Research on the six economies of the Gulf Cooperation Council
Category: MENA
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is a geographic region which comprises the Middle East and North Africa together. This is larger than the Arab speaking world as it includes Iran and Turkey. Thus, within MENA lies the Arab Middle East and, within that, the six Arabian Gulf countries.
Qatar has over the past three decades mediated several high-profile conflicts that have brought it unparalleled attention. It’s been said that this is remarkable given the commonly accepted assumption that small states, particularly from the Global South, are inherently limited in their power to act as third parties during conflict (Barakat, 2024). Qatar’s rise as a mediator didn’t happen overnight. According Wirtschafter (2024), Qatar started to play a regionally important role in the years after the the launch of Al Jazeera, “which gave the small Gulf state an outsized influence” .
Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. Qatar is winning praise for its diplomacy skills. Vyacheslav Prokofyev/AP
Qatar’s strategic importance is further reinforced by its hosting of Al Udeid Air Base, the largest U.S. military installation in the region, and the presence of six major U.S. universities at Doha’s Education City.
A car sticker supports Qatar’s relationship with Turkey, which has deepened as a result of the blockade. Naseem Zeitoon/Reuters
“Al Jazeera helped create Qatar’s maverick image but also repeatedly got it into hot water. During the Iraq War, President George W. Bush, in a meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, reportedly contemplated bombing the Doha headquarters of the broadcaster, which was airing video of the fighting in the Iraqi city of Fallujah that the Pentagon said was misleading. The White House dismissed the report at the time, and the British government denied it.”
Given the collapse of the Netanyahu Government over the Wye peace agreement, it is time to question whether the entire process begun in Oslo in 1993 is the right instrument for bringing peace between Palestinians and Israelis. It is my view that the peace process has in fact put off the real reconciliation that must occur if the hundred-year war between Zionism and the Palestinian people is to end. Oslo set the stage for separation, but real peace can come only with a binational Israeli-Palestinian state.
This is not easy to imagine. The Zionist-Israeli official narrative and the Palestinian one are irreconcilable. Israelis say they waged a war of liberation and so achieved independence; Palestinians say their society was destroyed, most of the population evicted. And, in fact, this irreconcilability was already quite obvious to several generations of early Zionist leaders and thinkers, as of course it was to all Palestinians.
“We can not fight for our rights and our history as well as future until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness.”
“Zionism was not blind to the presence of Arabs in Palestine,” writes the distinguished Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell in his recent book, “The Founding Myths of Israel.” “Even Zionist figures who had never visited the country knew that it was not devoid of inhabitants. At the same time, neither the Zionist movement abroad nor the pioneers who were beginning to settle the country could frame a policy toward the Palestinian national movement. The real reason for this was not a lack of understanding of the problem but a clear recognition of the insurmountable contradiction between the basic objectives of the two sides. If Zionist intellectuals and leaders ignored the Arab dilemma, it was chiefly because they knew that this problem had no solution within the Zionist way of thinking.”
David Ben-Gurion, for instance, was always clear. “There is no example in history,” he said in 1944, “of a people saying we agree to renounce our country, let another people come and settle here and outnumber us.” Another Zionist leader, Berl Katznelson, likewise had no illusions that the opposition between Zionist and Palestinian aims could be surmounted. And binationalists like Martin Buber, Judah Magnes and Hannah Arendt were fully aware of what the clash would be like, if it came to fruition, as of course it did.
Vastly outnumbering the Jews, Palestinian Arabs during the period after the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate always refused anything that would compromise their dominance. It’s unfair to berate the Palestinians retrospectively for not accepting partition in 1947. Until 1948, Jews held only about 7 per cent of the land. Why, the Arabs said when the partition resolution was proposed, should we concede 55 per cent of Palestine to the Jews, who were a minority in Palestine? Neither the Balfour Declaration nor the mandate ever specifically conceded that Palestinians had political, as opposed to civil and religious, rights in Palestine. The idea of inequality between Jews and Arabs was therefore built into British, and subsequently Israeli and United States, policy from the start.
The conflict appears intractable because it is a contest over the same land by two peoples who always believed they had valid title to it and who hoped that the other side would in time give up or go away. One side won the war, the other lost, but the contest is as alive as ever. We Palestinians ask why a Jew born in Warsaw or New York has the right to settle here (according to Israel’s Law of Return), whereas we, the people who lived here for centuries, cannot. After 1967, the conflict between us was exacerbated. Years of military occupation have created in the weaker party anger, humiliation and hostility.
To its discredit, Oslo did little to change the situation. Arafat and his dwindling number of supporters were turned into enforcers of Israeli security, while Palestinians were made to endure the humiliation of dreadful and non-contiguous “homelands” that make up about 10 per cent of the West Bank and 60 per cent of Gaza. Oslo required us to forget and renounce our history of loss, dispossessed by the very people who taught everyone the importance of not forgetting the past. Thus we are the victims of the victims, the refugees of the refugees.
Israel’s raison d’etre as a state has always been that there should be a separate country, a refuge, exclusively for Jews. Oslo itself was based on the principle of separation between Jews and others, as Yitzhak Rabin tirelessly repeated. Yet over the past 50 years, especially since Israeli settlements were first implanted on the occupied territories in 1967, the lives of Jews have become more and more enmeshed with those of non-Jews.
The effort to separate has occurred simultaneously and paradoxically with the effort to take more and more land, which has in turn meant that Israel has acquired more and more Palestinians. In Israel proper, Palestinians number about one million, almost 20 per cent of the population. Among Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which is where settlements are the thickest, there are almost 2.5 million Palestinians. Israel has built an entire system of “bypassing” roads, designed to go around Palestinian towns and villages, connecting settlements and avoiding Arabs. But so tiny is the land area of historical Palestine, so closely intertwined are Israelis and Palestinians, despite their inequality and antipathy, that clean separation simply won’t, can’t really, occur or work. It is estimated that by 2010 there will be demographic parity. What then?
Clearly, a system of privileging Israeli Jews will satisfy neither those who want an entirely homogenous Jewish state nor those who live there but are not Jewish. For the former, Palestinians are an obstacle to be disposed of somehow; for the latter, being Palestinian in a Jewish polity means forever chafing at inferior status. But Israeli Palestinians don’t want to move; they say they are already in their country and refuse any talk of joining a separate Palestinian state, should one come into being. Meanwhile, the impoverishing conditions imposed on Arafat are making it difficult for him to subdue the highly politicized inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank. These Palestinians have aspirations for self-determination that, contrary to Israeli calculations, show no sign of withering away. It is also evident that as an Arab people — and, given the despondently cold peace treaties between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Jordan, this fact is important — Palestinians want at all costs to preserve their Arab identity as part of the surrounding Arab and Islamic world.
For all this, the problem is that Palestinian self-determination in a separate state is unworkable, just as unworkable as the principle of separation between a demographically mixed, irreversibly connected Arab population without sovereignty and a Jewish population with it. The question, I believe, is not how to devise means for persisting in trying to separate them but to see whether it is possible for them to live together as fairly and peacefully as possible.
What exists now is a disheartening, not to say, bloody, impasse. Zionists in and outside Israel will not give up on their wish for a separate Jewish state; Palestinians want the same thing for themselves, despite having accepted much less from Oslo. Yet in both instances, the idea of a state for “ourselves” simply flies in the face of the facts: short of ethnic cleansing or “mass transfer,” as in 1948, there is no way for Israel to get rid of the Palestinians or for Palestinians to wish Israelis away. Neither side has a viable military option against the other, which, I am sorry to say, is why both opted for a peace that so patently tries to accomplish what war couldn’t.
The more that current patterns of Israeli settlement and Palestinian confinement and resistance persist, the less likely it is that there will be real security for either side. It was always patently absurd for Netanyahu’s obsession with security to be couched only in terms of Palestinian compliance with his demands. On the one hand, he and Ariel Sharon crowded Palestinians more and more with their shrill urgings to the settlers to grab what they could. On the other hand, Netanyahu expected such methods to bludgeon Palestinians into accepting everything Israel did, with no reciprocal Israeli measures.
Arafat, backed by Washington, is daily more repressive. Improbably citing the 1936 British Emergency Defense Regulations against Palestinians, he has recently decreed, for example, that it is a crime not only to incite violence, racial and religious strife but also to criticize the peace process. There is no Palestinian constitution or basic law: Arafat simply refuses to accept limitations on his power in light of American and Israeli support for him. Who actually thinks all this can bring Israel security and permanent Palestinian submission?
Violence, hatred and intolerance are bred out of injustice, poverty and a thwarted sense of political fulfillment. Last fall, hundreds of acres of Palestinian land were expropriated by the Israeli Army from the village of Umm al-Fahm, which isn’t in the West Bank but inside Israel. This drove home the fact that, even as Israeli citizens, Palestinians are treated as inferior, as basically a sort of underclass existing in a condition of apartheid.
At the same time, because Israel does not have a constitution either, and because the ultra-Orthodox parties are acquiring more and more political power, there are Israeli Jewish groups and individuals who have begun to organize around the notion of a full secular democracy for all Israeli citizens. The charismatic Azmi Bishara, an Arab member of the Knesset, has also been speaking about enlarging the concept of citizenship as a way to get beyond ethnic and religious criteria that now make Israel in effect an undemocratic state for 20 per cent of its population.
In the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza, the situation is deeply unstable and exploitative. Protected by the army, Israeli settlers (almost 350,000 of them) live as extraterritorial, privileged people with rights that resident Palestinians do not have. (For example, West Bank Palestinians cannot go to Jerusalem and in 70 per cent of the territory are still subject to Israeli military law, with their land available for confiscation.) Israel controls Palestinian water resources and security, as well as exits and entrances. Even the new Gaza airport is under Israeli security control. You don’t need to be an expert to see that this is a prescription for extending, not limiting, conflict. Here the truth must be faced, not avoided or denied.
There are Israeli Jews today who speak candidly about “post-Zionism,” insofar as after 50 years of Israeli history, classic Zionism has neither provided a solution to the Palestinian presence nor an exclusively Jewish presence. I see no other way than to begin now to speak about sharing the land that has thrust us together, sharing it in a truly democratic way, with equal rights for each citizen. There can be no reconciliation unless both peoples, two communities of suffering, resolve that their existence is a secular fact, and that it has to be dealt with as such.
This does not mean a diminishing of Jewish life as Jewish life or a surrendering of Palestinian Arab aspirations and political existence. On the contrary, it means self-determination for both peoples. But it does mean being willing to soften, lessen and finally give up special status for one people at the expense of the other. The Law of Return for Jews and the right of return for Palestinian refugees have to be considered and trimmed together. Both the notions of Greater Israel as the land of the Jewish people given to them by God and of Palestine as an Arab land that cannot be alienated from the Arab homeland need to be reduced in scale and exclusivity.
Interestingly, the millennia-long history of Palestine provides at least two precedents for thinking in such secular and modest terms. First, Palestine is and has always been a land of many histories; it is a radical simplification to think of it as principally or exclusively Jewish or Arab. While the Jewish presence is longstanding, it is by no means the main one. Other tenants have included Canaanites, Moabites, Jebusites and Philistines in ancient times, and Romans, Ottomans, Byzantines and Crusaders in the modern ages. Palestine is multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious. There is as little historical justification for homogeneity as there is for notions of national or ethnic and religious purity today.
Second, during the interwar period, a small but important group of Jewish thinkers (Judah Magnes, Buber, Arendt and others) argued and agitated for a binational state. The logic of Zionism naturally overwhelmed their efforts, but the idea is alive today here and there among Jewish and Arab individuals frustrated with the evident insufficiencies and depredations of the present. The essence of their vision is coexistence and sharing in ways that require an innovative, daring and theoretical willingness to get beyond the arid stalemate of assertion and rejection. Once the initial acknowledgment of the other as an equal is made, I believe the way forward becomes not only possible but also attractive.
The initial step, however, is a very difficult one to take. Israeli Jews are insulated from the Palestinian reality; most of them say that it does not really concern them. I remember the first time I drove from Ramallah into Israel, thinking it was like going straight from Bangladesh into Southern California. Yet reality is never that neat.
My generation of Palestinians, still reeling from the shock of losing everything in 1948, find it nearly impossible to accept that their homes and farms were taken over by another people. I see no way of evading the fact that in 1948 one people displaced another, thereby committing a grave injustice. Reading Palestinian and Jewish history together not only gives the tragedies of the Holocaust and of what subsequently happened to the Palestinians their full force but also reveals how in the course of interrelated Israeli and Palestinian life since 1948, one people, the Palestinians, has borne a disproportional share of the pain and loss.
Religious and right-wing Israelis and their supporters have no problem with such a formulation. Yes, they say, we won, but that’s how it should be. This land is the land of Israel, not of anyone else. I heard those words from an Israeli soldier guarding a bulldozer that was destroying a West Bank Palestinian’s field (its owner helplessly watching) to expand a bypass road.
But they are not the only Israelis. For others, who want peace as a result of reconciliation, there is dissatisfaction with the religious parties’ increasing hold on Israeli life and Oslo’s unfairness and frustrations. Many such Israelis demonstrate against their Government’s Palestinian land expropriations and house demolitions. So you sense a healthy willingness to look elsewhere for peace than in land-grabbing and suicide bombs.
For some Palestinians, because they are the weaker party, the losers, giving up on a full restoration of Arab Palestine is giving up on their own history. Most others, however, especially my children’s generation, are skeptical of their elders and look more unconventionally toward the future, beyond conflict and unending loss. Obviously, the establishments in both communities are too tied to present “pragmatic” currents of thought and political formations to venture anything more risky, but a few others (Palestinian and Israeli) have begun to formulate radical alternatives to the status quo. They refuse to accept the limitations of Oslo, what one Israeli scholar has called “peace without Palestinians,” while others tell me that the real struggle is over equal rights for Arabs and Jews, not a separate, necessarily dependent and weak Palestinian entity.
The beginning is to develop something entirely missing from both Israeli and Palestinian realities today: the idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial community, as the main vehicle for coexistence. In a modern state, all its members are citizens by virtue of their presence and the sharing of rights and responsibilities. Citizenship therefore entitles an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Arab to the same privileges and resources. A constitution and a bill of rights thus become necessary for getting beyond Square 1 of the conflict because each group would have the same right to self-determination; that is, the right to practice communal life in its own (Jewish or Palestinian) way, perhaps in federated cantons, with a joint capital in Jerusalem, equal access to land and inalienable secular and juridical rights. Neither side should be held hostage to religious extremists.
Yet feelings of persecution, suffering and victimhood are so ingrained that it is nearly impossible to undertake political initiatives that hold Jews and Arabs to the same general principles of civil equality while avoiding the pitfall of us-versus-them. Palestinian intellectuals need to express their case directly to Israelis, in public forums, universities and the media. The challenge is both to and within civil society, which has long been subordinate to a nationalism that has developed into an obstacle to reconciliation. Moreover, the degradation of discourse — symbolised by Arafat and Netanyahu trading charges while Palestinian rights are compromised by exaggerated “security” concerns — impedes any wider, more generous perspective from emerging.
The alternatives are unpleasantly simple: either the war continues (along with the onerous cost of the current peace process) or a way out, based on peace and equality (as in South Africa after apartheid) is actively sought, despite the many obstacles. Once we grant that Palestinians and Israelis are there to stay, then the decent conclusion has to be the need for peaceful coexistence and genuine reconciliation. Real self-determination.
Unfortunately, injustice and belligerence don’t diminish by themselves: they have to be attacked by all concerned.
Why do the US and Britain still claim the invasion of Iraq was to spread democracy?
The hostility towards elections and democracy by the US-British military administration that brutally overran the nation in 2003 was well documented at the time — as was the mass movement for free elections, writes
A little late to the party, I recently watched Once Upon A Time In Iraq, the BBC’s 2020 five-part documentary series about the US-British invasion and occupation of the Middle East nation.
During the episode about the capture of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in December 2003, the narrator noted: “Though Iraq was still governed by the [US-led] coalition, the intention was to hold democratic elections as soon as possible.”
This fits with the common understanding of the Iraq War amongst the media, academic and political elites. For example, speaking on the BBC News at 10 in 2005, correspondent Paul Wood stated: “The coalition came to Iraq in the first place to bring democracy and human rights.”
Likewise, writing in the Guardian in 2013, the esteemed University of Cambridge Professor David Runciman claimed: “The wars fought after 2001 in Afghanistan and Iraq were designed… to spread the merits of democracy.”
No doubt similarly benign framing of the West’s intentions and actions will be repeated as we approach the 20th anniversary of the invasion on March 20 2003.
But is it true? As always it is essential to compare the narrative pumped out by corporate and state-affiliated media with the historical record.
We know that soon after US-led forces had taken control of the country, Iraqis began holding local elections. However, in June 2003, the Washington Post reported “US military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.”
The report goes on to quote Paul Bremer, the chief US administrator in Iraq: “I’m not opposed to [self-rule], but I want to do it in a way that takes care of our concerns… in a postwar situation like this, if you start holding elections… it’s often the best-organised who win, and the best-organised right now are the former Baathists and to some extent the Islamists.”
On the national level, Professor Toby Dodge, who advised US General David Petraeus in Iraq, notes one of the first decisions Bremer made, after he arrived in Baghdad in May 2003, “was to delay moves towards delegating responsibility to a leadership council” composed of exiled politicians.
Writing in his 2005 book, Iraq’s Future, the establishment-friendly British academic goes on to explain “this careful, incremental but largely undemocratic approach was set aside with the arrival of UN special representative for Iraq, Vieira de Mello” who “persuaded Bremer that a governing body of Iraqis should be set up to act as a repository of Iraqi sovereignty.”
Accordingly, on July 13 2003 the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) was set up. Dodge notes the membership “was chosen by Bremer after extended negotiations between the CPA [the US Coalition Provisional Authority], Vieira de Mello and the seven dominant, formerly exiled parties.” The IGC would “establish a constitutional process,” Bremer said at the time.
However, the Americans had a serious problem on their hands. In late June 2003 the most senior Shia religious leader in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a fatwa (a religious edict) condemning the US plans as “fundamentally unacceptable.”
“The occupation officials do not enjoy the authority to appoint the members of a council that would write the constitution,” he said. Instead, he called for a general election “so that every eligible Iraqi can choose someone to represent him at the constitutional convention that will write the constitution” which would then be put to a public referendum.
“With no way around the fatwa, and with escalating American casualties creating pressure on President Bush,” the Washington Post reported in November 2003 that Bremer “dumped his original plan in favour of an arrangement that would bestow sovereignty on a provisional government before a constitution is drafted.”
This new plan, known as the November 15 Agreement, was based on a complex process of caucuses. A 2005 briefing from peace group Justice Not Vengeance (JNV) explained just how anti-democratic the proposal was: “US-appointed politicians would select a committee in each province which would select a group of politically acceptable local worthies, which in turn would select a representative… to go forward to the national assembly” which would “then be allowed to elect a provisional government.”
In response, Sistani made another public intervention, repeating his demand that direct elections — not a system of regional caucuses — should select a transitional government. After the US refused to concede, the Shia clerical establishment escalated their pro-democracy campaign, organising street demonstrations in January 2004.
100,000 people protested in Baghdad and 30,000 in Basra, with news reports recording crowds chanting: “Yes, yes to elections, no, no to occupation” and banners with slogans such as “we refuse any constitution that is not elected by the Iraqi people.”
Under pressure, the US relented, agreeing in March 2004 to hold national elections in January 2005 to a Transitional National Assembly which was mandated to draft a new constitution.
The campaigning group Voices In The Wilderness UK summarised events in a 2004 briefing: “Since the invasion, the US has consistently stalled on one-person-one-vote elections” seeking instead to “put democracy on hold until it can be safely managed,” as Salim Lone, director of communications for the UN in Iraq until autumn 2003, wrote in April 2004.
Why? “An elected government that reflected Iraqi popular [opinion] would kick US troops out of the country and is unlikely to be sufficiently amenable to the interests of Western oil companies or take an ‘acceptable’ position on the Israel-Palestine conflict,” Voices In The Wilderness UK explained.
For example, a secret 2005 nationwide poll of Iraqis conducted by the UK Ministry of Defence found 82 per cent “strongly opposed” to the presence of the US-led coalition forces, with 45 per cent of respondents saying they believed attacks against British and American troops were justified.
It is worth pausing briefly to consider two aspects of the struggle for democracy in Iraq. First, the Sistani-led movement in Iraq was, as US dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky argued in 2005, “One of the major triumphs of non-violent resistance that I know of.”
And second, it was a senior Iraqi Shia cleric who championed democratic elections in the face of strong opposition from the US — the “heartland of democracy,” according to the Financial Times’s Martin Wolf.
It is also worth remembering, as activist group JNV noted in 2005, that president George W Bush’s ultimatum days before the invasion was simply that “Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours.” This was about “encouraging a last-minute coup more than the Iraqi leader’s departure from Baghdad,” the Financial Times reported at the time. In short, the US-British plan was not free elections via “regime change” but “regime stabilisation, leadership change,” JNV argued.
This resonates with the analysis of Middle East expert Jane Kinninmont. Addressing the argument the West invaded Iraq to spread democracy, in a 2013 Chatham House report she argued: “This is asserted despite the long history of Anglo-American great-power involvement in the Middle East, which has, for the most part, not involved an effort to democratise the region.”
In reality “the general trend has been to either support authoritarian rulers who were already in place or to participate in the active consolidation of authoritarian rule… as long as these rulers have been seen as supporting Western interests more than popularly elected governments would.”
This thesis is not short of shameful examples — from the West’s enduring support for the Gulf monarchies in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, Oman, Qatar and Kuwait, to the strong backing given to Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt before both dictators were overthrown in 2011.
Back to Iraq: though far from perfect, national elections have taken place since 2003. But while the US has been quick to take the credit, the evidence shows any democratic gains won in Iraq in the immediate years after the invasion were made despite, not because of, the US and their British lackey.
Indeed, an October 2003 Gallup poll of Baghdad residents makes instructive reading. Fully 1 per cent of respondents agreed with the BBC and Runciman that a desire to establish democracy was the main intention of the US invasion. In contrast, 43 per cent of respondents said the invasion’s principal objective was Iraq’s oil reserves.
“In the desert I had found a freedom unattainable in civilization; a life unhampered by possessions.”
Wilfred Thesiger was a writer, an amazing photographer and a consummate explorer. His most notable works are Arabian Sands (1959) which documented his journey across the Empty Quarter of the Arabian peninsula and, The Marsh Arabs (1964) which documented his time living in the marshes of Iraq.
Timeless tracts
As a student, studying Arabic, I read Arabian Sands. I recall being very much taken with it and it bringing about a sense of nostalgia. The work by Thesiger concentrates on his Arabian travels between 1945 and 1950. It charts two crossings of the Empty Quarter undertaken between 1946 and 1948. Thesiger’s first crossing, from Mughshin in Oman to Liwa across the eastern sands, was followed by a crossing of the western sands from Manwakh in Yemen, via Liwa, to Abu Dhabi.
The book largely reflects on the changes and large scale development that took place after the Second World War and the subsequent gradual erosion of traditional Bedouin ways of life that had previously existed unaltered for thousands of years. It captured well the lives of the Bedu (Bedouin) people and other inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula and is now considered a classic in the genre of travel literature. In the 1950s, The Times described Thesiger as “the last of a great line of Arabian explorers.” In an obituary piece for The Guardian, Michael Asher wrote that Thesiger’s description of the traditional life of the Bedu was probably “the finest book ever written about Arabia and a tribute to a world now lost forever.”
The Rub’ al Khali (Arabic: ٱلرُّبْع ٱلْخَالِي, “the Empty Quarter”) is the desert that encompasses much of the southern third of the Arabian peninsula.Arabia.. The Empty Quarter, with is ever impressive sand dunes, covers around 250,000 square miles and spans Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen.Wilfred Thesiger’s photo albums from his time in Arabia are available online via Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.Volume 13 – “Empty Quarter, Trucial Coast (1947–8)”“Only in complete silence, will you hear the desert.”Volume 14 – “Dubai, Bahrain, Oman (1948–9)”“For this was the real desert where differences of race and colour, of wealth and social standing, are almost meaningless; where coverings of pretence are stripped away and basic truths emerge.”“For a time I believed that mankind had been hypnotised by a landscape so different from anything they knew at home, and that they had been led into a state of euphoria by the beauty of the desert.”
“Humanism is the only resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.”
Edward Saïd’s seminal work, Orientalism, has, according to one academic, “redefined our understanding of colonialism and empire.” In Orienrltalism, Saïd surveys the history and nature of Western attitudes towards the East, and contends that “orientalism” is a powerful European ideological creation – a way for writers, philosophers and Western political powers (alongside their think tanks) to deal with the ‘otherness’ of eastern culture, customs and beliefs. Drawing on his own experiences as an Arab Palestinian living in the West, Said examines how these ideas can be a reflection of European imperialism and racism. He traces this view through the writings of Homer, Flaubert, Disraeli and Kipling, whose imaginative depictions have greatly contributed to the West’s romantic and exotic picture of the Orient.
Paraphrasing from the book’s introduction, orientalism is the amplification of difference, the presumption of Western superiority, and, “the application of clichéd analytical models for perceiving the Oriental world,” from the perspectives of Western thinkers and scholars. According to Said, orientalism is the key source of the inaccuracy in cultural representations that form the foundations of Western thought and perception of the Eastern world. The theoretical framework that orientalism covers has three tenets: (1) an academic tradition or field [think: Sir Richard Burton or possibly and less so, Wilfred Thesiger] (2) a worldview, representation, and canon / discourse which bases itself upon an, “ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and the West (3) to be used as a powerful political instrument of Western domination over Eastern countries.
“The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.”
A long time ago I read The Devil That Drives. It is an excellent biography, written by Fawn Brodie and first published in 1967. It covers comprehensively the life of Sir Richard Burton. Brodie creates a brilliantly vivid and captivating portrait of Burton. By way of her prose, he emerges vividly from the richly textured fabric of his time (i.e, the Victorian era and the age of Colonialism and Imperialism). His travels to Mecca and Medina dressed as a Muslim pilgrim, his witnessing of the human sacrifices at Dahomey and his unlikely but loving partnership with his pious Catholic bride are treated both with compassion and scholarly rigor. It is one of very few books that I’ve read again. I see it as something of a companion to Edward W. Saïd’s 1978 Orientalism.
“A first class biography of an exceptional man … read it.” — J.H. Plumb, New York Times
“The latest, far the best and surely the final biography of Sir Richard Burton, one of the most bizarre characters whom England has ever produced.” — Graham Greene, The Observer
Sir Richard Burton, it has been said, was a true man of the Renaissance. He was soldier, explorer, ethnologist, archaeologist, poet, translator, and one of the two or three great linguists of his time. He was also an amateur physician, a botanist, a geologist, a swordsman, and a superb raconteur. Burton is also said to have been the first to translate The Arabian Nights.
Every night for three years the vengeful King Shahriyar sleeps with a different virgin, executing her the next morning. To end this brutal pattern and to save her own life, the vizier’s daughter, Shahrazad, begins to tell the king stories of adventure, love, riches and wonder – tales of mystical lands peopled with princes and hunchbacks, the Angel of Death and magical spirits, tales of the voyages of Sindbad, of Ali Baba outwitting a band of forty thieves and of jinnis trapped in rings and in lamps. The sequence of stories will last 1,001 nights.
As Schwarz (2016) recalls, Winston Churchill once described Iran’s oil – “which the U.K. was busy stealing at the time” — as “a prize from fairyland far beyond our brightest hopes.” Churchill was right, but was seemingly unaware at the time that this would be the kind of fairy-tale blessing whose treasures almost invariably come tied with various terrible curses.
Recall that BP which is now British Petroleum (or ‘Beyond Petroleum’) was once, basically, British Persian.
Change in name onlyAnglo-Iranian
Its all about the (the control of the) oil
1945
It is hard not to see how the commercial extraction and exportation of oil since before the creation of the modern nation state, in most instances, on the Arabian peninsular has not had an elemental impact on these countries’ political and socioeconomic trajectories since the early decades of the last century.
Life Magazine, June 1945.Iran“The Map”IraqBahrain (and the Brits)Saudi Arabia(un)leashed…
As per a 1957 Time magazine piece, “THOUGH Britain has populated the Middle East with British political advisers to Arab rulers, and for a time seemed to be running the whole show, in economic fact the region has in recent years been dominated by U.S. companies, who stay out of local politics. They produce about twice as much of the Middle East’s oil as the British. and own nearly 60% of the area’s known reserves. Tiny, treeless Kuwait. the richest producing state in the rich Middle East, is, for example, a sheikdom under British protection and equipped with a British political agent, but its British producing company is half-owned by Gulf Oil (U.S.). Americans also team up with British. Dutch and French interests in Iraq. But Saudi Arabia’s Aramco is entirely an American concession—a syndicate formed by Standard Oil of California, the Texas Co. and Jersey Standard Oil (Esso), plus a smaller share to Mobil Oil.”
1955
1973 oil crisis
We say “petrol…”…they say “gas”President Reagan meeting with Afghan Mujahideen leaders in the Oval Office in 1983.
Operation Cyclone… Iran–Contra affair… The USA and the UK were funding Afghan mujahideen from 1979 to 1992, prior to and during the military intervention by the USSR in support of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. It is now know that the CIA and MI6 were supporting militant Islamic groups, including groups with jihadist ties, that were favored by the regime of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in neighboring Pakistan, rather than other, less ideological Afghan resistance groups that had also been fighting the Soviet-oriented Democratic Republic of Afghanistan administration since before the Soviet intervention.
February 12, 1985, President Ronald Reagan has breakfast in the private President’s Dining Room on the Second Floor of the White House with King Fahd ibn ʻAbd al-ʻAzīz of Saudi Arabia.
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The Islamic bond (Sukuk) is fast rising in popularity and so lucrative is the potential market that conventional international banks are falling over themselves to set up Shariah-compliant operations. With abundant oil-windfall revenues and a raft of infrastructure mega projects either underway or on the drawing board, the Gulf is fast becoming the logical choice for new and established players alike to set up shop.
As conventional bonds are “off limits” to Muslims because interest is paid to those who invest in them, the Gulf debt market was until recently underdeveloped. This is changing because Sukuk offer a share in the proceeds from a business venture rather than paying out interest.
Bahrain has been a leading “offshore” banking center for decades and its central bank, the Bahrain Monetary Agency, is one of the pioneers of Islamic banking. However, until recently, the “capital” of Islamic finance was Malaysia. Competition is certainly building up, Swiss banks are now making efforts to understand, embrace and implement some elements of Islamic finance and the UK’s chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, has said that he wants London to become the global Islamic finance center.
The latest Sukuk deal from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) bloc is Saudi Basic Industries Corp’s (SABIC’s) $800 million issue. This is significant because it is the first Saudi Sukuk to be issued under the new Capital Market Law and the debt market in the Kingdom is relatively untapped. If SABIC becomes a Saudi trendsetter, there is no doubt that the GCC will become the global hub for Islamic finance. The only question is if the likes of Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs will pitch their headquarters in Dubai, Manama or Riyadh? According to the Islamic Finance Information Service, there were three key players in terms of issuing Sukuk in 2005 — GCC countries, Malaysia and Pakistan. To date, most Sukuk have been corporate, not sovereign. For instance, the only major sovereign bond issue in the GCC countries during 2005 was by the government of Bahrain ($79.5 million). It therefore follows that the potential Middle Eastern sovereign Islamic bond market could be huge in the future.
In 2005, a Malaysian company, Jimah Energy Ventures, issued the largest Sukuk for the year — $1.27 billion; Malaysian companies also issued the second and third biggest Sukuk last year (Musyarakah One Capital’s Sukuk for $658 million and PLUS Expressway’s for $634 million). However, the tables turned in early 2006 with DP World launching the largest Sukuk in history. The $3.5 billion issue by Dubai Ports, received more than $11 billion in subscriptions! The Malaysian bank, Commerce International Merchant Bankers, was the leading Sukuk manager (as of Q2 2005) with $1.39 billion, but the UAE’s Dubai Islamic Bank was in third place having managed three Sukuk worth $633 million. Interestingly, and indicative of the trend in conventional banks moving into Islamic finance, HSBC Amanah was last year’s second most important Sukuk manager having helped various entities raise $ 882 million, in seven separate issues.
The overall pool of assets managed by Islamic banks, according to estimates by Reuters, is between $250 billion and $400 billion. Over the past five years the Sukuk market has grown significantly — the latest data from Bahrain’s Liquidity Management Center indicates that there is almost $ 18 billion worth of outstanding issues; of this, no less than 52 percent originates from the GCC countries.
Various changes have taken place or continue to take place and all bode well for the Gulf’s nascent financial centers. The first is that much more of the region’s oil windfall revenues are being retained within the region than in previous oil booms. Ongoing reforms, particularly in the region’s real estate sectors, are attracting significant levels of this retained capital. The second is the region’s increasingly bullish private sector. All regional governments are investing heavily in their respective infrastructures and unlike the past, most of today’s projects are generating growth, and not white elephants.
Thirdly, governments and regulators in various GCC countries are being proactive in promoting Islamic banking and are developing custom-built regulatory frameworks, rather than simply following Malaysia’s lead. Combined, these changes mean that more local entities are seeking to raise money via Sukuk issuance and domestic investors are more willing to invest in such bonds. Many of the Sukuk issued in the Gulf till now have been oversubscribed due to high demand, but many more are in the pipeline. The head of Islamic Finance at the Dubai International Financial Center, Khalid Yousaf, estimates that the GCC countries are likely to see another $9 billion worth of new Sukuk between now and the end of the year. Many of the Gulf Sukuk that are open to foreign subscribers are not just attracting Middle Eastern and Asian investors, but increasingly European and US ones too. Furthermore, Western companies are also starting to seek Islamic debt. For instance, the Gulf East Cameron Partners from the United States recently became the first American firm to issue a Sukuk ($166 million).
As the sophistication of Shariah-compliant products increase (particularly the emergence of a secondary market for trading issued Sukuk, as is happening in Dubai and Manama), a far higher number of Muslims and Islamic countries will opt for Sukuk as opposed to conventional bonds. And, why not? For all intents and purposes, the financial returns are comparable; the only real difference is that one is just that bit more ethical than the other.
Bio.
“Emilie Rutledge is an economic researcher at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai” (2006).
The dollar is once again losing value, and has depreciated by seven per cent against the euro since the start of the year. How far it will go is anybody’s guess, but the odds are, it will fall further.
Li Yong, China’s Vice-Minister of Finance, has talked of a possible further 25 per cent fall. According to some estimates the amount the United States now owes to the rest of the world now stands at $3 trillion. This, not anything else, is the prime reason for the dollar’s decline.
Although the Federal Reserve does not want to see the dollar collapse, it probably views any dollar devaluation as a convenient way of partially reducing the US’ huge current account deficit. If the dollar declines so will the ‘value’ of the deficit. However, a falling dollar does not bode well for the GCC. It will exacerbate inflation as European and Japanese goods become more expensive and it will also result in a depreciation of the ‘real’ value of the region’s reserve holdings. In addition, because oil and gas are priced and sold in dollars the GCC also stand to loose some revenues in this respect also.
Nevertheless, we have seen only a limited response to these currency conundrums in the form of Kuwait’s decision to allow its currency to appreciate marginally against the dollar. There has been talk from several of the region’s central bankers about a possible realignment in their foreign reserve holdings but as yet no concrete action has been announced. For the time being at least, any speculation that other GCC states were about to follow Kuwait’s lead have been discounted. Both the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority and the Central Bank of Oman came out and publicly defended the status quo.
Apart for arguments such as ‘providing stability’ and ‘eliminating intra-regional exchange rate risk’ (all 6 GCC states are pegged to the US dollar, albeit Kuwait maintains a more flexible band within which to fluctuate), there is another argument for maintaining the dollar peg. And that is that the collective peg is an interim step towards forming a single GCC currency in 2010. Having a joint peg is a good thing, as it eliminates exchange rate risk within the bloc, but it could just as easily be achieved with a joint peg to the euro or a trade weighted basket of currencies.
Happy creditors no more? For many years Asian central banks, particularly those of China and Japan, have been willing to finance US deficits despite the risks, in order to support their own export-led growth models. However, the scale of financing (subsidising) required to sustain the US’ current account deficit may soon exceed their absorptive capacities. A law of diminishing returns also comes into play; there comes a point when alternative economic growth models look more appealing that accumulating ever greater numbers of underperforming US Treasury Bonds.
The current situation is somewhat perplexing, the country that controls the world’s de facto reserve currency, also happens to be the world’s largest debtor. In any other walk of life, you would be forgiven for being somewhat wary if lending to someone with huge debts. The US like any other debtor may be tempted to use (or not do anything much to prevent) devaluation to reduce external deficit, and this is hardly a desirable trait for a reserve currency.
The dollar has been the dominant reserve currency for at least the past half century and will no doubt continue to be one for some time to come. It can however no longer take this role for granted. One thing is constant in history and that is nothing remains the same forever. Back in the early 1990s after a period where the dollar devalued considerably, many economists at the time speculated about the dollar’s role as the world’s de facto reserve currency. The dollar, nevertheless rebounded, and continued to play its role, in part because there was no viable alternative.
This has changed. Today we have the euro (tomorrow perhaps, even the Yuan). In general for a currency to qualify as a reserve one it needs to meet several criteria including being backed by a large economy, which itself has free flows of capital, open and deep financial markets and low inflation. The euro zone has all of these characteristics and to top it all, it runs a current account surplus.
Those who switch first stand to gain the most: It is now estimated that the US’ deficit consumes no less than two thirds of the worlds total current account surplus. Joseph Stiglitz, a former head of the IMF, recently pointed out that there is obviously something peculiar about a global financial system in which America borrows more than $2 billion each and every day from other countries (in March the US’ Trade Deficit was $62bn) whilst lecturing them on fiscal responsibility.
One could view the current state of affairs as a bit like the classic ‘prisoner’s dilemma’. If any one Asian central bank switched its reserves into euros tomorrow it would undoubtedly benefit vis-à-vis the others, but if they all attempted to switch at the same time they would collectively see the value of their reserves fall considerably, as the resulting run on the dollar would adversely affect all that hold it in reserve.
Reactionary tendencies will probably mean that the GCC dollar peg remains for the time being but there is a strong and growing argument for a move away from too much dependence on the dollar. If Gulf central banks were to buy euros today with some of their dollars reserves, they would get far better exchange rates than if they were to wait for Asian central banks to make the move first.
It is surely worth the while of the GCC’s central bankers to seriously consider alternative options to the current status quo, it would be a shame if the considerable economic achievements of the past few years are washed away by maintaining a rigid dollar peg that may be extremely expensive to maintain and cause unnecessary inflation.
Bio.
“Emilie Rutledge is an economist with Gulf Research Centre” (2006).
Current trends indicate demand and supply will increase, says expert
During the Gulf Research Centre’s third annual conference recently, Anas Alhajji, moderator of the Gulf Energy Program-me at the GRC, said he expects oil prices to stabilise in 2006.
Prices will only decline significantly, he said, if the US falls into recession as a result of a decline in government spending. “The soaring price in 2005 was due to the market fundamentals of limited supply and rising demand. Opec members ran out of marketable excess capacity, and non-Opec production was lower than expected, while global demand especially in the US, India and China continued to grow,” Dr. Alhajji said. Current trends estimate that both demand and supply will increase in 2006. However, oil prices will depend on the size of the additional production capacity, he added.
According to experts at the Dubai-based GRC, the Gulf is likely to experience a period of high growth in 2006, a modest decline in oil prices, significant political developments, rising tension, and a slow shift in focus towards Asia in the realm of international relations.
Emilie Rutledge, economist at the GRC, said that high oil prices and the increasing global demand for oil triggered a boom for the GCC economies. The region’s aggregate GDP rose by 5.3 per cent, stock markets grew by 79 per cent and market capitalisation touched $1.1 trillion, an increase of 110 per cent over 2004. The aggregate GCC trade surplus stood at $253 billion in 2005, and imports of good and services rose by 20 per cent, she said. “Regional governments are generally aiming to avoid over-dependence on oil through economic diversification strategies, labour nationalisation policies and the privatisation process,” she said.
Vital issues
GRC Chairman Abdul Aziz Sager highlighted important issues in 2005, including the continuing political reform process that has firmly implanted itself in the region, the effects of the unprecedented increase in oil prices on the GCC economies, as well as the numerous security challenges that confront the region. “Despite the economic and strategic importance it represents, the developments in the Gulf region during 2005 were not reassuring as far as the status of Gulf security is concerned,” Sager added.
The GCC defence budget amounted to $34 billion during 2005, a $4 billion increase over 2004. The budget growth could be related to higher revenues because of oil prices, said Mustafa Alani, Director of the Security and Terrorism Programme at the GRC.
