Gulf International Relations

Brian Ulrich — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 02:10:48 +0000

Gregory Gause’s The International Relations of the Persian Gulf provides an excellent overview of its subject over the past 40 years since the British withdrawal, while providing both interesting unifying themes and well-supported arguments about several controversial issues. Gause views the Gulf states bordering the Gulf as forming a “regional security complex,” meaning that the bulk of their foreign policy energy is dedicated to their relations with each other. Between 1971 and at least 2003, the Persian Gulf saw a tripolar system based around Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Politics among them was often characterized by concern with transnational identities, such as Arab ethnicity or Shi’ism, and a critical factor shaping interstate relations, including the major wars, was states’ fears that these identities could be manipulated so as to undermine their own internal security. This is especially true when discussing Iraq.

An early case of a Gulf regime entering a conflict was Saddam Hussein’s decision to attack Iran in 1980. While acknowledging that the Iraqi government saw an opportunity to advance territorial claims at the head of the Gulf, Gause argues based on the timing of events that the actual decision to go to war was motivated by a fear of revolutionary Shi’ism spreading to Iraq, a fear which also motivated support for Iraq by Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf states. Gause adduces a similar motivation behind Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, producing a great deal of evidence that Saddam Hussein, with a certain amount of paranoia, believed Israel, the United States, and the smaller Gulf monarchies were conspiring with internal dissidents to undermine his regime in the wake of the unsuccessful Iran-Iraq War. A belief that danger was imminent led him to attack Kuwait in August 1990, instead of trying to wait until he had nuclear weapons. In this context, Saddam saw Kuwait’s over-pumping of oil as in part an attempt to undermine his own economy and patronage capacity by driving down prices.

Gause devotes an entire chapter to the American decision to attack Iraq in 2003, which he argues undid the tripolar system leading to a current situation in which it is unclear how power and influence will ultimately be distributed. His argument here is that while some within the Bush administration were in favor of an attack on Iraq from the get-go, Bush himself only came to support the idea after September 11, and this support was based primarily on the belief that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons programs and could provide such weapons to terrorists. Once this decision was made, confirmation bias and internal administration politics led to exaggerations of the intelligence in areas such as nuclear weapons and al-Qaeda links that served to make the case for war to the American public.

As someone who follows these issues closely, I felt like I’d heard almost everything in this book before at some point or another, but it was still invaluable to have it all in one place as part of a common narrative and analysis. Looking at the region today, one can see the continued foreign policy salience of regimes’ concerns for their international security in Saudi Arabia’s decision to help suppress demonstrations in Bahrain. At the same time, I’m not as convinced as Gause is that Iraq is now primarily a playing field for outsiders as opposed to a power in its own right. While there are definite internal tensions to be resolved, Iraq currently has a stable government with a steadily increasing capacity, and I’m dubious that any of its neighbors want to see it collapse back into civil war. The key issue to watch there is what kind of path it charts amidst the Saudi-Iranian rivalry.

In summary, Gause’s book is a highly effective introduction to key regional issues, as well as a useful resource for those with some background in the area, which will continue as a flashpoint in world affairs for the foreseeable future.

(Crossposted to my blog)

A Precedent that will Reach to Himself

Eric Martin — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:06:14 +0000

Andrew Sullivan is right:

The document reads, like so much else from the Cheney years, like a document from a South American dictatorship in the 1970s or 1980s. If someone had told me a few years ago that it had popped up in the Soviet archives, I would have believed him. Read the whole thing if you can. It is a distressing document. Here’s what the “CIA pros” did to prisoners (the non-CIA pros improvised the president’s directive to torture and abuse prisoners in very similar ways): stress positions, nudity, hooding, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, long time standing, beatings, hypothermia, and walling. They key thing, according to the CIA, is to enhance “the potential dread a high-value detainee might have of US custody”. Notice the shift from the standards of the past. In the past, the US was known for being a country whose soldiers would never mistreat prisoners; now, the US wants the world to know that US custody is something to be dreaded. That’s what Cheney did to America. He’s proud of it. If you are ever captured by a US soldier, and suspected of terrorism, you know that torture will be coming soon. The values of Washington and Eisenhower and Reagan are inverted. The reputation of the US as a defender of human rights is reversed. The point is that America must be feared for its willingness to abandon all human rights.

This is what the neocon right believe in, even as they prattle on about extending human rights as an American value. They say they believe in democracy. What they also believe in is what we saw done to innocent human beings at Abu Ghraib:

Nudity. The HVD’s clothes are taken from him and he remains nude until the interrogators provide clothes to him.

Sleep deprivation. The HVD is placed in the vertical shackling position to begin sleep deprivation. Other shackling procedures may be used during interrogations. The detainee is diapered for sanitary purposes, although the diaper is not used at all times.

The diapers are necessary because when you shackle someone in the same position for hours and hours on end and feed him Ensure, he will shit himself. All torturing regimes deal with shitting torture victims. The US followed other regimes in both diapering prisoners or, better still, forcing them to lie in their own excrement, as was discovered by horrified FBI agents at Gitmo. Other torture regimes capture piss and shit in bowls beneath the torture victims. Various forms of nude shackling, sleep deprivation and dietary manipulation (all barred under Geneva and the UN Convention) are then supplemented by constant bombardment with light, loud noise, water-dousing and walling. These techniques can be used in combination. [emphasis added]

Don’t it make you proud? Don’t you wonder why the Obama administration would want to politicize criminal conduct by actually investigating torture and holding those that tortured accountable under the law?

As for the techniques, maybe we took diapering tips from the North Koreans, one of our new sources of emulation. And for those that don’t consider the use of sleep deprivation and stress positions (let alone waterboarding) torture, here are some passages from Kim Yong’s horrific tale of torture at the hands of the North Korean regime, some of whose torture methods Dick Cheney and George Bush adopted for the US government:

I was completely sleep deprived and could not react any longer. I had lost track of how many hours or days had passed. But I knew that if I told them what they wanted to hear, there would be no other punishment but a death sentence waiting for me. At moments, the sleep deprivation became so severe that I simply wanted to surrender, but I bit my lips to remain silent. As time went by, the interrogators became more and more furious.

Kim Yong was subjected to certain forms of physical torture that even Cheney didn’t push for, such as bamboo under the fingernails and electric shocks. And yet, according to Yong, stress positions were amongst the most grueling:

One of the worst tortures I endured was to have my body, waist down, submerged in water in a tiny cell that prohibited me from moving. The cell was so tiny that I had to bend slightly in order to fit my body in…[Later] they put me in solitary confinement in a tiny cell about two feet wide and five feet long and ordered me not to move an inch. When I couldn’t bear the pain any longer, they brought me blank paper and made me write confessions.

Ironically, the Republican Party, which has come to stand for full throated support of torture for various categories of detainees (inevitably, and in practice, the innocent and guilty), is prone to flag lapel pin demagoguery and other ostentatious displays of ostensible patriotism. And yet, Party members seem entirely unaware of just how contrary their support of torture is to the vision of the revered, if only in the abstract, founding fathers (let alone the more recent object of adulation, Ronald Reagan).

Consider that George Washington, then facing a truly existential crisis, refused to allow prisoners to be tortured – even as the fledgling republic teetered on a precipice in the midst of an improbable military campaign against the British. Thomas Paine, too, offers no equivocation (via Glenn Greenwald):

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. [...]

The executive is not invested with the power of deliberating whether it shall act or not; it has no discretionary authority in the case; for it can act no other thing than what the laws decree, and it is obliged to act conformably thereto…

And yet the torture cheerleaders attack the patriotism of those that would uphold the values of Washington, Paine, Jefferson, Madison and, even, Reagan - as opposed to the policies and values of Dick Cheney, George Bush, John Yoo, Jay Bybee and David Addington.

Tell me again which group is truly defending America and the ideals we aspire to?

American Footprints » Bush Admin

Gulf International Relations

A Precedent that will Reach to Himself