In the run up to the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, a triumvirate dominated Arab politics: Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia. After the cold war had underscored a strategic and ideological enmity that pitted Saudi and Egypt on other sides of a regional divide in the 1950s and much of the 1960s, the shock of the major loss of Arab territory to Israel in the 1967 War, saw Cairo and Damascus conduct a largely Saudi-funded rearmament drive care of the then Soviet Union. The initial coordinated Arab military success on the battlefield in 1973, combined with the Saudi-led wielding of the Arab oil weapon in the midst of the war, showed that the Arabs could provide a relatively coherent front in the face of a common regional foe, even if Egyptian-Syrian disunity over what should be the extent of the fighting with Israel allowed the latter to regain the military advantage during the war. Sadly, from the Arab perspective, the post-war Arab diplomatic successes proved limited, not least in the face of US “salami slicing” that sought (and eventually secured) separate diplomatic processes involving Israel and its neighbors. Despite Syria’s tactical alliance with what had become the radical Islamic Republic Iran as it fought a common foe – Iraq - in the 1980s, Saudi Arabia did not shrink from support for Damascus, concerned that the containment of Iran should not usher in too strong an Iraq, a concern that later proved justified. The Saudi efforts to promote a common political front with Egypt and Damascus would reach its high point in the aftermath of Iraq’s attack on Kuwait and therefore on what was becoming a settled Arab state system in 1990. Financial largesse from Saudi Arabia, as well as the UAE and Kuwait, for Syria and Egypt would cement common interests as Iraq was isolated and a regional peace process with Israel made relative progress (and nearly secured a Syrian-Israeli peace deal in 1999). After the emotional and political low point in Saudi-Syrian relations caused by what the Kingdom believed was direct Syrian involvement in the killing of former Lebanese premier, and Saudi ally, Rafiq Hariri in 2005, relations are now being restored to a more rational basis, even if this is clearly not an inter-Arab alliance of the kind seen previously.
Despite the poisonous Saudi-Syrian relationship following the Hariri assassination, and given the growth of Iranian regional power, abetted by Syria in Lebanon and Palestine, Riyadh is once again seeking to engage with Syria at the highest level, seeing, as it did at the Riyadh GCC summit in March 2007, cooperation on Arab-Israeli security as a building bloc for efforts to tackle Riyadh’s greater concern, Iran. The collapse of Saudi-promoted Palestinian national unity agreement in June 2007 had made Riyadh conclude that Syria and Iran were pursuing common interests that made Saudi engagement with Syria pointless, despite periodic suggestions that renewed attempts at understanding were being considered. Talk of a renewed “Arab Cold War” as Syria’s alignment with radical and sometimes Iran-backed Arab fighters put it on one side of a regional divide, and US-backing for Saudi Arabia and Egypt put the two so-called “moderate” states on the other, is now subsiding however. Saudi Arabia has returned to a policy of trying to resume cooperation with both Egypt and Syria. At the same time Iraq remains off limits as its government continues to be perceived in Riyadh as too close to Iranian interests, a stance significantly at odds with the Emirati and Kuwaiti engagement with Baghdad.
What then has changed to re-enthuse Riyadh about engagement with mistrusted Syria, when previous efforts to loosen Damascus’ friendship with Tehran failed? One element is the resumed strength of the Syrian regional role. At one time Saudi Arabia was hoping that Syria’s isolation in the Arab world, the work of the internal tribunal enquiring into the Hariri assassination that Lebanon is cooperating with, and internal Syrian pressures would be a way of weakening the Damascus leadership. Eighteen months ago those close to the thinking of the Saudi leadership would talk up Saudi options with the Syrian opposition while a leading figure in the latter, former Syrian vice president Abdul-Halim Khaddam, was publicly courted in Riyadh. A key factor in changing this approach was the failure of Saudi efforts to mediate a national unity government in Lebanon despite the pressing need created by the 2006 Hizbollah-Israel war. The Saudis tried to include Iranian-backed Hizbollah without it having a literal veto over Lebanese decision-making. Qatar took over mediation duties and provided a platform for a deal in May 2008 that necessarily gave Hizbollah, and therefore indirectly its allies, Syria and Iran, a veto on Lebanese decision-making, after the threat of a resumed civil war a few months earlier had emphasized how close the country was to collapse. The deal got wide Arab backing. Since then Syria has opened diplomatic relations with Lebanon for the first time, thereby formally ending residual ideological attachment to Bilad as-Sham (Greater Syria). Thus Syria has had its importance in Lebanon emphasized via the Hizbollah veto in government, but has also addressed the wider demand among many Lebanese and wider Arabs that its own role be exercised responsibly. As Lebanon approaches fresh elections expected in June 2009, national cooperation is however once again in doubt, for all the Saudis’ ongoing efforts to promote conciliation. The possible exclusion of Hizbollah from the next Lebanese government due to the strength of anti-Syrian forces led Mr Hariri’s son Saad could resume civil conflict scenarios and/or encourage Hizbollah to once again challenge Israel.
The Israel factor in regional instability, and the Syrian and Iranian connection in provoking it, was once again evident in December 2008/January 2009 in the Gaza war. This led Saudi Arabia to seek cooperation with Syria to lessen the chance of either Lebanon or Palestine being the platform for a renewed regional conflict that squeezes perceived Arab interests between Israel on one side and Iran on the other. This requires inter-Lebanese and inter-Palestinian cooperation, and therefore both Syrian and Saudi support. The US was acquiescent in Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Gaza. At the same time, under President Obama, the US is giving greater emphasis to its own engagement with Syria and, on a separate basis, Iran. Saudi Arabia therefore is judging that it needs to be at one with US efforts to promote a coalescence of Arab interests in reducing the risks of conflict with Israel. At the same time the warm words emanating from the new US Administration toward Iran are encouraging Riyadh to seek to use this attempted Arab unity as a way of underscoring to the US the importance of Arab concerns and specifically of the Saudi role in the region.
This Saudi strategy of attempting to contain Iran’s regional weight through political maneuver also has several internal drivers. During high level engagements in 2007 the two countries warned each other of their sectarian reach. The Kingdom’s weight over Iran’s Sunni Arab population on the northern shores of the Gulf is in some doubt, however, while the Shia Arabs of oil-rich Ahwaz are plainly beyond the Kingdom’s capacity to influence. The Sunni Arab Iranians’ loyalty to Iran is not solid, as events at the beginning of the 1980s Gulf war showed when they welcomed the arrival of Saddam’s forces. However this community does not look to Saudi Arabia as its contemporary “liberator”. These Iranians are linked to the so-called “hawala” community of “migrants” dwelling on the southern Gulf shore who traversed the Gulf in the 18th and 19th centuries and who in the GCC states are often, because of their historical Iranian connection, labeled as “Persian”. The difficulty for Saudi Arabia is that these particular Sunni Arabs are by no means “wahhabi”; their Arab identity is not suffused with the religious puritanism of the kind seen among those that originate in such conservative Saudi Arabian heartlands as Najd. At the same time Saudi Arabia has watched with alarm at Iran’s ability to address Bahraini Shia majority concerns with renewed assertions of the historical Iranian identity on the two Gulf islands. Among the majority Bahraini Shia population as many as 60% are genuinely of Persian origin and are willing to describe themselves as such, some even using the label “Iranian”. Their political marginalization in Bahrain, despite their inclusion in parliamentary politics along with those Shia of Arab origin, makes these Bahrainis supportive of occasional territorial claims from senior Iranian figures, even if these statements are subsequently played down by Iran’s official foreign spokesmen and by the Bahraini government itself. In Saudi Arabia itself, however, the Shia minority of around 8% of the population is overwhelmingly Arab, lessening but not eliminating the reach of Iran. While the mainstream Saudi Shia leadership focuses on trying to encourage King Abdallah to pursue a more inclusive version of national identity that reduces the “wahhabi” features of the state, other and seemingly growing voices have sounded far more strident and have even been prepared to publicly assert themselves in demonstrations and in statements that challenge the legitimacy of the Saudi state. In Mecca in February 2009 religious police clashed with Shia whose treatment of the burial ground of the Prophet Mohammed and seeming disdain for the burial sites of his companions was, for better or worse, in keeping with Shia stances. Extremely religiously repressed and denied a coherent political voice in the Kingdom, Saudi Shia do not have to do much to engender fears among the al-Saud leadership. In a measure of the formal partnership between Shia moderates and the King, those arrested were later released after Saudi Shia leaders petitioned the monarch in the traditional fashion. Shortly afterwards, a Saudi Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr talked of the Shia having to “secede” of if their rights are not respected.
Saudi officials see an Iranian hand in any such internal challenges, as was more typically the case during such disturbances in the 1990s. An Iranian role was also assumed when Shia from Qatif in Eastern Province in December 2008 and January 2009 staged several days of solidarity demonstrations over the Israeli war with Gaza. There was genuine anger throughout the Arab world at not just Israel’s action but the mooted Arab government responses. However, Iran was seen by Riyadh as exploiting such a situation, further encouraging the constraints on demonstrations throughout the Gulf until local disquiet required the legalizing of formal solidarity demonstrations as seen in several emirates in the UAE for example in early January. With non-Arab leaders seen in the region as having been the clearest condemners of Israel’s actions, the Gulf Arabs states belatedly sought to combine a tough anti-Israel stance whilst wary of a strategic context that, through the popularity of Hamas, could provide plaudits for Iran as occurred via Hizbollah in 2006. After the recent Gaza war, the push for inter-Palestinian agreement has been a response to internal Palestinian and wider Arab needs as the two Palestinian leaderships were divided between the so-called radical and moderate blocs in the Arab world. Qatar, whose emergency summit in January 2009 sought to respond to the public anger, found itself the lone GCC member of the radical bloc as the meeting was boycotted by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. The subsequent involvement of all the Arab leaders at the Kuwait summit brought an attempt by Saudi Arabia to exploit the sense that their own division had helped limit their popular and political credibility. Language designed to promote renewed efforts to find a Palestinian and wider Arab unity was utilized and financial aid was offered to the Palestinians – an incentive that notably failed to keep them together in 2007. In March 2009 the Saudis hosted Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, along with Qatari and Kuwaiti rulers in a pre-Arab League meeting designed to ensure that the Doha hosted Arab League meeting in April will see senior attendance as a symbol of cooperation. With the recent election of a right wing Israeli government that could see a tension in US-Israeli relations not witnessed since 1991-2 when the right wing administration of Yitzhak Shamir was in power, the closing of Arab ranks makes sense at the domestic and regional level. Syria is keen to signal that, despite Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, it is open to US peace efforts, a position that Iran’s internal political and ideological constraints prevent it from stating. For Syria it may only be the process that is seeks rather than the (remote and often elusive) fruits of peace. As long as Israel will not consider conceding all of the Golan Heights, Damascus cannot be seriously tested on the issue. With that process liable to be elusive, and events in Lebanon liable to be fractious, especially when the promised Hariri tribunal gets underway, the durability of efforts to renew the Saudi alliance with Syria will be seriously at question. Substantive Syrian promotion of inclusion in Lebanon and Palestine would not guarantee that Bashar is exonerated by the International Tribunal, while any Syrian loosening of its relationship with Iran, while potentially bringing much needed Saudi financial aid, is of dubious strategic value. Syria seems to prefer to consider its options, which attending summits and being nice to the Gulf Arabs does not harm.
US president Obama’s video address to Iran on March 20th 2009 talked of mutual respect and ending terror. It did not clearly refer to Iran’s possible nuclear weapons ambitions. Iran like Syria will want to exploit its seeming strength in such a situation. Iran is seeking incentives to take any engagement with the US beyond low level positioning of the kind already explored more discretely under the last US Administration. Notably, in mid-March the US extended its economic sanctions on Iran. If a new Iranian president – assuming Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is replaced in the June presidential election - gains the support of the Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khammanei to promote national inclusion in Lebanon and Palestine and downplays armed struggle, then this will aid efforts at cooperation between Saudi Arabia, Syria and Egypt. Ultimately, however, the Palestinians or the Lebanese themselves could upset this equation if Israel is disinterested in either a political process or holding off its military options, whether there is a Palestinian or Lebanese national unity government in place or not. Furthermore if the Iran nuclear question is fudged by the US, then Syria has every reason to maintain as close a relationship with Iran as it can. Assuming the Middle East Peace Process remains stalled, the “Arab” option will be less attractive for Syria, even if encouraging Hamas or Hizbollah militancy is likely to be less favored in Iran or Syria for as long as the US is in a conciliatory mood.
JIME Center.All rights reserved.