Oil oozing from US Middle East madness

By Colin S. Cavell

One objection to the contention that current US policy in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region is committed to implanting a new US democratic model to replace the formerly autocratically-ruled US client states in an attempt to perpetuate its historic dominance over the region and thus ensure continued access to relatively cheap and unimpeded crude oil and natural gas is the fact of apparent American steadfast support for the Persian Gulf monarchies.

These Persian Gulf monarchies, relics of a bygone era of fairy tales and fantasy, have been grouped together politically and economically into the so-called [Persian] Gulf Cooperation Council [P (GCC)] since 1981, in response to the genuine fear that the revolutionary example posed by the Iranian Revolution would engulf these reactionary regimes. Their continued existence in the modern world is an artificial contrivance constructed by and for the benefit of the two main imperialist powers in the region: the USA and the UK. Unhampered access to relatively cheap oil and natural gas is the raison d'être of this regional configuration. Preserving this access is the number one priority of these imperial powers.

Encompassing the kingdoms or sheikhdoms or sultanates or emirates of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, these six sovereign states-recognized as such by the United Nations-collectively sit on an estimated 50% of the world’s petroleum reserves and are the world’s largest providers of liquefied natural gas and, hence, boast an impressive GDP of over $33,000 per capita as of 2012. Of course, we must remember that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the overall value of goods and services produced over a specific time period (usually a year) in a particular (usually national) social formation or economy divided by the number of people in the economy.

In the case of each of the Persian Gulf monarchies, wide asymmetrical divides in wealth exists between the ruling families, their court followers and obsequious and parasitic stooges as compared to average citizens. In other words, the high GDP levels of these countries mask the existence of widespread poverty throughout the realms. The extensive divide is even further exacerbated when the wealth of the royal family and their immediate supporters is compared with that of the migrant workers who make up the majority of almost all of the (P)GCC countries’ populations. Yes, you read correctly that most of the human population of these regimes is comprised of expatriate, i.e. foreign, workers. [In the UAE, over 91% of the population are expatriate workers. In Kuwait, over two-thirds of the population are expatriates. In Oman, expatriate workers comprise nearly 30% of the population. In Qatar, expats outnumber native citizens by a factor of seven. In Bahrain, more than half of the population are expatriates. In Saudi Arabia, nearly a third of the population is expatriates.]

“Does unfettered access to cheap oil and gas trump America’s avowed support for democracy?” it is asked. More to the point, “Will not American hypocrisy and double standards guarantee that whatever new doctrine the US has for the MENA region be rejected, as subject populations refuse to be hoodwinked for another generation?” Detractors say that the policy-if there is in fact one-is not coherent, uniform, nor convincing. It is, some say, illogical, chaotic, and mad. It is asserted that the Americans and the British are only interested in solidifying and expanding their hegemony in the region, and they don’t care who they have to kill, control, or manipulate in order to accomplish this task. It is easy to understand this reaction, especially by those directly affected by these imperial policies, but all systems act to moderate conflict, stabilize its component parts, regularize its operations, and create scenarios for predictable outcomes, and contrive remedies to address system instability-if they are to last. The USA/UK regional system of control over the MENA region is no different, and many practitioners of statecraft in these hegemons are and have been quite aware for some time that the current structure of this imperial structure for the MENA is unsustainable.

If money alone could buy social peace, then surely the (P)GCC countries would be the imagined paragons of paradise long sought for by adventurers and explorers. However, such is not the case. With more than half of the (P)GCC member-states’ 42 million people and by encompassing more than 80% of the member-states’ land area in addition to possessing the world’s second largest reserves of oil while remaining the world’s largest oil producer, Saudi Arabia is the bellwether of the (P)GCC union. Incorporating the aggregate of the Arabian Peninsula, Saudi Arabia is the second-largest Arab-speaking country behind Algeria in terms of land area, though Egypt remains the Arab world’s most populous nation by a factor of three over Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy established in 1932 and ruled over by the sons of the Kingdom’s Bedouin founder Abdulaziz ibn Saud, who had a reported 22 wives and at least 37 sons. Its current ruler is the 88-year-old Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, the sixth ruler of the Kingdom since its inception and King since 2005. With a reported 13 wives and at least 25 children, the aging monarch is said to be in deteriorating health and, hence, a succession crisis looms large over the Kingdom.

Just last October, 80-year-old Crown Prince (and successor to the throne) Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, father of at least 32 children with over eleven different wives, died reportedly of cancer in New York City, becoming the first Saudi Crown Prince to die before becoming king. More recently, just a month ago in June of 2012, one of the King’s brothers, 79-year-old Nayef bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, who succeeded Prince Sultan as Crown Prince of the Kingdom, died reportedly of cardiac problems in Geneva, Switzerland and was succeeded by 76-year-old Defense Minister Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud as the new Crown Prince. Nayef, a staunch opponent of democracy and women’s rights and an unyielding defender of the Kingdom’s absolute monarchy, had been acting as de facto ruler of the Kingdom due to the King’s illnesses, and it was he who reportedly gave the order to send in Peninsula Shield Forces into Bahrain in mid-March of 2011 to stamp out pro-democracy activists there. Both men each have had three wives with Nayef siring ten children and Salman currently the father of 13.

Beyond these aging sons of the Kingdom’s founder waits over several thousand third generation princes of the House of Saud each with varying degrees of experience and qualifications. Given that assassination took the life of previous King Faisal in 1975 and that court intrigue is a staple of monarchical governments, one can be assured that intense rivalries for power exists amongst this third generation coterie.

Espousing an extremist and ultra-conservative version of Sunni Islam, known as Wahhabism whose followers-Salafists-claim to be faithful to the ancestral path of “the true interpretation of Islam”, the Saudi king claims divine sanctification as the guardian or custodian of Islam’s two holiest mosques, one in Medina and one in Mecca. And because the Quran does not sanction monarchy, the House of Saud-like its sister (P)GCC monarchs-promote the idea that they are somehow ordained to be Allah’s representatives on Earth, a propaganda tactic harking back to the notion of the ‘divine right of kings’ from Europe’s Middle Ages and which retains saliency only so long as the populace remains ignorant and without formal liberal education.

According to the 2012 US Department of State’s annual report on human trafficking, “Saudi Arabia is a destination country for men and women subjected to forced labor and to a lesser extent, forced prostitution.” Workers from throughout Asia are lured to the Kingdom by promising labor contracts only to find themselves pressured into “involuntary servitude, including nonpayment of wages, long working hours without rest, deprivation of food, threats, physical or sexual abuse, and restrictions on movement such as the withholding of passports or confinement to the workplace.” Moreover, because the Kingdom requires foreign workers to receive an “exit visa” from their employer, many migrant workers are “forced to work for months or years beyond their contract term because their employer will not grant them an exit permit.”

The withholding of domestic workers’ passports is one of the major ways in which Saudi employers are able to manipulate and exploit foreign labor. The so-called “sponsorship” system requires all foreign laborers to be sponsored by a Saudi employer which, in practice, means that each employee is tacitly owned by an employer until that employer allows the worker to either be employed elsewhere in the Kingdom, by virtue of what is called a “no objection” letter, or granted an exit visa to return to the worker’s country of origin. This sponsorship system, in fact, is practiced throughout the (Persian) Gulf monarchies. In fact, over 100 workers from India just this week, in July 2012, were finally allowed to go home after spending six years in Bahrain because their employer, Nass Contracting, refused to grant them exit visas after they quit their jobs for low pay back in 2006. Indeed, the only reason the company finally and begrudgingly granted the exit visas was because, so far this year, 26 migrant Indian workers have hung themselves and committed suicide due to their impoverished conditions in the country. Such is the case with many low paid migrant workers throughout the (Persian) GCC who opt for suicide to relieve their misery. As for the KSA, the latest published report from 2010 states that nearly 800 workers committed suicide in the Kingdom that year.

Women from Asia and Africa are routinely forced into prostitution and “Yemeni, Nigerian, Pakistani, Afghan, Chadian, and Sudanese children are subjected to forced labor as beggars and street vendors in Saudi Arabia, facilitated by criminal gangs.” Saudi men are notorious throughout the Arab world as regular solicitors of prostitution in Bahrain, Thailand, Egypt, Yemen, Morocco, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, with many engaging in “temporary” and “child marriages”. Kidnapping of women from Asia, Europe, Africa, and even America for sexual slavery is a practice condoned by the regime. The US State Department notes that “widespread trafficking abuses” occur particularly in Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.

The royal family’s descent into sexual scandal and immoral behaviour is legend. From the 2010 conviction of Prince Saud Abdulaziz bin Nasser Al Saud, given a life sentence for beating his man-servant and sexual slave to death, to the child sex rings operated by Saudi princes, to former King Fahd’s million dollar gambling outings in Monte Carlo casinos, such instances of outright debauchery and excess only hint at the utterly corrupt nature of this dynasty which continues to be propped up by the USA and the UK for imperial purposes.

With help from British intelligence, Ibn Saud was able to successfully consolidate power over a very large swath of the Arabian Peninsula establishing the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) in 1932. Thirteen years later, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met the now Saudi King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud on board the USS Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake in Egypt, north of the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, on February 14, 1945. They concluded a now historic deal whereby the US would guarantee the safety and survival of the House of Saud in exchange for relatively cheap and unobstructed access to the oil lying beneath the Kingdom’s sands. Oil, which had been found two decades before in the neighboring British protectorates of Bahrain and Kuwait, following the initial discovery in western Persia in 1908, was now sought after by every country on Earth, as WWII taught all parties that victory belonged to those with superior oil resources as the basic fuel for modern machinery.

The resulting so-called “special relationship” between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the USA established a position of predominance for the USA in the Middle East with access to cheap oil in seeming perpetuity in exchange for a guarantee to maintain the rule of a single family while locking its populations into a straightjacket of undemocratic and dictatorial rule. This equation of maintaining a single family in power in exchange for cheap access to oil would become the model for subsequent post-WWII US foreign policy dealings with countries which were blessed with highly sought-after natural resources. Maintaining the monarchical structures of the remaining British protectorates in the Persian Gulf thus served both USA/UK imperial interests. FDR and subsequent U.S. administrations concluded that when it comes to dealing with oil-rich countries, it is not only easier to placate one ruling family, as opposed to a democratic mass, but, as well, it is politically viable-at least for a certain period of time-as negative blowback from dictatorial rule will primarily fall upon the indigenous ruler and not his external military backers.

In Saudi Arabia, there are no guarantees of freedom of speech, religion, association, nor press. Women are forbidden from driving cars, walking in public without family-related male escorts, working in most businesses, and practicing in most professions. Crimes such as “witchcraft” are taken seriously and are punished by beheadings. Government-authorized religious police, known as the mutaween, are found ubiquitously throughout Saudi Arabia and tasked with enforcing Sharia law as interpreted by a government Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPVPV). While ostensibly acting as guardians of virtue, they are in fact gendarmes of the regime acting as its secret police. Renown for being arcane and even idiotic, an incident in 2002 in which 15 girls died after being forced to remain inside a burning school because the mutaween said they could not be allowed outside in public without headscarves and abayas and accompanied by male escorts is only emblematic of their utter stupidity and uselessness to the well-being and safety of the general public.

Legal due process and constitutional rights are entirely unheard of in the Kingdom, and one’s liberty is continually subjected to the whim of the House of Saud. As in Bahrain and in each of the monarchies, one’s personal influence with a member of the royal family, referred to locally as “wasta”, is sought after by would-be social climbers who attempt to out-compete against each other in a pathetic display of sycophantic slavishness. In effect, jurisprudence in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia puts a lie to all fairy tales ever told about the supposed benevolence of kings, queens, royalty, and kingdoms as well as any notion that sanity reigns in such fiefdoms. The country’s culture and intellectual life is stunted and deformed, and widespread hypocrisy pervades the Kingdom as anyone can witness on any air-flight away from the (Persian) Gulf monarchies as women de-robe from their abayas and pack away their sheilas and hijabs and walk back to their seats in 21st-century garb. The number of private parties in the region where residents abandon their social pretense of piety are legend. To assert that much of the Kingdom is living a lie from the top to the bottom is no exaggeration.

Because of the excesses, multiplicity of scandals, and unbelievable outrages of KSA’s ruling family members (as well as that of fellow (Persian) GCC royals), it has been an unwritten practice of the American media to maintain a veritable silence regarding news from the Kingdom. The average US citizen has little to no idea who America’s biggest ally in the Persian Gulf is nor any notion of what passes for its government, culture, or society in general. American citizens sometimes hear tales from fellow expatriates who talk about striking it rich while working in the (Persian) Gulf, or they are privy to lurid stories about sexual relations in the Gulf, but, whatever they hear, it is always counterbalanced with the assurance that the Kingdom is “our friend” and the source of “our” oil. Average American citizens would be outraged if they were aware of the nature of the regime their tax monies and military have been defending for decades.

When the Arab Spring democratic movements erupted across the MENA region in early 2011, the Kingdom responded, as it usually does when faced with difficulties, by throwing money at the “problem” (i.e. the threat of democracy) hoping it would go away. Witnessing the deposition of longtime dictators in Tunisia and Egypt shocked the Kingdom’s rulers. “How,” they queried, “can the USA abandon their allies and allow this to happen?” For the first time in decades, dissolution of the House of Saud became a real possibility, and the royals awakened from their stupor.

In addition to establishing a new $130 billion social welfare program, pumping in an extra $10.7 billion into the country’s development fund, and granting a 15% pay raise to all state workers, the royal family braced themselves for what they feared was an existential threat. Alas, they were grateful that just the year before in 2010, they had agreed to purchase $60 billion worth of arms from the USA over the next ten years, an agreement steered through the US Congress in September 2010 by Barack Obama. Surely, these new weapons would aid them in their struggle against democratic activists they hoped!

Soon, however, the regime of longtime Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was being attacked by armed rebels leading to a civil war, as French President Nicolas Sarkozy called Gaddafi a threat to the financial security of mankind. The pockets of the Kingdom opened up further to help finance the overthrow and killing of Gaddafi. New elections were taking place in Tunisia and Egypt, and the Kingdom decided to back extremist Salafist parties in an attempt to influence the electoral outcomes. Meanwhile, large crowds began demonstrating in Sana’a, Yemen's capital, in late January of 2011, followed by military defections and calls for the ouster of the longtime dictator. Again, the Kingdom’s pockets were appealed to by the US to help restore security to Saudi’s neighbor to the south, Yemen. Then on February 14th 2011, the people of Bahrain launched their rebellion which was violently attacked by the Al-Khalifa monarchy. As the pro-democracy crowds swelled to several hundred thousand in the center of Manama at the Pearl Roundabout, Prince Nayef gave the order to the Peninsula Shield Forces to cross the causeway linking the Kingdom to its vassal state and ruthlessly crush this uprising which threatened to spill over into KSA. Again, the pockets of the Kingdom were once more taxed to finance the long-term occupation of Bahrain which continues to this day. Then in June of 2011, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh was injured in a bomb blast at the presidential compound in Sana’a. The aging dictator, like his Tunisian counterpart was invited for convalescence in the Kingdom. The US appealed for help to stabilize the ascendancy of Vice President Abd al-Rab Mansur al-Hadi until Saleh could return. In response, the Kingdom opened its pockets once more. Then in July, the Free Syrian Army (FSA) announced its formation with the stated goal to remove Bashar Assad as president of Syria. How could this movement and its western intelligence operatives be funded asked the US to the Saudi royals? As luck would have it, the Gulf monarchs came to the rescue providing financial aid, weapons, Salafist fighters, and even guaranteeing the salaries of all FSA active members.

How the Obama Administration has been playing the Gulf royals should be clear by now. Educated in Chicago street politics, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have stirred the MENA cauldron in order to drain the coffers of the Kingdom as well as its fellow (Persian) GCC subordinate states in order to facilitate the already unstable nature of these sclerotic and ossified regimes and thus set the stage for Act II of the Arab Spring-the uprooting of the Persian Gulf monarchs, should Obama win reelection this November. Those who fail to see the unfolding of this logic are the same ones who never thought the US would abandon Mubarak or Ben Ali or Saleh or its new ally-since 2006-Gaddafi. What of Israeli and US plans to attack Iran? What of the US beefing up its ships and military forces in the Persian Gulf? What of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s focus on Damascus and the ouster of Assad and promising payback to Russia and China for not kowtowing to US dictate? There is absolutely no way the US will abandon its Persian Gulf monarchical allies critics say. And such is, indeed, the truth…until they do.

As the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel stated in his Philosophy of Right (1821): “What is rational is real; and what is real is rational.”