Still looking to America
The states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which encompass Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and Oman, face a new strategic environment. The US-led intervention in Iraq has unleashed unpredictable and potentially dangerous forces in the region. For GCC governments, particularly in the northern Gulf, the elimination of Iraq as a military threat for the foreseeable future is an indisputably favourable development. But the hazards of a large-scale armoured incursion from the north have been replaced by fears of assertive and possibly rebellious Shiite populations, particularly in Saudi Arabia, emboldened by the resurgence of Shiite power in Iraq. Concerns about Shiite sedition inspired by events outside the borders of the GCC have not been as deep as they are at present since the Iranian revolution of 1979, which was accompanied by clerical calls for the overthrow of monarchies on the Arab side of the Gulf.
For Saudi Arabia, whose oil-rich eastern province contains the 10% of its population that is Shiite, this fear is especially stark. A local Shiite branch of Hizbollah staged an insurgency in the eastern province during the early 1990s, and members of the group participated in a daring attack on the US Air Force’s al-Khobar housing compound in Dhahran in 1996. In the latter incident, which killed 19 US personnel and wounded scores of others, the involvement of senior Revolutionary Guard officials stirred Saudi premonitions of a serious Iranian challenge. The election of Mohammed Khatami as president of Iran in the following year put an end, for the moment, to Iranian conspiracies against the al-Saud. Sensitivities in the Kingdom on this matter, however, are never far from the surface. In September 2005, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal complained that the US and Saudi Arabia had ’fought a war together to keep Iran out of Iraq after Iraq was driven out of Kuwait … Now we are handing the whole country over to Iran without reason’. Iranians, he alleged, insinuate themselves into areas that American troops have pacified and ’pay money … install their own people [and] even establish police forces and arm the militias that are there … And they are protected in doing all this by the British and American forces’. This elicited an equally revealing riposte from Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, who maintained that four million Shiites were living as marginalised, second-class citizens in the Saudi Kingdom.
The spectre of a Shiite insurgency, spurred by irredentist elements inflamed by the ascendancy of co-religionists in Iraq, is not the only thing that the Saudis have to worry about; Riyadh and its oil- and gas-producing GCC neighbours must also be alive to the threat of terrorism. Osama bin Laden, among other jihadist theoreticians and practitioners, has reversed a long-standing view that energy-related infrastructure should be protected from attack, so that it would be available to meet the well-being of all good Muslims, but especially Arabs, when the ruling apostate regimes have been unseated and the caliphate re-established. The revised targeting doctrine calculates that the benefits of economic warfare against the ‘near’ and ‘far’ enemies outweighs the reconstruction challenges that would be faced by a triumphant caliphate. Energy infrastructure is therefore now at risk, as relentless attacks against pipelines and other system components in Iraq, Central Asia and elsewhere confirm.
Magnified dilemmas
The lower Gulf also occupies an altered strategic landscape. For Qatar, the UAE and to a lesser extent, Oman, Iran has been seen as the main threat. From the perspective of rulers in these countries, this threat is now relatively unconstrained. The United States is seen has having essentially disarmed and dismembered Iran’s only regional strategic counterweight, while appearing to be incapable of reining in Tehran’s assertiveness on its own or in combination with European allies, especially in the realm of nuclear proliferation. Bahrain has to deal with the additional complication of a large Shiite population with close ties to Iran. Moreover, the countries of the lower Gulf, in common with their peninsular neighbours, face the threat of jihadist terrorism, which will become increasingly acute as veterans of the Iraq insurgency return to their home countries to carry on the fight.
The one element in the strategic equation that will not change is American interest in the Gulf. Demand for oil is unlikely to decrease, which means that GCC states will continue to enjoy the somewhat equivocal blessings of a US military presence, even as they ponder the perils of domestic anti-Americanism and the concomitant risk of association with such a resented outside power. To complicate matters, Bahrain and Qatar must contemplate their vulnerabilities to Iranian retaliation, should Washington’s tough rhetoric turn out to be a prelude to increased pressure against the clerical regime, possibly including attacks against Tehran’s presumed nuclear-related facilities.
Outwards, not inwards
Under these circumstances, GCC states might be expected to band together more tightly than they had done in the past. This, however, is not yet the case. Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain and Oman all maintain bilateral ties to the United States and privilege that relationship in contrast to their own multilateral GCC obligations.
All the GCC states, except for Saudi Arabia, have defence cooperation agreements with the United States. These agreements are bilateral, although when they were negotiated by the individual countries there was substantial collusion among them: negotiators for the GCC countries shared information about what the US side was offering – and requiring in return – in supposedly secret talks. Unsurprisingly, the resulting Defense Cooperation Agreements look broadly similar. Ironically, swapping intelligence about the US position in delicate negotiations represented the high water mark of practical GCC cooperation. Each country proceeded to seek the security of an external security guarantor in the form of the United States, rather than in the enhancement of the collective capabilities of the GCC itself.
Military links to the US
Thus, despite the simulacrum of military competence displayed by GCC units at the battle of Khafji in 1991, Kuwait agreed to host a brigade set of pre-positioned equipment and ultimately provide the staging area for US ground forces in the 2003 Iraq war. Bahrain, which had long hosted the shore-based headquarters of the since superseded MIDEASTFOR, became the location of the US Fifth Fleet headquarters, the forward naval and marine forces headquarters for US Central Command (CENTCOM), and the favoured location for support installations for US personnel deployed with their families.
Qatar, in the wake of a palace coup that toppled the emir in 1995 and placed his son in power, astonished Washington by offering to construct an enormous airbase and host a correspondingly large US military presence. This was perhaps to be expected as a stratagem by the new government not only to shore itself up, but also to assert itself vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia and establish a degree of strategic independence from it. Qatar’s timing was impeccable, insofar as the durability of the large US presence in Saudi Arabia was then already clouded by doubts on both sides. Since 1996, the US has greatly improved the airbase, which can support 10,000 US personnel, reconstituted the Combined Air Operations Center that guided US operations in the skies over Iraq, and established a special operations forces headquarters, as well as command elements for the army, air force and crisis response detachments. Eventually, Qatar will host the forward headquarters of CENTCOM, which has hitherto been a command without a country, and an expanded ‘Millennium Village’ – a large billeting facility that is supposed to be terrorism-proof. The American infrastructure will include a massive pre-positioning capacity for equipment, spare parts and fuel.
The UAE also hosts a significant US presence. Al Dhafra airbase serves as a major intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance hub for an air expeditionary wing and as a staging ground for tankers, high-altitude surveillance aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles. The ports of Jebel Ali and Fujaira supply the US navy and air force units deployed to the UAE; these facilities constitute one of the busiest US Navy liberty ports around the world. Meanwhile Oman, which in 1979 led the permanent deployment of American personnel and equipment outside the confines of Saudi Arabia, still provides sites for the storage of US war materiel.
Procurement and planning
GCC procurement programmes reflect the impulse to cultivate foreign protectors rather than build a joint defence capability, especially one that would entail burden-sharing and rational allocation of security responsibilities. This reflex stems, in part, from historical rivalries among the sheikhly clans that came to dominate policymaking in the GCC states. It was not so long ago, for example, that the al-Thani of Qatar and al-Khalifa of Bahrain rattled sabres over the Hawar Islands that lie between these two countries. Another impetus is the desire to dilute Riyadh’s predominant presence within the confines of the GCC. Then there is the free rider problem; if the US can be counted on to preserve the independence of GCC states for its own strategic purposes, then local rulers are free to structure their diplomacy and military strategy to meet other objectives, including patronage and inter-dynastic competition. As a result, while procurement programmes burgeoned in the 1990s, cooperative endeavours stagnated. The 5,000-strong GCC Peninsula Shield force, located at Hafr al-Batin in Saudi Arabia, is today no larger than it was when it was formed in the late 1980s. The erection of a regional integrated air defence, which the US was urging on Gulf states even before the creation of the GCC in 1986, still has yet to emerge from a vague planning process.
Instead, GCC countries have procured major platforms and weapons systems without regard to interoperability or common doctrine and organisation. There are no projects to enable GCC forces to deploy rapidly, no common logistics network so that Bahraini F-16s can operate from UAE bases, and no networking or coordination capacity. Saudi Arabia has made a major investment in F-15S aircraft, AWACS, refuelling tankers and sophisticated air defence radars, as well as an assortment of surface-to-air missiles including Patriot, I-Hawk and Shahine. They also have M1A2 tanks, advanced French frigates, US attack helicopters and multiple launch rocket systems. Yet their ability to move their forces within and outside the Kingdom is limited, as are their surveillance capabilities, especially at sea.
The UAE has invested in block 60 F-16s that are more advanced than their US counterparts, French tanks, Russian armoured personnel carriers, and a blue-water navy supplied by French and Dutch manufacturers, but armed with American cruise missiles. Kuwait is contemplating buying additional F/A-18 E/F aircraft, while Bahrain and Oman fly F-16Cs. Qatar, which implicitly relies on the US, rather than its own combat capability for its defence, and Bahrain, whose new parliament is sceptical about major defence procurement efforts, are not in the same league as other GCC states. Oman’s defence budget is also quite modest. There is no GCC-wide acquisition plan and therefore no hope in the foreseeable future of a coordinated GCC defence.
Continued disaggregation
For Saudi Arabia, which supported GCC military cooperation because it afforded the Kingdom a platform from which to influence smaller and less wealthy neighbours, the trend toward deeper bilateral ties with the US, which, among other effects, has resulted in ‘US Major Non-Nato Ally’ status for Kuwait and Bahrain, remains a disappointment. In December 2004, speaking to the First IISS Gulf Dialogue in Bahrain, Prince Saud al-Faisal described this trend as ‘alarming’, lamenting that such ‘separate arrangements are not compatible with the spirit and charter of the Gulf Cooperation Council’, and adding that they ‘weaken not only the solidarity of the GCC … but also each of its members. ‘In the military sphere’, he warned, ‘any agreement with a third party cannot … substitute for the necessity of developing the indigenous resources of the GCC’. It would appear that Saudi Arabia is for the time being destined for further disappointment.
