America’s Mixed Messages

DECEMBER 27, 2018GUEST  LEAVE A COMMENT

USCGC Bertholf, a National Security Cutter (Wikimedia Commons)

by Karen J. Greenberg

I grew up in New London, Connecticut, watching many a military ship float by my window. New London was home to the Coast Guard Academy and sat across the river from a U.S. Navy submarine base. Uniformed guardsmen, sailors in training, and sub crews leaving port would regularly wave to my friends and me from the decks of their ships. It never occurred to me that, 50 years later, such ships would come to my attention again, this time because of the confusing messages they’re sending overseas, a reflection of the conflicting images embedded in Washington’s latest version of diplomacy and foreign policy.

We still want populations around the world to admire, appreciate, and respect this country as a democracy and a powerful protector. Some ships are used to make exactly that point. And yet, in the twenty-first-century version of war American-style, other ships have become the very image and essence of hardship and harm in ways that violate the most basic tenets of democracy and justice.

This mixed message is anything but new to American foreign policy. In 2003, seven months after the invasion of Iraq, Margaret Tutwiler, incoming undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, was assigned to deal with the sort of worries then being raised by Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN). He chaired the Foreign Relations Committee and so oversaw Tutwiler’s confirmation hearing, describing himself as “deeply concerned” and “anxious” about the country’s deteriorating image abroad.

“Americans are troubled,” he explained, “by examples of virulent anti-American hatred in the Islamic world and are frustrated by public opinion in allied countries that seems increasingly ready to question American motives or blame American actions for a host of problems.” Tutwiler responded with intrepid optimism. She understood the uphill battle she faced, she assured him, one that required “maintaining and in some respects regaining respect and understanding” for the U.S. around the globe. And she promised to do what she could “to contribute to the overall effort of trying to prevent any further deterioration in our nation’s image.”

Five months later, Congressman José Serrano (D-NY), a member of the House Appropriations Committee, would suggest just how implausible was Tutwiler’s task of convincing allies and enemies alike of the good intentions of the United States, in Iraq in particular. Though respectful of the idea of public diplomacy, he expressed extreme doubt about the possibility of applying it successfully in that war-torn land then occupied by the U.S. military. As he put it, he was cognizant of just “how difficult it has become for us on the one hand to try to change the image of who we are; and, on the other hand, you know, invade and occupy an Arab country.” Then he added, in a bow of empathy for Tutwiler, “I just wonder how my job would be if I had to tell people that I am a good guy, while, on the other hand, I hit them over the head with a hammer.”

I was at that long-ago hearing and his words punctuated an otherwise boilerplate event, bringing the room to a stunned silence for a moment — even if, soon after, everything went right on as if Serrano had never said a word. Since then, those words of his have come back to haunt me often, as I’ve witnessed the policies and practices deeply embedded in America’s war on terror. In that moment, Serrano highlighted the deep contradiction between Washington’s desire to project a protective, constructive, compassionate image abroad, and the contrasting reality of injustice and aggression which has torn at our standards and tarnished that very image. Recently, as I began to delve into this story of U.S. ships deployed on the high seas, his words resonated one more time in an unexpected fashion.

Operation Hammer

For a century, the U.S. Navy has used hospital ships to bring medical aid to those in need around the globe. In recent years, there have been two such vessels: the USNS Mercy and the USNS Comfort. The last two are still in operation as floating hospitals, transporting medical aid to communities around the globe. They provided medical assistance to Indonesia in the wake of the tsunami and earthquake in 2004, help to Haiti in the aftermath of its devastating 2010 earthquake, and aid to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria ripped through the island in the fall of 2017.

As 2018 ends, the Comfort is completing a three-month medical assistance program designed to tend to the sick in Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, and Honduras. Deployed as part of U.S. Southern Command’s Enduring Promise Initiative, that ship, according to the Navy, “reflects the United States’ enduring promise of friendship, partnership, and solidarity with the Americas.”

Several years ago, out of curiosity, I asked a Navy friend if I could see the Comfort at a time when it was docked in Baltimore. Granted it didn’t have patients then, but it proved to be a remarkable vessel. A full-scale hospital on the seas, it has 1,000 beds, several operating theaters, labs, radiology equipment, and dental equipment, while carrying a staff of 900. The Comfort is prepared to see up to 1,000 patients a day in distant lands. On December 1st, the head of U.S. Southern Command, Admiral Craig Faller, visited Colombia and met with local officials to underscore the “security partnership” between the two nations at the moment the ship was stationed there.

Unfortunately, this is not the only message that U.S. vessels are sending out these days. In the same hemisphere where the Comfort now sails, there are more than a dozen other ships on a shared mission of quite a different sort. These also fly the U.S. flag, although under the auspices of the Coast Guard, a division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), rather than the Navy. Approximately 400-foot vessels, they are known as National Security Cutters and have been refashioned not as hospital ships but as prison ships. They, too, are patrolling the southern waters of the Americas. Their mission is the apprehension and detention of drug smugglers, part of a multinational effort to stem the narcotics trade. They detain prisoners of the “drug war” on board, theoretically as a prelude to their future charging and prosecution, usually in the United States.

During the first 20 years of this drug interdiction program, the U.S. detained around 200 individuals per year on board such ships. Then, in 2012, Washington escalated its efforts by launching a Coast Guard-led multinational campaign. It would soon be overseen by Marine General John Kelly, who became head of U.S. Southern Command as that year ended. A further and more pronounced expansion of the program came when he was appointed secretary of DHS, the Coast Guard’s mother agency. In 2017, as shipboard detentions soared, Kelly described the policy as an effort to stem the “existential” threat to the nation that drug traffickers posed.

As if to enshrine Congressman Serrano’s long-gone comments and offer a new lesson in American “public diplomacy,” this program of increasingly murky detentions at sea was dubbed Operation Martillo, or Operation Hammer. Under it, by the fall of 2017, the numbers of detainees had leapt more than 300% to 700 that year. Meanwhile, some of the detained, on release, have reported unjust, often brutal treatment, in both physical and legal terms. Physically, some were shackled for significant periods to the decks of Coast Guard ships, kept there in chains exposed to the wind, rain, and sun, while forced to defecate into buckets.

Legally, they suffered as well. As the New York Times reported, they were “not read Miranda rights, not appointed lawyers, not allowed to contact their consulate or their families.” Nor were they brought before a judge in the timely fashion that the law demands. In many of these cases, stateside judges have failed to apply a basic legal rule known as speedy presentment, designed to prevent the incommunicado warehousing of defendants for interrogation purposes and start the 70-day period that the government has to bring a case to trial.

Of course, this sort of militarized detention of prisoners offshore of American justice is nothing new in this century. No surprise, for instance, that these Coast Guard prison ships were referred to as “floating Guantánamos” by a former Coast Guard lawyer and “boat prisons” by another Coast Guard officer. For those of us who have been following the role of the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in the war on terror, the playbook has, in fact, been all too familiar. Claiming the need for intelligence about operational networks (in this case those of drug running outfits, not terror ones), the authorities claim the right to detain those apprehended in their busts for informational purposes before turning them over to the criminal justice system.

Increasingly, in the case of the Coast Guard (as at Guantánamo), there seems to be no time limit on such imprisonments and anything but a rush to charge the detainees in federal court.  Nor, it seems, is any special attention paid to the conditions of confinement, no matter how cruel. As at Guantánamo, being held at sea now increasingly means being kept away from both public scrutiny and the law as it is acknowledged and practiced on shore.

Remember, many of the individuals who arrived at Guantánamo had already been held for long periods of time away from lawyers or the legal system. Not surprisingly, the assumption of guilt rather than innocence was baked into such detentions, as it now is into the Coast Guard ones. As a former Coast Guard commandant claimed, when defending that service against the name “floating Guantánamos,” such detainees are “peddlers of poison who elected to engage in criminal activity.” In this, he was following to a T the Guantánamo playbook. There, in defense of the mistreatment of war on terror detainees, it was often said that they had engaged in anti-American activities — the assumption being that they were not worthy of the protections afforded others in U.S. custody.

In 2017, Seth Freed Wessler offered a vivid portrait of such attitudes and of the kind of imprisonment at sea that went with it. (“Most of the time, he couldn’t move more than an arm’s length in either direction without jostling the next shackled man. ‘The sea used to be freedom,’ he told me. But on the ship, ‘it was the opposite. Like a prison in the open ocean.’”) Wessler focused on two Ecuadorians detained in 2014 on a Coast Guard vessel for more than 70 days and spoke as well to many other prisoners held on such ships, often for long periods, prior to their prosecution in the U.S. In some instances, the Coast Guard detainees were even transferred from one ship to another, while authorities prodded them for information outside the court system.

According to Laura Pitter, U.S. deputy director at Human Rights Watch, there’s a direct relationship between lack of access to the courts and the abuse of prisoners in custody. As she noted in describing to me a forthcoming essay of hers, “National Security and Court Deference: Ramifications and Worrying Trends”:

“A pattern of abuse characterizes these ship detentions. It has been made possible by judges permitting the government longer and longer delays in getting defendants before them as promptly as required, and once they get there these defendants have no real ability to challenge the way they’ve been treated. There are safeguards in place to guard against abuse, but the prosecutors have been circumventing them and courts have been permitting it.”

Detention Missions

From the earliest days of the post-9/11 era, prisoners were put aboard ships for interrogation purposes. John Walker Lindh, a U.S. citizen and among the first American captives in the war on terror, was held for questioning aboard the USS Peleliu; others were held aboard the USS Bataan before being turned over to the criminal justice system. As recently as 2014, Abu Khattalah, convicted in 2017 in connection with a 2012 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya, was held aboard the USS New York and interrogated for 13 days without a lawyer being present.

Other terror suspects have spent long periods aboard such naval vessels,subjected to regular questioning, sometimes under harsh conditions, before being transferred to law enforcement custody. Abdulkadir Warsame, a Somali national, for example, was apprehended in the Gulf of Aden in 2011 and held aboard a Navy ship for two months for questioning. He later pled guilty to providing material support to both the Somali terror group al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda.

Abu Anas al-Libi, a Libyan, was captured by Army Delta Force commandos and held on a Navy vessel for about a week prior to being read his Miranda rights. As the Atlanticmagazine reported in 2014, in such terrorism cases, the Navy had “taken on the role of high-seas prison warden.” Like the prolonged detentions at Guantánamo, such detentions at sea under conditions that avoid the requirements of law give America another black eye abroad. (It was no happenstance, for instance, that ISIS mockingly adoptedGuantánamo’s orange jumpsuits for its prisoners before openly treating them in a horrific fashion.)

As the shackling of men on the decks of ships reveals, the Coast Guard’s present war-on-drugs detention mission is not one it has exactly been prepared for. Early this year, then-Coast Guard Commandant Paul Zukunft told Military.com that the service was “exploring the possibility of leasing a dedicated commercial vessel that would do nothing but hold suspects until they can be transferred to the United States.” Consider that an indication both of Coast Guard discomfort with its present role and of the fact that drug detentions at sea are likely to be realities for the foreseeable future — though conceivably in privatized settings where whatever happens on board would be even further removed from public scrutiny.

The conflicting images the United States is projecting in the Southern Hemisphere are perfectly illustrated by its bizarrely bifurcated seaborne missions of hope and despair. On the one hand, the hospital ships, as their very names — Mercy and Comfort — suggest, are beacons of U.S. public diplomacy. On the other hand, those Coast Guard prison ships lower the “hammer” not just on drug dealers but on international legal codes, domestic law, and military law, while hammering this country’s reputation abroad as well. (It’s no irony but a reflection of twenty-first-century Washington reality that the prisoners shackled on those vessels are from some of the same countries, including Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, targeted this year by those hospital vessels.)

Even as unlawful detention on the high seas continues, other challenges to the image of the U.S. as a lawful nation capable of bringing aid and comfort elsewhere are multiplying. Consider it more than symbolic that the very position Margaret Tutwiler once held, undersecretary for public affairs and public diplomacy, remains unfilled in Donald Trump’s Washington. It’s just one more sign of the State Department’s evisceration by a willful refusal to fill empty posts, including ambassadorships to Bolivia, Honduras, and Panama, countries central to the war on drugs. Worse yet, there are plans to retire either the Mercy or the Comfort by the end of 2019, reducing by half the U.S. Navy’s ability to care for those in need around the world.

It’s clear enough these days where the image of America is headed.

Karen J. Greenberg, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law and the author of Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State. She also wrote The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days. Julia Tedesco contributed to the research for this article. Copyright 2018 Karen Greenberg.

Republished, with permission, from TomDispatch.

The UAE campaign against political Islam ...

The UAE Campaign Against Political Islam: Implications For London

DECEMBER 27, 2018GIORGIO CAFIERO  4 COMMENTS

Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed

by Giorgio Cafiero

Arguably, of all Arab states, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is least tolerant of political Islam and most determined to weaken its influence throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The rulers in Abu Dhabi, who control most decision-making on the federal and international level, see no distinction between a moderate, democratic Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated party, such as Tunisia’s Ennahda, and the Islamic State (ISIS or IS) and other ultra-violent extremist groups such as Boko Haram, al-Qaeda, and al-Shabaab.

UAE authorities have clamped down on Islamist activism in the Emirates where, in contrast to Bahrain and Kuwait, no Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organizations are permitted to exist, let alone hold any power in government. Since the 1990s, officials in Abu Dhabi have seen Islamists in the UAE as an internal “creeping threat” to the federation’s survival as a nation-state and have often pointed their fingers at foreign states—chiefly Qatar, which Abu Dhabi has accused of sponsoring Islamists in the UAE in order to weaken the Emirates’ regional and global influence.

That the UAE’s official religion is Islam, the country has Sharia (Islamic) courts, and Emirati rulers frequently use religious language illustrates how Islam is importantly connected to the concept of political legitimacy in the Emirates. Thus, the Muslim Brotherhood, as a transnational movement that advocates democratic reforms, social justice, charity, and a rejection of certain Western influences, poses an ideational threat to the UAE’s rulers from social, religious, and political standpoints. At the heart of Abu Dhabi’s threat perception of the Muslim Brotherhood is the challenge of sustaining legitimacy, especially once the UAE enters the post-oil period and the nation’s social contract comes under new strains.

In the UAE, Islamists have capitalized on perceived injustices and cultural ills (readily available alcohol, bikini-clad tourists at beaches, prostitution, nightclubs, etc.), and high levels of inequality between Abu Dhabi and Dubai on the one hand and the five less wealthy emirates—Ajman, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah, and Umm al-Quwain—on the other. Such realities in the UAE have afforded members of al-Islah—the UAE’s outlawed Muslim Brotherhood affiliate—an opportunity to portray themselves as pious Muslims in a country governed by rulers who have deviated from “appropriate” (as they see it) Islamic social practices. This kind of rhetoric unsettles Emirati leaders as it threatens to undermine their legitimacy.

As Christopher Davidson put it, “Islah’s commitment to keep pushing for evolution towards democracy—in line with a clause in the UAE constitution of 1971—has effectively placed it into direct confrontation with the country’s now committedly apolitical ruling families. Less obviously, Islah has also served a useful bogeyman role, as most of the arrests have been publicly blamed, albeit without substantive evidence, on some kind of external plot involving the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.”

From the UAE’s standpoint, countering extremism in the Islamic world requires cooperation among all Muslim-majority countries’ governments and a common understanding of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. Abu Dhabi’s perceptions of Qatar and Turkey as predatory states are largely based on the support that Doha and Ankara have provided the region’s various Muslim Brotherhood offshoots. Emirati leaders see this as a grave threat to peace, stability, and moderation not just in the Persian Gulf, but across the greater Islamic world.

Throughout the post-2011 period, Abu Dhabi’s foreign policy has become increasingly aggressive in terms of countering perceived Islamist menaces. The UAE’s role in Libya as a sponsor of Operation Dignity, its military campaigns against Islamist groups in Yemen, its support for the Egyptian coup in 2013, its reported coordination with Russia and the Damascus regime in fighting Islamist groups in Syria’s civil war, and its blockade of Qatar are all demonstrative of Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed (MbZ)’s determination to suppress the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups all over the MENA region. Allegations that the UAE supported the failed 2016 coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan must also be viewed in the context of Abu Dhabi’s efforts to push back against political Islam.

Anti-Muslim Brotherhood Campaign in London

The UAE’s efforts to weaken the Muslim Brotherhood have played out in the West too. Abu Dhabi has attempted to pressure the United Kingdom in particular into changing its views of political Islam. In July 2018, UAE Foreign Minister Anwar Gargash delivered a speech before Policy Exchange (a think-tank linked to the British Conservative Party) in which he called the Muslim Brotherhood a “gateway drug to jihadism of all kinds.”

That same month, UAE lobbying efforts in London and Washington faced controversy after Spinwatch (a public interest monitor) released a 52-page report unveiling communications between lobbyists and British diplomats that highlighted the “aggressive nature” of the UAE lobby in the UK and the U.S. Spinwatch reported that UAE lobbying aims “to bend those countries’ home and foreign policy to promote its interests and further its agenda.” According to the report, “Promising billions in return for influence in the U.S., infiltrating the British media to smear rivals, threatening to interfere in British parliamentary select committee reports, buying politicians’ loyalty with lavish trips, donating to think-tanks and trying to influence them and protesting against press freedom—something that the UAE does not itself recognize—some would see as a step too far.”

Emirati officials have reported that the Muslim Brotherhood, having “been masterful in working undercover and presenting themselves in a veneer of moderation,” is “ingrained” in British society. The presence of Emirati Islamists as recipients of political asylum in London has fueled friction in the UAE and UK’s bilateral relationship. Authorities in the Emirates have pushed their British counterparts to deport al-Islah figures. Against the backdrop of the UK’s post-Brexit political climate, in which Islamophobia is an undeniable reality, the UAE’s anti-Muslim Brotherhood campaign in Britain has sought to capitalize on anti-Islamic/anti-Islamist attitudes in the country to stoke anti-Qatari sentiments throughout the GCC crisis.

To this end, to influence discourse in the UK’s capital, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have set up “mysterious” anti-Qatar organizations. By attempting to cement an association between the Muslim Brotherhood and jihadist terror factions that have spilled blood in London and Manchester, the UAE’s lobbying efforts have sought to make more Brits see a connection between Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the threat of radical Islamic terrorism to the UK and to the Western world at large.

In September 2017, exiled Qatari businessman Khalid al-Hail organized the Qatar, Global Security & Stability Conference in London. The speakers included a host of American, British, and Israeli politicians, analysts, and military officials with a notable absence of Qataris. This “opposition” conference called for a “bloodless coup” in Doha. Media outlets in the UAE broadcast the event live. Funding for the conference also allegedly came from the Emirates.

In November 2014, the UAE sent a strong message to London when it designated three UK-based organizations—Islamic Relief Organisation in London (a.k.a. Islamic Relief), Cordoba Foundation in Britain, and Islamic Association in Britain—as terrorist groups. These three UK-based entities belonged to a list of 85 “terrorist” organizations that the UAE released at once. Among those listed were numerous non-profit Muslim organizations in other Western countries such as the Washington, DC-headquartered Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Islamic Relief, the largest Islamic charity in the West with a presence in over 20 countries and cooperative ties with European Union officials, “regularly promotes extremist preachers” and has links to the Muslim Brotherhood, according to UAE media.

From Abu Dhabi’s perspective, the UK government should join the UAE in viewing Islamic Relief, Cordoba Foundation in Britain, and Islamic Association in Britain as terrorist threats, not legitimate actors in British civil society. The UAE’s leadership believes that British officials are misguided in providing cover to such organizations with alleged Muslim Brotherhood connections under the banner of freedom of speech. Writing for the Abu Dhabi-based The National, Sam Westrop, the Director of Islamist Watch (a project of the right-wing US-based Middle East Forum) has called on Western governments to recognize that Islamic Relief is “a charity that has served for three decades as a key conduit for international aid efforts [which] could also be the financial arm for an international movement dedicated to promoting extremism and instability, and to radicalising historically moderate Muslim communities.”

Disagreements on Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood

In a move that many analysts considered the result of pressure from the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the UK government conducted a controversial review into the Muslim Brotherhood in 2014. Sir John Jenkins, London’s then-ambassador to Riyadh, led the review, which was released in December 2015. The Jenkins report found no direct links between the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK and “radical” Islam. Nonetheless it concluded that membership might serve as a “possible indicator of extremism” with the movement being a “rite of passage” to violent radicalization for certain members. After the Jenkins report was completed, then-Prime Minister David Cameron stated that London would not outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood—however, he did assert that it maintained a “highly ambiguous relationship with violence” and was “deliberately opaque.”

Looking ahead, there appears no reason to conclude that the UK is on the verge of designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. Doing so would clearly be interpreted as caving to pressure from London’s Arab Persian Gulf allies, rather than any credible intelligence, and is thus highly unlikely. Additionally, another factor, which also weighs into the U.S. government’s decision to avoid designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, is the fact that key Arab allies of the West permit local Muslim Brotherhood branches’ political wings to run for seats in the parliament and influence discourse on social issues. Such Arab states include Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia. Additionally, fellow NATO member Turkey’s ruling neo-Islamist party—the Justice and Development Party—is understood as being ideologically linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Qatar crisis, which broke out in May/June 2017 and remains unresolved, has further highlighted the limits of Abu Dhabi’s means to influence London’s position on the Muslim Brotherhood. Developments in Qatar-UK relations since the GCC dispute erupted have reaffirmed London’s keenness to continue engaging and cooperating with Doha despite diplomatic pressure from the Saudi/UAE-led anti-Qatar quartet. Like other Western capitals, London has seen its relationship with Doha as useful for addressing geopolitical crises in the Middle East, as well as attracting greater foreign investment through the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), which has pumped billions into the British economy.

Having signaled how vested the UK is in expanding ties with Doha, the UK has made it clear to Abu Dhabi that London, along with Washington, Paris, and Berlin, will not support the anti-Qatar bandwagon of authoritarian Arab states in their quest to eradicate political Islam from the MENA region. That the UK has shown no willingness to reassess its relationship with Qatar highlights the failure of the UAE to sell its blockade of Doha to the establishment in London as a responsible action aimed at countering violent extremism.

The Matthew Hedges Case: Challenging a Balance of Power

According to an anonymous source cited by Arabi21, while detained in the UAE from May to November 2018, Matthew Hedges was a bargaining chip that the UAE government used to pressure officials in London into extraditing political opponents currently based in the United Kingdom who’d been granted asylum. The report stated: “The move angered the British who told Abu Dhabi that British law does not allow the extradition of people granted asylum and that the procedure was complex and could not be done through an easy government decision.” While the issue of political Islam has fueled some tension between London and Abu Dhabi for years, the recent detention of Hedges (if indeed related to questions of political Islam), and the international outcry over his detention in the press, would signal how this issue has potential to heavily impact issues at the fore of UK-UAE relations.

Given the extent to which Abu Dhabi and London have enjoyed a historic and strong relationship—a relationship shaped by Emirati investment in the UK, by the many British nationals who work and vacation in the UAE, and defense deals that are extremely lucrative for the UK, Hedges’ case took many by surprise. Amid his saga, MP Crispin Blunt wrote articles demanding that the UK revisit its ties with Abu Dhabi. He argued that London should consider replacing the UAE with either Bahrain or Oman as a favored Persian Gulf ally. Ultimately, under strong British pressure, the UAE blinked and freed Hedges last month.

But with MbZ at the helm, the UAE is unlikely to accept a junior partner status in the Abu Dhabi-London relationship. Looking ahead, the world is growing more multipolar, which has major implications for UK-UAE relations. The UAE is less reliant on its western allies by virtue of its deepening relations with China, India, and Russia. Meanwhile, as the UK continues to look to its post-Brexit future and seeks new trade partners and deals, the UAE is increasingly important to the British economy. This is a fact that officials in both Abu Dhabi and London realize.

That Hedges was freed through a presidential pardon—and therefore, in the eyes of the Emirati authorities, went home as a man found guilty of espionage—underscores the UAE’s unwillingness to accept the British position that the charges levied against Hedges lacked any basis in evidence. For the UAE, sticking by the narrative that Hedges had spied in the Emirates was about saving face. This required them to release Hedges in a manner that enabled Emirati leadership to remain dignified, rather than appearing to be a small state that overreached and ultimately capitulated to a former imperial power.

Consequently, UAE leadership may be prepared to continue challenging London in unconventional ways on the Muslim Brotherhood issue in the future, so long as the UK continues to host dissidents and Islamists from Arab Persian Gulf countries, and London refuses to accept Abu Dhabi’s narratives about political Islam and Qatar. Nonetheless, should the UAE continue using a variety of tactics to pressure the UK on these issues, Abu Dhabi may well cause serious damage to its relationship with London. The long-term implications of that policy could prove negative for the UAE’s national interests and reputation in London and other Western capitals.

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GIORGIO CAFIERO

Giorgio Cafiero is the CEO and founder of Gulf State Analytics, a Washington, DC-based geopolitical risk consultancy. In addition to LobeLog, he also writes for The National Interest, Middle East Institute, and Al Monitor. From 2014-2015, Cafiero was an analyst at Kroll, an investigative due diligence consultancy. He received an M.A. in International Relations from the University of San Diego.

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America's Middle East Purgatory

Tuesday, December 11, 2018 - 12:00am

America’s Middle East Purgatory

The Case for Doing Less

Mara Karlin and Tamara Cofman Wittes

MARA KARLIN is an Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She was U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development from 2015 to 2016.

TAMARA COFMAN WITTES is a Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. She was U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs from 2009 to 2012. 

 

When U.S. President Donald Trump talks about the Middle East, he typically pairs bellicose threats against Iran and the Islamic State (or ISIS) with fulsome pledges of support for the United States’ regional partners, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia. But the tough talk is misleading: there is little reason to think that Trump actually wants the United States to get more involved in the region.

He pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal [1] but has shown no eagerness for a conflict with the Islamic Republic. He has continued U.S. President Barack Obama’s support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen but resisted calls for deeper military engagement there. Despite his promise of a “deal of the century,” a U.S. proposal on Arab-Israeli peace remains on the shelf. His support for an “Arab NATO,” a security alliance among Egypt, Jordan, and six Gulf states, has been stymied by deepening rifts among the Gulf countries. His vacillating approach toward Syria has led to confusion over the U.S. military’s mission there. The Defense Department has scaled back U.S. military capabilities in the Middle East in order to redirect resources to the increasing threats posed by China and Russia, leaving partners in the region wondering about Washington’s commitment to their security. For all the aggressive rhetoric, Trump’s Middle East policies have proved remarkably reserved. 

In that regard, Trump is strikingly like his predecessor. Trump may talk about the Middle East differently than Obama did. But the two seem to share the view that the United States is too involved in the region and should devote fewer resources and less time to it. And there is every reason to believe that the next president will agree. The reduced appetite for U.S. engagement in the region reflects not an ideological predilection or an idiosyncrasy of these two presidents but a deeper change in both regional dynamics and broader U.S. interests. Although the Middle East still matters to the United States, it matters markedly less than it used to.

U.S. strategy toward the Middle East, however, has yet to catch up with these changes. The United States thus exists in a kind of Middle Eastern purgatory—too distracted by regional crises to pivot to other global priorities but not invested enough to move the region in a better direction. This worst-of-both-worlds approach exacts a heavy price. It sows uncertainty among Washington’s Middle Eastern partners, which encourages them to act in risky and aggressive ways. (Just look at Saudi Arabia’s brazen assassination [2] of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi or its bloody campaign in Yemen [3].) It deepens the American public’s frustration with the region’s endless turmoil, as well as with U.S. efforts to address it. It diverts resources that could otherwise be devoted to confronting a rising China and a revanchist Russia. And all the while, by remaining unclear about the limits of its commitments, the United States risks getting dragged into yet another Middle Eastern conflict.

To say that the Middle East matters less to the United States does not mean that decreased U.S. involvement will necessarily be good for the region. The Middle East is in the midst of its greatest upheaval in half a century, generating an all-out battle for power among its major players. The region’s governments, worried about what Washington’s growing disregard for the Middle East means for their own stability, are working hard to draw the hegemon back in. But it is time for Washington to put an end to wishful thinking about its ability to establish order on its own terms or to transform self-interested and shortsighted regional partners into reliable allies—at least without incurring enormous costs and long-term commitments. That means making some ugly choices to craft a strategy that will protect the most important U.S. interests in the region, without sending the United States back into purgatory.

A LESS RELEVANT REGION

In response to the Iraq war, the United States has aimed to reduce its role in the Middle East. Three factors have made that course both more alluring and more possible. First, interstate conflicts that directly threatened U.S. interests in the past have largely been replaced by substate security threats. Second, other rising regions, especially Asia, have taken on more importance to U.S. global strategy. And third, the diversification of global energy markets has weakened oil as a driver of U.S. policy. 

During the Cold War, traditional state-based threats pushed the United States to play a major role in the Middle East. That role involved not only ensuring the stable supply of energy to Western markets but also working to prevent the spread of communist influence and tamping down the Arab-Israeli conflict so as to help stabilize friendly states. These efforts were largely successful. Beginning in the 1970s, the United States nudged Egypt out of the pro-Soviet camp, oversaw the first Arab-Israeli peace treaty, and solidified its hegemony in the region. Despite challenges from Iran after its 1979 revolution and from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq throughout the 1990s, U.S. dominance was never seriously in question. The United States contained the Arab-Israeli conflict, countered Saddam’s bid to gain territory through force in the 1990–91 Gulf War, and built a seemingly permanent military presence in the Gulf that deterred Iran and muffled disputes among the Gulf Arab states. Thanks to all these efforts, the chances of deliberate interstate war in the Middle East are perhaps lower now than at any time in the past 50 years. 

But today, the chief threat in the Middle East is not a state-on-state conflict but the growing substate violence spilling across borders—a challenge that is harder to solve from the outside. The terrorism and civil war plaguing the Middle East have spread easily in a permissive environment of state weakness. This environment was fostered by the U.S. invasion of Iraq and then, more generally, by the dysfunctional governance that led to the Arab uprisings of 2010–12 and the subsequent repressive responses. The region’s most violent hot spots are those where dictators met demands from their citizens with force and drove them to take up arms. The United States cannot fundamentally alter this permissive environment for terrorism and chaos without investing in state building at a level far beyond what either the American public or broader foreign policy considerations would allow. And so it simply cannot hope to do much to counter the Middle East’s violence or instability. 

Some of the chaos directly threatens U.S. partners. Jordan’s vulnerability skyrocketed in 2014 as hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees fled there (which is the reason the United States ramped up its aid to the country). Saudi Arabia’s critical infrastructure has proved dangerously exposed (which is why the United States deepened its support there, as well). But today, the primary threats to these partners are internal. In Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, dysfunctional state-led economic systems and unaccountable governments are failing to meet the needs or aspirations of a large, young, reasonably healthy, and globally connected generation. Change will have to come from the Arab states themselves, and although the United States can support reformers within Arab societies, it cannot drive this kind of transformation from the outside. 

Some argue that these problems still matter a lot to the United States and that there is still much it could do to solve them if it were willing to go all in. Proponents of this maximalist approach believe that with sufficient resources, the United States could decisively defeat ISIS and other extremists, stabilize and reconstruct liberated communities, and lay the foundations for a lasting peace by pushing states to overhaul the social contract between rulers and ruled. This outcome is not impossible to imagine. But the experience of the United States in Iraq, Libya, and Syria suggests that this path would be rockier than it might first appear and that it would be extremely challenging to sustain domestic political support for the large, long-term investments that these goals would require.

Even as the Middle East’s problems have become less susceptible to constructive outside influence, the United States’ global interests have also changed—most of all when it comes to Asia. For decades, U.S. policymakers debated whether China could rise peacefully [4], but the country’s destabilizing behavior, especially its insistence that its neighbors accept its territorial claims in the South China Sea and over Taiwan, have led many to worry that it will not. Both Obama and Trump recognized that Asia has become more important to U.S. grand strategy. As the former put it when announcing what became known as the “rebalance” to Asia, “After a decade in which we fought two wars that cost us dearly, in blood and treasure, the United States is turning our attention to the vast potential of the Asia-Pacific region.” Russia, meanwhile, has generated growing concern ever since its invasion of Crimea in 2014, and fears about European security and stability have pushed the Middle East even further down the list of U.S. priorities. 

Then there is oil—the fuel that first drew the United States into the Middle East after World War II. Middle Eastern oil remains an important commodity in the global economy, but it is weakening [4] as a driver of U.S. policy. One reason is the more abundant global supply, including new domestic sources aided by technologies such as fracking. Another is a widely anticipated stall in global demand, as technological advances and concerns about greenhouse gas emissions cause countries to shift away from fossil fuels. The result is a Middle East that is less central to global energy markets and less able to control pricing—and a United States that can afford to worry less about protecting the flow of oil from the region. 

Many of the things that mattered to the United States when it first became involved in the Middle East still matter today. The United States should still care about protecting freedom of navigation in the region’s major maritime passages, preventing oil producers or troublemakers from suddenly turning off the flow, and containing would-be regional hegemons and other actors hostile to Washington. The question is how crucial these priorities are relative to other ones, and how much the United States should invest in them. The answer is that the United States should probably be less involved in shaping the trajectory of the region than it is. 

LOST ILLUSIONS

For a long time, policymakers have been tempted by the notion that there is some kind of golden mean for U.S. engagement in the Middle East. Somehow, the argument runs, the United States can develop a strategy that keeps it involved in the most critical issues but avoids allowing it to be drawn into the region’s more internecine battles. In this scenario, the United States could reduce its military presence while retaining a “surge” capacity, relying more on local partners to deter threats and using aid and trade incentives to build coalitions among local actors to advance stabilizing policies, such as conflict resolution.

But this Goldilocks approach rests on the false assumption that there is such a thing as a purely operational U.S. military presence in the Middle East. In reality, U.S. military bases [5]across the Gulf countries have strategic implications because they create a moral hazard: they encourage the region’s leaders to act in ways they otherwise might not, safe in the knowledge that the United States is invested in the stability of their regimes. In 2011, for example, the Bahrainis and the Saudis clearly understood the message of support sent by the U.S. naval base in Bahrain when they ignored Obama’s disapproval and crushed Shiite protests there. In Yemen, U.S. support for the Emirati and Saudi military campaign shows how offering help can put the United States in profound dilemmas: the United States is implicated in air strikes that kill civilians, but any proposal to halt its supplies of its precision-guided missiles is met with the charge that denying Saudi Arabia smarter munitions might only increase collateral civilian casualties. U.S. efforts to train, equip, and advise the Syrian Democratic Forces [6] in the fight against ISIS are yet another reminder that none of Washington’s partnerships has purely operational consequences: U.S. support of the SDF, seen by Ankara as a sister to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, has made the United States’ relationship with Turkey knottier than ever. 

Supporters of the Goldilocks approach also suggest that the United States can substitute military engagement with vigorous diplomacy. But U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s experience with the negotiations over the Syrian civil war, where his efforts were undercut by Obama’s reluctance to involve the United States, demonstrated that diplomacy without teeth doesn’t get you very far. Goldilocks proponents imagine that the United States can somehow escape the push-pull dynamic of Middle Eastern involvement, but all this approach ends up accomplishing is prolonging the time in purgatory. Yet it is not enough to simply propose that the United States do less in the region without explaining what that would look like in practice. It is clear that Washington should reduce its role in the Middle East; how it scales back and to what end are the critical questions. 

A new approach to the region should begin with accepting a painful tradeoff: that what is good for the United States may not be good for the Middle East. U.S. policymakers and the public already seem surprisingly comfortable watching repressive Arab rulers consolidate power in some countries, while brutal insurgents displace civilians and destroy cities in others. But a superpower must make tough choices, prioritizing the conflicts and issues that matter most for its global strategy. During the Cold War, for example, the United States took a relatively hands-off approach to most of Africa, backing anticommunist strongmen and proxies in a few places even at the cost of long-term stability. This had terrible consequences for the people of, say, Angola or what was then Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), but it was a tolerable decision for U.S. interests. The same is likely to be true in the Middle East today. 

It is not enough to just set limits on its commitments; the United States must also clearly communicate those limits to other countries. At a summit at Camp David in 2015, Obama alarmed Gulf partners when he told them that the United States would protect them from external threats but pointedly declined to mention internecine ones. Obama was right to put the onus on Gulf states to address their own internal challenges and to make clear that the United States had no dog in most of their regional fights. Today, likewise, the United States should put its regional partners on notice that it will not back some of their pet political projects, such as the United Arab Emirates’ attempt to resuscitate the Palestinian politician Mohammad Dahlan in the Gaza Strip or its effort, along with Egypt, to back the military commander Khalifa Haftar in Libya. Washington must also set clear guidelines about when it will and won’t use force. It should clarify, for example, that it will target terrorists who threaten the United States or its partners but will not intervene militarily in civil wars except to contain them (as opposed to resolving them through force). 

Since a less engaged United States will have to leave more of the business of Middle Eastern security to partners in the region, it must rethink how it works with them. For example, the U.S. military is fond of talking about a “by, with, and through” approach to working with local partners—meaning military “operations are led by our partners, state or nonstate, with enabling support from the United States or U.S.-led coalitions, and through U.S. authorities and partner agreements,” as General Joseph Votel, commander of U.S. Central Command, explained in an article in Joint Force Quarterly [7] in 2018. But that model works only if the partners on the ground share Washington’s priorities. Consider the Defense Department’s doomed program to train and equip rebels in Syria. Rightly mistrustful of those partners, fearing they might drag the United States into a war with Bashar al-Assad, Washington was unwilling to provide sophisticated support. And although the fighters were instructed to prioritize attacking ISIS over regime forces that were shelling their hometowns, they changed course when Turkey invaded Afrin and began fighting the Turks instead, stalling the campaign against ISIS elsewhere. The United States has worked well with Kurdish militias in the fight against ISIS in northeastern Syria—but as soon as Trump expressed his desire to pull U.S. forces out, the rebels began to explore cutting a deal with Damascus. 

It is also crucial that the United States accept the limitations of its partners and see them for what they truly are, warts and all. Sometimes, these partners won’t be able to confront security challenges without direct help from the United States. In these cases, U.S. policy-makers will have to accept that if the effort is imperative for U.S. national security interests, Washington will have to do the work itself. For example, the United States has spent decades trying to build a security alliance among Gulf states. Even before the current Gulf rift [5]began, this effort had started going off the rails, with many countries allowing mutual hatreds to get in the way of a cooperative effort against Iran. Now that Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates are blockading Qatar, this alliance is looking even more like a pipe dream. 

A clear-eyed approach also requires accepting that China or Russia (or both) will likely gain more of a footing in the Middle East as the United States pulls back. The good news is that neither power is likely to make a real bid for regional hegemony. So far, China [8] has established itself in the region by gingerly stepping around multiple conflicts, seeking friendships and trade relationships while carefully avoiding taking sides in any rivalries. The crass views of power and money evident in Russia’s involvement in Syria, where Kremlin-linked mercenary firms have fought for Assad and gained lucrative oil profits, suggest that regional governments will face a strict quid pro quo from Moscow, not the kind of reliable partnerships the United States has traditionally provided. Setting Syria aside, Russia’s role [9] in the region has been similar to China’s: free-riding on U.S. security guarantees while using diplomacy and commercial ties to make friends as widely as possible without offering unique guarantees to any one party. Given the relatively limited ambitions of China and Russia, and how well the United States has demonstrated the immense price of being the regional security manager, Washington should be able to retain the preponderance of power in the Middle East even after pulling back. Yet if one of its core partners or interests is threatened, it will need to be prepared to change course. 

WHAT STILL MATTERS

These recommendations all involve accepting what doesn’t matter to U.S. interests. But there are issues in the Middle East that still greatly concern the United States. Those who prefer that Washington withdraw from the region entirely underestimate how dangerous the resulting power vacuum could be. The United States does have important interests in the region to protect. 

One of them is sustaining freedom of navigation for the U.S. Navy and for global commercial traffic through the Middle East’s major maritime passages—the Strait of Hormuz, the Bab el Mandeb Strait, and the Suez Canal. Fortunately, this is a global priority. Outside the Persian Gulf itself, the littoral states and other concerned parties across Asia and Europe share Washington’s objective. Chinese naval forces have participated in antipiracy efforts in the Horn of Africa, and the Chinese navy recently built its first overseas base [10] to support that mission, in Djibouti. The United States could encourage China to participate in the 33-member Combined Maritime Forces and Combined Task Force 151, which fight piracy in the Gulf of Aden and off the eastern coast of Somalia, to ensure that China’s activities are focused on shared maritime security. This would allow the United States to rely more on other concerned parties to address the piracy challenge. Still, doing so would come with its own costs—particularly as China has sought to rewrite the rules on freedom of navigation in its own region.

Fighting terrorism also remains a priority. To secure the American people, including U.S. forces stationed abroad, and the most important U.S. partners, the United States will have to prevent new threats from emerging in the Middle East. Like the Obama administration, the Trump administration has emphasized the need to lower the level of U.S. involvement in counterterrorism efforts. But this approach has its limits. Washington should recognize that its partners will inevitably permit or even encourage the activities of terrorist groups if doing so aligns with their short-term interests. Qatar, for example, has proved willing to work with extremist groups that, at a minimum, give aid to terrorist groups with international ambitions. The United States should recognize that it cannot control everything its partners do and focus its efforts on discouraging their relationships with terrorist groups that might pursue operations beyond their immediate neighborhood or acquire game-changing capabilities. 

Finally, the United States still has an interest in seeing its main partners—however imperfect they are—stable and secure, and it should weigh its investments in security cooperation and economic aid accordingly. Washington also needs to ensure that problems in the Middle East don’t spill over into neighboring regions (a lesson from the Bosnian war in the 1990s that policymakers forgot when confronted with the Syrian war). Preventing conflicts from spreading does not mean launching all-out military interventions. But it will sometimes require the United States to actively contain the fighting and engage in coercive diplomacy designed to bring civil wars to a swifter end. 

THE DEVIL WE DON’T KNOW

Ultimately, lasting stability and security for the Middle East will come only if the relationship between rulers and the ruled changes. That will require more transparent, responsive, accountable, and participatory governments that give citizens a reason to buy into the system, instead of encouraging them to work around it through corruption, leave it behind through emigration, or try to tear it down through violence. 

But that change cannot be driven by the United States without far more carrots and sticks than Washington is prepared to deploy. U.S. policymakers should instead support those who are proposing constructive solutions and work to shape the environment in which local actors will make their own choices about reordering the region. That work could involve others with a stake in Middle Eastern stability—Europe, for example. But for the foreseeable future, policymakers must accept that the Middle East will likely remain mired in dysfunction and that U.S. partners there will bow less and less to Washington’s preferences. The United States will also have to abandon the fairy-dusted prospect of a negotiated agreement to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and settle for constraining the worst impulses of both sides as they reckon with recalcitrant domestic politics. The Iran nuclear deal did not put an end to Iran’s destabilizing behavior or permanently box in its nuclear ambitions. But it did—and does—offer meaningful, verifiable constraints on Iranian nuclear activity for a significant period of time, better than can be expected from U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s list of demands backed by “maximum pressure.” The United States should return to the agreement and continue efforts to roll back Iran’s bad behavior both alone and with partners.

Heavy U.S. involvement in the Middle East over the past two decades has been painful and ugly for the United States and for the region. But it is the devil we know, and so U.S. policymakers have grown accustomed to the costs associated with it. Pulling back, however, is the devil we don’t know, and so everyone instinctively resists this position. It, too, will be painful and ugly for the Middle East, but compared with staying the course, it will be less so for the United States. It’s time for the United States to begin the difficult work of getting out of purgatory.