Two years ago any suggestion that Gulf Arab capitals should engage with Iraq to prevent territorial collapse on their doorstep and offset Iranian influence regionally was dismissed. Why should we do the Americans’ “dirty work”, would be a common response. The notion that Sunni Arab states could try to keep Iraq close and thus weaken the perceived Shia bloc was not taken seriously. This view now appears to be changing. Jordan’s King Abdullah had previously echoed wider Arab sentiment when he warned a couple of years back of a “Shia crescent” covering the region. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak put it more crudely: the Shia (Arabs) are loyal to Iran, he argued at one point. However the UAE, Jordan and Lebanon have recently re-engaged with Baghdad. For Jordan maintaining a diplomatic wall with its old ally, Iraq, was not sustainable as Jordan is currently home to up to one million Iraq refugees and is seeking to restrain that migration.
Since 2006 the US’s military “surge” has combined with expedient US alliances with Iraqi Sunni Arab fighters to help reduce the violence. Enhanced Sunni Arab strength on the ground, and a (Shia-led) Iraqi government that has attempted to challenge militant Iraqi Shia forces and (to some extent) constrain Kurdish national aspirations, has created a diplomatic opening in the otherwise closed wall of Iraq’s relations with the rest of the Arab world. Most of the key Arab states are not exploiting this opening and continue to watch and measure their moves in light of future developments in Iraq and in the US-Iranian “relationship”. Unlike many other Arab states, the UAE and Jordan previously had operations in the Green Zone in Baghdad, until they became victims of the worsening security situation - the Jordanian embassy was destroyed in a terror attack in 2003 and a UAE diplomat stationed in Baghdad was kidnapped in 2006. With increased US encouragement on the back of an improved internal situation in Iraq, these two countries and Lebanon have led the Arab trail back to Baghdad. The UAE already had by far the most advanced relations with Baghdad among the Gulf Arab governments. The UAE had been host to out-of-favor Iraqis over three decades, and since 2003 both aided the new Iraq government and provided homes for some of its discontents, including Iraq Ba’ath Party exiles of contemporary or older standing. This “balanced” relationship with Iraq is consistent with the UAE’s long standing approach to managing relations with the key Gulf powers. In the 1980s it maintained relations with both Iraq and Iran even though different emirates faced in different directions. In June 2008 the UAE declared that Iraq’s Gulf War debt was cancelled, a UAE foreign minister visited Baghdad for the first time since 1990, and a new UAE ambassador for the soon to be reopened embassy was named.
Jordan’s King Abdullah visited Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad in early August, showing that his strategic fears need not prevent diplomacy, especially when highly subsidized oil was on offer. Lebanon’s prime minister Fouad Sinoira (second highest official in the country) was thus prompted to do the same thing a few days later, primarily motivated by its desire to obtain similar oil terms to Jordan but also reflecting Lebanon’s more stable internal politics in which (pro-Iranian) Shia militants Hizbollah have increased leverage. With the partial exception of Bahrain, however, (which followed the UAE initiative by announcing the reopening of its embassy but without naming an ambassador) most GCC governments remain cautious. Expressions of desire to re-open embassies have been affirmed in the last year but with little follow-through, even in the improved security environment. Saudi Arabia’s commitment to a debt write-off is unlikely to be implemented any time soon. This issue is seemingly off-limits in the case of a Kuwait held hostage to parliamentary opinion. Egypt was represented (briefly) in Baghdad’s Green Zone until its ambassador was brutally murdered in 2005. It also led the process of Arab recognition of the new Iraqi government following the formal restoration of Iraqi sovereignty in 2005. Like Saudi Arabia, Egypt is also considering reopening its embassy pending a “security assessment”. However in both these cases the cache of their full diplomatic engagement is being held in reserve pending further possible changes, within and without Iraq.
Syria has maintained high level links with Iraq, and re-opened its embassy (but not appointed an ambassador) in 2007. It is acknowledged in the Arab world that Syria, under US pressure has tried to tighten its border to prevent mostly Arab jihadis crossing over into Iraq. However, what remains a strategic Syrian alliance with Iran is distrusted, while the Lebanese peace deal, based on Syrian neo-hegemony and an effective Hizbollah political veto in Lebanon, is looked upon with little more than resignation by most Arab states. Qatar however sees the relative stability that has followed its mediation of the Lebanese deal, as confirmation of its own regional diplomatic arrival.
No one is predicting plain political sailing among what remain often irreconcilable Iraqi forces. However there is a sense in some Arab capitals that a perceptibly turning tide needs consolidating. The more nationalist arm of Sunni Arab opinion in Iraq has long sought to leverage the role of neighboring Sunni Arab states in order to advance their cause in Iraq. However internal realities place limits on the impact of such engagement, in turn limiting the involvement of Arab actors. Those Arab governments that are beginning to make their way to Baghdad, as well as to host Mr Maliki, are hoping that gains for Sunni Arabs in Iraq can go beyond the easing of de-Ba’athification and greater roles for former relatively senior army and intelligence officials in the new regime. Those governments and the far more reticent Saudis, know that this overlaps with US demands being made of Iraq, but the Arab states are not naïve. The delicate internal balance of Maliki’s government is resting on an alliance disinclined to share power with perceptible foes. Furthermore, and despite having increased Sunni Arab representation, the official Iraqi armed forces remain reliant on Shia and Kurdish militias and still lack a genuinely national espirit d’corp. Saudi Arabia has signaled its disapproval of Gulf Arab engagement with Iraq, which has encouraged a firmer line by an already internally hamstrung Kuwait, but does not appear to be deterring the UAE at least.
The Iran factor is a large part of the calculations of Iraq’s Arab neighbours. A militarily decimated Iraq plainly cannot play the balancing role it did in the 1970s and, most acutely, in the 1980s. In the late 1990s Gulf and other Arab states drew closer to a then relatively weak Iraq, encouraging the further loosening of UN economic sanctions in order to try to offset Iranian regional weight and satisfy domestic opinion. There are elements of this behavior in the current stance of some Arab states toward Iraq, at a time when the extent of the US’s forward role over the medium to longer term is uncertain as it was in the 1990s .
The next few months could see an enhanced US effort to engage Iran while continuing to underscore Washington’s coercive military and economic options. However a new US Administration, which may step up the emergent diplomatic effort with Iran, could equally find that failure on this route leaves it little alternative to military options and/or allowing Israel to exercise its own such options. Saudi Arabia and the smaller Arab states stand to lose the most in the event of either a nuclear Iran or a US/Israeli war to prevent it, but feel powerless to affect developments. There are suggestions that some Gulf Arab states would prefer what they would hope would be a limited US/Israeli military strike against Iran to any future US acceptance of Iran as a nuclear weapons power. This perspective is hotly denied in Saudi Arabia, albeit that some senior al-Sa’ud would concur with it. However views privately expressed to the US seem unlikely to affect what will actually happen. The chances of the GCC states privately (as well as publicly) trying to deny the US use of their military bases and facilities are slim, and in any case this would be impractical given their vulnerability to Iranian attack regardless of the location from which any attack on Iran began. The GCC states have shown little sign of preparing strategies for working with either US diplomacy or defence options. Encouraging Iranian compromise has fallen to Arabia’s kingpin, but the detailed diplomatic brief and the political and military muscle required for any deal are beyond Riyadh’s hands and capabilities.
There are signs though of an Arab attempt to support Iraq in order to encourage its re-entry into the Arab fold. In any case the smaller Gulf Arab states have nowhere else to go other than promote good relations across the Gulf, a strategy that Kuwait assiduously followed up to August 1990 and which Qatar is the effective embodiment of today, albeit in a more pronounced and sometimes maverick manner.
Sunni Arab engagement with Iraq will need to include Saudi Arabia and Egypt if the Shia-led government in Baghdad is to be encouraged to loosen its links with Iran and to enhance nascent internal political accommodation. However, while Egypt cannot be overlooked by a traditionally diplomatically cautious Saudi Arabia, ultimately it is to Saudi Arabia that Iraq will look for signs of a real thaw. As de facto ruler the then Crown Prince Abdullah effectively embraced Saddam Hussein via his ostensible second in command, Izaat Ibrahim al-Douri, at the Beirut Arab summit just months before the fall of the Iraqi regime. As King, and in command of what has become since the security challenges of 2003-05, a stable and extremely prosperous country, Abdullah has not been prepared to receive Maliki despite backing the US military surge and the implicit support the operation gave the Iraqi premier. Saudi Arabia’s obstinacy on this question is compounded by a “wait and see” attitude toward the incoming Administration in Washington and a greater ability than its small GCC neighbours to withstand pressure from the outgoing US Administration to “get in line” over Iraq. At the same time Saudi Arabia’s former active courtship of Iran’s President Ahmedinejad has given way to semi-public exasperation. Nevertheless, Saudi Arabia’s contacts across the Iranian regime are maintained and Saudi hopes of an enhanced role for the pragmatic former president Ali Rafsanjani in Iranian diplomacy are periodically raised (even if they are equally regularly frustrated).
The Arabs are aware that inside Iran a more flexible assertion of its national interest is being expressed in public under presidential aspirant and supreme leader confidante, Ali Larijani. The policy substance on the nuclear question is as yet unchanged however. Saudi press opinion is getting increasingly shrill about Iranian regional ambitions, which continue to be viewed as having resumed the revolutionary posture of the 1980s, while their GCC neighbours, and in particular Qatar, are seen by some harder line nationalists in the Saudi media as effectively playing the role of appeasers. Against this background, some of the GCC states are making their moves toward Iraq. This has the virtue in the current regional alignment of not antagonizing Iran, which backs the Iraqi government.
Saudi Arabia however seems likely to remain confident enough to sit on its hands, blessing the “moderate” Sunni Islamists and nationalists in the Iraqi government, and cleaving to its renewed importance to US regional calculations after US objectives awry in Iraq. What Saudi Arabia lacks, in common with the smaller GCC states, is any idea of what to do if Iran accedes to the historic diplomatic compromise that is being touted by the Europeans with US connivance. In the event of a US/Israeli war against Iran, it is perhaps only the UAE that has an insurance policy. Whilst possessing a small Shia Arab population compared to many of its GCC neighbours, the UAE has high levels of Iranian investment and a re-export business overseen by a sizeable Iranian business community. At the same time the UAE works with the US (its pivotal defense ally should it come under direct attack), by pursuing diplomacy with Iraq and by periodically demanding a resolution to the disputed Iranian-held Gulf islands. It seems likely that Bahrain will follow suit in restoring relations with Iraq, although Qatar’s good relations with Syria and Iran might militate against an obviously US-encouraged Qatari return to Baghdad. For its part Oman’s relative physical remove from Iraq make is more politically detached from these machinations.
The Arabs are likely to remain divided over tactics when it comes to Iraq, waiting as ever on a US lead. Saudi Arabia in particular seems set to stand aloof from an Arab rapprochement with Baghdad. Talk of war compounds Riyadh’s fear of being seen by Iran as a part of a perceived US-Arab plot to split Iraq from Iran. Enhanced US diplomacy with Iran is however likely to encourage engagement with Iraq by Arab governments sensing that otherwise they could be left high and dry in a changing regional order. Much though will depend on how Iraq manages its internal and external relations, and whether its government and state can become sufficiently internally coherent to be able to offer the Arabs meaningful incentives to deepen their diplomatic engagement.
JIME Center.All rights reserved.