I once met an American diplomat and asked him whether the United States was ready to put pressure on Arab governments so that they initiate real political reforms. His answer was a bit strange.
“We write this in our literature, but we do nothing more,” the diplomat said. “If you do not demand political reforms, nobody else will do that on your behalf,” he added.
Several years later, the Arabs demanded political reforms, and demonstrations erupted. Egyptians took to the streets in Cairo to ask the strongman of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, to step down.
Mubarak should have been the last in a series of military rulers in Egypt starting with Gamal Abdel Nasser that ushered in a totalitarian system of rule that lasted long, bringing about corruption and mismanagement at all levels of the state. This rendered Egypt a weak country on the way down a catastrophic slope.
Egyptians chose Mohamed Mursi to be the president of their country in the first post-revolution presidential elections. However, there was a conspiracy hatched underground that spoiled the joy of the Egyptian people.
Army chief Field Marshal Abdel Fattah Al Sisi took a bloody and unprecedented route to power. Washington’s closest allies stood by his side, providing him financial and moral support. Corrupt army generals, whose corruption is well-known to the US, were given billions of dollars.
Al Sisi’s supporters are even trying to coerce people to accept him. For instance, one of the Gulf countries has gone as far as preventing Sudanese nationals working there from remitting money to their country in order to force the government in Khartoum to consider Al Sisi a legitimate president, even as he has risen to rule his country on the corpses of his countrymen.
We demanded reform in Syria. Bashar Al Assad, however, countered this demand by throwing barrels of explosives on his people. These barrels do not discriminate between fighters and civilians, men and women, or children and grown up Syrians. They are full of explosives and always thrown from Syrian helicopters on cities and suburbs, claiming a countless number of lives. Assad’s forces also used chemical weapons that destroyed the lives of hundreds of women, children and old people. The United States did nothing to stop this. Obama’s red line continues to be an illusory one that goes back and forth according to American interests.
The United States has failed to find a mechanism by which it can put pressure on Arab countries to initiate the political reforms it preaches. American policies in this regard are unspecific, and American administrations continue to offer political and military support to Arab regimes.
A report released by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is a case in point. Titled “A New US Approach to Gulf Security”, the report contains several recommendations for the American administration to deal with Gulf countries.
Although an outstanding institution had prepared the report, it stuck to the military framework for reform. It did not mention any valuable political or economic reforms. The following are the most important recommendations in the report:
• To make military supplies to the Gulf states selective in order to control equipment used for torture, and building defence capacity to force them to promote domestic reform.
• To reconsider military training provided by the US to foreign officers, and instead focus on political and institutional reforms and durable security.
• To arrange for a high-level plan that articulates a comprehensive and positive vision for the alliance between the US and Gulf states.
• Make Bahrain the focal point for US reforms promotion in the Gulf. The US administration should empower the government and moderate opposition to reconcile, based on a road map of political and institutional reforms. If the situation deteriorates, Washington should prepare a contingency plan for moving the US Fifth Fleet headquarters out of Bahrain.
All the aforementioned points focus on the security of the Gulf. There is no clear mention of any political or economic reforms. The strange thing is that the writer of the report asks US President Barack Obama to address the Gulf states to assure them about their future. At the same time, he talks in the last recommendation about a contingency plan for moving the headquarters of the US Fifth fleet from Bahrain.
Over the past weeks, social media have been splashed with an expressive photo of the US president in which he is putting his hand on his face. The caption says: “Those Bedouins caused me trouble and made me dazed.” The photo depicted the situation the Gulf.
The six Gulf countries are different from each other when it comes to their foreign policies. After Al Sisi came to power, the differences have become internal. We are now waiting for the American administration to intervene and solve this problem. This shows the world that the GCC has failed to solve its own problems. Does this mean that Al Sisi has already achieved his goal? I think so.
