be acknowledged as significant if only because a third Arab state, an increasingly powerful and influential one, joins Egypt and Jordan in recognizing Israel. That is a breakthrough. Where Kushner has stumbled is in trying to hype it and sell it as something other than what it is. The Emiratis and the Israelis have been doing business for many years, but it has been done sub rosa. Normalization acknowledges that situation. And at a time when COVID-19 is laying waste to the global economy, it does herald economic benefits for both countries with deals in defense, medicine, agriculture, tourism and technology being mooted.

Mohammed bin Zayed, though smarting at the nixing of the F-35 deal, can still lay claim to gaining much-added influence and stature in Washington, a situation that is not likely to change should Joe Biden win the presidency. For Benjamin Netanyahu, the wins are less clear cut. The , already outraged at his failure to deliver on annexation by July 1, may decide that what they see as his latest and largest betrayal — the suspension of West Bank annexation — is sufficient grounds to bring him down and force another election, one that, should he lose, will make him ever more vulnerable to a court case that could lead to conviction and jail for Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.

*[Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Mauritania recognized Israel, whereas it froze diplomatic relations in 2009.]

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The men were convicted and sentenced to death in 2014 for the killing of a policeman. That conviction was overturned when evidence emerged that they had been tortured into giving false confessions. Despite that decision, the death penalty was reinstated and subsequently confirmed by the court of cassation. An official in the public prosecutor’s office defended the court’s latest ruling while denying the , claiming that medical reports showed that the confessions were obtained “in full consciousness and voluntarily, without any physical or verbal coercion.”

In Bahrain, Justice Is Still a Far-Off Goal

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That confounds the earlier court decision to throw out the convictions, which was based on an investigation undertaken by the Bahraini government’s own  that showed the men had been tortured. However, in the contorted reality of the kingdom’s politicized judicial system, the court of cassation decided that the convictions were not based on evidence extracted under torture but rather on other evidence.

“Close and Important Relationship”

Amnesty International  the latest verdict, saying: “The two men were taken to the Criminal Investigations Department where they were tortured during interrogation. Mohamed Ramadhan refused to sign a ‘confession’, though he was subjected to beating and electrocution. Hussain Ali Moosa said he was coerced to ‘confess’ and incriminate Mohamed Ramadhan after being suspended by the limbs and beaten for several days.”

Moosa has said that, after his genitalia were repeatedly beaten, he was told that if he signed a confession implicating Ramadhan his sentence would be commuted to life: “They were kicking me on my reproductive organs, and would hit me repeatedly in the same place until I couldn’t speak from the pain. I decided to tell them what they wanted.” His repudiation of the confession was ignored by the courts.

In UK Parliament, four days prior to the court of cassation ruling, the Conservative MP Sir Peter Bottomley had  Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab for a statement on whether he would use what he called “the UK’s constructive dialogue” with Bahrain to publicly raise the cases of the men. In reply, the Minister for the Middle East and North Africa James Cleverly spoke of a “close and important relationship” with an “ongoing, open and genuine dialogue” with Bahrain. The minister averred that “this dynamic” enabled the UK to raise human rights concerns, adding “the cases of Mr Moosa and Mr Ramadhan had been, and would continue to be, raised in conversations with officials in Bahrain.”

Earlier this month, it was revealed that another heavily politicized judiciary, this time in Iran, had upheld the death sentences of three young Iranian protesters who had been arrested in November of last year during countrywide protests that saw  by security forces. Though moving swiftly to convict the men and sentence them to death, the authorities have done virtually nothing about investigating the killings carried out by the state in suppressing the protests. Amongst media highlighting their case is the Saudi news site . It noted that a hashtag trending in Iran, “#do not execute,” has had over 2 million tweets. On July 19, Iran s, according to one of the lawyers for the accused.

In 2019, Saudi Arabia executed a , including six women, many for drug-related offenses. Some were crucified after being beheaded. At least one was a minor. In April, the kingdom announced it would no longer execute juveniles; rather it would sentence them to a maximum of 10 years in a juvenile detention center. It is unclear if the decree will save the life of , who was 17 when arrested and 19 when sentenced to death. His uncle Nimr al-Nimr, a prominent Shia Muslim cleric and critic of the ruling family, was beheaded in 2016.

State-Sanctioned Arbitrary Killing

In Egypt, more than  have been sentenced to death since Abdel Fattah el-Sisi came to power in 2013, with nearly 200 executed. At least 10 children have been sentenced to hang. In the country’s prison system, there is another kind of death — by deliberate medical neglect, as was the case with the country’s first democratically elected president Mohammed Morsi. He was repeatedly denied medication for his diabetes and collapsed and died in a Cairo court on June 17, 2019.

On November 8 last year, a panel of UN experts led by Agnes Callamard, the special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, that Morsi’s death “after enduring those conditions could amount to a State-sanctioned arbitrary killing”. The case  on the horrific conditions in Egypt’s overcrowded and brutal prison system, a situation that has been severely exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

On July 13, prominent Egyptian journalist  died from COVID-19. He had been arrested and held in pre-trial detention for criticizing, on the Al Jazeera news network, the of the coronavirus crisis. The charge against him was broadcasting false news. The 65-year-old suffered from heart disease and diabetes, and was therefore at high risk of contracting the disease. After falling ill Monir was released to hospital a week before he died. An influential critical voice was silenced. Surely that was the intention — death, be it by medical malfeasance or by execution, is a powerful weapon in the hands of authoritarian regimes.

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The man bringing Froome to Israel is 61-year-old Israeli-Canadian billionaire businessman Sylvan Adams. Adams has unabashedly appointed himself Israel’s , whose remit is to use his wealth and the vehicle of sport to improve the image of the country he now calls home. That sounds suspiciously like , but Adams says that is : “We’re not trying to cover up our sins and wash them away with something. Actually we’re just being ourselves and it’s not washing, it’s sport. It’s not called sportwashing, it’s called sport.”

A New Narrative

Adams likes to boast about bringing in celebrities like Lionel Messi for a football friendly, or Madonna when Israel hosted the Eurovision song contest. He doesn’t talk about the fees he paid to bring them in — it is all about telling positive stories, creating a new narrative. And he insists that what he is doing is not political. Adams is prepared to acknowledge that the Israelis “live in a bit of a rough neighbourhood, and we have issues with our neighbours, but that’s not the whole story.” And in his relentlessly sunny version of reality he sees but one dark cloud: “By just focusing on one aspect of life here, you are necessarily distorting the true picture and necessarily creating, and I hate to say it, fake news.”

One of his biggest coups and one he is building on with the acquisition of Froome was to secure the first leg of the famed Giro d’Italia for Israel in 2018. Adams is himself an amateur racing fanatic: He built the  in Tel Aviv and named it after himself. He says that, though it took a little convincing, the Giro organizers were eventually won over and the deal was done. Again,  “When I brought the Giro here and we had helicopter footage from the north to the south over three beautiful days, people saw it and it looked like the Giro. Really, it was fantastic,” Adams proudly recalls.

One doubts, however, that the footage caught the concrete wall that slashes through the land and divides Palestinian families, the illegal settlements implanted in the West Bank, the olive groves uprooted and destroyed, the nearly 2 million Palestinians crammed into the 365 square kilometers of the Gaza Strip. With a mantra of good news and pleasing views, Adams hopes that what many others see as sportswashing and what he insists is just “sports” will further facilitate the process of Israel’s normalization with the Gulf states.

He points to the presence of teams from Bahrain and the UAE in the 2018 Giro race held in Jerusalem as evidence of building friendly relations and the race itself as a “bridge of peace.” And he talks of meeting Prince Nasser bin Hamad Al Khalifa, son of the king of Bahrain, a fellow racing enthusiast and head of the . Adams was part of the Israeli delegation that went to the Bahraini capital Manama last year to discuss financing Donald Trump’s so-called “deal of the century,” which is where he met Prince Nasser. The prince has been credibly accused of  in 2011.

Though the allegations against Nasser are widely known and the subject of conversation and  within the racing community, this news seemed either to have  or he knew and wasn’t troubled: “I went to the palace. We had a private meeting. I told him about the velodrome and sent him an invitation.” Good news then.

More Good News

Continuing on the good news front, Manchester City, owned by a senior member of the Abu Dhabi ruling family, had its  from Champions League football lifted on July 13. The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) overturned UEFA’s February ruling that punished the club for being in breach of Financial Fair Play regulations. Although Manchester City had “obstructed” UEFA in its investigation and shown “disregard” for the principle of cooperating with the authorities, CAS determined that as concerned the central finding — that the team’s Abu Dhabi ownership had played a shell game, disguising what was its own funding as independent sponsorship — “most of the alleged breaches were either not established or time-barred.” That does suggest rather strongly that at least some of the breaches were established and others disallowed on a technicality.

It is widely accepted that, in building Man City into a football behemoth, club executives played fast and loose with the financial rules. Now with this decision, it is accepted that Abu Dhabi, with the payment of a €10-million fine ($11.4 million), knocked down from the €30 million UEFA had levied, can get away with it.

For those in the business of sportswashing, that’s very good news. That and the fact that fans will look away from the unsavory, will see sport as an escape with no political intersections. As Sylvan Adams, the sportswashing denier, puts it: “I’m reaching sports fans who don’t dislike us. I’m not talking to the haters; haters gonna hate, and you know we live in a happier world. We don’t hate, we’re open, we’re free-thinking people. I’d rather live in our world. The world’s a little sunnier and nicer in our world rather than spewing hate all the time.”

*[This article was originally published by .]

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A key economic indicator is the property market. In the final quarter of last year, both residential and office capital values had  by 2.4% for the former and 1.9% for the latter. The drop reflected a narrative that had been developing for several years, the result of over-building in both markets. But with the impact of the coronavirus not yet being felt, developers had remained optimistic that a rebound was just around the corner. As the head of a leading Dubai property valuation service said at the end of January: “Lowered borrowing costs, improved product offerings and attractive developer payment plans may all now be creating the right conditions for improved buyer confidence in Dubai’s property market.”

Freefall

The optimism was not entirely ill-founded, based as it was, in part at least, on the boost that Expo 2020, scheduled to run for six months from October, would give to Dubai’s economy. The exposition, the largest ever undertaken in the Arab world, had projected a . Footfall was expected to be 25 million, with 14 million coming from abroad. However, organizers, citing the pandemic, announced on May 4 a postponement until October 2021.

By that point, Dubai’s tourism industry was already in complete freefall. Hotels and restaurants had been shuttered since mid-March, and passenger flights in and out of the city suspended. The comparison with 2019 could not be starker: Last year, the emirate entertained 16 million overseas visitors. The tourism sector generated  making Dubai the world’s third largest city in attracting direct international tourist spending, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council. All of that has disappeared in a matter of weeks and a mood of deep pessimism has settled over the economy.

A  released by the Dubai Chamber of Commerce on May 19 showed that 75% of the businesses surveyed expected to close within the next six months. Nearly half of the restaurants and hotels surveyed said they could not survive beyond mid-June. According to the survey, those hardest hit are small and medium businesses. The poll, conducted in all major business sectors between April 16 and April 22, surveyed 1,228 CEOs. Nearly 75% of those surveyed were businesses with fewer than 20 employees.

Other sectors of the economy shared in the gloomy news. The giant port operator DP World was  by Moody’s two notches to Baa3, the lowest investment grade. The ratings agency cited rising debt and the “negative interference” between the firm and the government as reasons for the downgrade. As by Reuters, “Dubai is borrowing $9 billion to take full control of the port operator DP World and to refinance the debt of state investment vehicle Dubai World, which was at the centre of the emirate’s 2009 debt crisis.” In short, the government is leveraging DP World’s balance sheet to repay Dubai World’s debts.

Debt Burden

Meanwhile, it has rushed in to bail out state-owned Emirates airline with an undisclosed amount of cash. In a  that underlines the tight links between the ruling family and the crown jewel of its business empire, Crown Prince Hamdan bin Mohammed, in announcing the bailout, wrote that “Today, we renew our commitment to support a success story that started in the mid-1980s to reach its goal of sitting on the throne of global aviation.” The airline is also  in loans on the international market, it has been reported, to supplement the government’s equity injection.

It should be noted that Dubai, together with the federal United Arab Emirates government, has taken  to assist both businesses and individuals impacted by the coronavirus. Among them are a financial support package that had, by April 5, reached $70 billion; financial incentive packages for small and medium enterprises; the easing of visa renewal processes for expat workers; a reduction in utility bills; and a suspension of evictions.

However,  in assessing the UAE’s ability to manage the economic consequences of the pandemic that “the negative growth and fiscal implications are most acute in Dubai, while it faces the greater risk of its government-related entities requiring financial support as a result of the deterioration in economic conditions.”

With a debt burden now standing at , Dubai faces a nervous time while wondering how long the impact and the effects of the pandemic on the economy will last. As with the crash of 2009, the emirate has a backstop: its sister city state of Abu Dhabi. But support will come with a price, and the crown prince and de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, will surely use any request for financial help to further consolidate his already formidable power base within the UAE.

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On March 18, with less than 30 cases reported, the country’s president Kais Saied announced a firm lockdown and a between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. By that point, Tunisia had closed its borders and put in place restrictions on public gatherings. By comparison, it took the government of Boris Johnson until March 23, with more than 6,000 reported cases and after weeks of dithering, to order a lockdown.

All Possible Means

The Tunisian response, with the tough lockdown in place for six weeks, has achieved impressive results. Available show a steady daily decline of reported cases from a high of 60 on March 24 to just 2 on June 2 and no new cases at the time of writing. To date, the total number of confirmed cases is just over 1,000 with 49 deaths reported. That’s in a country with a population of 11.8 million people. Again, to put those figures into perspective, the UK, with a population roughly six times that of Tunisia, has 275,000 reported cases and nearly 40,000 deaths.

Given the state of the Tunisian economy, with the tourism industry just barely recovering from the substantial damage inflicted on it by  and now reeling under the impact of the coronavirus, it is a remarkable achievement. Tunisia plans to reopen its land, sea, and air borders at the end of June.

According to the defense and security website War on The Rocks, one of the keys to the success was the quick  of the armed forces into the battle against the coronavirus. On March 19, the minister of national defense put the military at the disposal of the government by declaring its commitment “to harness all possible human and material means as required to limit the spread of this virus and to preserve the lives and security of citizens.”&�Բ�����;In the days and weeks that followed, the military assisted in security measures at quarantine sites, the setting up and running of field hospitals and mobile testing units, screening facilities on the border with Libya, and in the remote and lightly populated south of the country, it ran mobile health “caravans” that provided not only doctors and nurses but brought food supplies.

The defense ministry provided a constant stream of announcements reinforcing the message that the military was acting in concert with the government and health authorities. This, from mid-April, regarding , gives a sense of the approach the ministry has taken: “In support of the national effort to combat the corona pandemic, and in coordination with the National Observatory of New and Emerging Diseases and the Pasteur Institute in Tunis, this morning, Wednesday, April 15, 2020, a military health team went to Tataouine Governorate to focus the equipment of the mobile bacterial laboratory … The mobile laboratory will contribute to (increase) the number of tests directed by civil parties to investigate suspected cases of corona in the southeast.” Deploying the military so effectively in the battle to successfully combat the pandemic is a confirmation that the democracy established in 2011, always frail and beset with threats both internal and external, is growing more robust.

But huge challenges remain. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates the economy will  by more than 4% next year, with unemployment swelling to 25%. With countries like the UK still struggling to come to grips with the pandemic, Britons, for whom Tunisia has been a destination of choice, are far less likely to go abroad, as are most other Europeans. The tourism sector, when it is functioning, generates roughly 8% of the country’s GDP and employs 400,000. Until the pandemic is defeated and people feel confident about traveling, it will continue to languish.

Treacherous Politics

What was particularly harsh was that the sector, after years of struggle to get beyond the legacy of the 2015 terrorist attacks, had  last year, with a record 9.3 million visitors. Tourism revenues were worth $2 billion. Even more worthy of note is that the country’s foreign currency reserves hit a five-year high, standing at the end of 2019 at $6.96 billion. Much of that gain is down to the recovery in the tourism sector. Now the industry has slipped back into the doldrums, causing significant economic harm.

Just as well then that on June 3, the Arab Monetary Fund  it was loaning Tunisia $59 million. The fund, based in Abu Dhabi, also indicated it was considering a further loan to assist in reforms in the banking and finance sectors. While not a significant amount when compared to the $745 million  on April 10, it is important if only because it signals that the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed has, for the time being, at least dropped his efforts to undermine the only democracy to emerge from the Arab Spring.

What has brought about this  by the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates has much to do with what is going on in neighboring Libya, where the UAE-backed warlord Khalifa Haftar is losing to the Tripoli based Government of National Accord backed by bin Zayed’s rival, Turkey.

The challenge for the Tunisians will be to play a clever hand and avoid the proxy wars and the treacherous politics at work in the neighborhood. If their handling of the COVID-19 crisis is the measure to go by, then they should come through with their democracy not only intact but strengthened in the time of coronavirus — an accomplishment indeed when one considers what is happening otherwise in, for example, the world’s oldest and most established democracies.

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First to Libya. On April 4, 2019, the UAE-backed warlord Khalifa Haftar launched an offensive with his self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) aimed at seizing the capital Tripoli from the internationally recognized Government of National Accord (GNA), led by Fayez al-Sarraj. That was just 10 days before the two sides were due to meet in United Nations-sponsored talks organized by Ghassan Salamé, the UN special representative. Haftar may well have been buoyed by a  with US President Donald Trump, but his chief backer supplying the air support for his ground troops was — and remains, as the war drags on one year later — the UAE.

The GNA, backed by Turkey, has until recently had limited success other than holding a defensive line against Haftar’s troops, a mix of mercenaries (of which the most effective ones are Russian), militias and remnants of the forces from the overthrown regime of Muammar Gaddafi.

Marked Change

But now, with significant military support from Turkey, the GNA is clearly on the offensive, a marked change from nearly a year of hunkering down in defensive positions around the capital. Haftar’s forces have suffered  from mid-April on, losing control of seven towns northwest of Tripoli. Among them are three strategic coastal cities — Sabratha, Surman and al-Ajaylat — located between Tripoli and the Tunisian border. Haftar’s response was to launch multiple rocket attacks on the capital, with residents reporting explosion after explosion amidst an atmosphere of fear and panic.

With the United States using its UN Security Council  the Algerian Ramtane Lamamra, Salamé’s successor as envoy, the peace process, at least for now, is effectively dead. Despite the fact that 14 of the 15 UNSC members quickly voted for the experienced and respected Lamamra, the Americans, responding to pressure from the UAE and Egypt — Haftar’s other key regional backer — nixed the appointment.

Business Is Brisk in MENA Arms Trade

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And so to Yemen. On April 23, the Saudi-led coalition announced a of the two-week unilateral ceasefire declared earlier in April, despite the fact that the Houthis, the Saudis say, have consistently violated the ceasefire. The Houthis counter with the claim that it is the coalition that is in violation. (It does seem, however, that the Houthis are the ones most responsible for violations.)

How curious, then, that just two days later the secessionist Southern Transitional Council (STC), heavily backed by the UAE,  of “self-administration” for the south’s governorates, including the strategic island of Socotra. The announcement was made by the STC in Abu Dhabi, where the leadership is based. That appears to have caught the Saudis and Prince Khalid bin Salman off guard.

Overplayed Hand

The younger brother of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has been assigned the daunting task of extricating the kingdom from a war that MBS had expected to win in a few weeks back in March 2015. Now, more than five years on, Saudi Arabia is desperate to find a way out of a reckless venture that has cost it hundreds of billions of dollars and huge global reputational damage. The reputational damage is thanks largely to an indiscriminate bombing campaign that has destroyed much of Yemen’s infrastructure, killed and wounded tens of thousands of civilians and helped to put most of the country’s 29 million people at risk of starvation or death from preventable diseases such as cholera.

It is ironic that the Emiratis, who went into the war with the Saudis and prosecuted it in the south, have since last summer withdrawn their ground forces while escaping with little reputational damage for their own . For Khalid bin Salman and the carefully built , which was supposed to bring various elements from the south together with the internationally recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, the irony is a bitter one — and even more so for his brother, the crown prince.

In a tweet on April 27, Khalid described the decision as “surprising” and called, rather forlornly one suspects, for “returning to implement the Riyadh Agreement and its support for the legitimate (Hadi) government.”

It may be that in Yemen, both MBZ and the STC have rather overplayed their hand, with the majority of the southern governorates rejecting the declaration almost as soon as it was released. But in the game to create a pliable client state in the south, with the port of Aden as its capital — in effect a return to the pre-1990 arrangement but with the crucial distinction that it will be the UAE pulling the strings — MBZ is far ahead of MBS, who is mired in an unwinnable war in the north that the STC declaration has made all the more entangled and difficult for the Saudis to escape from.

And in Libya, though Haftar is on the back foot, there is no indication that MBZ is about to cut him loose. Rather the opposite, as the ECFR’s Tarek Megerisi noted in an , bin Zayed’s “support for Haftar does not wane. In fact, it gets stronger and stronger.” Megerisi puts that down to three factors. First, the Emiratis have committed too much to Haftar to back out now. Second, they are prepared to take a few lumps because they believe that ultimately, their man will prevail. And, finally, with the way Haftar works, there are no obvious replacements.

Underlining the point that the UAE has the warlord’s back was Haftar’s April 27 announcement that he was  a “popular mandate” and announcing “that the general command is answering the will of the people, despite the heavy burden and the many obligations and the size of the responsibility” and despite, apparently, his heavy battlefield losses. It was a statement that was most unlikely to have been made without the knowledge and approval of bin Zayed. It bears an uncanny resemblance to the STC’s April 25 declaration of “self-administration.”

As he plays out his strategies, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi may well believe that keeping Yemen and Libya in a state of ongoing war suits both a broader geopolitical agenda and his cleverly understated, but nonetheless powerful, ambition to turn the UAE — a collection of small Gulf emirates — into a regional powerhouse with himself emerging as de facto leader of the Arab world.

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Let us briefly recall in broad brushstroke the  of Vision 2030 when it was released on April 25, 2016. It called for a radical restructuring of the Saudi economy and with it a social and cultural revolution — economic diversification with the banner headline of increasing the share of non-oil GDP from 16% to 50%; the empowerment of women into the private-sector workforce together with a call to increase the sector’s GDP contribution to 65%; the listing of private and government-owned companies, including Aramco, on the Saudi stock market, Tadawul; commitments to realize jobs for young Saudis through the creation of entertainment, hospitality and non-religious tourism industries; the provision of affordable housing for those same young Saudis struggling to get on the property ladder; and the ramping up of religious tourism.

Just one statistic should suffice to illustrate the scope of that particular ambition: By 2020, the plan was for the number of Muslims performing the umrah to nearly double to 15 million a year, and then to double again to 30 million by 2030. But the umrah this year has been indefinitely postponed, and COVID-19 in Mecca — where authorities are racing to try and  — could well force the  of the hajj. No one, of course, could have anticipated a coronavirus pandemic. But it has been clear for two months or more that in a slowing global economy, the virus would impact in a significant way on the oil market.

The Glut of Oil

The Saudi response was to launch a price war with Russia in early March that was only partially resolved on 12 April with the  of US President Donald Trump. All the while the glut of oil has grown and grown — hence the ongoing collapse of prices. While lockdowns are being eased in some countries, the time when the world was consuming 100 million barrels a day are gone for now, with some analysts suggesting those days may be gone forever. Prior to COVID-19, most assumptions were that peak demand — the point at which the world’s appetite for oil begins its permanent decline — would hit around 2030. That scenario dovetailed rather nicely with Vision 2030. What if, however, peak demand has ?

If such is the case, the breathing space that Mohammed bin Salman could reasonably have expected in order to achieve his revolution has evaporated literally overnight. A crown prince and a kingdom that had sought to move in double quick time to liberate itself from oil dependency through economic diversification now has no time whatsoever.

What then for those sectors that he has with great determination opened, sectors which for decades had been denied by religious authorities? The non-religious tourism industry that launched with great fanfare celebrating, for example, the extraordinary natural beauty and ancient sites of , has been halted in its tracks. The opening of entertainment venues to men and women similarly stilled. And religious tourism, which has generated huge amounts of revenue for the government, has been forced to the sidelines by the coronavirus.

The millions of jobs that Vision 2030 promised for young Saudis in the private sector have for now at least simply gone away, and finding them has suddenly become an overwhelmingly difficult task. As David Roberts, a Gulf specialist at King’s College London, noted in a Chatham House webinar, “Saudi Arabia’s non-oil economy has gone into reverse for the first time in three decades.” Speaking at the same webinar, Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, an associate fellow with Chatham House’s MENA program, argued that the three sectors most in need of foreign investment — hospitality, (non-religious) tourism and entertainment — are the ones that will be hit hardest and, therefore, least likely in the near term to generate such investment.

The European Council on Foreign Relations’ Cinzia Bianco, in a , notes that though Saudi Arabia may have won the oil price battle with Russia, it may well be on the road to losing the war. She adds: “Riyadh announced in March that it would  government expenditure by $13.2 billion, or nearly 5 percent of its budget for 2020. And it has prepared  to scale back expenditure by an additional 20 percent.”

Where to Cut?

With oil falling to $20 a barrel and no sign that it will get much better — indeed suggestions are that it could well slide even lower to as little as  — those emergency plans are very likely to come into play. That means deep spending cuts. The question is where will Mohammed bin Salman, having already saddled the kingdom with a war in Yemen that has consumed hundreds of billions of dollars, make those cuts?

The obvious choice would be to mothball the AI city of Neom, the Red Sea luxury tourism project, the entertainment city of Qiddiya — that is, all the giga-projects that the crown prince is so enamored of. But to do so would be a huge loss of face. Cuts could come in health and education, but the latter needs a huge boost to upgrade standards in order to meet the demands of Vision 2030. And cutting health spending while the kingdom is in the throes of the coronavirus crisis is unthinkable. Defense spending could be slashed. Unlikely, however, given that the Saudis see Iran as an existential threat, that must be matched or overmatched with the latest in high-tech military equipment.

The crown prince could always go back to the princes of the ruling house and to the big merchant families and squeeze them once more, as he did with the  of November 2017. The risk here is that with such a move his enemies only multiply.

In order to avoid the dreaded L — a flatline where the economy does not over time trend upward — Mohammed bin Salman will need to do more than use the country’s sovereign wealth fund to snap up bargain-basement deals as the world economy crashes. His problem is that with the collapse of oil and the economic derailment engendered by COVID-19, the cards he’s holding are beginning to look weak indeed.

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Assad’s warplanes, which had repeatedly struck non-military targets in Idlib, disappeared from the skies, leaving a civilian population — many of them already internally displaced — with a very thin strand of hope that they might somehow survive. However, Erdogan could take little solace from the deal other than that the threat of refugees attempting to cross into Turkey was checked. Putin, on the other hand, had once again shown a deft hand, protecting Russia’s influence while displaying his mastery of the Turkish leader.

Russia Makes Its Move

At the Moscow meeting, carefully placed statuary celebrated Russian triumphs over the Ottomans and underscored Putin’s intention to make it abundantly clear to Erdogan and his entourage who was in the driver’s seat. Writing on Al-Monitor, columnist  drily observed: “For anyone familiar with Putin’s penchant for symbolism in messaging his politics, the choreography of the Kremlin reception with Erdogan looked very diligently planned to humiliate and impose on him a Syria deal on Russia’s terms.”

Recent moves by the Russians indicate that the Kremlin has every intention of strengthening its military hold in Syria. The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW), in its , details two moves.

The first involved the use of Qamishli Airport in the northeast province of Hasakah as a base for fixed-wing aircraft, including the SU-25 fighter. The second move was the passage of a ship from the Russian navy’s Black Sea Fleet en route to the port of Tartus, reportedly carrying unspecified weapons and military equipment to reinforce Syrian regime troops. A second ship, , was carrying military ambulances, presumably as part of an effort to combat the novel coronavirus known as COVID-19, though the Russians denied they had any cases among their soldiers stationed in Syria.

For its part, the Israelis have continued a policy of hitting what they believe are Hezbollah targets inside Syria. The most , one that Israel has yet to publicly announce, was a raid on al-Shayrat airbase on March 31, near the central city of Homs. The base is said to be used by the Iranians to bring weapons into the country. If the reports are correct, it would be the second time that al-Shayrat has been hit in less than a month. Clearly, the strategy is to keep Hezbollah on edge and to curtail its military capacity to launch missiles into Israel while avoiding any actions on the Syrian front that would cause friction with Russia. (In September 2018 a Russian  was accidentally shot down after Israeli fighters forced the plane into the path of a Syrian missile.)

Speaking to the UAE

One other player keeping a close eye on Syria is the Abu Dhabi’s crown prince and de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates, Mohammed bin Zayed. MBZ, as he is known, had re-established diplomatic relations with Syria in 2018. In December of last year, the Emirati charge d’affaires in Damascus, Abdul-Hakim Naimi, without a doubt instructed to do so by MBZ, went out of his way to  on President Assad, speaking of “his wise leadership” and “the solid, distinct and strong relations” between their two countries.

On March 27, : “I discussed with Syrian President Bashar [al-Assad] updates on COVID-19. I assured him of the support of the UAE and its willingness to help the Syrian people. Humanitarian solidarity during trying times supersedes all matters, and Syria and her people will not stand alone.”

On March 30, the Syrian regime announced the . But there are deep concerns that the Assad government has both underestimated and underreported the true extent of the situation. A health service battered by nine years of civil war, hugely overcrowded prisons filled with oppositionists, and millions of internally displaced people are all cited as setting the country into the path of a huge and emerging coronavirus crisis. So, offers of support from the UAE are timely, even if tinged with political opportunism.

Missing in action are the Americans. Ever since President Donald Trump’s  in October 2019 of the withdrawal of US forces from Syria — subsequently modified after it was made clear to him the extent of damage such a step would entail — the US has had little to say and nothing of substance to offer. This was as good an indication as any that when it comes to Syria, it is Vladimir Putin who is playing the war like a chess match and making all the right moves.

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When contrasted with the confused and uncertain responses of the United Kingdom and the United States, the handling of the coronavirus crisis by the Saudi authorities has been exemplary. The kingdom took the first step on February 27 when it  for overseas umrah pilgrims. On March 2, the kingdom reported its first case, moving quickly as the numbers inexorably rose. Saudi Arabia closed schools and universities on March 9; on March 15, all international flights, both incoming and outgoing, were suspended, initially for a two-week period (that will no doubt be extended.)

The following day operations in many government agencies were suspended. Markets, shopping malls and restaurants were closed, with the latter still allowed to provide takeaway service. Pharmacies and grocery stores remain open, while people have been warned to isolate at home. On March 23, when the numbers  sharply to 562, the government announced a 21-day, 6 p.m. to 7 a.m. , enforceable with fines and jail time.

Well Rehearsed

In part the Saudi response is due to the fact that the kingdom is already well rehearsed in dealing with dangerous viruses, most recently (and one that  the country) MERS- CoV, otherwise known as Middle East respiratory syndrome. It helps too that the kingdom is an authoritarian regime, run very tightly by Mohammed bin Salman. Images of empty streets in the capital Riyadh and a deserted Corniche in Jeddah attest to the simple truth that, unlike the UK, when the government so orders, the people have no choice but to obey. Even so, on the COVID-19 front, Mohammed bin Salman has acquitted himself well.

Yemen is another matter altogether. When MBS launched the war against the Houthi rebels on March 25, 2015, he was convinced he would achieve a quick win in a matter of a few weeks. The war grinds on, and the crown prince must share responsibility for the humanitarian disaster that has engulfed the people of Yemen. There is no doubt that he is seeking to find a way out of the quagmire which, in addition to the destruction inflicted upon the Arab world’s poorest country, is costing the Saudis several billion dollars a month to wage.

Recent efforts to end the war have floundered in large part because the Houthis show no inclination to stop. They continue to take territory, most recently the , and to profit mightily from a black market war economy that includes the seizure and selling on of humanitarian food and medical aid. It doesn’t help that the United Arab Emirates has pursued a distinct agenda, supporting the Southern Transitional Council (STC) separatist movement, while the Saudis are left trying to shore up the internationally recognized, but widely discredited, government (IRG) of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi.

Hadi’s forces and the STC came to blows after the UAE announced its withdrawal from southern Yemen in August of last year. A hastily patched together deal, the , signed in November and intended to end the IRG-STC fighting, has been honored only in the breach. Khalid bin Salman, the younger brother of MBS, was drafted in to try and find a way to extricate the Saudis from Yemen, but his efforts have achieved no noticeable results. The war continues with no end in sight and no end to the misery of the Yemeni people.

Russian Goad

Mohammed bin Salman’s third war — over oil prices with Russia — is one that he could have chosen to avoid, but, goaded by the Russians, MBS leaped into battle. Heading into the OPEC+ meeting in Vienna on March 5, the Saudis, nervously watching the price of oil slip as the coronavirus took its toll, were anxious that a production cut be enforced to protect their market share and halt the slide. When the next day the Russian energy minister, Alexander Novak, left the meeting after  was reached, he threw out a line that angered the Saudis. “From April 1,” the minister said, “we are starting to work without minding the quotas or reductions which were in place earlier.” As far as Russia was concerned, any member could pump what they liked.

With apparently little thought for the consequences, MBS reacted to the Russian goad. The Saudis announced that from April 1 they would raise production by more than 2 million barrels a day, to 12 million, and slash prices by up to $10 a barrel. With the  on the world market increasing daily thanks to the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the price of oil crashed. At the time of writing it was selling at around $25 a barrel. Just one month ago it was trading at $65. The Russians have gone on record stating they are happy with oil at $30. The Saudis need $80 a barrel. Some energy analysts are suggesting the price could go as low as $10 a barrel.

Meanwhile,  have tumbled below their opening value as the world’s largest oil company cuts its . The Saudi government, facing a massive deficit, is  too, just at the time when MBS urgently needs funds to get Vision 2030, already experiencing setbacks, back on track. The coronavirus has already taken a huge chunk out of the money the country garners from , with umrah canceled and the hajj now threatened. The ongoing war in Yemen continues to drain the budget.

Three wars that are testing MBS to the limit. It may be that in the oil price war, the Russians blink first, and Khalid bin Salman may find a road to peace in Yemen, though the odds of either happening are high. Meanwhile, COVID-19 rampages on wrecking economies and threatening a world recession. Ironically, though MBS is making all the right moves to win the coronavirus battle in Saudi Arabia, the long-lingering effects of the virus on the global economy may cause him to lose the only war he has, thus far, effectively prosecuted.

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Data show that as conflict has grown in the Middle East so too has the flow of weapons to the region. SIPRI examines weapons exports and imports in four-year spans. Comparing the previous four-year period (2010-14) to the latest (2015-19) yields some astonishing figures. Overall arms imports to the Middle East jumped by 61%; the Saudis increased imports by 130%, Egypt by 212% and Qatar by an eye-watering 631%. The world’s largest importer of weapons is Saudi Arabia, accounting for 12% of global arms imports between 2015 and 2019. Of the top 10 importers, six are MENA countries. Joining the Saudis are Egypt, the UAE, Qatar, Iraq and Algeria.

Geopolitics and Strategy

Clearly there are geopolitical and strategic reasons for the increases. The Saudis are engaged in a war in Yemen that has dragged on for five years, and they are deeply worried about the sort of attacks from Iran or from Iranian surrogates that crippled Saudi Aramco facilities in September of last year. They remain under threat from Houthi rocket attacks launched from inside Yemen, and their southern border is under constant menace from Houthi incursions.

SIPRI notes that 73% of the kingdom’s arms imports come from the US, while the UK accounts for 13%. It adds that “despite the wide-ranging concerns in the USA and the United Kingdom about Saudi Arabia’s military intervention in Yemen, both the USA and the UK continue to export arms.”

Egypt, now in third place in the weapons import table, is fighting a jihadist insurrection in North Sinai and is an active participant in arming the Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar in his bid to topple the internationally recognized government of Fayez al-Sarraj. Egypt has been busy importing from a number of countries including Russia, France, Germany and Italy (from whom it is purchasing frigates), and from the world’s largest weapons exporter, the United States. In a nearly perfect closed circle, virtually all of the $1.3 billion the Americans give annually in aid to Egypt is  military equipment, spare parts, training and maintenance from US weapons firms.

However, Russia, the second-largest exporter, has raised its game in Egypt. Recent sales include a fleet of MiG-29s and S-300s, and in the offing is a $2-billion purchase of Su-35 fighter jets. This last deal has , but it is evidence of how effective Russian President Vladimir Putin has been in the . As Pieter Wezeman, a senior researcher in the SIPRI Arms and Military Expenditure Programme, told Arab Digest, “The Russians have been very successful in bringing Egypt back as (arms) recipients. There is now a very significant flow.”

The last time the Russians exported weapons in such volumes to Egypt was in the 1970s. Wezeman called it “a surprising element” in the SIPRI report. Noting the economic difficulties the country is in, he asked, “Why do they buy and where is the money coming from?”

Lavish Spending

Qatar placed 10^th in the arms imports table. On consideration, it is not, perhaps, too surprising that the world’s wealthiest per capita country should spend so lavishly on weapons. Since 2017, the Qataris have been at loggerheads with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (joined by Bahrain and Egypt); together the four have enforced a land, air and sea blockade whilst rupturing diplomatic links.

In the early days of the blockade, there was real anxiety that the Saudis, with whom the Qataris share their only land boundary, would invade in force. But that anxiety has long since waned, especially as the United States has repeatedly made it clear that Qatar is a friend and not, as the blockading countries claim, a supporter of terrorism. And when one considers that the indigenous population of the country is approximately 275,000, the purchase of 12 Rafale jets from France, 26 F-15s from America and 24 Typhoons from the UK, together with 7 Italian warships, at a total cost of nearly $40 billion, is quite extraordinary.

The UAE, though it saw a percentage drop in imports, remains a very important player. As the SIPRI report notes, “The United Arab Emirates has been militarily involved in Libya as well as Yemen over the past five years and was the eighth largest arms importer in the world in 2015-2019.” The Emiratis are major suppliers of arms to Haftar. This includes light armored vehicles, small arms and weaponized drones in contravention of UN Security Council Resolution 1970. The Emiratis are not the only ones to turn a blind eye to the arms embargo; so too have the Turks, the Jordanians, the French and the Egyptians, but the UAE is arguably the most .

The biggest drivers behind increased arms sales in the region are Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Pieter Wezeman says that the two countries have taken what he calls an “assertive and aggressive approach in order to increase their influence by buying and using weapons.” Wezeman says that though he is careful with predictions “looking at the deals signed, the planned deals and the threat perceptions, it is likely that the market for Middle East arms sales will continue to remain large.”

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The leading economies of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates both showed weaknesses. In the case of the UAE, the Purchasing Managers Index (PMI), a measure of the prevailing direction of economic trends in the manufacturing and service sectors, fell below the 50 mark for the first time, an indication of contraction in those sectors. That, combined with a 6% year-on-year drop in real estate prices led by a weak  sector and private sector credit growth that slowed to its lowest point in three years, is a marker of concern.

Of growing concern, too, for the Emiratis is Expo 2020. The exhibition is slated to launch in October of this year and run through to April 2021. Cancellation of the event, which is now a distinct possibility, would have a big negative impact on Dubai, where it was hoped it would help float an already troubled economy. 

In the Doldrums

Regarding the Saudi economy, Capital Economics’ Jason Tuvey notes that “the downturn deepened in Q4 of last year and, while the worst has probably now passed, the downside risks to the outlook are mounting.” He acknowledged that though the worst was probably now over, growth in 2020 will be subdued, saying that “we have pencilled in GDP growth of 1.3% this year. Our forecast is well below the consensus and the risks are increasingly skewed to the downside.” Chief among those is the price of oil which, as a result of the failure last week from OPEC+ to secure a production limit and the Saudi decision to launch a price war with Russia, has now fallen to below $40.

The religious tourist market in Saudi Arabia has been undercut, with the annual Umrah pilgrimage  — a blow for the time being to the country’s audacious plans to hike  all types of tourism as part of its Vision 2030 project. Included in the plan is the goal of turning the kingdom into one of the top five tourist destinations in the world, creating 1 million new jobs in the process. Along the way, tourism is supposed to generate 10% of the Saudi GDP. Those were always lofty aims, unlikely to be fully realized. COVID-19, though its effects may not be long-lasting, has put a dent into those plans just as the Saudis were poised for take-off.

Qatar, which had previously ridden out the economic impact of the feud with its Gulf neighbors, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, is now “in the doldrums.” As Capital Economics puts it, “activity in the non-hydrocarbon sector remains weak. The recent credit boom has passed its peak. Activity in the real estate sector is sluggish. The number of properties sold in December fell by 17% y/y and real estate prices declined by more than 8% y/y — prices are over 25% below their 2015 peak. And the Markit PMI fell back from 49.4 in December to 48.7 last month. On a positive note, tourist arrivals jumped in December close to levels last seen before the blockade was imposed in mid-2017.”&�Բ�����;But, as elsewhere in the Gulf, tourist numbers will decline as the epidemic continues to spread. And should the coronavirus linger, even the 2022 FIFA World Cup could be in jeopardy.

Terrific Pummeling

Both Oman and Bahrain, the weakest of the Gulf Cooperation Council economies, continue to feel the hurt from low oil prices. Bahrain’s ongoing political impasse and the drain on the economy of a heavy security commitment aimed at keeping its majority Shia Muslim population cowed has not helped. Even Kuwait, which ended a  with Saudi Arabia over a shared oil field, has suffered from weak investment in the private sector.

In the short term, Middle East equity markets have taken a terrific pummeling from the global impact of COVID-19. According to  the markets took a combined $77-billion hit in the week beginning February 24 as oil prices slumped to their worst performance since 2008. The Saudis were the biggest losers, dropping $41.7 billion, while shares of Saudi Aramco dropped to their lowest level since the initial public offering in December last year.

But will the additional burden of the coronavirus have a long-lasting impact on the already ailing Gulf economies? That’s the $64-billion question. Pessimists suggest that as the virus wends its way through the world, the Gulf states will be hit hard, particularly as several of them, the most powerful, are built on hydrocarbons. There are others, however, who argue that the voice of pessimism is too strong. They point to the fact that China now appears to have contained COVID-19 and that the number of new cases is rapidly falling.

One such optimist is Oilprice.com’s Josh Owens. He notes that China, having successfully , has already started to reboot its economy. Owens writes: “China is getting back to work. And you can be sure that the Chinese government will be doing everything in its power to stimulate growth.” If that is the case, it should be good news for the Gulf’s hydrocarbon producers and their stalling economies. The problem is that no one either in the Gulf or anywhere else knows where the coronavirus is headed nor how big the impact will be. But with reports of cases growing across the region, the economic prognosis, in the short to medium term, is not looking particularly healthy.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post As Coronavirus Spreads, the Gulf’s Economic Prognosis Is Not Healthy appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The minister was referring to how the private sector has veered away from the affordable housing market, preferring to build for the upper middle classes and rich elites. He was also obliquely referencing the no-interest house purchase loans the kingdom used to dole out but has striven to eschew since embarking on Vision 2030, the grand reform of the Saudi economy launched by Mohammed bin Salman in 2016. Housing was one of Vision 2030’s 13 so-called  Among its goals are “increasing the supply of houses at reasonable prices within a fast time frame.” Another is “securing housing for the underprivileged segment of society.”

Some Progress

More than three years on, some progress has been made. The housing ministry says that it has exceeded its 2019 targets of providing the kingdom’s citizens with home ownership support through its . Among the statistics cited for the Sakani initiative was the  that “300,041 families (benefited) in all regions of the kingdom.”

Under the auspices of the Real Estate Development Fund (REDF), reforms were launched in 2018 designed to stimulate the mortgage market. They include dropping the down payment from 10% to 5% and increasing the banks’ maximum loan-to-value ratio for mortgages of first-time homebuyers from 85% to 90%. The REDF also initiated a  of subsidized support for those low to middle-income wage earners already holding mortgages.

Nonetheless, as ordinary Saudis see the emphasis the crown prince has put on building NEOM, his $500-billion AI-powered city of the future, Qiddiya, an entertainment city north of Riyadh, and the Red Sea Resort designed for the ultra wealthy, they can be forgiven for feeling that even with the reforms, affordable housing remains a promise yet to be fulfilled by the government.

It is worth noting that at a recent , the housing minister was billed as “a Founding Member, and active Director of the Board, of numerous Giga-Projects in the Kingdom; including NEOM, the World’s most ambitious project and Qiddiya Investment Company, Saudi’s pre-eminent entertainment, sports and cultural destination.”

Although the Housing Vision Realization Program calls for the Saudi private sector and the local home construction industry to build affordable homes, the government has chosen to do business with an American firm Katerra, based in Silicon Valley. In October 2018, it signed a massive but non-binding $40-billion deal that would see Katerra provide hundreds of thousands of pre-fabricated affordable units to the kingdom. As part of that larger deal,  earlier this month that it has entered into a $650-million contract to build 8,000 homes across the kingdom.

Curious Connections

It may seem a trifle curious that after committing to use the private sector in Saudi Arabia to build affordable housing, a significant contract was subsequently signed with an American company. But Katerra is backed by Softbank, and Softbank — via its founder Masayoshi Son — is deeply connected to Mohammed bin Salman. In September 2016, after a short meeting with Son, MBS, as he is known, agreed to  from the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund into the Japanese financier’s $100-billion Vision Fund.

A year later, Son was asked by Bloomberg if he got the money from MBS in one hour. To which the , “No, that’s not true. I got $45 billion in 45 minutes, that’s $1 billion per minute.”

Katerra is the sort of endeavor Son likes to back with massive infusions of cash — in this case $1 billion — to help start-up companies grow very fast using technology as the ramp to drive up their valuation and secure quick returns. The problem is that these companies can grow too fast, with outsized promises to match the outsized egos of their founders. So it has proved with Katerra.

As a New York real estate news website  (TRD) notes, “the Silicon Valley company’s rise follows a similar narrative to that of other SoftBank-backed startups, including WeWork, Compass and Uber: break down the walls of an industry, grow at all costs and figure out the metrics later.” As for the link between Son, Katerra and the Saudis, Softbank told TRD that it helps its “portfolio companies navigate entrance to new and promising markets, such as Katerra’s work for Saudi Arabia.”

Saudi Unemployment Statistics Spell a Troubled Vision 2030

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The Real Deal  a string of abandoned projects, an abruptly closed factory and hundreds of laid off workers in the United States, as well as corporate shenanigans, all of which raise serious questions about how Katerra is run. Yet this is the company charged with being a leading player in solving Saudi Arabia’s affordable housing crisis. Katerra has made big promises to the kingdom, among them that it will build 10 to 15 houses a day by the third quarter of 2020. That seems an extravagant claim, given the company’s track record in America.

Securing affordable housing for young Saudis will go a long way to securing Mohammed bin Salman’s position. If he delivers on that front, questions about the tight links between Katerra, Son and the Public Investment Fund the crown prince controls will probably go away. But if Katerra flops, those links may come back to trouble MBS.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Why Is a US Company Helping Saudi Arabia Solve Its Housing Crisis? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Britain has had a significant stake in efforts to reform both the police and the judiciary in the wake of a commissioned by Bahrain in 2011. The Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) was established to examine the way in which the government of King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa put down a popular protest in February and March 2011. The commission was headed by the distinguished human rights expert Cherif Bassiouni. His investigation proved, in forensic detail, that the police and the security forces had used harsh and disproportionate force, up to and including prisoners beaten to death in detention, to crush what had been a largely peaceful protest movement. 

Torture Allegations

The BICI report made numerous recommendations, all of which were accepted by King Hamad. Among them was the establishment of the position of ombudsman. With the support and guidance of the UK, the ombudsman’s office — the first of its kind in the Middle East — opened in 2013 under the auspices of the kingdom’s Ministry of Interior.

In May 2016 the office undertook an investigation into allegations, repeatedly raised in court and by family members, that Ramadan and Moosa had been subjected to torture. It closed the investigation in October 2016, refusing to disclose any findings. Presumably under pressure from the UK, the ombudsman subsequently reopened the investigation. In its , the office acknowledged that in the case of Mohammed Ramadan there was evidence of torture and recommended that the death sentences for both men be “reconsidered.”

On October 22, 2018, the court of cassation  the verdicts and ordered a case review. That decision was based on evidence that included medical reports by a doctor from the public prosecution office documenting torture allegations. That evidence had not been considered by the court in the original trial. The case was referred back to the high criminal appeals court. It was this court that on January 8 reconfirmed the death penalties, a decision that ignores credible evidence, supported by the government’s own investigation, that the original convictions were based chiefly on confessions secured under torture.

In addition to moral and ethical considerations, the British government has spent more than  on efforts designed to reform the security and justice systems in Bahrain. The ombudsman’s office is a significant part of that effort. The money has come from three little-known funds: the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund, the Global Britain Fund and the Integrated Activity Fund.  that the funds, which have received little parliamentary scrutiny, serve as expensive window dressing that enables and allows for the continuation of a culture of impunity and abuse.

Dereliction of Duty

Giving weight to that position is a  released in August 2016, which noted that only a few months after Mohammed Ramadan’s arrest in 2014 his wife had filed a complaint with the ombudsman that her husband had been mistreated and denied medication. Subsequently a more detailed complaint alleging torture was filed in July of that year. Neither was investigated by the ombudsman.

As the report states: “Concern is expressed at the absence or at least serious delay of a thorough, independent and impartial investigation or prosecution into the allegations of torture and ill-treatment of Mr. Mohammed Ramadan and the continued upholding of his conviction and imposed death sentence … with the reliance on false confessions extracted under torture as a basis for the verdict.”

In its 2018 report, the ombudsman’s office, despite calling for “reconsidering” the verdicts, shows no intent to properly investigate the torture allegations. In light of the fact that these two men are facing execution by a firing squad, this seems a particularly egregious dereliction of duty.

After all, the organization carries on its website a mission statement committing to the “protection of (an) individual’s rights, his personal freedoms and his right to physical safety against any maltreatment by NSA (National Security Agency) staff, in accordance with the constitution of the Kingdom of Bahrain and its valid laws, and in the light of standards and controls laid down in the international conventions endorsed by the Kingdom of Bahrain.”

In light of this latest court decision, various human rights organisations,  among them, are calling for the government of Bahrain to quash the convictions. Now may be the time for the UK government, in private if not publicly, to add its voice to that call.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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On January 5, Tehran announced that it was “the last key component of its operational limitations in the JCPOA, which is the limit on the number of centrifuges.” Many commentators initially took that as a statement that Iran was walking away from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), designed to prevent the Iranians from developing nuclear weapons. “It’s finished. If there’s no limitation on production, then there is no deal,” was how , president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, put it.

Others, however, noted the careful wording of the statement which includes this sentence: “Iran’s cooperation with the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) will continue as before.” As Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions took its toll, Iran began a step-by-step withdrawal from the JCPOA. This was the fifth and final step. But by offering to continue cooperation with the IAEA, Iran has given itself — and the Europeans who want to find a way to salvage the JCPOA — a little bit of useful wriggle room.

How Will Iran Respond to the Assassination of Qassem Soleimani?

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The Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, was quite explicit in signaling that Tehran is still prepared to keep the deal alive. While his 5 January tweet confirmed the Iranians would no longer accept any restriction on the number of centrifuges, he : “This step is within JCPOA & all 5 steps are reversible upon EFFECTIVE implementation of reciprocal obligations.” It was a play for time, a classic chessboard move in response to an aggressive and reckless attack. Trump doesn’t care a fig about the JCPOA, but the Europeans and the British do. What next then for the Iranians?

Securing Gains

America’s allies in the region, most notably Saudi Arabia and Israel, would appear to be most at risk from retaliation. That being the case, one wonders to what extent, if any, Donald Trump weighed up the danger he was putting the Saudis and the Israelis (and other countries in the Gulf and the Middle East) in when he decided, without congressional oversight and without informing key allies, to ratchet up the stakes to such a level by ordering the killing of Suleimani.

The Iranians may well decide that a direct attack on US bases or military personnel is far too risky. That being so, they could choose to carry out an aerial raid on Saudi Aramco, as happened in September, or attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz to oil tankers. Or they could choose to use Hezbollah rockets based in Lebanon against Israel or use the Houthis to hurl rockets from inside Yemen at multiple targets in Saudi Arabia. 

What senior leadership in Tehran is weighing up, though, is the strategy that will best protect the gains Iran has achieved over several years thanks largely to Suleimani’s ruthless tactics. He effectively deployed a form of asymmetrical warfare that saved Iran’s Syrian ally Bashir al-Assad, dictated much of the military, economic and political direction of neighboring Iraq, and tied up the Saudis in an unwinnable war in Yemen.

Retaliation that provokes a significant military response from the Israelis will likely wind up drawing the Americans in and lead to a major war breaking out, something the Iranians cannot win and that will see them lose all the gains they have secured. 

Calibrated Approach

Even a more calibrated approach — missile attacks on Saudi Aramco installations, for instance — could still lead to an escalating war situation, given how central Aramco is to the ambitions of the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Missiles fired by the Houthis into Saudi Arabia would perhaps make a point, but there is no guarantee of that or even that the Houthis, who are fiercely independent, would go along with Tehran, given what would be the likely consequences for them. 

Donald Trump is in an election year, and what he cannot afford to do is to draw America into another war in the Middle East. However, a temporary blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by the Iranians — even the threat of a blockade — would allow for plenty of bluster and saber-rattling on both sides without a war breaking out. As well, as London-based Capital Economics has , “if Iran tried to close off the Strait of Hormuz, we’ve estimated that Brent crude would jump to $150pb.”

A massive price bump at the fuel pumps is exactly the situation that would damage the president as he seeks another term in office. In reality, then, neither side wants a war. Nor do the Israelis, the Gulf states, Iraq or anyone else in the Middle East and the wider world. In the days and weeks to come, it is to be expected that the Iranians will move with great care while at the same time seeking to satisfy the need to quench public anger in Iran at Suleimani’s killing. The real threat, the trigger that could cause all-out war lies elsewhere — in Donald Trump’s White House.

Trump is perfectly capable of a huge miscalculation. If his tweets since the assassination are anything to go by, he is relishing a new role, backing up the bullying bravado with hard military muscle. His grasp of the region is tenuous at best and he has surrounded himself with sycophants who feed his ignorance.

The killing of Suleimani in Iraq was an extraordinary act of violence, one Trump clearly enjoyed carrying off. Should he decide that any Iranian response, regardless of how low-level or indirect it is, is worthy of a similar act of violence, then almost certainly the region will be plunged into war.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post What Next for Tehran and Trump? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

360° Context: Britain Faces a Historic Election

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Maybe it is because I am an immigrant myself, or maybe it’s that I am just a weird foreign policy nerd, but I would like to hear what our politicians think about what is going on in Egypt right now, where 60,000 prisoners of conscience are jailed in appalling conditions and where a president, ousted in a  2013 coup, died in June during a trial on espionage charges. As a UN noted on November 8, Mohammed Morsi was held in solitary confinement for six years, forced to sleep on a concrete floor and denied treatment for his diabetes and high blood pressure. The report went on to say that because of the denial of medical treatment, President Morsi “progressively lost the vision in his left eye, had recurrent diabetic comas and fainted repeatedly.”

Agnes Callamard, the UN’s special rapporteur on and a lead author of the report, wrote that “The authorities were warned repeatedly that Dr. Morsi’s prison conditions would gradually undermine his health to the point of killing him. There is no evidence they acted to address these concerns, even though the consequences were foreseeable.” The report concluded that “Dr. Morsi’s death after enduring those conditions could amount to a State-sanctioned arbitrary killing.” Note: a state-sanctioned arbitrary killing of the first and only democratically elected president in Egypt’s history. Any thoughts on that from our politicians?

I would like to know what steps Britain’s new government will take to work toward ending the war in Yemen. The tell an awful story: nearly 100,000 dead, 4,500 instances where civilians have been directly targeted — the Saudi-led coalition being responsible for two-thirds of this and the rebel Houthis the rest; 13 million Yemeni civilians facing starvation; critical infrastructure such as hospitals, schools and electricity plants destroyed in a war that is into its fifth year.

Have our politicians conveniently forgotten the support that Britain has given the Saudis? As Arron Merat wrote in a recent Guardian , “Every day Yemen is hit by British bombs — dropped by British planes that are flown by British-trained pilots and maintained and prepared inside Saudi Arabia by thousands of British contractors.” So yes, I would like to hear from the party leaders what role the UK could play in pushing forward a peace initiative.

I might also want to know what those vying to form a government feel about the remarkable protests that have brought millions of young Arabs into the streets in Algeria, Iraq and Lebanon. They are protesting for an end to corruption. They are sick and tired of old sectarian politics. They want an end to the repression. The UK didn’t do much in the last Arab Spring save stand by the dictators and abandon the protesters. Any thoughts on fresh approaches? I didn’t think so.

And we are still happy — very happy — to do business with the Saudis, whose crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. This is a man who routinely jails anyone even remotely suspected of not being loyal to his arbitrary, cruel and dictatorial rule. Oh, and will we continue in our contented way to do business with the United Arab Emirates who detained and tortured a British student, , and who have sentenced the distinguished human rights advocate Ahmed Mansoor to 10 years in prison? Of course we will!

And as the Iranian authorities carry out their ruthless assault on protesters who are being hit with the double whammy of a corrupt and brutal regime and the campaign of relentless sanctions imposed by the United States, where are we on that nuclear deal? Do we think the Trump approach is working? Do we know what happens to the deal? Do we even care? I’d like those questionS put to each and every party leader.

I’d like to know what they make of Turkey’s incursion into northern Syria, of the support that outside forces are giving a renegade general in the Libyan Civil War, or how we can support Tunisia’s fragile democracy. I would love to hear their thoughts on the so-called “deal of the century.” Do they really think that Jared Kushner’s bully’s plan will end the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians? There are a lot of answers I’d like to hear, but the questions are not being asked. A note to my UK media colleagues covering the election: It is not too late to start asking.

We are told that everything will be sorted out once we just get past that damn Brexit barrier. But surely we, the humble voters, deserve to know what sort of foreign policy those who hope to form a government will have and how our government behaves in the world and in a region as crucial to global peace and security as the Middle East.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The UK Election: What About Foreign Policy? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Call it what you will, but it is surely not an accident that the end of the five days, 22 October, coincides with a meeting between the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in . Here, Putin can put the finishing touches on his latest diplomatic coup in the Middle East, one that saw American troops pulling out in a confused retreat after their president and commander-in-chief gave a thumbs up to Erdogan to move into Syria in a phone call.

In a subsequent effort to , Donald Trump said this: “They had terrorists, they had a lot of people in there they couldn’t have … and they had to have it cleaned out.”&�Բ�����;He later compared the assault to a couple of  it out in the school yard. “Sometimes,” proffered the self-proclaimed genius of foreign policy, “you have to let them fight, then you pull them apart.”

Defying America

Meanwhile, Russian media was gleefully screening  of its forces taking control of a hastily abandoned US base. One has to go back to the  and scenes of American helicopters being pushed into the sea off the decks of US warships to find a comparable image of the military humiliation of the world’s most powerfully armed nation.

Efforts to portray Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s journey to Ankara to secure a ceasefire (or a pause) as some sort of diplomatic win were almost immediately undercut by reports that the Turks were continuing their offensive in the border town of Ras al-Ayn, a charge Ankara unsurprisingly denied. In any event, President Erdogan can take great satisfaction in setting himself up as the leader who defied the might of America. And he is well along the road to giving the Kurds a bloody nose while establishing a deep buffer zone in Syrian territory that, with the approval of the US, will be patrolled and policed by Turkish soldiers.

But it is Vladimir Putin who can take the greatest pleasure from this latest American debacle in the region. He can position himself as the peacemaker and the pragmatist who, unlike Donald Trump, hasn’t buckled and walked away from the Middle East at its great hour of need. Just how easily he has filled the vacuum left by the American president was shown by his triumphal visits to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi in the wake of the Turkish incursion. He was  like a modern-day czar, signed trade deals and talked the language of relationships and trust.

Putin was, without mentioning Trump, making the point to his Saudi and Emirati hosts that Russia was a friend on whom they could rely. He was not going to treat them as a convenient cash cow for weapons sales, nor make unreasonable demands that they hold down the price of oil. Nor would he ever, as Trump has repeatedly done,  the aged and frail Saudi King Salman. 

No, the Russian leader was not interested in short-term transactional deal-making which brought benefits to one side whilst exploiting and insulting the other. Rather, Vladimir Putin, the old spymaster, was saying he was in the business of establishing a long-term relationship based on shared values. In that regard he holds both Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, and Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, as valuable and valued assets to be listened to and treated with respect.

Quid Pro Quo

Donald Trump, on the other hand, sees the Saudis in particular only through the lens of . So, for example, while he was precipitously pulling troops out of northern Syria, he was sending soldiers to Saudi Arabia in direct and open contradiction to his stated policy to get the US out of the Middle East. But that, it seems, was okay because “they buy hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of merchandise from us, not only military equipment. In military equipment, about $110 billion. It’s millions of jobs.” And, the great dealmaker was quick to add, “But are you ready? Saudi Arabia, at my request, has agreed to pay us for everything we’re doing.”

Beyond the fact that the Saudis have been buying American military hardware for decades, it will be galling for them to have so publicly and baldly stated that their nervousness about the Iranians has, according to the president’s way of thinking, required them to buy in American troops. That the custodians of Islam’s two holiest sites need foreign non-Islamic soldiers to protect them is, among other things, a massive propaganda gift to IS and al-Qaeda.

True, Putin did  the Saudis that had they had the Russian S-400 missile defense system, the Saudi Aramco attack could have been thwarted. But teasing is not a humiliation, and what Mohammed bin Salman is now discovering is that Trump enjoys humiliating America’s friends and allies. The young prince is nothing if not proud, a quality that Putin has shrewdly gauged and is effectively deploying. Equally shrewdly he has adroitly turned Trump’s latest foreign blunder with the Turks to his advantage. Small wonder, then, that on October 15 Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House Speaker, that “All roads seem to lead to Putin with the President, isn’t it so?”

 *[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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In early May, Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and the lead architect of the so-called “deal of the century,” gave a lengthy ��to Robert Satloff, the executive director of the pro-Israeli Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). In it he expressed disappointment with the Palestinians. “It’s been very disheartening for us,” Kushner told Satloff, “to see that the Palestinian leadership has basically been attacking a plan that they don’t know what it is as opposed to reaching out to us.”

“Poor Jared,” one is tempted to say, “all that hard effort and so little gratitude!” So what that his father-in-law����as the capital of Israel,�� the Palestine Liberation Organization’s mission in Washington, cut off all US funding to the Palestinians, waved through the Israeli annexation��of the Golan Heights and kept Jordanian King Abdullah — whose country is home to 2 million Palestinian refugees — completely in the dark?

So what that Kushner, a New York real estate broker whose family supports illegal settlements, has two advisors — Jason Greenblatt and David Friedman — who themselves are keen settlement advocates? The former has said that the settlements are not illegal. The latter is the US ambassador to Israel and in that capacity has deemed the settlements already part of Israel. This is the trio who we are asked to believe will come up with a fair and balanced plan. And the Palestinians? They haven’t reached out — shame on the Palestinians.

The interview Kushner gave is full of empty platitudes and slippery evasions. He boasts “nothing’s leaked from my team … and I think that is something that we’re very proud of.” Perhaps nothing has leaked because there is nothing of substance to leak. The deal such as it is seems to promise a bright economic future for the Palestinians if they just get on board and trust in Jared.

The latest gambit in trying to maneuver the Palestinians into a corner is a����in the Bahraini capital Manama that is set for 25-26 June. According to a White House��statement released on May 19, the conference will provide a “framework for a prosperous future for the Palestinian people and the region, including enhancements to economic governance, development of human capital, and facilitation of rapid private-sector growth.”

The statement adds: “This is a pivotal opportunity to convene government, civil society, and business leaders to share ideas, discuss strategies, and galvanize support for potential economic investments and initiatives that could be made possible by a peace agreement.” Cart before horse comes immediately to mind. There can be no economic deal without first a political deal; that is a broad and widely shared consensus. But Kushner, a young man with no previous experience in the Middle East, disagrees. “Look,” he told Satloff, “we don’t want to go through history on this.”

One of his most disingenuous comments in the interview was when he was asked about a two-state solution, suggesting that “it means one thing to the Israelis, it means one thing to the Palestinians … let’s just not say it.” Think about that for a moment: A central tenet of achieving a fair and equitable deal is not going to be mentioned. In fact, just about the only thing that emerges between the lines in 45 minutes of weaving, bobbing and preening was that Kushner and his sidekicks Friedman and Greenblatt want to secure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long-held goal of burying the two-state solution forever while facilitating the annexation of the illegal West Bank settlements into Israel.

The Palestinian Authority has said, quite rightly, that it ; nor will Palestinian . Israel’s new friends, the Saudis and the , will be there to make promises that they will stump up the cash that is intended to cause the Palestinians to cave in. In that regard Dan Shapiro, a former American ambassador to Israel, : “What makes it very difficult to see the conference being successful is that the US has cancelled all donor assistance to the Palestinians, so it’s asking others to invest where it has chosen to .”

We have been here before with the Trump presidency. A grand gathering is called, replete with overblown rhetoric and assumptions that intractable problems that have existed for decades will be resolved in a couple of days. Remember the�� in February? That was intended to pull together the nations of the world in a great coalition that would stand up to Iran. The Americans blustered and fulminated, Netanyahu blundered badly by tweeting about preparing for war, and anybody with any sense stayed away. The conference was an enormous flop and, unsurprisingly, Trump never mentions it even as he continues to ratchet up the pressure on Iran. Already the Manama gathering has the unmistakable stench of failure hovering over it. When it ends, the strategy such as it is will be to claim that the Palestinians, ungrateful wretches, rejected a generous offer. Kushner tried, the Palestinians failed. It is so nakedly transparent that even some of Israel’s most trenchant supporters are wincing.

Robert Satloff, in a�� to his interview, aptly titled “Jared Kushner’s Peace Plan Would Be a Disaster,” begs Kushner and Netanyahu not to proceed: “I hope that ‘Bibi the strategic thinker’ wins out over ‘Bibi the political tactician,’ and that he uses whatever tools at his disposal to abort the Kushner plan.” He concludes the article with this: “For Israel and its friends the key point remains: The only way to protect the long-term viability of the best aspects of the plan is to kill the plan.”

Sadly Jared Kushner does not appear to be listening. He told Satloff: “When you work for your father-in-law, you can’t disappoint.” And so it is onward to Manama, expert analysts, Middle East old hands and diplomats, even good friends and staunch allies be damned. Jared has got the deal of the century sorted.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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On May 2, Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, was playing his cards very close to the chest at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a pro-Israeli think tank. Kushner is the man charged with delivering the so-called “deal of the century” that will supposedly secure peace between Israel and the Palestinians. He provided no hard details about what shape the deal would take. However, in a 45-minute��, Kushner disingenuously deflected a question about a two-state solution: “[It] means one thing to Israelis and another to Palestinians, so we told ourselves — let’s try not to say it.”

On the same day, thousands of miles from Washington, the head of a little known US government commission was attending a Holocaust memorial ceremony at Auschwitz. Paul Packer, a New York hedge fund manager appointed by Donald Trump to run the United States Commission for the Preservation of American Heritage Abroad,����that the occasion, attended by several US ambassadors “shows the commitment that the Trump administration has to the words, ‘Never Again’, and to making sure that all our allies know the words of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, that anti-Zionism equals antisemitism.”

Packer’s mention of Pompeo referenced a����the secretary of state had given to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in March of this year. AIPAC has close links with WINEP. The secretary of state, commenting on the rise of anti-Semitism, said “this bigotry has taken an insidious new form in the guise of anti-Zionism [which] denies the very legitimacy of the Israeli state and the Israeli people.” In attacking academics, journalists and politicians who criticize Israel, and condemning those who support the��Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement��(BDS) Pompeo continued: “Let me go on the record. Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.”

Three-State Solution

As the two-state solution slides, or rather is driven, into oblivion by the Trump administration and the Israeli government, I am reminded of a����John Bolton, now the president’s national security adviser, made in 2017. He was in Israel at the time and he said there should be a three-state solution: the Israelis to absorb most of the West Bank including the settlements and areas already designated as under its full control; the Jordanians to pick up the isolated Palestinian communities that were left in the West Bank; and Egypt to take Gaza��— the Palestinian dream of a homeland snuffed out irrevocably.

We still do not know what the Kushner deal entails, but implicit in the treatment of the Palestinians by the Trump regime is the threat that if they don’t take whatever is on offer, the situation will only get worse. Bolton’s seemingly off the cuff remark may be the bleak future Trump will seek to punish them with should the Palestinians turn down his son-in-law’s deal.

At WINEP, Kushner talked obliquely about economic sweeteners: “What we will be able to put together is a solution that we believe is a good starting point for the political issues and then an outline for what can be done to help these people start living a better life.”��The bulk of the sweeteners, reportedly in the form of����from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, is the carrot. However, the Palestinians will see it for what it is — a bribe to abandon their rights and their homeland.

The Americans, anticipating rejection, have already shown some of����by, amongst other things, eliminating almost all financial assistance to the Palestinians,����the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA),����the Palestine Liberation Office in Washington, and most menacingly����Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, fresh from��another election victory,��is already����claiming the West Bank settlements as sovereign Israeli territory.

Should he do so, he would be gambling that the Trump administration would unequivocally back him against international opprobrium as it has already done with the annexation of the Golan Heights. It is a risk, but a calculated one.

Clear Messages

The message is clear: Trump has already punished the Palestinians and is saying he is fully prepared to punish them a whole lot more. There is nothing remotely statesmanlike in the American strategy. In keeping with the president’s approach to foreign affairs, Jared Kushner has eschewed the systems and structures that in normal times are used as essential tools of diplomacy. He shares his father-in-law’s egotistic view that he has no need for the machinery of government nor the thoughts of wiser and older Middle East experts. In his very limited worldview, this is just another Manhattan real estate deal writ large.

In turning down “the deal of the century” — as they must — the Palestinians will be castigated as ungrateful and shortsighted. After all, Kushner will say, It is supported by your fellow Arabs, the Saudis and the Emiratis. Those who defend the Palestinians and attack the deal will be cast as anti-Zionists and, therefore, anti-Semites. It is, to give it its due, a clever ploy; too clever perhaps, by half.

Last year at a conference in Vienna on anti-Semitism, 35 distinguished Israeli academics, thinkers and artists published a in which they argued that “this fight against anti-Semitism should not be instrumentalized to suppress legitimate criticism of Israel’s occupation and severe violations of Palestinian human rights.” But that is precisely what the Trump administration and Benjamin Netanyahu are doing. The authors of the letter noted:��“Many victims of the����opposed Zionism. On the other hand, many anti-Semites supported Zionism. It is nonsensical and inappropriate to identify anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.” ��he letter went unheeded.

In his interview at WINEP, Jared Kushner claimed that his deal will achieve a positive outcome: “If you’re able to help the Palestinian people have dignity and opportunity, that’s within the whole region’s interest and in America’s interest. Stabilization is a very important thing.”

Boxing the Palestinians into a corner from which there is no escape creates neither dignity nor opportunity. Attempting to silence their supporters and thoughtful critics of Israel with claims of anti-Semitism will not lead to stabilization. In all likelihood, it will create quite the opposite. Jared Kushner and his father-in-law will come to learn the limits of their arrogant bullying. But as ever, the full cost will be borne by the Palestinians.

*[This article was originally published by .]

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The decision on April 22 by Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa to restore the individuals may be a first step in what remains a long and difficult road toward dialogue and reconciliation. Bahrain has been wracked by more than eight years of civil unrest that has severely damaged the kingdom’s economy, seen thousands of protesters jailed and nearly 1,000 stripped of their citizenship.

The Gulf island’s main political opposition groups have been banned and their leaders jailed. In June 2017, Al-Wasat, Bahrain’s only independent news site was shuttered, effectively silencing free media. Freedom of expression, too, has been severely curtailed. The human rights activist is currently serving a five-year sentence for tweets that criticized the war in and conditions in the country’s main prison, Jau. Another activist, , is serving a life sentence and , the leader of al-Wefaq, the largest opposition movement, was jailed for 15 years which on appeal was altered to . Other oppositionists and human rights activists are either in prison in Bahrain or in exile in the West.

The vast majority of those affected by the government’s crackdown on dissent are Shia Muslims, the majority indigenous community in a kingdom ruled for more than two centuries by the Sunni al-Khalifa family. Shia Bahrainis have long complained of discrimination in job hiring, housing, education and other facilities provided by the state. They point to a gerrymandered political system entrenching the status quo and the failure of the ruling family to deliver on promises made in 2001 for a more equitable power-sharing arrangement. When those concerns boil over and lead to unrest, the government responds with harsh measures.

Post-Independence

Indeed, the history of Bahrain since it gained independence from Britain in 1971 has been one of persistent cycles of reform and repression, intrinsically linked one to the other. When reform demands go too far and threaten the position of the ruling family, repression kicks in. That in turn becomes excessive and a process of reform begins anew.

Bahrain elected its first parliament in 1973. But after legislators refused to approve a draconian state security law, parliament was dissolved just two years later.��The then and still prime minister, Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa, together with his brother Isa, the emir, ruled with a firm hand. They were aided by Ian Henderson, a Scotsman who ran the state security apparatus with such ruthless efficiency that he earned the sobriquet “Butcher of Bahrain” from regime opponents.

A in 1981 and an uprising in the 1990s calling for democratic reform led to periods of intense repression. However, the repression eased when the emir died in 1999 and his son, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, succeeded him. Hamad introduced a reform program that saw the state of emergency, in place since 1975, lifted. The state security law was abolished. Political opponents and human rights activists were released from prison, and others were allowed and encouraged to return from exile under a general amnesty. Restrictions on the media were loosened.

In February 2001, a referendum was held in which Bahrainis voted overwhelmingly in support of the National Action Charter, a roadmap toward the . In 2002, Bahrain adopted a new constitution along the lines of the charter’s provisions, with Hamad declaring himself king. For the next several years, though many Shia continued to feel marginalized and discriminated against, the reform agenda was the order of the day, a state of affairs that benefited the country both economically and politically.

Arab Spring

The Arab Spring and the events of February and March 2011 saw the cycle of repression return with a vengeance. Peaceful calls for a faster pace of reform gained huge support in the kingdom across sectarian lines. In a country with an indigenous population of less than 700,000, it is estimated more than 100,000 people took to the streets of the capital, Manama. The ruling family saw the reform demands as a major threat, the most serious it had ever faced. There was good reason for concern: Popular protests had already toppled two Arab strongmen in North Africa.

For its part, Saudi Arabia feared that should the Khalifa family give ground, that would serve to empower its own Shia community, heavily discriminated against and the majority population in the oil-rich Eastern Province adjacent to Bahrain. On March 14, 2011, Saudi Arabia, joined by the United Arab Emirates, sent troops down the causeway linking Bahrain to the Saudi mainland. Demonstrations were crushed and protesters routed by Bahraini security and military forces. Dozens were killed, hundreds wounded and thousands arbitrarily jailed. Torture in detention was widespread with at least two detainees being beaten to death.

King Hamad, facing international criticism, commissioned a tribunal of human rights experts chaired by the distinguished law professor, Cherif Bassiouni. The was, and remains, the only independent analysis of its kind dealing with the events of the Arab Spring, and it is to the king’s credit that he commissioned it.

Bassiouni’s report, released in November 2011, was a damning indictment of how the government had handled what had been a largely peaceful call for democratic reform. The king accepted the report in full and promised to carry out all its recommendations, many of which relate to the police and security forces. Critics argue that in the years since the report, very few of the recommendations have been fully implemented. The government takes the position that most have.

Dialogue and Reconciliation

What is not in dispute is that the regime, citing security concerns, has continued to bear down hard on any form of dissent. Dialogue and trust between the opposition and the ruling family has completely broken down. However, that may be about to change. On April 26, Hasan Shafaei, an official at the Bahraini Embassy in London met with this author. He said that King Hamad wants to “encourage opportunities to create a better situation.” Shafaei is a former activist. In 2002, he was a founding member of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights with Nabeel Rajab and Abdulhadi al-Khawaja. He said that, in his opinion, the opposition had “missed opportunities in the past” and urged it to “take advantage of this goodwill from the king.”

The citizenship restoration decree should be seen as King Hamad’s signal that now is the time to move forward to dialogue. Significantly, included in the 551 were 138 names of individuals who had been stripped of their citizenship and sentenced to between three years and life in a just a few days earlier, on April 16. Though the prison sentences stand, King Hamad could not have stated more clearly that citizenship stripping should not be used by the courts as punishment. It is a step that will not have pleased some within the ruling family, but it is as strong an indication as any that the cycle of repression could end and an agenda of reconciliation begin.

To speed up the process of reconciliation, Shafaei, a human rights adviser to the embassy, said that “more good news was coming.” That could include the release of political prisoners, including Rajab. He noted several recent meetings between the prime minister and a senior religious leader of the Shia community, Sheikh Abdullah al-Ghurifi. Those meetings, this author was told, had the full approval of the ailing Ayatollah Isa Qassim, the highest religious authority for Bahraini Shias. (However, Sheikh Qassim was those who had his citizenship restored by the king after having it revoked in 2016.)

Shafaei also pointed to a new alternative sentencing law passed last year that includes the imposition of community service sentences, house arrest, electronic tagging and attending training and rehabilitation programs. Although it was not a point Shafaei made, the new law has the virtue of helping to deal with serious overcrowding and the consequent poor conditions faced by inmates at Jau Prison.

Ali Alaswad is a senior al-Wefaq politician, now in exile in London. When told of Shafaei’s comments, he played down the significance of both the meetings with the prime minister and the restoration of citizenship. “[King Hamad] wants us to say thank you when their citizenship was taken for no reason.” Alaswad told this author there are 4,500 political prisoners in detention, adding “we will not be happy till they are back home.”

At the same time, though, Alaswad signaled there is room for some optimism. Though al-Wefaq is not willing to enter into a formal dialogue with the government simply on the basis of the king’s citizenship decision, that could change. “Release some political prisoners and we are ready to reconsider. A prisoner release is a good opportunity for dialogue,” he said.

Within that statement lurks the potential to break the long and damaging stalemate that, since 2011, has affected every level of Bahraini society. Should the king follow through on what Hasan Shafaei has called “good news” and release some of the prisoners over the Islamic month of Ramadan, the arduous task of building trust and finding common ground can begin. It will be a sign for all Bahrainis that they can dare to hope there is an end to an awful period in their history. It would be useful, too, to restore Sheikh Isa Qassem’s nationality. Finally, should the release of prisoners include Nabeel Rajab, an internationally-recognized human rights voice, King Hamad will have signaled to the world that he is serious about ending the cycle of repression.

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The narrative is an appealing one. The Islamic State (IS or ISIS) was cornered and down to defending a single village, Baghouz, in southeastern Syria, near the Iraqi border. A vast caliphate that once stretched across Syria and Iraq is utterly vanquished. Barghouz was the “last stand” for IS, and once it fell, victory was proclaimed.

Much of the reporting in the media subscribed, to a lesser or greater extent, to that narrative. On March 8,����provided footage of what it called “a glimpse of what is left of the ISIS caliphate.” Days earlier,����argued that IS was “reduced to a last sliver of land,” and Barghouz, this “last stand, last bastion, will go down in a torrent of fire and blood.”

That such a narrative track is widely off the mark helps to obscure an unpalatable truth. The Islamic State is anything but defeated. As the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) notes, IS is well on its way to re-establishing sanctuary in Iraq. A����released on March 7 details nine regions where IS either has durable support or is militarily entrenched, from Iraqi Kurdistan to the Baghdad Belts regions that encircle the capital city, to the Jazeera Desert in the west and the Hamrin Mountains running from Diyala Province north of Baghdad, through to Kirkuk Province on the border of Iraqi Kurdistan.

The extent to which the Islamic State has re-established itself in a country where it was supposedly defeated is testament to its resilience and to the appeal of an extremist ideology that has, counter to wishful thinking, only been reinforced by battlefield losses. Nor ought one discount the shrewd and strategic military tactics Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph, and his advisers have brought to bear in a war they see as being without end.

Testament to Resilience

The Hamrin Mountains serve as good evidence. The city of Hawija, which sits adjacent to the mountain range, was the last major urban center to fall to Iraqi forces in September 2017, two months after the liberation of Mosul. The city had been held for three years by IS and before that was, for several years, a hotbed of Sunni insurgency against the Shia-dominated central government. ISW����it as “a historical stronghold for ISIS and its predecessor al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) with a sympathetic population of Sunni Arabs.”

When IS abandoned the city to coalition forces, it moved into the mountains, which provide both security from airstrikes and support from the locals. It also left behind sleeper cells to be activated at the appropriate time. Tensions between Iraqi Kurdish forces on the one hand, and the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) and the Shia Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) militia on the other, created what the ISW calls “security gaps” that IS was able to further exploit. Efforts to dislodge IS from its mountain sanctuary have thus far failed.

Another case in point is��, Iraq’s second largest city, much of which was destroyed in the battle to free it from the caliphate. Many of the city’s Sunni Arab population that was displaced by the war has declined to return, discouraged by IEDs left behind by the jihadists, by the lack of reconstruction progress and by ongoing insecurity. As ISW notes “ISIS established a network of sleeper cells throughout Mosul after its recapture by the U.S. Anti-ISIS Coalition in July 2017.”

It was members of these cells that were responsible for several vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED) attacks in Mosul, the most recent occurring on����this year. Such attacks underscore how little security the central government is providing for returnees. The corruption and incompetency that have marred efforts at reconstruction of the city have provided further propaganda wins for IS. The displaced Sunni population also faces hostility from the PMF encamped around Mosul. Many feel they have little choice but to remain in impoverished refugee camps, angry, fearful and unhappy. It is a situation that plays into the hands of IS.

In the south of the country, Anbar Province saw brutal fighting in the liberation of the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi in June and July 2016. It was hailed at the time as a significant victory. The victory, however, has been undercut by a growing IS presence. As the ISW report notes: “The (Iraqi army) discovered sophisticated tunnel networks entering Fallujah from the direction of Amariyat al-Fallujah in January 2019. ISIS likely used the tunnels to infiltrate cells into the city. Security forces later arrested more than 180 individuals connected to ISIS in Fallujah in February 2019.”

Add to that the expansion of support zones linking the Baghdad Belts to Diyala and Anbar provinces, and the large support zone that exists in the western Jazeera Desert bordering on Syria, and what emerges is the picture of a shadow caliphate, one that has significant military prowess unencumbered by the exigencies of running a formal state. Hit-and-run guerrilla raids, the assassination of bureaucrats and tribal leaders allied to the central government, the destruction of government facilities, ongoing suicide and VBIED attacks leading to a constant state of insecurity are all the hallmark of this shadow caliphate.

Continuing Deadlock

What makes the situation even more favorable for IS is the����in forming a national government in Baghdad, six months after an election that had already suffered from a very low voter turnout. The impasse between two Shia blocs over ministerial appointments means that the reconstruction work, which is so crucial to preventing the country from sliding back into an anarchic state of war, is scarcely being undertaken. Meanwhile, endemic corruption cripples what little is being done.

The situation could hardly be riper for a second IS jihad. The shadow caliphate can argue that takfiri Iran is an occupying force “enslaving” Sunni Iraqis. The Iranians arm and support the Shia militias and already have a significant military presence in Iraq, one that the Islamic State will be determined to confront. For its part, Iran will not hesitate to defend Baghdad, as it did in the past, should IS threaten to take the capital.

A confrontation between Iranian forces and the Islamic State in Iraq is a scenario that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton might well find useful. An Iran dragged into a bloody local war at a time when the United States is ramping up hard sanctions is a weakened Iran, one where regime change could become less of a pipe dream and more of a reality.

As Trump’s America strives to replace the ayatollahs while simultaneously trying to disengage from the war against the Islamic State, talk of last stands is wildly premature. It dramatically underestimates both the broader geopolitical narrative and the military prowess of an enemy driven by an intractable, brutal and uncompromising ideology.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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I remember once, several years ago on a Skype call, Ahmed joked with me that he was “the last man talking” in the United Arab Emirates and the region about human rights violations. He pretty much was. Almost every other activist in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries is in jail, in exile or silenced by the fear of what the authorities will do to them and to their loved ones.

Ahmed Mansoor and his family��have paid a ��for his human rights advocacy. In early 2011, after signing a petition calling for democratic and economic reforms, he was subjected to an online smear campaign orchestrated by the state security apparatus. “Twitter, Facebook, text messages, television and radio spread false information about me to create an environment of hatred,” he said. It was a campaign that included many death threats.

Then in April of that year, he was arrested, held in jail for nearly eight months and convicted of “insulting the rulers” in a grossly unfair trial. On November 27, 2011, Mansoor was sentenced to three years in jail. The next day, thanks largely to an international outcry,��he and four others��sentenced with him were pardoned.

By the time he was released, he had already lost his job as a senior engineer in a telecommunications firm. Subsequently, the government refused to issue him a Certificate of Good Conduct. Without the certificate, he couldn’t be employed in either the private or public sectors. His bank accounts were frozen. His passport was confiscated and he was banned from travel — a ban which the authorities refused to lift so he could receive in person the prestigious for Human Rights Defenders in Geneva in 2015.

I had written to the judges’ panel in support of his nomination for the prize. Here is part of what I said:��“Should the judges reach a decision to give Ahmed Mansoor the (award) they will have acknowledged an unswerving defender of human rights in a region and at a moment when those rights are under unprecedented attack. They will have kept alive a flame of hope for all those in the Gulf states and beyond who have been intimidated, imprisoned and abused by their governments. They will, in this most dangerously violent of times for the Middle East and the world, have saluted a voice of peaceful protest that refuses to be silenced.”

Despite the risks he faced, Ahmed continued to work with journalists like myself and with international human rights organizations to advance the cause of human rights in the UAE. Then, in March 2017, Ahmed was seized and taken to an unknown place. His family had no idea where he was and had virtually no contact with him. He was denied access to a lawyer of his choosing. Nearly a year after he was taken, he was��, sentenced to 10 years in jail and fined 1 million dirham ($272,300) after being convicted under draconian anti-terror laws of “insulting the status and prestige of the UAE and its symbols including its leaders” and of “seeking to damage the relationship of the UAE with its neighbours by publishing false reports and information on social media.” In late December last year, his final appeal was rejected.

I think of him often and of the great courage he displays in prison and this poem, one of his, reminds me of that courage and of his fortitude:

What are all those stars for?

And the night

And the clouds

And the sky erected like a tent in the desert

In a place like this

Everything is

Luxury

Suppressing activists like Ahmed Mansoor, crushing dissent in the Middle East has never been easier thanks to the Trump administration. Under Donald Trump, the US has abandoned any pretext of concern about human rights issues anywhere in the world. The American president, like the Arab dictators, hates criticism. Like them, he is thin-skinned and exceptionally arrogant. Like them, he lies blatantly while accusing the media of telling lies when it raises legitimate criticism. Like them he uses his office to advance his family’s fortunes. Like them, he seeks to silence dissenting voices.

We in the West must not be silent in demanding that the UAE government release Ahmed Mansoor. It is already a deep stain on the UK that we have accepted so many gross violations of human rights in Egypt, in the UAE, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia in return for trade deals and weapons sales. We must demand that Alistair Burt, the Middle East minister, and Jeremy Hunt, the foreign secretary speak up, and that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office condemns the crackdown on dissent in the UAE and other Gulf states.

Ahmed would want me to mention Alya Abdulnoor, a young woman dying of cancer, chained to a hospital bed and refused permission to spend her last days at home. He’d want me to mention , a distinguished economist serving 10 years, and the lawyer , and the many other prisoners of conscience cruelly held in jail in the UAE. He would want me to speak of the Bahraini opposition leader and the human rights activist , and thousands of other political prisoners and protesters held in Bahrain’s Jau Prison; and of and dozens of other women activists held in Saudi jails, subjected to appalling abuse.

He would want me, and all of us here, to break the silence that vicious regimes have imposed on peaceful activists and that the acceptance and encouragement of western governments has allowed to flourish.

How did you not see me,

As if I were hiding behind a mountain,

And how did I see you then,

Passing in a distance of two leagues,

Curving the moon with a gaze,

And pulling the stars,

To the field?!

Ahmed Mansoor knew that one night the men in black balaclavas would arrive and seize him. I asked him once why he persisted in going down a road that would lead again to his incarceration. He said: “The only way to counter repression is by revealing it. And yes there is always that possibility that I will go back to jail. But if we do not talk, who will?” We will, Ahmed, because we must. Your courage dictates we cannot and we will not be silent.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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One of the many challenges of covering the impact of Donald Trump’s presidency on global affairs is that, in the constant churn of stories generated by his Twitter outbursts and the abrupt policy decisions he makes, really important stories get lost in the storm. One of those lost stories happened the weekend before the US president’s delayed State of the Union address, which he finally on February 5.

On the preceding Saturday, Russian President Vladimir Putin ��he was following in Trump’s footsteps and pulling out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). In what he called a “symmetrical response,” Putin signaled that a new nuclear arms race was under way: “Our American partners announced that they are suspending their participation in the INF Treaty, and we are suspending it too. They said that they are engaged in research, development and design work, and we will do the same.”

It was a clever response, with Putin able to say that Russia was against the destruction of the treaty, but if that was what the US was going to do by walking away, then his country would mirror American actions step by step. You develop and build new nuclear weapons, we will too.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the world was striving to limit the spread of nuclear weapons.��All of those Cold War decades of delicate��and exquisitely challenging negotiations designed to stave off nuclear annihilation now seem somehow quaintly old-fashioned.��In the macho world of the new authoritarians, led by President Trump, the bigger the weapons and the more you have, the tougher you are.

Trump’s reason for pulling out of the INF was that the Russians were non-compliant and were using the agreement as cover to get a leg up on America. That is undoubtedly the case but the treaty, even in violation, acted as a constraint.��So, why would��what is still the world’s greatest military superpower enable the Russians by walking away? And what are the implications for the Gulf and the wider Middle East as a new nuclear arms race emerges from Trump’s decision?

Nuclear Weapons in the Gulf

To the first question, one can only speculate, given the strange and troubling relationship that Trump has with what has been America’s greatest enemy: Russia. It is the second question, however, that should be of most concern. As the war rhetoric against Iran ratchets up, and as the nonproliferation environment weakens, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman may push to arm Saudi Arabia with nuclear weapons.

Though he dismisses the Iranian military capacity in public, in private he must know that in any conventional war scenario, the battle-hardened Iranians would prevail on the ground.��The Saudis may have sharpened their air expertise in Yemen at the expense of both the civilian population and the rebel Houthis, but it is ground forces that would ultimately decide the outcome. As the Yemen conflict has shown, Saudi Arabia’s ground troops are an incompetent and ill-prepared fighting force, hence the reliance on the air war to try subdue the Houthis.

In a conventional war, the Iranians would use Iraq as the pathway to attack Saudi Arabia along its northern border. They could be in the capital Riyadh in a matter of days.��That is a sobering thought and one that could serve as a catalyst for securing the bomb. The logical place to turn to is Pakistan, which has possessed nuclear weapons since the mid-1980s.��Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan is����to the Saudis, even more so than his predecessors. Indeed, he came to the so-called “” in October 2018 with a begging bowl in hand, one the Saudis were happy to fill.

If Saudi Arabia acquired nuclear weapons, then it follows that Iran would do so as well. Indeed there are forces within Iran, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who have long advocated that to preserve and protect the revolution, their nation must have the bomb.

And here we come to the extraordinarily reckless and dangerous game that President Trump, National Security Adviser and Secretary of State are playing. Bolton, in particular, has long advocated for regime change in Iran. The harsh sanctions that America is imposing on the Iranians and demanding that the rest of the world follow are intended not so much to effect regime change in and of themselves, but rather to prevent the Iranians for a time from securing nuclear firepower.

The Saudis, in the meantime, will have picked up,��, nuclear weapons from Pakistan.��Backed by a nuclear-armed Israel that shares the Saudi fear of Iran and with whom Mohammed bin Salman has forged a close relationship, the two together with other Gulf states will be the ones to force regime change backed by the nuclear muscle that Iran lacks. They and not the Americans. So the thinking goes.

That scenario is useful for Trump because the last thing his base wants is any more engagements in foreign places — and that is especially true of the Middle East. Hence, his oft-repeated and ill-thought-out vows to withdraw American troops. These are gambits, designed to shore up his support as he heads into what will undoubtedly prove for him a bruising��and difficult re-election bid in 2020.

The Iranians, however, will not succumb. Indeed, such naked threats will only serve to pull the country’s often battling factions together. Iran will do whatever is necessary to acquire a nuclear counter-punch. And Vladimir Putin, burnishing his already significant power in the region, may be very happy to oblige.

A nuclear stand-off in the Gulf, with all that that implies, could be far closer than any of us realizes.

*[A version of this article was originally published by .]��

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As the world’s media has once again picked up on the����of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s involvement in the brutal murder of journalist��, another story is receiving scant attention.

Alya Abdulnoor is a young Emirati woman who was arrested in July 2015 and eventually charged with financing international terrorist groups, though the only evidence presented was a record of websites she had visited. Abdulnoor was not politically active; she was concerned about the impact of the civil war in Syria on women and children and had been collecting donations on their behalf.

When she was arrested, Abdulnoor was already suffering from cancer. She was detained in an unknown place for four months, according to the Geneva-based International Centre for Justice and Human Rights (ICJHR). She was subjected to torture and forced to sign a false confession that was used to convict her. This is standard practice in the United Arab Emirates; it was used against the acclaimed human rights activist����and the noted academic Nasser bin Ghaith, as well as dozens of other political prisoners.

In May 2018, a voice recording was smuggled out of Al Wathba prison, in the Emirati capital Abu Dhabi, and given to the ICJHR. In it, Abdulnoor detailed how she was exposed to torture, continuously intimidated and deprived of adequate medical care. Even though she was diagnosed with a recurrence of cancer shortly after her arrest, for several years the authorities did nothing to alleviate or treat the disease. She was eventually moved to a specialist hospital, but only after the cancer had spread throughout her body and she was unable to stand or walk without assistance.

On January 10, the ICJHR , Abdulnoor was moved against medical advice to a non-specialist hospital. When her family was able to visit her on January 21, she was under heavy guard in a windowless room without ventilation. She was chained to her bed.

The family has repeatedly requested that she be allowed home to die, citing federal legislation that allows such a practice, but the authorities have rejected all their requests. The family believes the move to the second hospital and the appalling treatment she is being subjected to is a punishment for their efforts.

The ICJHR notes: “Alya Abdulnoor is still denied basic hygiene care and adequate medical attention despite her critical condition now that cancer has reached her brain, her liver, lungs and her bones, making her pain unbearable. Despite the repeated requests of the family, the [Emirati] authorities are still refusing to deliver a medical report on Alya’s current state of health.”

Let Her Go Home

Stop for a moment and think about what the authorities in a country that Britain is happy to call a good friend and ally are doing to a dying woman and her family. It is extraordinarily cruel and happens only because the crown prince and effective ruler of the UAE — Mohammed bin Zayed — believes that, like his Saudi counterpart, he can behave with impunity, emboldened by the certainty that we will raise no objections. He is able to conduct his inhumane business in the shadows.

The Abu Dhabi crown prince has also largely escaped global criticism for the conduct of the UAE in Yemen, unlike Mohammed bin Salman, who is rightly held responsible for an aerial war that has killed of civilians. However, the Emiratis, too, have much to answer for. Among other charges, they stand accused of carrying out mass torture, including rape in����set up by them in the south of Yemen. Yet that has had far too little international exposure and condemnation.

Alistair Burt, the UK’s minister of state for the Middle East, has a��warm relationship��with the UAE’s minister of state for foreign affairs, Anwar Gargash. Writing in an Emirati newspaper in 2017, Burt had about their relationship: “It would be wrong to suggest that we see eye-to-eye on everything, but the depth of the relationship means that serious questions can be raised without fear, and positions better understood to mutual benefit.”

Minister, I ask you now and as a matter of extreme urgency to raise the case of Alya Abdulnoor with your Emirati counterpart. Tell Dr. Gargash to allow her to go home to die.

*[This article was originally published by .]

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When its Gulf neighbors — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, joined by Egypt — launched a land, air and sea blockade of Qatar in the early morning hours of June 5, 2017, the reason cited by what came to be called the quartet was that the Qataris were sponsors of terrorism.

It was then, and remains today, an odd charge given that the leaders of the blockade, the Saudis and the Emiratis, had much to answer for in their own back stories regarding terror funding. Added to that, Qatar is home to Al Udaid airbase, the largest US military facility in the Middle East. The base was at the heart of the air war against ISIS in Iraq and continues to fulfill the same role in Syria.

The story of terror funding by the Gulf states, including by Qatar, remains opaque and unlikely ever to be fully told. However, there were other reasons for the blockade, and chief among them was an effort to bring down Qatar Airways.

For several years prior to the embargo, the company had an annual growth rate of 20%. The airline ordered new planes at an aggressive rate, including a 100-aircraft deal for $18 billion with Boeing, announced in 2016. In doing so, Qatar Airways challenged the market dominance of the UAE’s Dubai-based Emirates and Abu Dhabi’s Etihad airlines. In the eyes of Qatar Airways executives, the blockade was designed so as to do maximum harm to their business at a time when both Emirates and Etihad were feeling strong commercial heat from their Gulf rival.

Ferocious Attack

The ferocity with which the blockading countries launched their attack on Qatar Airways was unprecedented in the annals of peacetime aviation history. It was conducted without warning, with no thought for the safety of passengers already in the air, and with utter disregard for contractual obligations.

At a meeting I had with senior executives of the company in September 2017, I was told how they had coped when flights already en route on June 5 were denied clearance to land at quartet airports. With 100-plus flights daily to 18 different cities across the four countries, the first concern was for those passengers already in the air as well as those waiting to board flights.

The Qatar Airways website had been blocked, so the company told passengers to use Facebook as a means of making arrangements. During the course of the day, several thousand flights were rebooked. Meanwhile, the airline’s offices in the quartet countries had been locked and sealed. The company had to deal quickly with 500 employees who, without warning, were denied access to their offices and their work. Qatari citizens were given two weeks to leave, while quartet nationals found themselves not only without jobs but also under a cloud of suspicion.

The airline also organized emergency flights to prevent food and medicine shortages by deploying its fleet of 22 air freighters. Prior to the blockade, roughly 40% of the country’s food supplies had entered across the land border with Saudi Arabia. Working closely with the Turks and the Iranians, the threat of severe shortages was averted within 48 hours of the implementation of the blockade. The early images of bare shelves and panic buying, much circulated by quartet media outlets, quickly disappeared.

The air blockade was an enormous challenge, one that Qatar Airways handled with a degree of quiet professionalism and determination that underlined the company’s message that, despite the best efforts of the Quartet, it was and would remain business as usual.

Reversal of Fortune

Fast-forward 18 months and Qatar Airways is in solid good health. It is Abu Dhabi’s Etihad that is��. The airline has just announced it is laying off 50 of its pilots. It has also canceled the purchase of 10 Airbuses and cut routes as it struggles to slash costs and contain staggering losses that in 2016 stood at $2 billion and a further $1.9 billion in 2017. It has yet to announce its losses for 2018. In a����of its dire straits, Etihad abruptly shuttered its first and business class lounge at London Heathrow in October.

Part of Etihad’s woes have to do with a disastrous foray into the European market that saw them purchase big chunks of failing airlines. In June 2014 the company took a��, as well as controlling shares of an associated business. Including the purchase of five landing spots at London Heathrow, the total bill amounted to an eye watering $640 million. As Alitalia reeled, Etihad continued to pour money into what seemed to a black hole. Alitalia declared bankruptcy in May 2017.

Another airline that Etihad had invested in substantially, Air Berlin, went bankrupt in August 2017. The loss to the company of that blunder stands at $800 million. Now comes word that the Abu Dhabi carrier, which was Air Berlin’s main shareholder, is facing a��for the way in which it pulled the plug on the German carrier.

A winner from the collapse of Air Berlin is Lufthansa. With its rival now out the way, Lufthansa stands a better chance of nursing itself back to health and will press the case that all three��Gulf airlines, by virtue of being owned by their wealthy governments, are receiving�� that threaten to ruin their competitors.

Salt on the Wound

Meanwhile Qatar Airways has consolidated its purchase of Meridiana, a faltering Italian airline. In September 2017, after weathering the blockade storm, it took a 49% stake in the company. In February of last year, Meridiana����as Air Italy and announced plans to expand its fleet from 11 to 50 aircraft by 2022, nicely filling the market gap left by the bankruptcy of Alitalia. Five of the new fleet are Airbus A330s from Qatar Airways.

Salt on the wound, it would seem, but Qatar Airway’s executives, ever the professionals, are taking care not to crow at the expense of Etihad. That troubled airline, under a new CEO, is struggling to deny����that it will merge with Emirates. Of course, it may well be the case that the last thing the Dubai carrier needs is to take on board its woefully underperforming Abu Dhabi counterpart, even as a gesture of fraternal support.

As Etihad flounders, it is the Qataris who have turned the tables on their rivals. Employing a mix of common sense, calculated gambles and good business practice to hold the high ground, Qatar has emerged the clear winner in the battle of the airlines. That ought to send a message to call time. Diplomatically and politically, the Saudis and the Emiratis have no support from their significant allies for continuing the blockade. How soon before they acknowledge the reality and put an end to this debilitating and frankly silly feud?

*[A version of this article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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First to the good news, at least from the perspective of the government of Bahrain and its supporters:��Despite an opposition call to , turnout, at 67%, was impressively . The government did not release the number of spoiled ballots, but one observer estimated it to be around 5%. The banned political society, Al Wefaq, claimed the turnout was 30%.

The number of women elected to the 40-member council of representatives doubled to six, with one, Fawzia Zainal, expected to be named speaker. The significance of that should not be overlooked or underestimated. In a region where women still face huge obstacles, Bahrain has taken a big step forward. Sixteen political societies participated in the election, which would seem to justify the government’s claim that voters had ample choice.��However, neither Al Wefaq nor the other banned society, Waad, were allowed to enter the election, and in Al Wefaq’s case its leader, , has been jailed for life on charges that independent analysts regard as utterly specious.

Earlier this year, the outgoing parliament passed a law that prohibited anyone from the banned political societies from running. Additionally, several who may not have had connections to Waad or Al Wefaq were disbarred. In one case, a candidate who put himself forward was told that an anti-regime comment he made in 2004 warranted his candidacy being disallowed. “We could not forget your past,” he was told. Given how the regime carefully managed the election, it is unsurprising that the campaign was run without controversy. “Troublesome” candidates were excluded, and those who ran discussed little of substance. As one observer put it: “It was very polite and low key. There was no noise.”

No Noise

In many ways, this was a vote designed to impress Bahrain’s Western allies, and by and large it worked. In a region where there is little democracy —��and what there is struggles to move forward — this tiny Gulf kingdom can boast of an elected parliament and one where women have achieved historic firsts. It can point to an historically high voter turnout despite opposition calls for a boycott. It can say, as the long-serving justice minister and head of the Supreme Elections Committee, Sheikh Khalid bin Ali al-Khalifa , “Bahrain is living a new chapter in democratic development.”

All of that may well be true. But behind this truth lies another one. You can find it within the walls of Jau Prison, where thousands of regime opponents are detained.��Among them are the human rights activists Nabeel Rajab and Abdulhadi Alkhawaja. In manifestly unfair trials, Rajab received a five-year term, and Alkhawaja was sentenced to life imprisonment.

This other truth can also be found at the entrances to the towns and villages outside the capital Manama, where residents are required to show ID cards at police checkpoints to go to and from their homes to get to work and school. You could also point to the number of Bahrainis who have been :��It is now creeping close to 1,000 in a country with an indigenous population of 650,000. To put that figure in context, were the same policy applied to the UK, one million Britons would be made stateless.

You could reflect the views of those who did vote but did so in a mood of quiet despair: “The opposition is crushed, the democratic process is being rolled back, it’s business as usual,” was how one person put it. Or you could note the views of someone who chose not to turn out: “After everything that has happened to us, I did not feel that I wanted to vote.” The despair is palpable.

Before the election, the outgoing speaker had issued a threat that those who did not vote could see their housing opportunities affected or access to early retirement benefits denied through the passage of a law forcing all eligible voters to cast a ballot.��According to the justice minister no such law was being considered, but it took him a week to make that statement. And in a country where so many have been arbitrarily detained and otherwise abused by the state and its security forces, the threat continues to hang in the air, even after his belated denial.

Implied Threats

On social media a campaign was run suggesting that those who failed to vote were complicit with Iran. It is a longstanding claim of the regime that anyone who calls for democratic reform or criticises the ruling al-Khalifa family is serving the interests of Teheran. Voters were required to bring their passports, which were stamped opposite the photo page you need to show immigration officers when you are leaving and entering the country. Bahrainis who are deemed critics of the regime may be refused permission to travel, and it often happens only after arrival at the airport. A passport without the voting stamp could be enough to prevent a traveler from boarding a flight.

It was subtle and nuanced — a managed language of veiled and implied threats. But that alone does not explain the high turnout.��Voters who had previously supported Al Wefaq ignored the boycott call. As one put it, “there is respect for Wefaq but the times have changed.” Put simply, Al Wefaq has lost the street. The Bahrainis who in their tens of thousands took over Manama’s Pearl Roundabout in 2011 to call for peaceful reform no longer believe that meaningful change is possible. After nearly eight years of draconian repression and political and economic stagnation, they have lost hope.

In the short to medium term the regime has prevailed. It has satisfied its Western allies and solidified its grip on power through the mechanism of a highly controlled parliamentary election. While doing so, the ruling family has made no concessions to its critics. The hardliners within the family, including the justice minister, remain in the ascendancy. But it is hard to see how in his words Bahrain is “living a new chapter.” For many Bahrainis, repression is nothing new, and it remains a dark and troubling story.

*[This article was originally published by .]

��The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Two years and counting into the radical transformation of the Saudi economy known as Vision 2030, a key component of the strategy — to empower the private sector and significantly reduce unemployment — remains stalled. Figures recently released by the government show the unemployment rate remaining at 12.9%, a stubbornly high and alarming number given that roughly 60% of the population is under 30. Youth unemployment is running at 25%, and the so-called youth bulge continues to grow exponentially.

Most of the new employment that Vision 2030 is supposed to create needs to come from the private sector. The government has called for the��creation of by 2022. Yet the private sector, intended to be the source for those jobs, is struggling in a��. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are the most likely place to find new jobs for young Saudis. And the government has aggressively pursued Saudization policies in, for example, the retail sector, but the plan has hit a major snag: Many young Saudis do not want to work for the wages that are on offer. Jobs in the government sector pay better and have much more attractive benefits. They are also less demanding.

Making a difficult situation worse, after decades of relying on foreign workers, a major push is on to drive down the number of foreigners working in the kingdom. The expat workforce has shrunk by����since 2017 and continues to fall rapidly. That has had an adverse impact on consumer spending, particularly for SMEs that are being asked to create jobs for Saudis even as they see their income shrinking. At the same time, SMEs are being required to let go of the foreign workers who make up 80% of their workforce.

There are solutions available to address the problem, but none of them come without significant costs at a time when the government is striving to reduce its public spending deficit. One suggestion, examined by the International Monetary Fund, is to explore wage subsidies to private firms to bring salaries more in line with the public sector. Another approach would be to provide unemployment insurance, or — and this is the easiest but also the most expensive option — put young Saudis into government jobs.

Creating more jobs in government is a trap that previous Saudi economic plans have consistently fallen into. It also runs against the grain of Vision 2030, which sees a downsizing of the public sector as a core component of activating and energizing the private sector. But faced with high unemployment, jobs in the public sector may wind up being the default response, in part because another area where delivery is stalling is education. The government has talked a good deal about retooling the education system to make it fit for purpose, but it has yet to walk the talk.

There is an urgent need for vocational skills training and for a focus on scientific and technical skills. It has long been acknowledged that despite massive spending, the Saudi education system continues to produce very poor results by international standards. Both the quality of teaching and the curriculum fall below the bar necessary to provide young Saudis with the skill sets to deliver Vision 2030.

There is still time, and certainly there is the financial clout — the rise in oil prices has enabled the government to����by more than 60% — to sort out the malaise that Vision 2030 is slipping into. But it requires more than just��a ��of the wildly optimistic targets first trumpeted back in 2016. It needs thoughtful and pragmatic leadership and that would seem to be in short supply in Riyadh.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the driving force behind Vision 2030, has shown a predilection for grandiose projects such as��NEOM, the $500-billion city to be built in the north of the country and driven by artificial intelligence. He remains����in the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and many foreign investors are concerned about the lack of judgment he has shown in a number of situations from the war in Yemen to the blockade of Qatar and the����of senior businessmen and leading members of the ruling family in November of last year. A focus on domestic issues, especially job creation for young Saudis, lacks the sort of pizazz that the young crown prince craves, but it is precisely on how he handles such bread-and-butter issues that his legitimacy to lead the country rests.

*[This article was originally published by .]

��The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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My thoughts are with Hatice Cengiz and Jamal Khashoggi’s family at this very painful time.

The job of journalists is to ask questions, to speak truth to power, to question authority. This has always been a very difficult struggle in the Gulf and wider Middle East, but this is what Jamal Khashoggi was committed to. He believed with great courage and passion that the way to achieve a better place for his country and society was to strive for an independent and free media. He was a pragmatist who understood well the limits of just how far he could push that narrative on, but he never, ever gave up pushing.

He was a brave and dedicated journalist and a warm and funny man.

The murder of Jamal Khashoggi does tremendous damage to the struggle to create a free and independent media in the Gulf and Arab worlds. It has already suffered so many grievous setbacks. To name but one, the Bahraini news site Al Wasat, the only truly independent voice in the Gulf, was shuttered by the authorities in the summer of 2017 with scarcely a murmur here in the West.

In 2011, , Al Wasat’s co-founder, was beaten to death in detention by the police when he went to complain about his house being bulldozed. How quickly Karim’s fate was forgotten. In 2017 the UAE sentenced a Jordanian journalist Tayseer Al Najjar to three years in jail and a huge fine for “insulting the symbols of the state.” In January of this year, was sentenced in absentia by a military court for insulting the armed forces. How discouraging is that given the relative level of freedom the media enjoys in Lebanon?

Under the guise of security, open criticism and free media are being inexorably crushed. A friend of mine in the region said it is as if the walls are closing in: “We cannot breathe.” It has become a grim narrative arc, one that began with modest gains and hope for a freer media environment in the early part of this century but — especially after 2011 and the events of what has been called the Arab Spring — spirals downward to the appalling murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

It is telling that a chief demand of the Saudis and the Emiratis when they launched their land, air and sea blockade of Qatar last June, joined by the Egyptians and the Bahrainis, was the shuttering of Al Jazeera. The news network is not without its faults, but thank goodness that Qatar has withstood the siege — even Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, has had to acknowledge that — and Al Jazeera remains safe.

Nonetheless, we are at a very low point for journalism in the Gulf and the wider Middle East. In my nearly 20 years of covering the region, I can think of no time when the struggle for free media has been so grievously wounded and so seriously set back.

The killing of Jamal Khashoggi — especially if the man I and many others believe is responsible for his death, MBS — is allowed to get away with it, as I fear now seems the case, his killing will only empower further atrocities and reprisals. The tame media will reflect the views and attitudes of the ruling families. Those journalists who want to ask questions dare not.

And silence will not be an option. Those who stay silent because they cannot stomach parroting lies will be seen as traitors or, as the president of the United States calls honest journalists, “enemies of the people.” In Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain the media are the slaves of their masters. It is a new form of Stalinism —  Gulf Stalinism — whereby the media become the mouthpiece of the rulers.

For the sake of my murdered colleague, I do not want to end on a note of pessimism, because to do so would be to acknowledge his death was in vain. It was not. What he believed in, what he stood for and wrote about, and what he died for is the way forward. The Gulf and its citizens and those throughout the Middle East will only realize their full potential in a society where a free media flourishes. That is what Jamal passionately believed. And he was right. Jamal is a martyr to that noble cause.

Dictators and their lies do not endure. Speaking truth to power, even with all the terrible consequences it entails for journalists, ultimately brings their lies crashing down around them.

Thank you, Jamal, for your great and courageous journalism, your dedication, your commitment, your humor and your kindness. Know that you will not be forgotten, and that your death is not in vain. In your name the cause of free media in the Gulf and wider Middle East will carry on. Its victory will be your lasting legacy.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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There is a link between the disappearance and murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the terrible war in Yemen that, after more than three years, continues to grind on relentlessly. The link is the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

When MBS, as he is known, decided to launch a war against Yemen’s rebel Houthis together with the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, he assumed that with massive air power he could bomb the Houthis into submission within a few weeks. A quick win would burnish his reputation as a warrior prince in the mold of his grandfather, the great Ibn Saud, founder of the modern kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

More than three years on — with over 10,000 civilian casualties, many of them caused by indiscriminate bombings, infrastructure destroyed, families shattered and the country on the cusp of the world’s worst humanitarian disaster — MBS persists in his aerial campaign. It was a heinous and fundamental misjudgement, but this arrogant young man, still only 33, refuses to admit his blunder. And the Yemeni people continue to pay an appalling price, attacked on the ground by the Houthis, caught in the splintering of rival militant factions, bombed in the air by the Saudi coalition — with weaponry sold to the Saudis by Britain and America.

Were this to be one error of judgement, it would more than suffice to condemn MBS. But the world, seemingly mesmerized by a cleverly spun narrative that he is a visionary modernizer, has chosen largely to allow him a free hand in Yemen.

No Bounds

When MBS pushed aside his rivals to the throne — Mohammed bin Nayef, the once powerful interior minister, and Miteb bin Abdullah, the head of the Saudi National Guard in 2017 — his ambition knew no bounds. Encouraged by US President Donald Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner (with whom MBS had formed a very close bond), the crown prince launched into a wave of reckless and ill-thought-through actions.

In June of 2017, he and Mohammed bin Zayed declared a land, air and sea blockade of fellow Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member Qatar. Again, the assumption was that the Qataris would surrender in quick order. Instead they stood their ground, using friendly relations with Turkey and Iran, their own vast hydro-carbon wealth, as well the initially laggard but ultimately crucial support of the United States to weather the assault. Today the dispute goes on and the GCC is ruptured. Iran — the avowed enemy of MBS’s quest to seize the mantle of hegemonic regional ruler — has, without so much as lifting a finger, emerged as the only clear winner.

In September of last year, MBS began a roundup of moderate religious leaders, including Salman al-Awdah, now facing the death penalty. He arrested young online activists and bloggers, most of whom had offered only mild and temperate criticism. It was another blunder, because these are precisely the people who would have helped him to realize his radical and revolutionary transformation of the Saudi economy and society — Vision 2030.

Announced to great fanfare in 2016, Vision 2030 is intended to wean the kingdom off its oil dependency and to invigorate the private sector by, amongst other measures, creating opportunities for women — all laudable goals and ones that Jamal Khashoggi supported. But Khashoggi, sensing he was next on the list to be taken, left the country in September of last year and took up his journalistic mission at The Washington Post. There he continued his trademark of writing journalism that was thoughtful, balanced and constructive. And while he became a harsher critic of MBS as the crown prince reinforced a campaign of fear and repression inside the kingdom, he never lost faith that Vision 2030 had within it the potential to achieve great and good change.

Blunder after Blunder

Mohammed bin Salman’s next gambit was to round up over 200 leading businessmen and senior members of the ruling family. They were held at the five-star Ritz Carlton Hotel in Riyadh. At about the same time, the Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, effectively held prisoner in Riyadh, appeared on Saudi television looking haggard and drawn to announce he was resigning. Hariri was saved by the intervention of the French President Emmanuel Macron and ultimately returned to Beirut, where he promptly withdrew his resignation. The prisoners of the Ritz Carlton were not so fortunate. In order to secure their release they were forced to turn over most of their assets to the government. It was a classic, mafia-style shakedown.

However, these were individuals with close ties to Western business, exactly the sort of people you would want at your side as you pitched for foreign investment to power forward Vision 2030. Instead they were cowed and humiliated, their passports, as well as their businesses, taken away.

MBS garnered huge international acclaim by allowing women to drive. He then began to arrest the women who had led the campaign because he did not want to give the impression that women were in any meaningful way gaining power in the kingdom. That would have threatened him.

When, in the summer of 2018, the Canadian foreign minister decried the arrest of Samar Badawi, the sister of the jailed blogger Raif Badawi, the Saudis reacted with fury, sending the Canadian ambassador home, recalling theirs and pulling thousands of Saudi students out of Canadian universities. A bemused world watched and said little. Donald Trump’s spokesperson said America was not going to take sides. The Canadians, to their credit, stood their ground and reiterated their support for fundamental human rights.

When in late August the Saudis announced they were shelving the IPO of Saudi Aramco, it was a belated acknowledgement of what had long been suspected. Selling off shares in the world’s largest energy company would require the sort of transparency that the Saudis simply could not provide. The ultimate boss of Saudi Aramco, a company supposedly independent of the ruling family, is Mohammed bin Salman.

Yet even with all these unforced errors and strategic blunders MBS, aided and abetted by the Trump administration, was still able to project a modernizer image. He was looking forward to another glittering Riyadh conference, the so-called Davos in the Desert — the second annual Future Investments Initiative; the first one took place just ahead of last’s year’s Ritz Carlton arrests had been an enormous success.

And then came the disappearance and brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Finally the world recoiled in horror. Major sponsors, powerful politicians and corporate leaders have pulled out of Davos in the Desert. It is a political and financial catastrophe for MBS and a personal humiliation.

I began this column by writing of the link between Yemen and Khashoggi’s killing. His death has galvanized governments on both sides of the Atlantic. Finally serious questions are being asked about British and American involvement in that war. Jamal Khashoggi, whom I first met in 2002, was a kind and gentle man, a brave journalist and a great Saudi patriot who loved his country deeply. Would that his murder helps bring an end to this awful Yemen conflict and thereby helps make some sense out of his awful and senseless death.

*[This article was originally published by .]

 The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Can the Murder of Jamal Khashoggi Help Bring an End to the War in Yemen? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Turkish authorities say they have examined CCTV footage, and there is that Khashoggi did leave the consulate. They insist he is still inside, and, if that is the case, then he is being held against his will. The fear is that he may have already been spirited out of the country and flown to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have form for such shenanigans: In the past two years, three princes, members of the ruling House of Saud, have disappeared from European cities and turned up in Riyadh, victims of state-organized kidnappings.

Jamal Khashoggi has a long career as a distinguished journalist. In 2003, he was appointed editor-in-chief of the leading Saudi newspaper Al Watan. The job didn’t last long. Barely two months in, he was sacked for publishing articles critical of the conservative religious elite. His subsequent career followed the same trajectory. He is a brilliant journalist with a fiercely independent mind but with a wily pragmatism to know just how close to the red lines he could go. He returned to Al Watan in 2007 and managed to remain at its helm for three years. His general strategy was to survive in his post until an article that was just a tad too critical got him into trouble. Then he would lie low before re-emerging. That takes a great deal of courage, especially in a country like Saudi Arabia.

In 2010, Saudi business magnate  asked Khashoggi to head his new media project, Al-Arab News Channel. It was envisioned as an independent, privately-funded Arabic news broadcaster, designed to offer objective, agenda-free coverage of current events in the region. Five years later it was finally launched in Bahrain’s capital Manama, but was almost after airing an interview with a Bahraini opposition leader.

In September of 2017, Khashoggi, with other colleagues, left the Saudi Arabia in the midst of a wave of arrests of clerics, academics and human rights activists. Amongst those arrested, and now facing charges that could lead to the death penalty, is the moderate cleric .

Radical Transformation

The Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS as he is known, has embarked on a radical transformation of the Saudi economy and society called . Its intention is to wean the kingdom off oil dependency while at the same time creating a vibrant private sector with a diversified economy. And while Vision 2030 talks a good deal about transparency and fulfilling the wishes of the people, in reality the model that MBS likes best is China’s, with its command economy controlled by an elite shaping a society where criticism is fiercely repressed.

Mohammed bin Salman followed up on the September 2017 arrests with what was called a campaign against corruption. Over 200 leading businessmen, including Waleed bin Talal, as well as senior members of the ruling family, were detained in a in November of last year. They were held at Riyadh’s five-star Ritz-Carlton Hotel and only released after agreeing to turn over the bulk of their assets and control of their companies to the government. Though the authorities claimed due process was followed, it was, in fact, a classic shakedown.

MBS had generated favorable global headlines with his decision to allow women to drive. However as the deadline approached in June of this year, he proceeded to activists who had campaigned for their rights. The message was clear: It wasn’t the pressure of activists that led to the decision, it was only the generosity of the crown prince that enabled the only women in the world banned from driving to finally be allowed to get behind the wheel.

Further arrests followed, including that of Samar Badawi, the sister of the jailed blogger Raif Badawi. Raif’s wife had fled to Canada with their children in 2012, and they are now Canadian citizens. When the government of Canada protested Samar’s arrest, as well as that of other women activists, the . Claiming infringement on their sovereignty, they recalled their ambassador, gave his Canadian counterpart 24 hours to get out of Riyadh and froze all new business and investment deals. Thousands of Saudi students studying at Canadian universities were ordered to come home.

In September, in a move with eerie and disturbing echoes of Stalinism, : “Producing and distributing content that ridicules, mocks, provokes and disrupts public order, religious values and public morals through social media … will be considered a cybercrime punishable by a maximum of five years in prison and a fine of three million riyals ($800,000),” the kingdom’s public prosecution announced in a tweet.

And now Jamal Khashoggi has disappeared. In for The Washington Post after leaving the kingdom, he had written: “My friends and I living abroad feel helpless. We want our country to thrive and to see the 2030 Vision realized. We are not opposed to our government and care deeply about Saudi Arabia. It is the only home we know or want. Yet we are the enemy.”

Repression Deepens

Indeed as Vision 2030 shows signs of faltering, repression deepens. One of the ironies of the Mohammed bin Salman regime — and for those affected, it is a cruel one — is that individuals who were supportive of the vision very quickly fell under the suspicious gaze of this impetuous young man who started to see enemies everywhere.

The message that the young crown prince strives to impart in the West, at least, is that the kingdom is open for business; that it has returned to moderate Islam; allowed movie theaters to open; that it displays progressive thinking by, for example, granting women the right to drive; but arrests the women activists who campaigned for that right. The disconnect between many of the good economic reforms MBS wants to secure and the way he is using his power to crush dissent grows ever wider by the day. And it begs the question, What is he afraid of?

Was he worried that women campaigners, by seeking more rights, would undermine his authority? Did he think that Salman al-Awdah, with his 14 million Twitter followers, would seek to turn them against him? Did he fear that a fearless journalist writing for an influential Washington publication would weaken his standing in DC?

All of these people supported Vision 2030. They could have been his allies as he launched this bold and necessary project to transform the country. Instead, as Jamal Khashoggi wrote, he treated them as if they were the enemy. These are the anxieties not of a powerful leader, but of a man who is, in point of fact, displaying grave weakness.

I fear for Jamal Khashoggi, who went to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in good faith. He is a good man and a fine journalist. His is a voice of reasoned criticism and wise comment that the Saudi crown prince should listen to. The thought that he might be forcibly repatriated back to the kingdom to face charges that could lead to a long prison sentence, or worse, fills me with dread. So I hope that good sense and common decency will prevail and he will be allowed to leave.

*[Note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Jamal Khashoggi had entered the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul. Portions of this article first appeared on .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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When then-deputy crown prince and now crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS as he is known,�� in early 2016��that he believed it was “in the interest of the Saudi market and in the interest of [Saudi] Aramco” to sell shares in the world’s largest energy company, he caught senior Aramco executives and market analysts and observers off guard.

The idea that a portion of the ruling al-Saud family’s crown jewel and main source of its vast wealth would be sold off in an initial public offering (IPO) immediately raised questions. Though Saudi Aramco ostensibly operates as a company separate from the al-Saud family, it remains in many ways an opaque concern. For an IPO to work much more transparency would be required, a point that MBS seemed to embrace, opining that, were it to happen, “[the IPO] is for the interest of more transparency, and to counter corruption, if any, that may be circling around Aramco.”

By April 2016, just ahead of the release of Vision 2030, the ambitious reshaping of the Saudi economy, with its concomitant reordering of the kingdom’s social norms and values, ��to those earlier musings. In valuing the company at $2 trillion, a figure that many in the energy sector thought wildly optimistic, and selling off some 5%, he reckoned that $100 billion would be raised for the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund (PIF).

The fund is designed to be the engine room driving forward the economic diversification that is supposed to wean the country off its oil dependency. As MBS put it, “within 20 years we will be an economy or state that doesn’t depend mainly on oil, whether from profits of the PIF or other sources of income.” (A bold claim but one MBS was comfortable making as, in his capacity as president of the all-powerful Council of Economic and Development Affairs, he directly controls the PIF.)

Overly Optimistic

In 2016, MBS said he was “trying to push for (the IPO) to be in 2017.” That, rather like his valuation of Aramco, has proved to be overly optimistic. Nonetheless, at the time, major banks including JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley rushed to manage the sale of shares, while the leading global stock markets, London and New York, vied to hold the IPO and gain the Aramco listing.

But ��when legal experts pointed out that should the New York Stock Exchange win Aramco, the Saudi government would be open to claims from victims of the 9/11 terror attack via the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens, including the leader, Mohammed Atta. In March 2017, a class action suit was filed on behalf of 1,500 injured survivors and 850 family members of murdered victims. The����that Saudi Arabia “knowingly provided material support and resources to the al Qaeda terrorist organization and facilitated the September 11th attacks.”

And concern mounted when, in November 2017, MBS arrested hundreds of senior businessmen and ruling family members on vague charges of corruption. They were released only after agreeing to turn most of their assets over to the government. Many of those arrested, like Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, had significant ties to Western investors.

The IPO faced a different challenge in London where the stock exchange had drawn criticism for its willingness to����on transparency in order to secure the Aramco listing. By then, the Saudis had already pushed back the IPO but continued to insist it would��happen in . It was not to be. On August 22 of this year the government announced it was suspending the sale of shares.

That left the PIF looking a little bare in the cupboard, especially after MBS had committed the fund to massive undertakings such as a new city in the north of the country, NEOM, incorporating the latest developments in artificial intelligence. The price tag for constructing NEOM is $500 billion. Other investments he has agreed to include $45 billion to a technology fund run by Masayoshi Son’s Softbank and $20 billion invested in a US infrastructure fund run by Blackstone Group LP.

The Missing Billions

So where to find that missing $100 billion? Quick as pulling a rabbit out of a hat, Aramco announced it was exploring the�� of the 70% stake��the PIF holds in the Saudi petrochemical firm SABIC. That could raise an estimated $70 billion for the fund. All very neat and tidy — too neat, critics may suggest, as it underlines both the lack of transparency and the absolute control that one individual, MBS, has over a sector that is supposedly independent of the government. That too has scared off potential investors.

The postponement of the IPO and the SABIC buy-out do not come without a cost. As����notes in a comment released on September 3, “economic diversification will either be scaled back or financed by higher direct or indirect public sector debt issuance.” The Aramco takeover of SABIC, Moody’s notes, will have to be financed largely with debt. It adds “significant reliance on debt issued by government-related entities will increase contingent liability and eventually exert negative pressure on Saudi Arabia’s credit profile.”

Mohammed bin Salman has been hailed in the West as a moderate and a reformer, a leader with whom the world can do business. But that reputation has suffered significant damage from the ongoing war in Yemen, from the sweeping arrests of women activists, businessmen and clerics, and from the continuing feud with fellow Gulf Cooperation Council member Qatar.

Critics wonder too about his handling of the PIF. Having inherited two huge white elephants, the��, sitting virtually empty on the Red Sea north of Jeddah, and the����outside the capital, does the country really need NEOM — yet another grandiose project with an enormous price tag?

��about the ease with which, in a meeting with MBS, he secured the $45 billion for his Softbank Fund: “I got $45bn in 45 minutes, that’s $1bn per minute.” Not exactly due diligence from MBS, a man who behaves like an autocratic CEO hell-bent on a fast track rebranding of his company. But Saudi Arabia is not a company — it is a country, and a conservative one at that. That’s a simple fact Mohammed bin Salman in his impatient quest for greatness would do well to note.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

*[This article was originally published by . Updated: September 26, 2018.]

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On June 6 in Jeddah, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and his Abu Dhabi counterpart, Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ), convened the first meeting of the Saudi-Emirati Coordination Council. Abu Dhabi is one of seven emirates that together make up the United Arab Emirates. While Dubai is seen as the financial hub and Sharjah something of a cultural center, Abu Dhabi is the political and military heart of the UAE.

Mohammed bin Salman, 25 years the junior of Mohammed bin Zayed, has a close working partnership with the older man. Together they launched the war in Yemen in March 2015 in response to an offensive by Houthi rebels that threatened to overrun the South Yemeni port city of Aden. That war continues with more than 10,000 civilian deaths — many of them caused by a Saudi-led aerial bombing campaign — and millions facing starvation in what is the Arab world’s poorest nation.

In June 2017, the UAE and Saudi Arabia collaborated in a land, sea and air blockade of��Qatar, a fellow Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member. The justification for the blockade (which was joined by Bahrain and Egypt) was a fake news story that was planted in local, regional and international media outlets. According to the story, Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, had praised Iran and Hamas while overseeing a military ceremony.

It was quickly and independently established that the����of the fake story was the UAE and, more precisely, Abu Dhabi. But the damage had already been done. Qatari nationals had been given just two weeks to leave the blockading countries. Families were broken up. Businesses, including the offices of Qatar Airways, were padlocked. For 48 hours, supermarket shelves were empty, but thanks to prompt intervention from Turkey and Iran, and a healthy Qatari sovereign wealth fund, any food shortages were quickly averted.

A year on, the blockade continues, but Qatar remains both resilient and defiant. The four blockading nations, the so-called quartet, have had no significant diplomatic or political support for an action that has ruptured the GCC. Even US President Donald Trump, who had initially tweeted his delight at the blockade, has long since abandoned the pretense that the action, led by MBZ and MBS, is worthy of any support from his administration.

Strategic Choice

And yet the feud, like the war in Yemen, goes on with no apparent end in sight. Now with the launching of the Saudi-Emirati Coordination Council, the two crown princes have signaled that the GCC is no longer a relevant or useful vehicle to advance their interests. Or as MBZ put it, using his��, “Our alliance with KSA [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia] is a strategic choice that increases our strength and provides both countries with a promising future.”

Both men share with President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a deep animosity toward Iran. So it is not surprising that talks have been going on behind the scenes not only with key players in the Trump administration, but also with the Israelis. As Adam Entous��, MBZ has for many years quietly but assiduously pursued links with the Israelis.

The election of Donald Trump gave him an unexpected opportunity to further his efforts in building an alliance of the willing against Iran. In December 2016, without consulting the Obama administration in what was a clear breach of protocol, MBZ met in New York with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, key advisor Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn, who was to become for a very short time Trump’s national security adviser until he was forced to resign for lying about his contacts with Russian authorities.

As Entous recounts, the purpose of the meeting was to confirm that the Abu Dhabi crown prince and his young Saudi friend were ready, willing and able to do their part to challenge Iran. He writes that “M.B.Z. wanted Trump’s advisers to know that he and his counterpart in Saudi Arabia, M.B.S., were committed to working with the new Administration to roll back Iran’s influence. Participants in the meeting said that M.B.Z.’s message — that Iran was the problem, not Israel — coincided with Netanyahu’s view.”

Rolling back Iranian influence does not come without its challenges. Dubai, in particular, has a long and mutually beneficial economic relationship with Iran. The��UAE accounts��for most of the , and in 2016, for example, the Emirates alone accounted for more than 60% of imports from Iran. It is a market that totals $23.7 billion, making Iran the UAE’s largest non-oil trading partner. Most of that business goes through Dubai, which has become the link for other nations to get around sanctions and do business with Iran. Enforcing Trump’s sanction plans to the full degree that the Americans are currently demanding would have a seriously negative impact on Dubai’s economy.

Equally, Dubai’s reputation as an open and tolerant business hub not concerned with foreign military adventures has suffered damage as the conflict in Yemen grinds on. Even so, Dubai’s emir, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, has had little choice but to go along with Abu Dhabi’s war in Yemen. It is abundantly clear that MBZ, as the deputy supreme commander of the armed forces, is calling the shots in the country’s muscular and aggressive foreign policy initiatives.

As part of that initiative, in the past three years, the , in the port cities of Assab in Eritrea, Somali’s capital Mogadishu and Berbera in Somaliland. Ports for both trading and militarily strategic purposes are high on MBZ’s the agenda. Indeed, the UAE entered the Yemen War with a����of securing Aden while supporting a secessionist movement that would see the rebirth of South Yemen as a nation that would fall within the Emirati sphere of influence.

Saudi End Game

Far less clear is the end game for the Saudis. MBS went into the war with the mistaken assumption that it would be over quickly, within a matter of weeks. Having won a great victory, he would thus����as a warrior leader in the mold of his grandfather, ibn Saud, the founder of the modern-day kingdom. As events proved, the Houthis have thus far proved more than worthy opponents to that vaunted ambition.

Unlike the Emiratis who have committed ground forces in the south, the Saudis, due largely to the poor quality of their army, have settled for a bombing campaign that has pulverized the country. It is they, not the Emiratis, who are receiving international condemnation, even though the UAE has carried out numerous and well-documented����in those areas of Yemen under their control.

It is the Saudis too who are under fire for accepting an American-driven initiative that wants the Palestinians to take whatever deal they are offered. That would include accepting Jerusalem as the undivided capital of the Jewish state, denying the right of return, and legitimizing and incorporating West Bank settlements into a greater Israel. It is a deal that has been cobbled together by Kushner with the support of wealthy pro-settlement American Jews, and it is one that almost completely ignores the rights of the Palestinians.

The muted response of the Saudi media, which is tightly controlled by the regime, to the Trump declaration on Jerusalem confirmed for Palestinians and their supporters that the Saudis had crossed the street to the American side. And even though the Emiratis are arguably even more deeply engaged with the Trump administration, it is the Saudis who are seen as having abandoned Palestine.

It is a measure of how well the Abu Dhabi crown prince has gauged his colleague: a young man in a hurry with a very big ego who loves playing center stage. On the other hand, MBZ much prefers to work assiduously behind the scenes. In granting Mohammed bin Salman the stage, he has cleverly avoided most of the international criticism that has found its way to the doorstep of the Saudi crown prince.

As the UAE continues to grow its footprint in Yemen and the Horn of Africa, MBS risks being outflanked as he wrestles with economic challenges at home. He has launched a hugely ambitious economic and social revolution titled Vision 2030. Elements of the plan, such as opening the country to tourism and entertainment, are modeled in many ways on what the Emiratis have already accomplished.

But it is a fact that the Emiratis got there first. And while it is true MBS has consolidated power in a manner unprecedented in the kingdom, the challenges he faces from within his own ruling family, from the religious elite and the citizens of a very conservative country are far larger than anything that Dubai and Abu Dhabi faced as they built their two city states into regional powerhouses.

For now, MBZ is happy to play the director allowing his young star the limelight. However, in one of his tweets about the Saudi-Emirati Coordination Council, he may have inadvertently shown his true hand and the depth of his own ambition. He wrote that “the UAE and KSA are forever joined by a strong alliance characterized by deep historical ties and a common destiny.” Citing 44 projects and joint agreements, he described the relationship as “a model alliance” and the council as a “quantum leap.”

One wonders if there will come a moment when MBS reflects that in the most significant of those joint projects — Yemen, the Qatar feud, Palestine and the Horn of Africa — it is he who is paying the higher price and who is being played. What then for the quantum leap?

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The warning signs are��clear��and unmistakable: The and its economy is tumbling into crisis. The country’s bond ratings are listed as��. Its����as a percentage of GDP stands at 94.9%, nearly four times the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) average. The����has warned that the time is past due for a comprehensive plan to deal with the spiraling debt burden. And Bahrain’s chief benefactors, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait��have ��on delivering a comprehensive bailout package until the authorities in Manama can articulate an effective approach to dealing with the economic crisis.

Compounding the challenges facing the kingdom is a political impasse that has persisted for more than seven years. Unique to the Gulf, Bahrain has a Shia Muslim majority ruled for more than two centuries by the Sunni al-Khalifa family. Shia Bahrainis have long complained of discrimination at the hands of the monarchy.

In February 2011, more than 100,000 peaceful protesters — in a country with an indigenous population of a little more than 650,000 — took to the streets and called for democratic reform. Hardliners within the ruling family saw this as a major threat; they had in their minds the role that popular protests had already played in the toppling of dictators in North Africa. Demonstrations in the capital were crushed with lethal force.

In protest, Al-Wefaq, the Shia political bloc in parliament, withdrew its 18 sitting members and in July 2011 pulled out of reconciliation talks altogether. Despite government promises of reform, repression was the order of the day; thousands were arrested, dozens were killed and hundreds more were injured.

As the government crackdown continued, Al-Wefaq responded with a boycott of the 2014 parliamentary elections. The government retaliated by jailing its leader, Shaikh Ali Salman, in 2015. He was����to four years in prison for “inciting hatred, promoting disobedience and insulting public institutions.” In 2016, Al-Wefaq and another political society, Waad, were�� by the government.

Trust Deficit

There can be no question that the stalemate has severely damaged Bahrain’s economy. It has eroded the many advantages that Bahrain had: a transparent and well-regulated banking system that was attractive to foreign investors; a well-educated youth population committed to an ethos of hard work; a reasonably vibrant private sector; and a society that in contrast to its nearest neighbor, Saudi Arabia, was relaxed and relatively tolerant, including, as it did,��Al-Wasat, an independent news site, something unique in the Gulf.

Today the country is divided deeply along sectarian lines. The majority Shia find themselves living in what amounts to a police state. The ruling family is split between hardliners who want to continue the policy of harsh repression and moderates who see the damage that the impasse has wrought. The trust deficit is huge.

If one accepts that the current situation is unsustainable and unacceptable — and the vast majority of Bahrainis do — and there is acknowledgement that, without a change of direction, the economy will continue in a downward trajectory, then it can be argued that the time is ripe for a move toward common ground that will lead to reconciliation.

The parliamentary elections slated for later this year present an opportunity for that process to begin, but huge obstacles remain in place. The government, at the behest of hardliners, has����members of banned political societies the opportunity to run in the election. Al-Wefaq remains divided over whether or not, even if it was allowed to field candidates, it would actually do so.

Both sides need to bend a little: the government by dropping its ban that is denying many moderates the opportunity to serve their country at a time of crisis, and the opposition by removing its boycott in order to secure a better deal for the citizens it represents. And, of course, the Shia community which has suffered enormously at the hands of the regime, would need to be persuaded that those among them who chose to run for public office are not betraying the community by doing so. The community would need to make a leap of faith that only its leaders can encourage and support it to take. That task would be made less daunting if the government was to begin the release of political prisoners from Jau Prison, where over 3,000 are currently being held.

Hardliners Have Failed

Granted, Bahrain’s parliament has limited authority and as a result of gerrymandering the opposition does not have any chance of securing enough seats to form a majority. Even so, better in than out. The 2014 boycott gave the hardliners in the ruling family clear ground to argue that the opposition was to blame for the impasse. Emboldened by what amounted to a strategic blunder by those they consider the enemy, they proceeded to crack down even harder, jailing opposition leaders, banning political societies,����and using the courts, draconian anti-terror legislation and the removal of citizenship in a ruthless bid to crush all domestic opponents.

The hardliners have failed, though, and the failure has not gone unnoticed by the outside world. US Republican Congressman Randy Hultgren, co-chair of the influential Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, has����to “allow its people to organize and express themselves peacefully and according to their own conscience.” Furthermore, “Political repression of the Shia community and free speech advocates and bloggers will not lead to stability, but instead will foster the kind of extremism Bahrain claims to be fighting.”

Above all else, business seeks stability. The congressman makes a simple but utterly valid point — repression in Bahrain feeds instability. It is time for leaders in the Bahraini business community, as well as across the Sunni and Shia communities, to break the impasse and move forward. It is time for moderates in the ruling family to step out of the shadows. The journey toward common ground for reconciliation needs to start now.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Donald Trump’s foreign policy approach to the Middle East, such as it is, is a wild zigzag of a ride that is now being driven largely by his national security adviser, John Bolton. Bolton’s grand��idée fixe��is to effect regime change in Iran. In order to do that, he needs to capture the attention of a president who complains often and bitterly that America’s friends and allies never, ever do enough.

When Donald Trump peevishly asks why American soldiers remain in Syria while its Arab neighbors do next to nothing to assist in finishing off ISIS, John Bolton pops up with a ready answer by calling for the formation of an��. The force would consist of troops from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar — as well as Egypt and Jordan.

When Bolton floated the idea, he was either blissfully ignorant or wilfully malicious in suggesting Qatar be part of the force. The Qataris are engaged in a bitter feud with the Saudis, the Emiratis, Bahrain and Egypt — the so-called quartet — who have waged a land, air and sea blockade for more than a year. The feud, largely driven by the Emiratis and the Saudis, has plunged to new depths of absurdity with Saudi Arabia, among other things, pirating ��and threatening to dig a canal to turn the country, which juts like a thumb off the Arabian Peninsula,��into an .

Meanwhile, Egypt has more than enough of its own brutal insurgency to cope with in the North Sinai with ISIS affiliate Ansar Beit al-Maqdis. Even were the Americans to use the big stick of threatening to cut off aid to force Egypt on board, it is highly unlikely the Sisi government would comply. Though it may be more than five decades ago, Egyptians well remember an����that destroyed a large part of the army in what came to be called their country’s Vietnam.

Speaking of Yemen, Bolton’s army, for it to have any hope of success, would be largely reliant on the Emiratis and the Saudis. But they are embroiled in a three-year war that has brought huge misery to the people of the Middle East’s poorest country. The war remains largely stalemated, with Saudi Arabia in particular having precious little to show for its efforts, which include the destruction of essential infrastructure and the killing and maiming of thousands of civilians with an aerial bombing campaign that in its savagery has brought international condemnation down on the Saudis’ head.

The Emiratis, fondly referred to as��“”��by US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, may well be up for a further military adventure that would buttress their foreign policy ambitions, but Saudi Arabia, with an ongoing war on its southern border, would be well-advised to steer clear.

Jordan, for its part, finds itself deep in an����that has been exacerbated by the more than 1 million Syrian refugees that have flooded into the country. The last thing on King Abdullah’s mind, surely, is to join a campaign that would see a Sunni Arab army enter a country that is increasingly falling into the hands of the Alawite dictator Bashar al-Assad, backed as he is by Shia Iran and by Russia.

So Bolton’s Arab army is a fantasy woven out of ignorance and wishful thinking, one unlikely ever to see the light of day. Or will it? Given that he wants to overthrow the current regime in Tehran, a Sunni fighting force that found itself in Syria and in conflict with Hezbollah and soldiers from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps could be just the spark that triggers the war that Bolton is eager to pursue.

His dilemma is that it must be a war that the US contributes to but does not lead. Trump’s base is well fed up with American military interventions in places they do not care about and indeed may have only vaguely heard of. No American boots on the ground, then. Logistical support, leading from the rear and being in coalition with an aerial bombing campaign — that’s about as far as Trump can afford to go.

That is, however, well beyond where his defense secretary and the Pentagon are prepared to go. Mattis has been careful, noting, for example, that military options toward Iran remain viable and on the table, but steering well clear of the sort of inflammatory language that Bolton is prone to use.

The difficulty is that the defense secretary is an increasingly��. More than one year into his presidency, Trump no longer feels the need to surround himself with people who refuse to pander to him and to give him assurances of personal loyalty. Buoyed by what he sees as his success with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, Trump believes that, like trade wars, foreign policy is an easy win. He is surrounding himself with people who flatter his gargantuan and demanding ego and reassure him that yes, Kim Jong-un will dance to the tune you play, when all the����leads to the supposition that it is America that is likely to be doing the dancing.

It has been said of John Bolton that he��“.”��He knows how to play the game, how to play up to Trump and how to bully those around him to get to where he wants to go. Make no mistake about it, Bolton wants regime change. To get that, he wants America’s allies in the Middle East, one way or another, to go to war with Iran, and as of now he couldn’t be better placed to push for that goal to become a reality.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit:����/��

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Amidst the turmoil of Donald Trump’s White House, uncertainty reigns over what this most unpredictable, irascible and ignorant of presidents will do about the Iran nuclear deal. He is due to sign the next waiver on May 12.

If his comments about the last time he signed are any indication to go by, then it is unlikely that he will put his skyscraper of a signature on the latest waiver. On January 12, , “Today, I am waiving the application of certain nuclear sanctions, but only in order to secure our European allies’ agreement to fix the terrible flaws of the Iran nuclear deal,” adding, “This is a last chance.”

What Trump demanded — that Iranian missile programs be linked to the nuclear deal and “subject to severe sanctions” — is precisely the terms that Iran will emphatically reject. Will he then carry through on his threat to pull out of the deal?

Trying to anticipate anything that Trump will do, other than to acknowledge that on a daily basis he gets his and tweets impulsively and compulsively on what the news network’s hugely biased presenters have to say, is a bit of a fool’s game.

So, having said that, let me play the fool. Donald Trump is in the grip of the worst crisis his crisis-ridden administration has yet faced. Michael Cohen, his personal lawyer, had his offices, home and hotel room raided by the FBI on April 9 in relation to hush money paid by Cohen to a porn star, who has alleged that Trump had an affair with her. The details of that story and an allegation by another woman are not really important.

What is important, what counts and what damages Trump most is that Cohen is his self-described attack dog, his fixer, his consigliere. Or as the man himself , “I’m the guy who protects the president and the family. I’m the guy who would take a bullet for the president.”

Cohen added: “If somebody does something Mr Trump doesn’t like, I do everything in my power to resolve it to Mr Trump’s benefit. If you do something wrong, I’m going to come at you,��grab you by the neck, and I’m not going to let you go until I’m finished.”��Charming.

And now the fixer is himself in a spot of serious bother, which leaves Donald Trump very exposed. Because Michael Cohen, in order to avoid what could be a very long jail term, may just decide that he is, after all, not the guy to take the bullet. He may decide to cooperate with the Mueller investigation to, as they say, flip.

Trump’s threats to fire special investigator Robert Mueller, repeated in his rant after the raid on Cohen, shows just how rattled the president is. And, oh glory, it has finally stirred some Republicans out of their moral torpor. There is now serious talk within the GOP about passing legislation to protect Mueller and his investigation into Russian involvement in Trump’s campaign and in the presidential election. As senior Republican succinctly put in, “[To fire Mueller] would be suicide.” And not, one suspects, just for the president but for the party he so ineptly leads as it heads into November’s midterm election.

Meanwhile, Trump has stirred up a potential trade war with China, even as departures from his administration continue at an astonishing rate. And he is beset again with what to do about Syria. The launch of strikes on three alleged chemical weapons sites in April has done little to convince his critics, many of them his own , that he has any clear policy in place beyond wanting to pull American troops out.

Though he was successful in achieving some European buy in by bringing France and the UK on board, the raid itself appears to have achieved little. Indeed, some commentators have argued that it only served to . Trump’s promise to deliver hard retribution to the Syrian dictator has morphed into the now familiar exercise of : “Mission Accomplished.”

Neither France or the UK (nor Germany) wants to see America walk away from the Iran nuclear deal. So, it may be that they hoped to curry some favor, gain some political capital by joining Trump. If so they may be disappointed.

The president’s new national security advisor, John Bolton, detests both the Europeans and the Iranians, so he will lobby hard for Trump to make good on his threat to decertify the deal. But John Kelly, the man charged with trying to bring some semblance of order to Trump’s court of chaos, is a decorated general. He knows about fighting wars on multiple fronts. As he surveys the many fronts on which the president is assailed, Kelly’s may be the voice of quiet sanity that urges Trump to sign the waiver this time — with as much ill-grace as the president wants to display. The general will advise him to wait until the next opportunity to refuse to sign comes around in three months’ time. At which point, Kelly, if he is still around, may be inclined to let this petulant child of a president have his way.

By then, it is anybody’s guess where the crippled zeppelin that is the Trump administration will have drifted or whether, in fact, it will have simply gone down in a spectacular act of self-immolation brought about by the firing of Robert Mueller.

So, my prediction is that on May 12, Trump will, with boorish threats and grandiose rudeness, sign the waiver one more time.

*[An earlier version of this article was published by .]

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Notwithstanding the entrenched animosity between bitter rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran, it is possible that Iranian regional ambitions could be curbed using the Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA) as both a carrot and a stick. Were that to happen, and Saudi fears about Iranian hegemony abated, at least somewhat, a surprising amount of progress could be achieved on many fronts in 2018. The catalyst for this opportunity is the rolling series of protests that began in Iran’s second largest city Mashhad in late December 2017 and roiled the country for the better part of two weeks.

That the protests started in Mashhad and not in Tehran is of more than of passing interest. The city holds the burial site of one of Shia Islam’s most revered Imams, Reza, and is also home to Ibrahim Raisi, a hardline conservative cleric who ran against President Hassan Rouhani in the May 2017 presidential election. Though he suffered a considerable loss, Raisi polled nearly 16 million votes — 38% of those cast — and he remains a force to be reckoned with.

Some argue that the protests were initiated by Raisi’s supporters in Mashhad with the intention of targeting President Rouhani, but that things quickly slipped beyond their control. Young Iranians, frustrated by scarcity of jobs and angered by rising inflation caused by a tough austerity regimen, took to the streets in force. They denounced not only the government but also the religious elite and Ayatollah Khamenei himself.

The speed with which the protests spread across the country caught the authorities by surprise. It took several days, and the arrests of thousands, to quell the unrest. Predictably, the religious authorities and Ayatollah Khamenei blamed foreign elements, chiefly the Americans. The and labelled Donald Trump a “psychotic.” took a different tack. Speaking on January 7, he argued, “It would be a misrepresentation and also an insult to the Iranian people to say they only had economic demands. People had economic, political and social demands.” In doing so, he simultaneously acknowledged the complaints of the protesters while undercutting the hardliners: “People’s access should not permanently be restricted. We cannot be indifferent to people’s lives and business.”

Much of the anger that put protesters on the streets can be traced to the release of a draft budget on December 10, 2017. Though it called for funds devoted to job creation, it also laid bare the costs of and, even more significantly, the amount of money going to religious institutions. Ordinary Iranians bearing the brunt of austerity measures in a stagnant economy are aware of how corrupt many of those institutions have become. Seen from that perspective, the budget was a deft and calculated move by the president, one that was designed to draw fire toward his opponents.

For the time being, the hardliners are on the back foot, outmaneuvered by a skilled politician who well knows just how important the nuclear deal is to his political survival. That hard reality, coupled with the protests, presents a tactical opportunity for Washington and Riyadh. The question is, will they play it effectively?

It has been said that Donald Trump knows how to deal with bullies like Kim Jong-un with a : Ensure that you are the bigger bully. Certainly his approach with Iran thus far has been to play that game. But he also likes to play the game of keeping people guessing, be they friend or foe. President Trump, by continuing the sanctions waiver while still threatening to withdraw from the JCPOA, gives all sides breathing space without compromising any positions.

Both President Rouhani and the Saudis must direct funds away from costly military efforts. In Iran, the protests, which spread to some 80 cities, showed the depth of anger, particularly among young Iranians, who see that the removal of sanctions has failed to deliver promised economic benefits. The Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), in the throes of driving through the greatest economic transformation the kingdom has ever seen, has twice been forced to dip into the public purse, most recently on January 6. Cuts to subsidies and perks for public sector workers and the military have fueled deep resentment.

Wars drain state budgets, and the longer they go on the greater the cost. For the Iranians, it is largely the Syrian front. For the Saudis and MBS, it is the Yemen conflict. When the Saudis first launched their aerial campaign over Yemen, they anticipated a quick victory. Nearly three years later, the war is at a stalemate with the Yemeni people brutally caught between the Houthis on the ground and the Saudi coalition in the air. Syria too, after nearly seven years of vicious conflict, is similarly stalemated with horrific consequences for the civilian population.

The outcome of a stalemate can be either the continued quest for military superiority by one side over the other or an acceptance that there will be no victory and that a negotiated settlement is the only way out. The latter requires give and take and an understanding that bitter pills will have to be swallowed by both sides. For the Saudis (and the West) that means accepting that Bashar al-Assad will stay in power. For the Iranians it means abandoning their support of the Houthis and being required to accept a Yemen effectively divided between Saudi and Emirati spheres of influence in the north and south, respectively.

There is already a roadmap in place for the negotiated settlement scenario — Iraq. The to push back against undue Iranian influence. The Saudis for their part have used diplomacy and commercial agreements to encourage the process of weaning Baghdad away from Tehran.

But why would Iran accept what amounts to a blunting of its regional aspirations? That is where Trump comes in. To survive politically, Rouhani needs to show he is turning the country around economically. With rising unemployment and deepening poverty, he does not have much time to play with. An adroit and judicious use of the JCPOA as both carrot and stick, coupled with Trump’s mastery of keeping everyone guessing, creates space for Rouhani to deliver tangible economic gains to the Iranian people.

An Iran focussed on domestic issues will dial down Saudi anxiety over Iranian regional hegemony, as will an end to both the Syrian and Yemen wars. The two great regional powers embarking on economic transformation of their respective economies will benefit not just their own citizens but the wider region as well.

A pipe-dream scenario? Perhaps, but MBS, were he to learn lessons from the Yemen quagmire and other foreign policy adventures gone awry, could stake a serious claim to be the leader of the Arab world. Rouhani could strike a serious and perhaps lasting blow to his political foes. And though it is difficult to know from day to day, self-inflicted crisis upon self-inflicted crisis, what goes on in Trump’s mind, he is hungry for a big win. Helping to shape an end to two ruinous wars while stabilizing a region now riven with sectarian tension would give him that. To quote the president, “Now that would be some deal.”

*[This article was originally published by��, a of 51�Թ�.]

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In 2017, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) marked himself out as a Middle East leader to be reckoned with. The consolidation of his power was completed with two audacious maneuvers that saw the removal of the 32-year-old’s chief rivals to the throne currently held by his aged and debilitated father King Salman. In June,��he forced out��the minister of the interior, . Nayef not only lost the ministry, arguably the most powerful in the kingdom, but was also removed as crown prince, the title taken by the ruthlessly ambitious MBS.

Then, in November, in a��, MBS netted Miteb, a son of the late King Abdullah and head of the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG), along with dozens of other senior royals and leading businessmen. Miteb, in addition to losing SANG, . Others followed suit, but the billionaire businessman has thus far��refused��to buy his way out and is demanding his day in court to refute the corruption allegations. Still, at the end of 2017, Mohammed bin Salman stood alone as the effective ruler of a country he intends to recast in his own expansive image.

Vision 2030, the sweeping plan to revolutionize the Saudi economy by energizing the private sector, empowering women in the workforce and privatizing huge swathes of state-owned enterprises, including a 5% IPO for the world’s largest energy corporation, Saudi Aramco, is still in its early stages. But if MBS is able to deliver on promises like meaningful jobs and affordable housing, he will hold the support of young Saudis who make up 70% of the population. For now, at least, his grip on the domestic front appears both complete and secure.

But it is in the domain of foreign policy that MBS will seek to reinforce his claim to leadership of the Arab world in 2018. And it is here, where the recent past serves as a prologue to an uncertain future, that the picture is far less reassuring. The war in Yemen, which he and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed launched nearly three years ago, drags on with no end in sight and with interminable suffering for the Yemeni people.

The feud with fellow Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member Qatar, which exploded in June of last year amidst allegations that the Qataris were terror funders, continues, even though Saudi Arabia’s Western friends and allies are happy to carry on����to��and making deals with this alleged “terror state.”

The dangerous game that MBS is playing with the United States and Israel to drive through a Palestine-Israeli��peace deal��is made all the more dangerous by President Donald Trump’s declaration of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The Palestinians who have been left out in the cold yet again are angry with America. But the anger that cuts deepest is rooted in a sense that the Saudis have betrayed their fellow Arabs and abandoned the cause of Palestine to curry favor with the Israelis and the Americans.

The one place where progress has been made is Iraq. There, the crown prince has shown what he is capable of, playing a��deft game��of diplomacy . Iran itself remains a great challenge, but joining forces with Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu to sabre rattle will achieve little else but to stiffen Iranian resolve.

If MBS is to finally consolidate his position as a great and good leader of the Arab world, he will need to find a way out of the quagmire that is Yemen. (A good start would be to declare a unilateral cessation to the air war.) He will need to resolve the GCC feud with Qatar that benefits none but Iran. He will need to bring the Palestinians into meaningful dialogue while distancing himself from the Israelis and treating the Americans with a degree of caution that has been lacking since Trump arrived in the White House.

If he chooses to pursue diplomacy in foreign affairs rather than reaching for military action and ill-considered deals, then Mohammed bin Salman will have gone a long way toward his goal. He is said to be a very intelligent man. It is also true that he is arrogant and impulsive. Thus far it is the arrogant streak that has prevailed and that has led him onto dangerous ground. Is he a leader who learns from his mistakes, or will 2018 see him repeating them? In a year’s time, and perhaps much sooner, we will have the answers.

*[This article was originally published by��.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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