Even before the rise of the Islamic State, the Gulf Cooperation Council faced challenges, both internal and external. Unlike anything it had confronted in its 33-year history, those challenges – political, economic, security, social and environmental – erode the unity and effectiveness of the GCC.
Now, a new and more ominous challenge confronts the GCC. The Islamic State presents not so much a new threat as the apotheosis of an ongoing one, the rise and spread of Islamism, or political Islam, in the Middle East. It is a danger that reaches inside the populations of the Council’s member-nations and may even threaten its borders. The violently Islamist Islamic State seeks to supplant the GCC, the Arab League and even individual governments to become the single leader of Arabs and Muslims. The fabled notion of a unified Muslim caliphate encompassing the entire umma is as old as Islam. Regardless of how illusory, however, its seductive appeal to many Muslims, especially youth, poses the Arab world’s most serious threat since communism and the Cold War. How should the GCC respond? What can individual member states do to thwart this newest peril? And, to whom should it turn for support and partnership?
A Council Beset by Challenges
The array of threats and challenges on the external front would appear to present the most toxic brew of issues for the GCC.
• The GCC continues to struggle to contain Iran, its perceived hegemonic behavior in the Middle East and nuclear weapons program.
• The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the oldest modern Islamist movement in the Arab world, and elsewhere following the early 2011 Arab Spring vaulted Islamism to the top of the region’s ladder of political movements. While that political threat has been contained for now, traditional Gulf States, chiefly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, must deal with an economically weak, military-controlled Egyptian partner politically and financially dependent on its benefactors in order to function.
• Historic enemies of the Gulf States – variously violent Islamists like Hamas, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda – continue to thrive and threaten stability.
• The recent Israel-Hamas clash in Gaza – despite unprecedented, if unspoken, support by many Arab states for Israel and its attempt to break Hamas – predictably returned Gaza to the status quo ante, doing little to resolve the region’s most enduring struggle, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Saudi Arabia as the sponsor for the Arab Peace Initiative remains exasperated by Israel’s failure to respond to the historic document, by the declining prospects for resolution of that conflict, and by its potential to inspire jihadists throughout the Muslim world.
• The Council remains conflicted by what to do about its large and vulnerable neighbor to the north, Iraq. Led largely by Saudi Arabia with its antipathy toward the Shia-led government in Baghdad, the GCC did little to support stability and prosperity in Iraq, effectively exacerbating the conditions for Sunni-Shia tensions and conflict there.
• Individual GCC members led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE strongly opposed the government of Bashar al Assad in Syria, openly called for his dismissal and even backed several of the opposition groups operating in the country, most of whom appear to be wilting in the face of the Islamic State’s successes. Meanwhile, Al Assad prevails, notwithstanding the threat he himself faces from IS.
• Egypt and the UAE, ostensibly with Saudi political support, launched air strikes against jihadist militias in Libya in late August, surprising most countries in the region and even the US. As in Syria, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have tried to bolster the fortunes of the more secular opposition groups in Libya but with similarly uncertain results.
• Finally, the GCC must contend with nervousness over its previously stalwart backer, the US. Differences over policy in Egypt, Syria, Libya, Iran and Iraq and doubts about America’s overall commitment to the region persist. Most important, GCC states have traditionally relied on the US to provide the leadership for helping to defend them in previous security challenges, whether from Iran, Iraq or terrorist organizations, and for preserving regional stability. The perception now, however, is that the US is disengaging from a region desperately in need of America’s strong involvement and leadership, and there is no one else to fill that role.
The internal challenges of the GCC stem largely, although not entirely, from these many external tests. Perhaps the most apparent and acute is the rising disputes within the GCC over how to deal with them. Saudi Arabia and the UAE – largely followed by Bahrain and Kuwait, which both face internal difficulties in dealing with large Shia minorities that preclude their taking more overt positions – have taken a tough line against jihadist movements and Islamism.
Qatar on the other hand, perhaps seeking to carve a niche for itself on the regional and international stages, has taken a more accommodationist and even supportive role. Qatar has publicly supported Hamas and the now disenfranchised Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and supplied funding and weapons to a wide array of opposition movements in Syria, including the Al Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusrah.
A less threatening but nevertheless nettlesome internal dynamic has been Oman’s cautious but successful diplomatic outreach to Iran, including secretly hosting high-level talks between the Islamic Republic and the US, which ultimately led to the current P5+1 negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear program. The negotiations have fed GCC paranoia over US abandonment. In addition, last year, Oman rejected Saudi Arabia’s call for a GCC union, which sought to advance economic integration among the six nations. Oman’s tradition of an independent track for its foreign policy is well familiar to the rest of the GCC and should not be viewed as necessarily threatening to an otherwise stable and secure Council.
There are other internal matters that corrode the unity and effectiveness of the GCC. Large Shia populations in Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia challenge the established Sunni authority but have been largely stonewalled by Sunni-dominant leaderships. The Qatar-supported and -hosted Al Jazeera television maintains a constant barrage of criticism aimed at Saudi Arabia, supplying an annoying irritant to Riyadh-Doha relations. And on Saudi Arabia’s and Oman’s borders, an economically weakening Yemen continues an ineffective campaign to confront terrorism, separatism and violent tribalism in several regions of the country.
GCC tensions came to a head in March of this year when Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain withdrew their ambassadors from Doha to protest Qatar’s “meddling in the internal affairs” of other Arab states, code for supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. While the three are slowly working to patch up matters, political differences remain as Doha continues to ride the wave of what it sees as the region’s future, political Islam.
The Threat of the Islamic State
Amidst that backdrop, there has arisen a new and ominous threat, the growing strength and appeal of the Islamic State. Both a terrorist organization and an Islamist-state builder, IS may present the most insidiously grave and immediate challenge to the GCC. Not only does it threaten the security of the GCC states but also severely tarnishes the moderate image of Islam, which these states try to project, if disjointedly, and the internal social cohesiveness of many of them by attracting increasing numbers of their citizens, especially youth, to their seductively simplistic but deviant version of Islam.
The Islamic State seeks to speak not just for Sunni Islam but all of Islam, pushing a violent and ultimately unworkable alternative to the kind of moderate Sunni Islam that the GCC and most other Arab states have sought to project.
Most disturbing to countries such as Saudi Arabia and other Muslim states, IS wants to supplant them all to become the undisputed leader of the world’s Muslims. Its declaration of a caliphate and its leader, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, as the caliph typify IS’s grandiose scheme, bolstered by an extraordinarily effective media campaign. It will appeal to millions of Arab Sunni Muslims who feel increasingly marginalized from their leaders, bereft of economic and educational opportunities, and overwhelmed by seemingly unstoppable intrusions of Western values, standards and culture.
IS’s impressive march through Syria and into Iraq has been facilitated in part by the GCC’s inability to unite behind effective strategies in those two countries. Iran immediately stepped up to support Baghdad when IS, then under the name of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS, aka the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, ISIL), took Iraq’s second largest city of Mosul last June and promised to move against Baghdad itself. Late last year, ISIS had penetrated Iraq and captured the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi in Sunni-majority Anbar Province – less than 50 miles from Baghdad – again with little GCC or global response.
But after the Mosul conquest, Tehran provided military advice, intelligence, weapons and training. It also helped to activate and organize – reorganize actually since many of them had existed during the period of America’s occupation – Iraqi Shia militias, including the Mahdi Army, Ketaib Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq. Had there been a response from the GCC or any one of its constituent states, it might have altered the balance in favor of the Arab world (as opposed to Iran) and improved abysmal GCC-Iraq relations. As it is, the Iranian action amplified IS’s anti-Shia, pro-Sunni rhetoric, exacerbating Sunni-Shia tensions in the region and creating the appearance of an Iran-Saudi Arabia proxy war in Syria and northern Iraq.
One should caution against inflating the IS threat. For example, while it may more immediately threaten countries like Jordan and Lebanon, it does not yet pose an immediate threat to the security of the GCC states per se. Nevertheless, IS inroads in those two vulnerable states would be devastating to the region. The GCC cannot afford to see IS advance beyond its already extended borders.
Any IS advances into those nations and formation of alliances with other extremist organizations – Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Boko Haram in Nigeria already have pledged support for IS – enhance its attractiveness to potential recruits in the GCC countries. That presents an inherent near-term threat to their security. The Saudi experience in Afghanistan with large numbers of Saudis signing up to fight there in the 1980’s and 1990’s ultimately redounded against Saudi Arabia when those veteran jihadists returned under Al Qaeda to carry out a campaign of terror in the Kingdom beginning in 2003.
IS has a far more effective media and recruitment campaign and the resources to make them even better than Al Qaeda then and now. A critical mass of Gulf jihadist IS veterans returning to wage jihad in GCC states would be highly destabilizing socially and economically, undermine their security and damage international confidence. The impact of rising jihadism in the Gulf oil states and attendant uncertainty would unsettle oil markets just as the terrorist attacks in Yanbu, Khobar and Abqaiq, Saudi Arabia did in 2004 and 2006.
For the states of the GCC, then, a response is not only desirable but necessary to preserve their individual and collective security, Gulf stability and the GCC’s unity and image.
Concerted and Collective Action
Action by the GCC must be decisive. It must come from the individual governments as well as from the Council. Moreover, the GCC must show the citizens of the Gulf and the world that it is prepared and able to respond to a threat.
Within the GCC, there has already been helpful movement. Condemnations by Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah and Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz ibn Abdullah al-Sheikh have been useful, especially the latter’s since the Muslim religious establishment has been traditionally reluctant to publicly criticize terrorist organizations. So, one of the first steps necessary is to launch a Muslim-worldwide condemnation and a campaign to fully repudiate the barren and barbarous religious and political ideology of the Islamic State. With the GCC in the lead, the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference should be receptive and fully supportive of the approach.
The campaign needs to educate Muslims of the dangers of IS’s ideology and reassure non-Muslims that its ideology contradicts the most basic teachings of the faith. The goal is to drive a clear wedge between the beliefs and practices of the world’s one billion-plus Muslims and the principles and actions of the Islamic State. The difficulty in such action, however, is how to address non-violent Islamism. Muslim countries like Turkey and Qatar would likely strenuously oppose any effort to attack Islamism. The GCC and its allies will be challenged to craft an approach that is able to contain Islamism without necessarily foreclosing a potentially acceptable version of it in the future, though strong doubts of such an evolution justifiably persist.
Second, the GCC must be willing to step up its political, economic and military support for the campaign against IS recently announced by President Obama. Saudi Arabia’s agreement to allow training of anti-IS forces in the Kingdom is an excellent step. Further actions should include funding such training, access to bases for US and allied air forces to carry out their air campaign against Islamic State strongholds, dispatch of GCC state armed forces to assist and train anti-IS forces, and GCC air forces to participate in the air campaign.
The real test, however, will be whether the Gulf States will make combat troops available. Obama wants to rely on Iraqi and Kurdish forces to confront IS fighters on the ground. Initially, at least, the capacity of either of them to successfully face down IS’s seasoned fighters is suspect. Obama has pledged not to deploy US ground forces. So, if those troops and US and allied air power are insufficient, then what? Deploying Arab ground forces to Iraq is fraught with many political and security questions both within the GCC and in Iraq. Will the GCC and other states insist that once again Americans do their fighting for them or will they break from tradition – as they did during the 1990-1991 Gulf War – and send their own?
Third, the GCC must begin to reach out to the new Iraqi government, demonstrate its support and begin to form a more positive relationship. It should not hesitate to encourage greater Sunni participation in that government and then reach out to Sunni tribes, parties and leaders to urge their support for Baghdad and the strategy to defeat the Islamic State. Saudi Arabia’s active involvement is especially critical since many of Iraq’s Sunni tribes extend into the Kingdom and tribal and government contacts on that level are extensive.
Assuming those actions are taken, the GCC should also offer financial and humanitarian support to Sunni tribes – with Baghdad’s blessing – and even investment in the economically depressed areas of Sunni Iraq, principally Anbar. One approach would be for the Saudis and others to join the US in a campaign to win back Iraq’s Sunnis, similar to the US military’s very successful Sunni Awakening, or Sahwa, campaign of 2006-2009. Helping to fund and then stand up Sunni local national guard units, as proposed by Iraq’s new government, would also prove helpful and serve to patch relations between the GCC and Iraq.
Fourth, there must be reconciliation within the GCC, principally Saudi Arabia and the UAE with Qatar. Qatar’s, and to a somewhat lesser extent, Kuwait’s, permissive environment for extremists groups must end. Clear guidelines of what GCC states may and may not do vis a vis non-governmental organizations outside the GCC need to be understood. This applies to Saudi Arabia as well, given the Kingdom’s history of supporting Wahabi and Salafist religious establishments around the world. The GCC must adopt and project a clear policy and plan for confronting and defeating Islamist extremism in the region and throughout the Middle East if it is to maintain the moderate image it has sought.
That will also mean allowing for certain forms of non-violent political opposition, a neuralgic problem for GCC and other Arab countries. That raises a potentially serious problem for the GCC and a fifth area for action. How far can GCC states realistically be expected to go to allow greater freedom of expression, respect for human rights and civil society institutions?
If GCC states – and Arab governments at large – are to address some of the underlying causes of extremism in their midst then they must be willing to consider taking steps, however slowly and incrementally, to provide some measure of greater political and economic space to their populations. Such an internal dialog must start with their own populations, however farfetched that might appear at the moment.
Also, the GCC and the US must have a frank and honest conversation about the latter’s support of democratization. Such a conversation must be based on realism. The US must recognize that in the current political/security environment, none of the GCC states is likely to become a democracy in the next 15 years, and probably much longer. GCC states will certainly balk at any opening in their political systems in the face of so many external threats.
However, a vigorous and determined strategy of action to defeat IS as suggested above simultaneously coupled with clear, modest steps toward relaxing restrictions on peaceful citizen activities and speech can drive home the message that citizens have far more attractive options available than the empty, dead-end promises of the Islamic State. Concurrently directing greater investment toward their individual publics and internal development, as many of the GCC states have already begun, will also boost public confidence in their non-elected (for the time being) leaders, who nevertheless seek to take their interests to heart.
A Strategy for the Future: Hope for Arab Youth, Partnership with the Non-Muslim Nations
Defeating the Islamic State and more especially the ideology that drives it will take several years, according to President Obama. The GCC states’ role in that effort may take even longer. It means not only “degrading and defeating” IS, as Mr. Obama has called for, but also replacing it. There must be no vacuum for an Islamic State version 2.0.
Ultimately, the GCC and their Arab brother nations must find an alternative to the nihilistic, dead-end ideology of IS, Al Qaida and all the other Islamist extremists. It must be one that can rally increasing numbers of Arab youth feeling hopeless about their futures and disenfranchised from the levers of government and society necessary for change. It also must be an option that draws the non-Muslim community of nations to their side as partners and fully integrates the GCC and the Arab world into the international community.
Charting that course may be the GCC’s biggest long-term challenge.