6/14/17 Derek Davidson on ‘What’s Happening in the Persian Gulf’

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Okay.
On the line, I've got Derek Davidson.
He used to be with the Rand Corporation and specializes in Middle East studies and writes for our good friend Jim Loeb over at the Loeb Log from time to time.
That's just like your earlobe, Loeb Log, for Jim Loeb's great blog and has a lot of great authors there.
And this one is from the Fifth.
What's happening in the Persian Gulf?
Well, I'm so glad that you've phrased the question so broadly because I want your very broad answer here, Derek.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you?
I'm okay, Scott.
How are you?
I'm great.
I really appreciate you joining us here.
So, well, let's start with just before the way your article begins with the controversy over Qatar to Donald Trump's trip to the Middle East that he took just a couple of weeks before and went and did a big sword dance and had a glowing orb globe thing button at the new counterterrorism center that everybody got so upset about or intrigued about, whatever it was.
And then he came home and then all this happened.
So I was wondering if, you know, maybe there was a nutshell that you could sum up.
What was it that happened on Donald Trump's trip that quite clearly changed the status quo in such a way that the Saudis and then everybody went ahead and did what they did?
You can explain that part too.
Right.
Well, I think what happened is that it cemented the Saudi sense that this president and this administration are going to, at least for now, I mean, you know, Trump, we all know can change his mind in a split second, but at least at the moment that they are going to adopt the Saudi view of the Middle East and view of the world.
And they've sort of given the Saudis a blank check in a sense to do what they want in their neighborhood and the U.S. will support them.
We know the Saudi U.S. relationship under the former administration, under the Obama administration was a bit frayed.
You know, Obama participated in supporting the Yemen operation.
I mean, he did a lot of things, you know, sold the Saudis weapons, did a lot of things to maintain that relationship.
But he also, of course, pursued the nuclear deal with Iran, which the Saudis didn't like.
And he also took a fairly neutral view, I guess, on things like this, like, you know, the disputes with other Gulf countries that happened to be American allies.
What happened with Trump, what's been happening with Trump, and I think that was cemented on his trip to Riyadh was the sense that that's all over.
This administration is taking a hard line with Iran.
They're going to back the Saudis in that dispute.
And they're also going to back the Saudis if it comes down to Riyadh versus Doha or any of these other countries that the Saudis tend to view as vassals and get very upset when they act independently.
So I think that was, it's sort of given the Saudis a confidence that they can go ahead and do what they want, they can start to deal with some nagging problems in their backyard without worrying about a negative response from Washington.
Well, I mean, I guess then the good news is all this is just a bunch of government programs, so none of it works, right?
All the Saudis keep doing is biting off more than they can chew and causing themselves more problems and limiting their own ability to do what they're trying to accomplish, which is shore up all their loose ends so that they can have a war with Iran or at least focus on limiting Iran's power in whatever ways they can.
And then, you know, their support for jihad in Iraq and Syria has led to nothing but blow back there and the empowering of Iran's allies in Iraq even far more than before.
Right.
These operations tend to backfire on the Saudis.
The Yemen intervention has been really, in addition to being a humanitarian catastrophe, it hasn't gone nearly the way that the Saudis wanted it to.
Their interventions in Syria to topple Bashar al-Assad haven't gone well.
They backed the Sisi government, you know, when Sisi carried out the coup in 2013 against the Muslim Brotherhood, and that regime has behaved brutally toward its own citizens and also has since, you know, done some things that aren't entirely in keeping with what the Saudis were hoping for.
So these things do tend to not really go the way that I think Riyadh would like them to go.
On the other hand, they're also incredibly destabilizing.
And so if we talk about the potential for a deeper regional conflict with Iran, even though things aren't really going according to Saudi plan, they're also kind of fraying the regional balance of things, and that could be very dangerous.
Now, I saw where the Turks said that they're sending a garrison to Qatar to shore them up.
Did that actually happen?
I don't think they've sent them yet.
Their parliament authorized the deployment of more troops.
They already have a very small contingent in Qatar, but the Turkish parliament authorized the deployment of more troops.
There's been talk, this predates this crisis, but there's been talk of the Turks opening up a base in Qatar.
They have close relations with the Qataris because, in part, ideologically, they're a very close match.
The Justice and Development Party that governs Turkey, it's not a Muslim Brotherhood party, but it's very aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood.
And Qatar, historically, has good relationships with the Muslim Brotherhood, which is part of the problem that the Saudis are having with them.
So there's an affinity there.
And also, the Qataris have cultivated a strong economic relationship with Turkey, which has needed it.
I mean, the Turkish economy is stagnating at best.
The Turks really, I mean, they've sent some signals very early in this diplomatic spat about maybe trying to play a mediating role and balancing their relationships with the Saudis and the Qataris, but they've really gone full, like, all-in with the Qataris at this point.
They're not even trying to pretend to any kind of neutrality anymore.
Well, and so, I mean, but the Pentagon is the 10 trillion ton guerrilla in the room here, right?
And they own huge pieces of real estate in Qatar, in Bahrain, and in Saudi Arabia.
So nobody's really doing anything, right, without their say-so.
Are you going to fight on all sides of this thing like they are in Yemen?
Yeah, I mean, it really has put the United States in an awkward position, right?
Because all of these countries are U.S. allies, and not just U.S. allies, but important to the military for its projection in the Middle East.
Their main, CENTCOM's main forward operating base is in Qatar.
The Fifth Fleet's main base is in Bahrain.
So you know, they are.
We've wound up on both sides of this situation.
So I think if cooler heads prevail in the United States, that's going to tend to, you know, Washington will tend to argue for ratcheting things down and, you know, everybody trying to get back on the same page.
But we've already seen in just the short period of time since this started, multiple times where contradictory messages are coming out of different parts of the U.S. government.
And that's not great either.
I mean, that adds to the chaos and the uncertainty about the situation, which is already chaotic enough as it is.
Right.
All right.
So, and by the way, do you know the status of the current number of and size of the bases that America has in Saudi Arabia?
I know that they actually did close a lot of them down at the start of the Iraq war, but not all of them, right?
I don't I honestly don't know what the deployment in Saudi Arabia is like right now.
I don't think it's very large.
I don't think it's as large as the deployment in Qatar, for example.
Yeah.
OK, so now.
As far as Iran goes and it's it doesn't seem like even under Trump and all his belligerence, even Mattis and all of his belligerence that they really want a shooting war with Iran.
I mean, it seemed like Mattis was willing to risk one recently when he wanted to board some Iranian ships and was prevented by the White House, I guess, were the way it was reported.
But then again, I mean, even with all their allies and everybody, they certainly don't have Saddam Hussein to help them anymore since Iraq war two.
And it doesn't seem like the army and the Marines want to do a whole lot of dying on the ground in Iran.
So I guess even worst case scenario, what's the plan for they just want to, what, keep waging a proxy war in Yemen forever under the theory that somehow that's going to break Iran's bank when they're hardly even involved in that thing at all?
Or what do they think they're doing?
I mean, I think the plan would be the ideal plan would be to reinstate the sanctions that existed before the nuclear deal and then ratchet up from there to isolate Iran, to surround Iran and to put economic and political pressure on Iran.
You know, the goal isn't clear to me really yet.
I know that this administration has been more openly talking about things like that sound like regime change as a goal than past administrations, certainly more than the Obama administration.
But even before that, I mean, the United States has kind of played at the margins with the idea of supporting revolutionary movements or movements that want to change the regime in Tehran.
But I've seen more of that in the last few months of this administration than many years prior.
So is that their goal?
I don't know.
And I don't know that they know yet.
I mean, we are still, you know, half a year into a new presidency and it takes a while for policies to sort themselves out.
So I think they sort of got the idea that they want to be as belligerent or as confrontational toward Iran as possible.
But I'm not sure they know to what end they want to do that.
They just know that they want to do it.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I guess Ayatollahs make for great boogeymen for arms sales and for a cold war.
But well, there is that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, but for a hot war purposes, seems like a real problem.
I mean, you talk about previous tensions.
I think it's been 10 years, really, since Admiral Fallon, who was the commander of CENTCOM at the time, let the vice president know that you're not going to have a war with Iran, dude, because I'm not going to carry out your orders to have one.
All right.
I'm going to have to go back to your drawing board, pal, because that's the baseline.
No, I won't do it.
And Cheney backed down.
And that was really what it came down to then.
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But even then, the question was, well, what do they want to do?
They wanted some strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps bases in Iran.
And then what?
And then what?
And then what?
In fact, that's the famous Mattis quote.
And they always spin this like Mattis is some wise guy, not wise guy, but wise leader or something that he kept asking Obama, oh, yeah, then what?
But his hypothetical wasn't if you get into a conflict, then what?
His hypothetical that he was challenging Obama on was Obama was trying to make peace with Iran.
And he was saying, oh, yeah, well, what if you make peace on the nuclear issue?
But then something happens in the Persian Gulf or something.
That was his then what?
Then what?
And he was trying to come up with a reason to have a fight.
And that was why Obama fired him.
So I don't like that.
And he's the guy who's now supposedly the adult in the room who's going to keep a lid on.
We what do we know about Donald Trump?
We know that he doesn't know anything about it.
And we know that all of his prejudices are hardcore against Iran and even the existence of the nuclear deal, etc.
Right.
I mean, there's he's surrounded himself.
It's not just Trump, who I agree.
But he doesn't really know anything about it.
He just has these sort of feelings that Iran is bad and that he opposes the nuclear deal.
But he doesn't really seem to have any grasp of the issues.
But he's surrounded himself with an administration that I think.
And now, you know, I should preface this by saying that he hasn't surrounded himself with much of an administration.
I mean, there are still a lot of high level foreign policy and national security jobs that haven't even he hasn't even started interviewing people, let alone gotten to the point of appointments or confirmation hearings.
But the people that he's got around him so far, I think it's striking in that they are all to the extent that we know their feelings on Iran.
They are all uniformly in this confront and, you know, belligerence camp.
There doesn't seem to be anybody in the administration who can articulate or would be willing to articulate a sort of counter view, you know, let's let's engage or let's try diplomacy or something like that, which which even for the Bush administration or going back successively, you know, all the way back to the 1980s, you know, which the relationship has been poisoned this whole time, I think is unique for a U.S. administration to not have even one person of any substance or, you know, high position in the administration who you think might take the other view, I think is unique and troubling.
I mean, I guess the hope is that the Exxon guy at least has a real in his former life anyway, a real profit motive in being well briefed on the real world, right?
That's a hope.
And I know people in the, you know, in the community of people who, you know, want more diplomacy toward Iran and want to improve that relationship.
That was a hope when Tillerson was nominated.
But as the CEO of Exxon, he also has very close relationships with the Saudis.
So I tend to.
So he can understand the truth, but he's going to choose wrong anyway, right?
Right.
I mean, I think there's it's equally possible that he's close enough with the Saudis that he also will, generally speaking, adopt their their point of view.
Not in turn.
He hasn't in terms of Qatar, although then again, he also probably has close ties with the Qataris from his old job.
But in terms of Iran, I think it's at least, you know, as likely that that he's going to have the same pro-Saudi, anti-Iran view of the world.
So now from reading, I read you and Giraldi and Paul Pilar have all written smart things about this.
And I'm not certain which all of the two of the three of you anyway, had mentioned about Qatar working on this natural gas field with the Iranians.
I guess it's underneath the Persian Gulf there and they kind of share rights to it.
Right.
It's not and I guess not.
They don't work with them in a collaborative sense, but they're both exploiting what is basically the same field.
It's got the Iranians call it their part, something else.
But like so it has two names, but it's basically the same field that they're both exploiting.
Well, and I guess I don't want to mischaracterize.
I think the way Paul Pilar was explaining it was and they're getting along just fine in doing so.
And that, you know, they both have an interest in not fighting about this, but continuing to get along.
And so, but that may be this is sort of the extent of the accusation against them is, oh, Qatar's cozying up to the Iranians.
But it's more like, no, they're just living in the real world with the Iranians.
It is the Persian Gulf after all.
And but that.
Well, the Arabs would call it the Arabian Gulf, but yeah.
And yeah, them and Fox News.
But so, but I mean, so what's the reality anyway?
OK, so I get it that the royal family in Qatar.
They're not just I don't know if they were installed by the Brits or not, but at least they're they're a different family than the Al-Sauds, all Sauds, and they have their problem.
So but what exactly, you know, is, you know, such a discrepancy that they would go to the lengths that they've gone to now with all these sanctions and blockades and threats and so forth?
Sure.
I mean, the problems with the Saudis between the Sauds and the Thonnies goes back to the 1990s, which is in 1995, the former emir, not the current emir, but his father, Sheikh Hamad, overthrew his father, Sheikh Khalifa, in a bloodless coup.
And already this is this is something that, you know, this is something that the Saudis don't like anything that's a coup or a revolution or something that's attacking established or, you know, the established order is something that the Saudis get nervous about.
But in particular, the Saudi Qatari relationship was pretty good until that point.
Qatar is the only other country in the world that has Wahhabism as its, you know, sort of state version of Islam.
So they had a historical affinity and it was very much not quite a vassal sovereign relationship, but the Qataris were, you know, loyal enough, they would do what, by and large, what the Saudis wanted.
But Sheikh Hamad, when he took power, one of the things he did was really start to give Qatar an independent foreign policy that, you know, was separated from the Saudis and separated even from the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council.
He started Al Jazeera, which is a part of his foreign policy projection and also has done some coverage of Saudi Arabia and all the other Gulf Emirates that they don't like very much.
And he, you know, as I say, kind of struck out on his own in terms of foreign policy.
And that's been the running dispute for over 20 years now.
It's manifested in different ways.
For a while, the Saudis were upset because the Qataris tried to maintain friendly relationships with Israel.
Not formal diplomatic relationships, but friendly relationships.
Nowadays, of course, the Saudis and the Israelis are almost in lockstep with one another, but they try to not talk about that.
You know, and then it shifted after the Arab Spring into concerns over Qatar's ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and some of these revolutionary movements that were kind of sweeping across the Arab world that made the Saudis very nervous.
And also now it's become about Iran.
Can you talk a little bit more about why the Saudis are so concerned about the Muslim Brotherhood?
Well, I mean, they were concerned in general about the Arab Spring, again, because these were movements that challenged the established order.
They challenged monarchies.
They challenged dictatorships.
And that makes the Saudis nervous, because...
Well, but the Muslim Brotherhood has been around for a long time, and it seems like the Saudis have disliked them for a long time, too.
They've disliked them, again, this goes back to the 90s, actually.
For most of the 20th century, the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood got on fairly well.
The Muslim Brotherhood had headquarters in Saudi Arabia.
A lot of Saudi teachers were drawn from the Muslim Brotherhood.
They brought them in to fill these sort of civil servant jobs.
So they had good relationships, or at least pretty good relationships, with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The falling out happened during the first Gulf War.
The Muslim Brotherhood was one of the groups that publicly condemned or criticized the Saudis for allowing American troops to be stationed on Saudi soil.
And that caused a break.
But the real hostility, I think, has come since the Arab Spring, because the Muslim Brotherhood has been so involved in these, or was so involved in these movements to overthrow, as I say, established monarchies and dictatorships.
And I guess the Saudis and the Mubarak regime, they were really tight for political reasons beyond ideological ones anyway, right?
Yes.
I mean, you know, the Saudis, and if you want to look at another historical example of the Saudis' hostility towards revolutionary movements, I mean, you can go back before Mubarak to the Nasser regime when they took power in the 50s.
For decades, for a couple of decades, they and the Saudis, you know, Egypt and Saudi Arabia were rivals, mostly because of this, I guess, conflict between republicanism, revolutionary republicanism, and traditional monarchism.
But yes, I mean, Mubarak, by the time of Mubarak, I mean, Egypt had become a monarchy in all but name.
I mean, it was a dictatorship he was planning on passing to his son.
So there wasn't that same ideological tension, and they were closely aligned.
That's interesting in the scheme of things where the conservative old Muslim Brotherhood, our democratic revolutionaries, compared to the regimes of the Middle East, it's sort of like at the end of the Soviet Union, when the right wing capitalists were the liberals and the communists were the conservative old right wing.
That wouldn't get away to you.
Things are kind of turned on their head, right?
All right.
Well, hey, listen, this has really been great.
I really appreciate your time on the show and reading all your great stuff that you Sure.
Thanks, Scott.
Thank you.
That's Derek Davidson, everybody.
He writes for the great Jim Loeb over at the Loeb blog, loebblog.com.
And this one is called What's Happening in the Persian Gulf from June the 5th by Derek Davidson.
I'm Scott Horton.
Thanks very much, you guys, for listening.
Full archives at scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org.
Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
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