Angry Planet - In Qatar and Saudi Arabia’s fight, Iran’s the real winner

Episode Date: June 15, 2017

Thanks to a hack allegedly carried out by Russian intelligence, relations between Qatar and Saudi Arabia are tense to say the least. The Kingdom has blockaded Qatar ports and several Gulf states have removed envoys and ambassadors. Right now, the Middle East looks a lot like Europe on the eve of World War I. This week on War College, Oklahoma University professor Joshua Landis runs us through the complicated factions making up the Middle East. According to Landis, Iran is the real winner in the latest dust up between old allies. By Matthew Gault Produced by Bethel HabteSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. What we're seeing in the Middle East today is a new security architecture being established. Iran has really in many ways won this major tug of war. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines.

Hello, welcome to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Galt. With me today is Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He's a frequent traveler to D.C., and he runs the blog, Syria Comet, which keeps track of the country's fractured politics. Joshua, thank you so much for joining us. Well, thanks for inviting me on, Matt. So I wanted to have you on today because there's been a lot of important news out of the Middle East in the past few weeks, and I'm worried some of it's been buried by America's domestic squabbles. And first and foremost is Qatar. And I'm wondering if you'll let the audience know what exactly has happened and what's going on there,

because it looks like a pretty big, it looks to me like a big deal. It is a big deal, and it throws chaos into the ranks of the U.S. coalition against ISIS and U.S. allies in general in the Gulf region. Qatar is a small island state in the Persian Gulf. It has about 300,000 inhabitants, not very much, but it's one of the largest gas exporters of the world, and it shares a major gas field, one of the biggest in the world under the Persian Gulf that is also under Iran. Saudi Arabia is upset at the Emir of Qatar and Qatar's foreign policy for a number of reasons, primary of which is that Saudi Arabia believes that Qatar is much too close to Iran,

is indulgent of Iran, and is helping Iran. Secondly, it believes that Qatar, and has accused Qatar, of funding terrorism. What that means is that Qatar is close to the Muslim Brotherhood, which Saudi Arabia does not like. They have differed over policy towards Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood, of course, won elections 2013 and got booted out in 2013. Cici came to power. This caused Egypt to side with Saudi Arabia against Qatar. Qatar has also a free press, or much more free press than Saudi Arabia does. El Jazeera is housed in Qatar. Saudi Arabia is not like Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera has been quite pro-Muslim Brotherhood, but it's also been critical of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf

countries. So Saudi Arabia doesn't like the freedom of Qatar, its independence, foreign policy, and particularly it's pro-Iranian and pro-Muslim Brotherhood foreign policy. For all these reasons, Saudi Arabia is trying to discipline small Qatar by flexing its muscles, showing that it can bring together a larger coalition of Allied States to the United States. The United States, Arab Emirates, Egypt, so forth in order to put sanctions onto Qatar, stop sending mail, food, really isolating Qatar in a way that will force the Emir to go on bended knee, apologize, and come back into the orbit of Saudi Arabia. But there was an event, right, that kind of kicked all of this off.

Can you talk about that a little bit? Yes. and that was what was called the hacking of Qatar's website. There's a lot of controversy about this. It's a little bit like the hacking of the Democratic website, of the Democratic Party in the United States, which then caused the big, you know, people have blamed for the loss of Clinton and Trump's success.

The U.S. is blaming Russia for hackiness. What happened is they took a speech given by the Emir of Qatar to a graduating class. of its war college and put it on its site. And that speech outlined that the Emir's criticism of Saudi Arabia. And it infuriated Saudi Arabia. Klahti said this was hacked, that this was not the right speech and so forth and so on. Saudi Arabia didn't buy any of that.

This has caused the fracturing of Gulf diplomacy, the coalition against ISIS. Many people are saying this is fallen right into Russia. his hands and they have allowed, they have sort of thrown dust into this coalition that is competing with Saudi Arabia in Syria. So that's the event that sparked this latest kerfuffle. Okay. And what do you see as kind of the different battle lines or different alliances? Like who is on Qatar's side? Well, Turkey, interestingly enough, Turkey, which has been close to Saudi Arabia, work with Saudi Arabia in Syria and so forth, and Qatar both, has sided with Qatar, said it would send more troops to Qatar and has not isolated Qatar in any way, despite

Saudi demands that it do so. So Qatar, Turkey. On the other side of the United Arab Republic, Yemen, the pro-Saudi part of Yemen, Libyan government depends on Saudi Arabia. Egypt, all of the states that are quite dependent, Jordan, Morocco, the other monarchies, the other members of the GCC, the Gulf Council that tries to unite the various Gulf countries. A lot of countries have hung back, haven't given completely full support of Saudi Arabia. They don't want to get sucked into this internist and squabble, but they have to go along with

Saudi more or less because Qatar is a small state. It's a rich one, but it's a small state and losing Saudi. support would be an angering Saudi Arabia is just not worth it for most of these countries. And are we seeing, along with, you know, sanctions, are we also seeing military action? Are people lining up on the borders? Are boats going anywhere? Not yet. There's fear that this could escalate and somehow spark a First World War situation where it would

provoke Saudi Arabia to get into a war that could drag Iran and Saudi Arabia into a into a hot war. I think that's unlikely. I think that Qatar will be forced to back down. I think Qatar will drag this situation out for some time. Qatar is very wealthy country. It's the wealthiest country in the world. Per capita income is the highest in Qatar.

It can afford to drag this out and cause some pain to Saudi Arabia, diplomatic pain. But I think ultimately for Qatar to really go its own way would mean going on to side of Iran. Iran, of course, is offered to help Qatai. But Qatar is unlikely to do that. It's a majority of Sydney country. It's a small country. It's in the Gulf. It can't afford to break from Saudi Arabia. We saw a similar situation in 2014 in which this same spat for the same reasons sparked up. And within nine months, the emir of Qatar had apologized and really came back into the fold.

and the situation was patched up. Ambassadors were returned to each country and so forth. I've not heard of that incident. Can you give us a little bit more background on it? Well, it had come right on the heels of the whole Egyptian contratoms, which was, as we remember in 2011, uprising in Egypt Arab Spring, Mubarak, who had been pro-Saudi, was kicked out of power by the Egyptian military. And there were elections.

The Muslim Brotherhood won in the elections. Qatar was very supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood. They subsidized and gave a lot of money to help stabilize this new government of the Muslim Brotherhood. Qatar believed and supported many of the Arab Spring revolts by sending money to Libya, to the anti-Khdafi forces in Libya, to Egypt. It had been funding groups that Saudi Arabia didn't like in Syria. So it was very independent policy. Then when Sisi overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, this created a lot of tension between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which escalated into withdrawing ambassador. Saudis withdrew its ambassador from Qatar, isolated it, forced its allies in the region to do similar things.

and Qatar then did step back and really trims its sales in order to bring its foreign policy more in alignment with Saudi Arabia. But that has gotten out of alignment, particularly as Saudi Arabia and Iran have gotten increasingly a daggers drawn. And we saw the incident most recently with the blowing up by ISIS of the parliament, or at least a bomb in the parliament of, Iran and the tensions between Sunnis and Shiites in general, Iran and Saudi Arabia in particular, have just grown to a peak. And so the whole region is very anxious. Why does Qatar support the Muslim Brotherhood? What's their interest there? Well, I think the Mir is being independent. He has made the calculation that most of the opposition parties in the Middle East want more Islam, the secular dictatorships, military regimes that populated the Middle East since World War II,

regimes like Assad regime in Syria, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Arafat in Palestine, Mubarak in Egypt, the Libyan Gaddafi regimes, Tunisia, all of these secular dictatorships had become terribly unpopular. Qatad was the war. really selling itself amongst the people, not only by supporting El Jazeera, which is the most widely watched station, bringing a breath of sort of fresh air, criticism, truth, news, real news into the homes of most Arabs through the satellite channel that was paid for by Klahtun subsidized, but also increasingly supporting the Islamic oppositions in all these countries that had weakened the legitimacy of all these dictatorships.

And Saudi Arabia is threatened by that. It's threatened by that for a number of reasons, first of all because it doesn't allow it for any criticism. I think the Emir of Qatar feels particularly immune to popular social movements because the country only has 300,000 people. They're so wealthy. Many of them are related that he can promote change in the Middle East without it threatening his own power, his own monarchy, if you will. Whereas the Saudis are in a much more precarious position. Their monarchy is big. They have well over 20 million people, close to 30 million people.

They have 15% Shiites in their country, which are opponents of the government by and large. It wants to preserve the status quo. It doesn't want to see governments in Egypt. It didn't like the Arab Spring. It tried to bottle up the Arab Spring. It has supported a rather conservative movement in Libya, getting rid of the Islam, limits to Libya, and Saudi Arabia has a long inimical relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood in particular. It hasn't always been inimical. Saudi Arabia in the 70s and early 80s invited

Muslim brothers from across the Middle East who were being kicked out of their country and persecuted in their country to come to Saudi Arabia. They allow them often they used them because they were very well educated. They allow them to come teachers in the schools and so forth. This is going all the way back to the 50s and Nasser in Egypt because Nasser persecuted many of the Muslim brothers, tortured them in his jails, they fled the country, and they went to Saudi Arabia. One of the key teachers of Bin Laden in high school who taught him, I believe it was math, as well as his soccer coach, was a Syrian Muslim brother who had fled a persecution from Haftz al-Assad in the 70s, went to Saudi Arabia, taught

bin Laden and influenced him, really radicalized him and gave him this much more radical picture. So the Saudis saw this radicalization the Muslim Brotherhood as a critique of the monarchy for being corrupt, for not really being truly Muslim, for not really upholding the Wahhabi values that it claimed to uphold. And so Saudi Arabia turned against the Muslim Brotherhood and has been a severe critic. of the Muslim Brotherhood ever since. And this has caused it to separate ideologically from Qatar, which has supported the Muslim Brotherhood.

Today, most of the Egyptian Muslim brothers who have had to flee the country because of persecution under Cece have either gone to Istanbul where Erdogan has given them some protection and home or to Qatah, where there are hundreds of Egyptian Muslim brothers and Muslim brothers from Syria and other places who have found protection and get visas in Qatar.

All right, you are listening to War College. We are on with Joshua Landis, and we are talking about the current tensions in the Middle East. We'll be back after a break. So we were talking about the Muslim Brotherhood and some of the ins and outs of the history of what's going on in the region. And you really make it sound like this is a conflict that falls along religious lines and ethnic lines with Qatar and Turkey

kind of in the background, almost as wildcards? Well, yes. I mean, this is a Sunni versus Shiite conflict in the largest scale because Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Assad regime in Syria, the new government in Iraq, since America put Shiites in power in Iraq, have all teamed up together. The Shiite-led countries or movements are one coalition. against Saudi Arabia with the other Sydney powers, the Gulf powers, and Egypt, which is quite dependent on Saudi Arabia. And those are the two major competing forces.

Israel is lined up with the Sunnis in the Gulf against Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah, which it fears to the north of it. And so those are the two major blocks. Qatar has tried to swim independently between them. It's firmly in the Sunni world, but it has much more, much better relations with Iran than these other Sydney powers, in part because it's very close to Iran. It shares this giant gas field. There's tons of a trade with Iran. Many ways Qatar is the entrepo and port city in which Iranian trade, which is significant with the Gulf, comes to the Gulf through Qatar. And so Iran's relations with Qatar are very important to the Emir.

And that's been the way the Emir has really found some elbow room to be independent from Saudi Arabia, which wants it really to follow in lockstep behind Saudi Arabia. You know, I know you told us earlier in the conversation not to worry, but this really does sound like a World War I entangling alliances moment. Why do you think that it's not going to come to violence? Well, the reason I don't think it will come to violence is because both Iran and Saudi Arabia, while they are major competitors, are fighting a number of proxy wars against each other. They're fighting in Syria, where they support opposite sides. They're fighting in Yemen, where they support opposite sides. There are tensions in many other countries like Bahrain and so forth, all of which could be seen as reasons why they would actually go to war. against each other. But I believe that they will limit the direct war in the same way that the

United States and Russia faced each other in the Cold War, fought proxy wars in many different countries. But we're too frightened of each other to really get into an all-out war. And I think the same situation exists between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Were they to go to war against each other and begin bombing each other with air forces and so forth. It would be devastating. Saudi Arabia has a better military, spends gobs more money than Iran does on its military every year. But Iran is a very sophisticated country. It has a very well-trained military.

It has many allies that are powerful. It would be devastating to the entire region. I think they're in a spitting match. They're fighting these proxies. wars, there's terrible ideological tensions, but I think they will back away from all-out war. I think neither Russia nor the United States or any of the other great powers in the region have any interest in such a conflagration. So I don't think that they'll be pushed into war either by their allies.

All right, well, let's talk about those allies a little bit. We said earlier in the conversation that there's a possibility that Russia is responsible for planting the story on the state-run Cotter website that has led to this most recent dust up. What would be the Kremlin's motivation if we believe the FBI and Cotter itself that they are the source of the hack? Well, it's to try to weaken this American coalition

that has undermining Assad sees Russia as a intrusion into really an American-dominated Middle East. Saudi Arabia, of course, is pushing the United States to be anti-Iranian, anti-Russian in the Middle East. So for Russia, it's a very cheap way to just divide and conquer and to get its way to weaken this coalition, this anti-Russian, anti-Iranian coalition. Right, because it's important to remember that these are both. American allies, right? And we sell arms to both countries.

Yes, and we have our fleet. We have a major base in Qatar. Qatar is an important power. We have worked with Qatar. Qatar has funded radical organizations, Salafist organizations in Syria, which we haven't always liked. But we've been working fairly closely with Qatar to try to rein that in, to get a number of organizations that Qatar has funded in the past put on. on a terrorist list and get Qatar to stop allowing individuals to fund them and so forth. So, yes, Qatar is an important spoke in American influence in the Persian Gulf in their Middle East writ large. All right.

Let's talk about Turkey a little bit. Let's switch our focus over there because they again seem like a, they're different than everybody else in the region, right? They are. They're Turks. First of all, they speak Turkish. they have been led, you know, the heritage of Ataturk, the George Washington of Turkey, that brought the country together after the Ottoman Empire fell apart and were First World War, defeated in First World War, and rebuilt Anatolian power based on Turkish nationalism. Turkey and Ataturk turned Turkey into a faithful ally of the West. He renounced Islamic heritage. He said Islamist.

held back to Turks. He wanted to secularize Turkey. He moved it into European orbit. Turkey has tried to become a European nation. And if you notice, you know, in the UN and the New York Times, Turkey is listed as a European country. That's the legacy of Ataturk. Erdogan, the new leader of Turkey since 2002, has really tried to reverse a lot of that secularism and has led Turkey out of Europe's orbit, has re-Islamized Turkey, and has consolidated power tremendously around his presidency, to the point that many people in the West have thrown up their arms and think that Turkey's lost, lost to Europe in a sense, lost to secularism is no longer a good ally. They're worried that it might even fall out of NATO. There's great distrust that has grown up between the West and

Turkey today, particularly since the coup d'etat, attempt, the failed coup d'etat of about six months ago, in which well over 100,000 Turks have been arrested, 300,000 have lost their jobs, major purge by Erdogan that has set all of his enemies on their heels, made them very anxious. Many of those enemies are people allied with the West. And so this has caused great tensions between the United States. and Erdogan. And what do you make of our recent decision to America's recent decision to lend material support to the Kurds?

That is really the last straw. You put your finger on it there because for Erdogan, that is the game changer in a relationship with America because 15 to 20 percent of the Turkish population, of Turkey's population are Kurds who are ethnically different from Turks. many of them speak their first language as Kurdish, which is an Indo-European language related to Persian, and they have been discriminated against, by and large, by Turkey. For the first half of the 20th century, they were told that they were not Kurds, that they were mountain Turks, that they had to become Turks.

It was a very unhappy situation. Out of that, discrimination grew up, what's called the PKK, a movement, this Kurdish Workers Party movement, led by Ocelon, a sort of Marxist independent leader who wanted Kurdish independence, started an insurgency against the Turkish government, which has led to the death of over 40,000 people in Turkey, mostly Kurds, but many Turks, and particularly many soldiers and policemen. And this ongoing civil strife is, you know, the most important issue in Turkey for the government. It holds great dangers for Turkey because were the Kurds to become completely alienated and to leave Turkey,

this would mean much of Eastern Turkey would be lost. It would split the country in two. So Erdogan is terrified of this. And America is supporting the Syrian Kurds. The Syrian Kurds are led by the YPG, which is an offshoot of the PKK, they all see Ochelon as this sort of leading figure politically of both movements. And so Turkey looks at the Syrian Kurds and says there's really no difference between them and this insurgency inside Turkey. They're all terrorists. And if America gives them arms, night vision goggles and trains them to fight.

to fight ISIS, all that training in arms and expertise, military expertise, is going to come right back into Turkey, is going to be at the disposal of the PKK, and it's going to kill Turks. And this is really America funding terrorism. And so for Turkey, America's single-minded decision to fight ISIS, even if it means aligning itself with Kurdish nationalism in Syria, is really a wrong move. And Turkey sees this as a major breach in the alliance. And that's where we are.

So there are tremendous tensions in that relationship. Do you think Turkey will leave NATO? I know Germany is pulling troops out of one of its bases there, correct? Angelic, which is a base that America helped establish and is part of the whole NATO thing. but it's been a linchpin of American power in the Middle East, containment of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It's a major Air Force base for American planes and NATO and so forth, and American training in the region. It's key to the fight on ISIS because many of the flights bombing are near Raqa are coming right out of Indyelik. So if Injulik were lost to this Western alliance and to the United States, it would be, it would be,

very painful. So I don't think Turkey will leave NATO. On the other hand, that his trust clearly weakens the alliance, the trust between the West and Turkey. Why Syria? Why did that become what appears to be the battleground between everybody? Syria is, in a sense, the cockpit of the Middle East, just geographically, but also ideologically in other reasons. Syria is in many ways a Noah's Ark. It's got two of every religious denomination, the Middle East, ethnicity, and so forth. And of course, borders, Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan. It's right in the middle. 70% of Syrians are Sunni Arabs, 10% are Kurds, and another 20% are various religious minorities, led by the Alawite minority, which is 10, 11, 12%, but has a lot of Christians

and others. So everybody cares about Syria. It's a tinterbox ethnically and religiously. So the tensions that were created in Iraq were the American invasion in 2003, in which Shiites fought Sunnis, who fought Kurds, and the breakdown of Arab nationalism into these three different subnational identities, Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis. drew the entire region into the Iraq conflict. Iran on the side of the Shiite, Saudi Arabia on the side of the Sydney Arabs, and Turkey, of course, terrified that the Kurds of northern Iraq would spark uprising amongst its own Kurds got compounded when Syria collapsed into civil war because all those problems immediately translated into Syria. America urged Turkey to send

its army into Syria to move against Assad with whom Turkey had had very close relations and to help overthrow the secular dictatorship in Syria in the hopes of putting a Sunni Arab new government. Turkey thought, okay, I can do that. And I will get the Muslim Brotherhood friendly Syrians to organize here in Istanbul, we'll arm them up. They'll overthrow Assad. And Turkey will really have extended its fear of influence throughout all of Syria.

because then the new Muslim Brotherhood leaning government, Sunni Arab government in Damascus, would be pro-Turkish. That was the idea. And that seemed good to America, but it all, of course, none of it turned out the way it was supposed to. Assad got reinforced by both the Russians and the Iranians and Hisbalah and all the Shiites rallied. The Sinis remained completely fragmented and despite military aid from America, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, you name it. all the Sydney world piled in, they couldn't pull off a wind. And it tore apart the region, turned into a major proxy war, and Turkey ended up holding the bag for 2.5 million Syrian refugees. ISIS used Turkey as its major egress point.

All of these jihadists started coming from the Arab world and Europe and other places going through Turkey. into Syria. And Turkey became the thoroughfare for every bad apple. And that's why Turkey got sucked into this. And for a long time, it kept its borders open. It thought, oh, I can handle the radicalization and I can handle these groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS and so forth, because they're momentary. And once we overthrow Assad, the radicalism will abate. It'll go back to normal. and Turkey will have influence in the region. Of course, none of that happened. And Turkey is holding the bag with all these refugees, ISIS fighting a low-grade war, the Kurds in revolt. And Turkey doesn't really know how to get itself out of this terrible situation. Any ideas? Well, you know, I think what we're seeing in the Middle East today is a new security architecture being established. Iran has really in many ways, won this major tug of war. It's one, first of all, because the United States helped put a

Shiite government that turned out to be quite pro-Iranian into power in Iraq, substituting Sunni Saddam Hussein, who was pro-Saudi in a way, at least was a shield in front of Shiite expansion, Iranian expansion. Assad didn't fall. Long and bloody civil war was through chaos, but he is reestablishing himself in Syria. His vahs. become stronger and is the dominant power in Lebanon. So there is this arc of pro-Iranian governments that stretches from Lebanon through Syria, Iraq, Iran. Russia has allied itself with this new Shiite power. America, which tried to balance Iran out against Saudi Arabia in a sense under Obama, has now lurched back into the Sydney camp where it has traditionally been, has come out

four square against Iran, against Shiites in general. I mean, all of them are clearly because it's still alive with Iraq, but against Assad government and Hezbollah and so forth. And now with this big split in the Sydney camp, America's position seems a little bit more fragile and less certain. And it is allied once again with the Sinai, that Saudi Arabia, the Gulf countries, against the Shiites. I'm not sure that's a good place for America to be.

I think it should be trying to balance and keeping a little, at least keeping an arm's length from this sectarian fight. But those are our traditional. Israel and Saudi Arabia are two major traditional allies in the Middle East. And to a certain extent, we're stuck with them for better, for worse. Many people in Washington think we should just go four square on their side and, you know, help them win. and that'll that'll chase in Iran and

Russia. I don't I think we're standing on a weak reeds there in the region. So that's a fragile Middle East and we tried to pivot to Asia and we've sort of been sucked back to this very important region which holds so much of the world's oil

which is key to economy and to the geostrategic sort of architecture of the world. And there we are. trying to maintain our leadership in a region that is extremely fragmented. Joshua Landis, thank you so much for coming onto War College and walking us through a very complicated and very interesting subject. Well, thank you for inviting me on. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you for listening to this week's show. War College was created by Jason Fields and Craig Heedek. Matthew Gult hosts the show and Rengles the Guest. It's produced by me, Bethel Havte. A friendly reminder to rate and review our show on iTunes if you haven't already. it very much helps other people find the show. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week. Well, we'll never see you. But you'll hear from us next week.