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Saudi Arabia and the $100 Billion Arms Sale: Its Effects on Middle East-U.S. Relations

The Saudi Trillions

Malise Ruthven, London Review of Books, September 7, 2017

It made perfect sense that the first port of call on President Trump’s first foreign trip, in May, was Riyadh. Saudi Arabia – the world’s second largest oil producer (after Russia), the world’s biggest military spender as a proportion of GDP, the main sponsor of Islamist fighting groups across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria and Iraq, the leader of a coalition in a devastating war against Yemeni rebels now in its third year – is a country one can do business with, even as the most ardent Kremlinologists in the West struggle to understand it. It is a place often defined by its contradictions, in which tribal codes of desert and oasis – puritanical, patriarchal, frugal and austere – co-exist and frequently clash with lavish displays of wealth and such emblems of modernity as air-conditioned shopping malls, designer boutiques and six-lane highways flashing with supercharged vehicles exclusively driven by men. Trump returned from his visit with a promise – he claimed – of $350 billion in Saudi spending on American armaments over the next ten years, with $110 billion right away, of benefit particularly to Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. The State Department celebrated the deal as supporting ‘the long-term security of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region in the face of malign Iranian influence and Iranian-related threats’.

But the last few months have seen a series of changes in the kingdom that make its future more unpredictable than ever. At the beginning of June, Saudi Arabia severed diplomatic ties with its neighbour Qatar, demanding that its al-Jazeera network be shut down for broadcasting propaganda and launching a regional stand-off that is far from being resolved. Then, two weeks later, there was what appeared to be a palace coup. Since the death in 1953 of the modern kingdom’s founder, Abd al-Aziz Al Saud (generally known as Ibn Saud), succession has passed down the line of his sons. The present king, Salman, reportedly Ibn Saud’s 25th son, inherited the throne in 2015 on the death of his half-brother Abdullah and is close to being the last of his generation. At 81 Salman is in fragile health: he has had two strokes and suffers from Alzheimer’s. On 21 June the doting king promoted his favourite son, the 31-year-old Prince Mohammed bin Salman (widely known by the initials MBS), to the position of crown prince, putting him in line to be the first of the third generation – Ibn Saud’s grandsons – to occupy the throne. According to the New York Times, MBS’s elevation at the expense of his older cousin, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef (known as MBN), was the result of a well-executed plot. MBN had been highly regarded by the US and its allies: as head of the interior ministry and chief of Saudi intelligence he presided over operations against al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP); he had attended training sessions with the FBI and was a powerful advocate of continued close relations with the Americans. In February the CIA honoured him with the George Tenet medal, in recognition of his ‘excellent intelligence performance in the domain of counterterrorism and his unbounded contribution to realise world security and peace’.

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On the night of 20 June, the eve of the Eid al-Fitr festival that ends the holy month of Ramadan, MBN was summoned along with other senior princes for an audience with the king. Shortly before midnight courtiers answering to MBS – who was already chief of the royal court as well as the world’s youngest minister of defence – removed his phones and pressured him to relinquish his posts. MBN at first refused but eventually gave in and is now said to be under palace arrest. Afterwards clips of MBN paying allegiance to his younger cousin were shown on Saudi media, to demonstrate a smooth transition, and it was put about – this time by US as well as Saudi officials – that MBN had been suffering from the effects of the ‘arsehole bomb’ attack in 2009, when an al-Qaida operative masquerading as a petitioner approached him and blew himself up with an IED hidden in his rectum. MBN survived the attack but was said to have become addicted to medication he had been taking to mitigate the effects of the trauma. Members of the Allegiance Council, a body of 34 senior princes established by King Abdullah in 2006 to resolve disputes by approving changes in the line of succession, were told that MBN had a drug problem and was unfit to be king. Despite private reservations, the council deferred to King Salman and rubber-stamped its approval, in a vote of 31 to three.

While not dismissing the claims about his health, at least one foreign diplomat and a well-placed Saudi source suggested that MBN had opposed the Saudi-led embargo on Qatar, and that this was the real reason for his fall. As in early modern Europe, palace politics in Arabia and the Gulf are not driven just by private ambitions but reflect wider geopolitical struggles. MBS is said to be close to his mentor Muhammad bin Zayed, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and deputy commander of the armed forces of the United Arab Emirates, the region’s most effective – and most interventionist – military power. Recent Emirati successes include taking the ports of Mukalla and Shihr in southern Yemen from AQAP, as well as two strategic islands in the Bab al-Mandab strait between Arabia and Africa, through which tankers carrying four million barrels of oil pass each day. Bin Zayed is thought to be the driving force behind the UAE-Saudi rivalry with Qatar which MBN was resisting. As one commentator tweeted after the coup, ‘bin Zayed has become the real ruler of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the two largest Arab countries. Congratulations to the people of these two countries …’

In this scenario MBS – now abetted by Trump – appears as the useful idiot. As defence minister, he was in charge of launching the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, which has been responsible for the killing of thousands of civilians in airstrikes and the displacement of more than three million people. According to the UN, 80 per cent of Yemen’s population is now in need of humanitarian aid that can’t reach the country thanks to the Saudi blockade; the lack of food and clean water has led to widespread malnutrition and at least 500,000 cases of cholera. Meanwhile, the Saudis’ military targets, the Houthi rebels who oppose the president they have protected in office, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, show no signs of giving up. Saudi Arabia has consistently accused the Houthis of being Iranian proxies, a charge that was once untrue but which effectively had the force of a prediction, since as the war has ground on Iran has stepped up its military aid to the rebels, partly to prevent total devastation.

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The diplomatic and economic campaign against Qatar, too, can be seen as an expansionist move, part of a Saudi-UAE effort to counter what they present as Iranian influence. As Richard Sokolsky and Aaron David Miller put it in an article for Politico,

The crown prince engineered this dispute not to punish Qatar for its financing of terrorism (a hypocritical comment coming from the Saudis, whose own citizens have provided funding to radical extremists over the years), but rather to end Qatar’s independent foreign policy and especially its support for the Muslim Brotherhood and its ties with Iran. Simply put, the Saudis want to turn Qatar into a vassal state – as they have done with Bahrain – as part of their plan to establish Saudi hegemony over the entire Persian Gulf.

But Qatar has its reasons to co-operate with Iran – not least the fact that the countries share ownership of the world’s largest natural gas field – and, partly through the offices of al-Jazeera, the only measurably independent news organisation in the region, it has shown itself more tolerant than any of its neighbours of the dissenting political movements whose fortunes improved with the Arab Spring. For the Saudi princes, the Muslim Brotherhood et al are an internal threat not to be countenanced. In this sense, the Saudi offensives against Yemen and Qatar seem less part of a plan for regional domination than a defensive operation designed to stoke up anti-Iranian and anti-Shia feeling at home – even when the Iranian influence is largely invented. ‘We are a primary target for the Iranian regime,’ MBS said in May, shortly before Trump’s visit, accusing the Iranians of seeking to take over Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia. ‘We won’t wait for the battle to be in Saudi Arabia. Instead, we’ll work so that the battle is for them in Iran.’ Chauvinism can be a useful asset for a ruler.

And Saudi chauvinism is far from being unpopular, even though half the population is 25 or younger. Tweets such as ‘I pledge allegiance to my Lord, his Royal Highness the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to listen and to obey,’ though recirculated by Saudi media, may reflect reality in a country where more than 90 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds are avid internet users: there is less noise to the contrary. But then again, obtrusively not obeying rarely ends well. And there is another reason the rise of MBS has been widely applauded by younger people: he has promised social and economic change, as well as an end to the filial gerontocracy that has endured for more than half a century. In a country where 40 per cent of people between the ages of 20 and 24 are unemployed, where 40 per cent of Saudis live in relative poverty and at least 60 per cent can’t afford to buy homes because of the princely grip on real estate, prospects for reform under a dynamic new leader who could rule for decades are enticing.

Last year MBS – by then already in charge of economic policy – announced plans to implement ‘Vision 2030’, a formidable project aimed at weaning the kingdom off hydrocarbons at a time when the price of oil hovers at less than $50 a barrel, driven down by the fracking revolution in the US and the falling off in global demand. Oil won’t sustain the Saudi economy for ever, and MBS’s programme – developed with considerable input from McKinsey – is aimed at curbing public spending and diversifying the economy. The plans include investing in Islamic tourism and in a revamped financial district in Riyadh, as well as expanding revenue streams generally and increasing job opportunities for young Saudis. Blue-collar foreign workers are to be

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replaced by Saudi nationals in areas such as mobile phone technology and engineering. As the Economist noted, though, Saudis tend to lack the technical skills needed for such a programme: ‘Schools stuff young heads with religion, but neglect more practical subjects such as maths and science.’

All this investment will require significant resources, and a central part of the plan is to sell off 5 per cent of Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest corporation, worth possibly $2 trillion, dwarfing Apple, Google, Amazon or ExxonMobil, and listing it on a foreign stock exchange in the world’s biggest ever IPO: Hong Kong, Singapore and London are among the contenders for the listing. Oil revenue – until recently Aramco’s profits were taxed at 85 per cent by the Saudi government – will be replaced by a vast sovereign wealth fund, to be invested in property and businesses abroad as well as at home, much as Qatar already does; the as yet relatively small Saudi fund began its overseas adventures last year with a $3.5 billion investment in Uber. But getting hold of the hundreds of billions that would be generated by an IPO means acceding to transparency rules that a company still 95 per cent owned by the Saudi state would find it hard to comply with. The London Stock Exchange, in its desperation for the prize, has shown that it is perfectly prepared to bend the rules in Aramco’s favour. Even so, a public listing – at the level Saudi Arabia expects – depends on the price of oil rising or at least not falling further; it also depends on the Saudis’ oil reserves being quite as large as they claim. In the face of all this uncertainty, Nick Butler, an ex-BP executive, recently suggested in the Financial Times that Saudi Arabia’s best option may be a private sale to China.

The kingdom has more trivial money worries too. The Al Saud are a royal family like no other: there are thousands of them, descending from the 22 wives Ibn Saud had while technically observing the Sharia requirement of four wives – max – at any one time. He was ‘father to the nation’ in more than a metaphorical sense. In the context of a tribal society, these prudential intermarriages had the benefit of binding together a number of different groups at a time when Ibn Saud was merely the head of a coalition of tribes who founded the modern kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 after he invaded the Hejaz, with its holy cities, Mecca and Medina. The trouble, presently, is that his descendants all expect their emoluments. The scale of this burden can be gauged from a classified cable sent by Wyche Fowler, then US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, to his government in November 1996, exposed by WikiLeaks, in which he reports that members of the Al Saud family receive stipends ranging from $270,000 a month for more senior princes to $8000 ‘for the lowliest member of the most remote branch of the family’. The system is calibrated by generation, with surviving sons and daughters of Ibn Saud receiving between $200,000 and $270,000, grandchildren around $27,000, great-grandchildren around $13,000 and great-great-grandchildren the minimum $8000 per month. According to the US embassy’s calculations, in 1996 the budget for around sixty surviving sons and daughters, 420 grandchildren, 2900 great-grandchildren and ‘probably only about 2000 great-great-grandchildren at this point’ amounted to more than $2 billion, with the stipends providing ‘a substantial incentive for royals to procreate’ since – in addition to bonuses received on marriage for palace construction – a royal stipend begins at birth. One minor prince, according to a Saudi source, had persuaded a community college in the state of Oregon to enrol him even

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though he had no intention of attending classes: his principal goal in life was to have more children so he could increase his monthly allowance.

In addition to the stipends, senior princes enriched themselves via ‘off budget’ programmes that ‘are widely viewed as sources of royal rake-offs’. The largest of these, according to the cable, was thought to relate to the holy shrines of Mecca and Medina – around $5 billion annually – and the Ministry of Defence’s strategic storage project, worth around $1 billion. Both were highly secretive and ‘widely believed to be a source of substantial revenues for the king’ – at that time King Fahd – ‘and a few of his full brothers’. Other ways the princes obtained money included borrowing from banks without paying them back (Saudi banks have been reluctant to lend to royals unless they have proven repayment records) and using princely ‘clout to confiscate land from commoners, especially if it is known to be the site for an upcoming project and can be quickly sold to the government for a profit’. King Abdullah, whose ten-year rule between 2005 and 2015 was seen as a period of modest reform, curbed some of these excesses by stopping handouts to family members going on holiday and discouraging them from using the national airline as a ‘private jet service’. As Karen Elliott House writes in On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Faultlines – and Future (2012), probably the best account of the country written so far by a Western observer (as a woman she had access to the half of the population that is off-limits to male reporters), ‘this plethora of princes is so large and so diverse that little if anything links them except some Al Saud genes … Collectively, they increasingly are viewed by the rest of Saudi society as a burdensome privileged caste.’ Though, thanks to another aspect of tribalism, even being an Al Saud doesn’t guarantee great privilege: sons and grandsons of Ibn Saud whose mothers don’t belong to elite Arabian lineages are considered ineligible for the throne. And as a recent BBC investigation showed, a number of dissident princes have recently vanished, or been disappeared.

The faith tradition that holds the Saudi system together – for now – is Wahhabi Islam, the iconoclastic creed of the 18th-century Islamic reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, whose pact with the Al Saud family led to the creation of the modern kingdom in 1932. Al-Wahhab’s stormtroopers, the Ikhwan, enabled Ibn Saud’s rise to power. They killed unarmed villagers regarded as apostates, thought nothing of slaughtering women and children, and routinely slit the throats of male captives. Contemporary accounts describe the horrors afflicted on the city of Taif in 1924, when the Ikhwan murdered hundreds of civilians, in a massacre similar to the violence committed by Islamic State or al-Qaida today. As an Arab witness wrote, Ibn Saud’s forces ‘normally give no quarter, sparing neither boys nor old men, veritable messengers of death from whose grasp no one escapes’. Some 400,000 people are reported to have been massacred by the Ikhwan during the early days of the Saudi state. The Wahhabi understanding of tawhid, the theology of monotheism or divine unicity, which forbids the veneration of any person or object other than Allah, is still used today to justify the ban on all forms of non-Muslim public worship in the kingdom, as well as the confiscation of non-Wahhabi textual sources such as Quranic commentaries brought in by pilgrims from South Asia, who have had them removed by the religious police while attending the Hajj. But tawhid, a theology that claims to be fundamentally opposed to polytheism, has an unexpected consequence. It mines the Islamic discourse to sustain a totalitarian outlook whose actual purpose is the preservation

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and enrichment of the tribal dynasty that owns and governs this enormous country in its exclusive interest.

Al-Wahhab’s views on the veneration of Muslim holy men – exemplified by his destruction of the tomb of Zayd ibn al-Khattab, brother of Umar, the most revered of the early caliphs and a companion of the Prophet – are now used to legitimise the orgy of cultural vandalism inflicted on Mecca and Medina, over which the king claims religious guardianship as custodian of the Two Holy Shrines, a status that is quasi-caliphal (the Al Saud lack the lineage formally to declare themselves caliphs). The centre of Mecca, the sacred hub of Islam, now resembles Las Vegas, with hotels such as the Raffles Makkah Palace and the Makkah Hilton towering over the Kaaba, the cube-shaped temple to which Muslims everywhere bow in the direction of prayer. Beyond the sacred mosque is the Mekkah Clock Royal Tower, a kitsch rendition of Big Ben around five times as high – one of the world’s tallest buildings. Wealthy Gulf pilgrims are expected to pay premium prices for rooms and apartments in these buildings, as part of the effort to make up for the decline in oil prices. Even the Prophet Muhammad himself is not immune from the corrosive effects of Wahhabi iconoclasm, on the grounds that the veneration of the Prophet (as distinct from the worship of God) constitutes forbidden idolatry. The Prophet’s mawlid or birthday festival – widely observed with processions and family gatherings in other Muslim countries – is banned in the Saudi kingdom, while the name ‘Muhammad’ is often used disparagingly, as a catch-all for despised Muslim immigrants working as menials. The site of Muhammad’s first wife’s house, where it is believed he received his first revelations and where five of his children were born, is now occupied by a row of public toilets.

In the kingdom at large, Wahhabi doctrine is enforced by the five thousand-strong religious police force – known as the mutawaeen – controlled by the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. These religious thugs, institutional descendants of the Ikhwan stormtroopers, patrol cities in expensive white SUVs enforcing prayer times and dress codes, as well as bans on music, sexual mingling and non-Wahhabi forms of religious worship. Even the international opprobrium heaped on the mutawaeen after 2002 – when they prevented 15 schoolgirls from leaving a blazing building, causing them to be burned alive – didn’t lead to their disbandment, though MBS has promised to curtail their powers. According to foreigners who have lived outside the privileged enclaves of expat colonies such as the Aramco-run city of Dhahran – known as Little America, with its manicured golf courses, where men and women mix freely and women are permitted to drive within the fenced-in corporate compound – the sense of fear is ubiquitous.

Simon Valentine, a British academic who spent four years in the kingdom teaching English, says that ‘meeting and talking with Saudis one soon perceives the fear that lurks behind the smiles, the sense that people are constantly aware of being watched, censored and condemned.’ Pascal Menoret, an anthropologist who formed close relationships with the young male tearaways he describes in his brilliant ethnographic essay Joyriding in Riyadh (2014), reports that surveillance, repression and eventually torture are realities that shape everyday life and deeply modify people’s interactions with each other – and with the anthropologist or field worker … This is a country where 12,000 to 30,000 political prisoners and prisoners of opinion

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rot in overcrowded, violent jails; a country where repression is organised by security forces that report to a handful of senior princes, out of the reach of an abrupt, arbitrary judicial system; a country where physical punishment, torture and the threat thereof, in the absence of transparent and fair procedures, are the alpha and omega of the judiciary and the ultima ratio of political acquiescence.

Saudi Arabia has no written constitution or written penal code, claiming that its laws are based only on the Quran and the Sunna (the teachings and practice of the Prophet). Those accused of political offences are often sentenced by the Specialised Criminal Court (SCC), set up to try terrorism-related cases, which routinely denies defendants the most basic fair trial guarantees, including the right to a lawyer, and passes sentences in closed proceedings. Authorities continue to hold prominent rights activists in prolonged incommunicado detention, completely cut off from their families and the outside world. According to the now disbanded Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association, one in every six hundred Saudis is in jail because of their opinions or political activities. Since the whole judicial system is based on confessions extracted under torture or the threat of torture, it is physical violence, not the Quran, that is the ‘true foundation of the law’.

Viewed through any kind of lens, social, cultural or economic, Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s most repressive polities. On the rankings devised by Freedom House, a US-funded NGO, America’s leading ally in the Arab world occupies the bottom percentile (5.8 per cent) in terms of political rights and civil liberties, belonging with Syria, North Korea, Somalia and the Central African Republic in the category designated ‘the worst of the worst’. Executions are conducted in public, and are not infrequent, with sickening examples circulating on YouTube. Last year the kingdom executed 149 people, including a mass execution of 47 men on 2 January 2016; 43 of them were reported to have been associated with al-Qaida attacks in the 2000s, but four were members of the country’s Shia minority, including the prominent cleric Nimr al-Nimr, an outspoken critic of the regime, certainly, but no terrorist. Recent protests in Sheikh Nimr’s home town of Awamiya have led to a siege by the Saudi authorities, with tensions flaring over plans to demolish the historic district, which the government claims is being used by armed insurgents. At least a dozen people are said to have been killed, while 15 Shia citizens are now on death row, awaiting a Supreme Court decision on their execution.

The kingdom’s defenders, including Philip Hammond, who as British foreign secretary at the time of Nimr’s execution said, ‘Let us be clear, first of all, that these people were convicted terrorists,’ like to point out Saudi Arabia doesn’t execute as many people as Iran – in 2014, there were more than 750 executions in the Islamic Republic. But then again, Iran, unlike Saudi Arabia, doesn’t impose the death penalty medieval-style, with beheading by scimitar as a public spectacle, a technique adapted by Islamic State to great effect. The British government’s defence of its ally has been unwavering over the years: on her visit to the kingdom in April, Theresa May celebrated the value of Saudi intelligence-sharing, with a spokesman for Number Ten explaining that the ‘security relationship’ between the UK and Saudi Arabia had saved ‘many lives’. It doesn’t hurt that another part of that security relationship involves the Saudis being the UK’s best customer for armaments by a factor of at least four; in July, despite

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pressure from campaigners, who questioned the legality of selling British weapons to a country that was using them against Yemeni civilians, the UK high court ruled that the world’s second biggest arms exporter could happily continue its sales to Saudi Arabia.The Saudi strategy towards the Shia minority – around three million people in the oil-bearing Eastern Province and 250,000 in the southwest region of Najran – has been carefully calculated over the years. When Ibn Saud took over the Eastern Province in 1913 its Shia inhabitants, mostly sedentary people engaged in agriculture, trade, fishing and pearl diving, who had enjoyed relative autonomy for centuries under Ottoman rule, became ‘subjects of a political entity that does not treat Shia Muslims as equal citizens’. The Ikhwan demanded that the Shia ‘deviants’ convert, which a number of notables did, pledging that they would hold their religious rituals in accordance with Wahhabi practice. Those co-opted by the government were given a degree of control over their own affairs, being allowed to run their own courts and legal system. From then on, Shia leaders found themselves in a see-saw predicament, with their degree of autonomy determined by the regime’s feeling of security. Late in 1979, after the Iranian revolution brought political Islam to the fore, a group of militants protesting against the corruption of the Al Saud took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca; with the help of French and Pakistani special forces the Saudis recaptured it after a two-week siege. Even though the militants had been devout Sunnis from the same tribe as the former Ikhwan, the regime and its American backers responded to the incident by cracking down on the Shia, especially those working in the oil industry. After 1979, Matthiesen writes, there was an unwritten rule that Shia – who constituted a quarter of the workforce – ‘should not be hired in security or any other key sector in the oil industry’ and that if they were employed at all, it would be as ‘drivers, clerks, gardeners, or in storehouses, food and community services’.

Since the 1980s, it has been difficult for anyone in the Shia opposition to find solidarity across sectarian boundaries. Radical opposition activists such as Sheikh Abdullah ibn Jibrin, who with others founded the London-based Committee for the Defence of Legitimate Rights, issued fatwas denouncing Shia as infidels deserving death; in the 1990s, Safar al-Hawali, former dean of Islamic Studies at the Umm Al-Qura University in Mecca and a leading critic of the Al Saud, circulated audio cassettes denouncing Shias as deviants. Loyalist Wahhabi scholars operating under the regime’s protective umbrella ensure that boundaries are maintained, issuing fatwas forbidding intermarriage between Sunnis and Shias, and forbidding Sunnis from eating meat slaughtered by Shia butchers. All this appears to have been part of a deliberate government strategy to persuade the Shia that, as Matthiesen puts it, ‘they would fare even worse under Islamists than they would under the royal family.’ Madawi al-Rasheed, a leading historian of the kingdom, writes that ‘the regime sees the perverse benefit of attacks on Shia worshippers by radical Sunni groups’: such attacks allow it to present itself ‘as the best protector of the Shia’, since the only alternative ‘would be radical jihadists’.

But the state has a simpler means of keeping the majority population in check. As an oil-rich monarchy Saudi Arabia, like other Gulf principalities, is a rentier state: there is no general taxation, which means that there is no basic social contract between people and their rulers. As the UN Arab Human Development Report put it in 2004, taxation makes a government ‘subject to questioning about how it allocates state resources. In a rentier mode of production,

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however, the government can act as a generous provider that demands no taxes or duties in return. The hand that gives can also take away, and the government is therefore entitled to require loyalty from its citizens invoking the mentality of the clan.’ The culture of dependency in Saudi Arabia, as elsewhere in the Gulf, relies above all on individual patronage. Pascal Menoret’s young interlocutors, most of them members of the kingdom’s displaced Bedouin tribes, found that Riyadh ‘had little to offer if one was not closely connected to the royal family’ or part of the oil-rent distribution networks controlled by them. They saw the Saudi capital as a ‘selective El Dorado where only a handful became rich, while the majority of residents, parsimoniously financed by the state or their employer, struggled to cover astronomic housing, transport and living costs’. For all the brazen affluence of princely palaces, the low-income areas of Riyadh ‘match the ghettos, banlieues, problemområde and favelas of other cities and testify to the fact that, in liberal societies as in those systems that are described as “authoritarian”, political power is equally based on economic violence’.

Menoret shows the way an atomised society is perpetuated by the control of public space: Riyadh was a gigantic suburb where families and individuals lived scattered in individual houses and small apartment buildings, far away from each other but under the surveillance of the state … Saudi Arabia was one of the rare Muslim majority countries where, for fear of political mobilisation, mosques were closed outside of prayer times. Malls were not more welcoming, and private security companies filtered out and chased bachelors and members of the lower classes. Even streets were repulsive and pedestrian-unfriendly; large and busy, deprived of shade, difficult to cross, their asphalt nearly melting under a scorching sun, they were abandoned to cars, trucks and taxis.

In this sexually segregated society, where marriage is seen as a calming influence, unmarried men are ‘feared as unruly and disruptive’ but, as House points out, most of the 40 per cent of unemployed Saudi men under the age of 24 who would like to marry can’t afford the bride price.

Menoret witnessed the consequences, spending many hours with frustrated young men whose idea of fun was to drive cars at 150 mph, ‘drifting’ into high-speed arabesques in parking lots and highways, or slaloming through traffic using a skilful combination of handbrake and steering wheel. Car drifting, imported from Japan, is now an official sport in Dubai and the Saudi kingdom, with Red Bull as a sponsor, but the illicit version is strictly forbidden, with fines of 10,000 riyals (more than £2000) and two months’ jail for offenders. The newly asphalted roads of Riyadh’s expanding grid – a city that has grown from a population of 300,000 in 1970 to six million today – provide perfect spaces for drifters as they wait for the urban expansion that will enrich their owners in the course of time. Like the monarchs of early modern Europe, the Saudi kings have bought loyalty, or rewarded their courtiers and members of his family, by giving out grants of land for future development. The Al Saud family was given the nickname Al Subuk – ‘the fences’ – for the hundreds of miles of wire they planted in the desert to keep intruders out of their properties, while waiting for the city’s sprawl to reach them. As Menoret found, there was an improbable community of interest between developers and drifters, with developers constructing ‘miles of straight asphalt that the drifters used as a playground, far

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away from people’s eyes’. Whenever the builders arrived and constructed new boulevards of suburban villas along with speed bumps and police stations, the drifters would move on to the next undeveloped site.

Among his community of outsiders, Menoret saw signs that the flouting of Wahhabi strictures isn’t confined to billionaire princes with their holiday compounds in Marbella, Tangier or Aspen. Escaping ‘the strict behavioral and spatial order promoted by the state’, ‘boys and girls and boys and boys flirted from car to car on select avenues’ in outlying parts of Riyadh, ‘throwing their phone number to each other on scraps of paper, texting each other or following the other’s car’. Alcohol was easy to find, ‘provided that you had the right contact and a car to get there’. A colourless local hooch made from dates, known as al-kuhul al-watani or ‘national alcohol’, was widely available, and when kept in water bottles was undetectable to visual inspection. After picking it up from your dealer ‘you would mix the alcohol with non-alcoholic beer and quickly reach inebriation. As Saudis would say, what’s prohibited is highly desirable.’ The pressure against religious control may be building.

This could be to MBS’s advantage as he seeks to update the Saudi economy. Most of Menoret’s tearaways are likely to remain among those left behind, but for others there are opportunities: 200,000 young Saudis are now studying on scholarships overseas, and 45,000 students have now graduated from the world’s largest all-female university. Saudi religious textbooks – which as recently as 2014 were imported into Mosul by Islamic State for use in schools, thanks to their hard line on infidels and dissidents – are now being modified to acknowledge examples of the Prophet Muhammad’s kindness to Jews. But whatever superficial modernisation ensues, the Saudi state still depends for its legitimacy on its long-standing accommodation with the Wahhabi faith. It is largely because of Saudi-funded evangelism that the violently anti-Shia Salafist movements inspired by Wahhabi ideology – from Islamic State to the al-Qaida affiliate formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra – are still spreading through the world today.

On his visit to the kingdom in May, Trump commended MBS’s Vision 2030 as ‘an important and encouraging statement of tolerance, respect, empowering women and economic development’. But most of his speech, given in the presence of fifty leaders of Muslim-majority states, was devoted to condemning extremism. In rhetoric worthy of any village imam or mullah, he proclaimed: ‘A better future is only possible if your nations drive out the terrorists and extremists. Drive. Them. Out. Drive them out of your places of worship. Drive them out of your communities. Drive them out of your holy land, and drive them out of this earth.’ Trump’s hosts no doubt found it pleasing that he bracketed Iran and Hizbullah – two Shia-based entities – with Islamic State and al-Qaida as the primary causes of extremism in the region. He made no reference to the fact that during the course of his visit to one of the world’s most tyrannical and theocratic states – the first country to be so honoured by his administration – Iranians were going to the polls in a general election that would have been unthinkable in the Saudi kingdom. The outcome saw Hassan Rouhani, a moderate leader keen to ease the Islamic Republic’s isolation, chosen to serve a second term as president. Rather than reinforcing the anti-Shia dynamic with multi-billion-dollar arms packages, the West should be using its power to counter

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the force of reactionary Sunni sectarianism that is the curse of modern Islam and the real source of extremism in the region.

$110 Billion Weapons Sale to Saudis Has Jared Kushner’s Personal Touch WASHINGTON — On the afternoon of May 1, 2017, President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, welcomed a high-level delegation of Saudis to a gilded reception room next door to the White House and delivered a brisk pep talk: “Let’s get this done today.”

Mr. Kushner was referring to a $100 billion-plus arms deal that the administration hoped to seal with Saudi Arabia in time to announce it during Mr. Trump’s visit to the kingdom this weekend. The two sides discussed a shopping list that included planes, ships and precision-guided bombs. Then an American official raised the idea of the Saudis’ buying a sophisticated radar system designed to shoot down ballistic missiles.

Sensing that the cost might be a problem, several administration officials said, Mr. Kushner picked up the phone and called Marillyn A. Hewson — the chief executive of Lockheed Martin, which makes the radar system — and asked her whether she could cut the price. As his guests watched slack-jawed, Ms. Hewson told him she would look into it, officials said.

Mr. Kushner’s personal intervention in the arms sale is further evidence of the Trump White House’s readiness to dispense with custom in favor of informal, hands-on deal making. It also offers a window into how the administration hopes to change America’s position in the Middle East, emphasizing hard power and haggling over traditional diplomacy.

The Trump administration is expected to frame the deal, worth about $110 billion over 10 years, as a symbol of America’s renewed commitment to security in the Persian Gulf. But former officials pointed out that President Barack Obama, whose arms sales to Saudi Arabia totaled $115 billion, had already approved several of the weapons in the package.

Trump’s Big Saudi Arms Deal Will Cause More Misery for Yemen May 23, 2017

The Trump Administration’s deal to sell U.S. weaponry to Saudi Arabia will boost support for the Saudis’ proxy war against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. In Donald Trump’s world, that counts as another win. “Tremendous day,” the President said on Saturday, when the arms deal was first made public, “hundreds of billions of dollars of investments into the United States and jobs, jobs, jobs. So I would like to thank all of the people of Saudi Arabia.”

Of course, the “people” of the desert kingdom didn’t have anything to do with making the deal. It was done by the ruling House of Saud, which has had intimate ties to the Pentagon, U.S. intelligence agencies, and American defense companies since 1943, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared, “The defense of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defense of the United States.” During the past seventy years, the Saudi monarchy has struck many, many arms deals with the U.S., including a $60.5 billion agreement with the Obama Administration, in 2010.

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So what, if anything, is different this time? First, the agreement marks another policy U-turn from Trump. During his election campaign, he described the Saudi government as “people that push gays off buildings,” and said they “kill women and treat women horribly.” Trump also suggested that Saudi Arabia was behind the terrorist attacks on 9/11. “Take a look at Saudi Arabia, open the documents,” he demanded. Instead of following up this declaration now that he is President, Trump has agreed to supply the Saudi defense forces with more U.S.-made tanks, planes, helicopters, ships, bombs, and other weapons systems.

The second notable aspect of the agreement is its scale. The Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, wasn’t exaggerating when he described it as “huge.” As Tillerson explained, it covers five broad categories: air-force modernization; air and missile defense; border security and counterterrorism; maritime and coastal security; and communications and cybersecurity.

Third, and perhaps most perniciously, the deal means that the United States is stepping up its support for Saudi Arabia’s proxy war against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, in which more than ten thousand civilians have already been killed, an unknown number of whom were blown to pieces by American-supplied bombs. In a piece published at the Hill, Kristine Beckerle, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said her organization had documented eighty-one attacks by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen over the last two years, many of which were “possible war crimes. In almost two dozen of these cases . . . we were able to identify the U.S. weapons that were used.”

Tillerson, who is familiar with the Saudi government from his years as the chief executive of ExxonMobil, didn’t refer to any of this in his remarks on the deal, of course. Instead, he said that the arms sale was intended to help Riyadh counter the “malign Iranian influence and Iranian-related threats which exist on Saudi Arabia’s borders on all sides.” One of these threats, in the Saudis’ telling, is the Houthi rebel movement that seized Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, in 2015, forcing the Saudi-backed government of President Abdo Rabo Mansour Hadi to take refuge in the port city of Aden.

Yemen’s civil war is a complicated conflict, rooted partly in tribal rivalries and religious differences: the Hadi government and most of its supporters are Sunni Muslims, while the Houthis are Shiites. A couple of things are clear enough, though. The support that Saudi Arabia and Iran have supplied to their respective proxies has only intensified the conflict. And conditions on the ground are getting worse. Because the Saudi coalition has destroyed key bridges, airfields, and ports, many Houthi-controlled areas are running desperately short of food and medical supplies. ”With almost 19 million reliant on aid, #Yemen is the world’s single largest humanitarian crisis,” the International Committee of the Red Cross said in a tweet a few days ago. “Now it’s in the grip of a cholera outbreak.”

Members of the Obama Administration must bear some of the responsibility for allowing the Saudis and their allies to hit civilian targets with U.S.-supplied bombs, but they did eventually impose some restrictions. Last May, after issuing repeated verbal warnings that went mostly unheeded, the Administration suspended sales to Riyadh of cluster munitions, which release

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dozens of small bombs over a wide area. In December, after the Saudi coalition bombed a funeral in Sanaa, killing about a hundred and forty people, the Obama Administration announced that it would no longer allow the Saudis to buy some precision-guided heavy bombs. Trump has now reversed this policy, agreeing to supply the Saudis with the very types of weapons they used in the deadly attack on the funeral. “Lifting the suspension on precision-guided munitions is a big deal,” William Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, told Mother Jones. “It’s a huge impact if it reinforces the Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen, and also the signal that it’s okay with us. It’s saying, ‘Have at it. Do what you want.’ ”

The Saudi-sponsored spread of Wahhabism, a fundamentalist brand of Islam, surely demonstrated that what the House of Saud wants isn’t necessarily good for the United States and other Western countries. In Yemen, the problem isn’t fundamentalist Saudi preachers; it is Saudi pilots dropping American-made bombs. An obvious concern is that, as a result of this deal, terrorist groups will find more recruits eager to strike the West.

“As we speak, millions of Yemenis are being radicalized against the country they blame for the civilian deaths,” Senator Chris Murphy, the Democrat from Connecticut, pointed out in a piece at the Huffington Post. A bill that Murphy has co-sponsored with Senator Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican, would restore some limits on the sorts of weaponry that can be sold to Saudi Arabia, but it seems very unlikely to become law. “By selling the Saudis these precision-guided weapons more—not fewer—civilians will be killed because it is Saudi Arabia’s strategy to starve Yemenis to death to increase their own leverage at the negotiating table,” Murphy went on in his piece. “They couldn’t do this without the weapons we are selling them.”

Trump and his colleagues are too busy boasting about, and exaggerating, the economic benefits of the new arms agreement to pause and consider its broader implications. But, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned more than half a century ago, what’s good for the military-industrial complex isn’t necessarily good for America, or the world.

Qatar's Crisis With Saudi Arabia And Gulf Neighbors Has Decades-Long Roots June 17, 20177

Coverage by the Arabic-language satellite channel Al-Jazeera has long been a sticking point in Qatar's relations with its neighbors. Saudi Arabia and others are pressuring the country to shut down the channel. The decision last week by Gulf Arab states to sever ties and halt trade with the tiny, hydrocarbon-rich country of Qatar has focused attention on what critics call Qatar's funding of Islamist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.

U.S. investigators believe the crisis was sparked by hackers who transmitted fake, inflammatory messages appearing to come from Qatar's emir. But the dispute is unfolding against a backdrop of long-standing irritation with Qatar among its larger Sunni Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf.

Saudi Arabia (which has also been accused of supporting terrorist groups), the United Arab Emirates and others have frequently complained about Qatar's state-backed media outlet Al-

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Jazeera and its equable working relationship with Saudi Arabia's main rival, Shiite power Iran. To some, the current crisis is a simple tale of cracking down on one source of terror financing. To others, it's the latest effort to rein in a small country with a history of going its own way.

Tensions that date back decades

Long before it was an oil and gas power, Qatar was controlled by outsiders. In the late 19th century, the Ottoman Turks held sway. For much of the 20th century, until it gained independence in 1971, Qatar was a British protectorate. The oil and gas age — the tiny peninsula controls the third-largest gas reserves in the world — made Qatar into one of the richest nations on Earth per capita. But Qatar's leaders, all from the ruling Al Thani family – Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani is currently in charge — chafed against the dominating, conservative influence of the behemoth next door, Saudi Arabia.

The tensions date back decades, but here are a few highlights:

In 1996, Qatar launched the Al-Jazeera satellite news channel and brought a new brand of news coverage to the region. Al-Jazeera disquieted Arab leaders with its reporting, in Arabic, on internal and regional controversies that previously went uncovered. It shocked some viewers by putting Israeli spokespeople on the air when it covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Hard-hitting coverage of Qatar itself was — and remains — off-limits.)

Qatar provoked the Saudis again as it cultivated ties with Iran, with which it shares vast natural gas resources. Qatar's North Dome gas field extends into Iranian waters, where it's known as the South Pars field. Qatar is the world's largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, although it could lose that status to Australia soon.

Gulf Arab annoyance at Qatar flared into open anger in 2011, when Qatar quickly embraced the Arab Spring uprisings, particularly in Egypt, Libya and Syria. Qatar backed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which saw one of its own, Mohammed Morsi, briefly succeed long-ruling President Hosni Mubarak. For its part, Saudi Arabia went all in behind the Egyptian military, which ousted Morsi just over a year after he was elected.

A 2014 flare-up, followed by worse

The Saudi ruling family loathed the Arab Spring uprisings as destabilizing to the region and possibly a threat to its own rule. It stepped up its own activism in the region, both on the ground and diplomatically.

In Libya and Syria, the Saudis and Qataris backed different fighting groups that were vying for influence. In 2014, Gulf states — led by Saudi Arabia — suspended diplomatic relations with Qatar for several months and threatened to do worse.

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Now, after a visit last month by President Trump to Riyadh, the Saudi Arabian capital, they have done worse. They are demanding far greater concessions from Qatar than they ever did in the past — such as closing Al-Jazeera and expelling Hamas leaders — in return for restoring ties. "This is far more dramatic than the diplomatic row that occurred in 2014," says Mehran Kamrava, head of the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University's outpost in the Qatari capital, Doha.

This time, the Saudis have closed Qatar's only land border, through which around 40 percent of its imports enter the country, and Gulf states have stopped air and sea shipments to Qatar. (Saudi Arabia has denied that there is a blockade against Qatar.)

Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Jaber Al Sabah (left) met with Qatari Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani in Doha, Qatar, earlier this month as the Kuwaiti leader tried to mediate an end to the regional crisis. But analysts warn there will be no quick or easy resolution.

Qataris in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain have been given two weeks to leave, and citizens of those three countries were given the same June 18 deadline to leave Qatar.

Beyond that, says Kamrava, the dispute feels more visceral. "This time, the disagreement appears much more personal," he says, adding that Qataris are "a bit shell-shocked" by the hostility.

Kuwait has tried to mediate. But Philip Gordon, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, says the escalating tensions and tougher demands will make a diplomatic solution that much harder to reach.

"Some of what [Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are] asking for ... expelling members of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, and shutting down Al-Jazeera ... those are pretty big asks," he says — not to mention demands that Qatar cut ties with Iran.

But in the wake of Trump's visit to Riyadh — and his ensuing comments specifically targeting Qatar without mentioning complaints about Saudi Arabia's behavior in the region — the view among Gulf states is that they now have the leverage to force Qatar to be more cooperative.

Riad Kahwaji at the Dubai-based Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis says the "gray zone" Qatar has been operating in — pledging allegiance to its Sunni Muslim neighbors in the Gulf Cooperation Council while continuing to support Islamist militants and cooperate with Iran — is disappearing. He says it's time for Qatar to choose. "If you are a true ally, and a member of the GCC," he says, "you cannot be supporting extremist groups, you cannot be in the same trench with Iran."

A new alliance?

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The crisis has forced Qatar to seek help — including from Iran. Iranian media are reporting that the country will send "humanitarian aid" shipments to Doha. Russia has also voiced support, and Turkey has stepped in to send food. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says a "very grave mistake is being made in Qatar" and has decried the isolation of the country as "inhumane and against Islamic values."

Some wonder whether all this pressure on Qatar might backfire, driving the country into an alliance with Russia, Turkey and Iran — one with very different objectives from the U.S.

But Sinan Ulgen, director of the Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies in Istanbul, says he doesn't see a Qatar-Russia-Iran-Turkey alliance being forged — at least, not yet. "There certainly is a risk, now that Turkey has firmly sided with Qatar, that this would lead to increased tension" with Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt, says Ulgen. But at the end of the day, Qatar "does not have the ability to withstand sustained pressure from its larger neighbors in the Gulf, especially if this strategy is indeed being backed by the U.S."

Thus far, Washington has sent mixed messages about the dispute, with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson calling for calm and dialogue, and President Trump saying it's time to put an end to Qatar's "very high level" of terror financing.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, maintains the U.S. Central Command's regional forward operating base in Qatar and has just signed a deal reportedly worth $12 billion to sell F-15 fighter jets to Doha.

Efforts to resolve the dispute appear to be still in the early stages, with a number of questions unanswered, says Mideast analyst : "How sustainable is the Turkish relief effort? How far are the Iranians willing to go to exploit this problem on the other side of the Gulf?" he asks — and wonders, for that matter, how far Qatar will be willing to go to satisfy the Saudis.

"Can they really, truly expel members of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, and will that be enough?" says Cook. "We're still in the, kind of, opening bids here, so I think this is going to go on. This is going to occupy us for the better part of the summer — and well beyond, actually."

Qatar rift: Saudi, UAE, Bahrain, Egypt cut diplomatic ties July 27, 2017

By Tamara Qiblawi, Mohammed Tawfeeq, Elizabeth Roberts, Hamdi Alkhshali, CNN

Abu Dhabi, UAE (CNN)Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates broke off relations with Qatar in the worst diplomatic crisis to hit Gulf Arab states in decades.

The three Gulf countries and Egypt accused Qatar of supporting terrorism and destabilizing the region. Qatar -- which shares its only land border with Saudi Arabia -- has rejected the

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accusations, calling them "unjustified" and "baseless." Yemen and the Maldives also cut ties with Qatar. Qatari citizens have been told they have 14 days to leave Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE, and those countries also banned their own citizens from entering Qatar.

Key developments: -- Qataris given 14 days to leave the UAE, Bahrain and Saudi -- Qatar ejected from the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen over alleged support of ISIS and al-Qaeda, according to Saudi state media -- Yemen and Maldives governments also cut ties with Qatar -- Emirates airline says it's suspending all flights to and from Doha starting Tuesday morning -- Kuwait, Oman only Gulf Cooperation Council members remaining with ties to Qatar. -- Iran blames tensions on Donald Trump's recent visit to Saudi Arabia -- Saudi Arabia said it closed Al-Jazeera office in kingdom -- Turkey calls for dialogue to resolve the rift Saudi Arabia's state news agency announced the cutting of ties Monday, saying it was seeking to "protect national security from the dangers of terrorism and extremism." All ports of entry between the two countries will be closed, according to the statement. Gulf allies have repeatedly criticized Qatar for alleged support of the Muslim Brotherhood, a nearly 100-year-old Islamist group considered a terrorist organization by Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The UAE accused Qatar of "funding and hosting" the group in its statement announcing the severance of ties.It also cited Qatar's "ongoing policies that rattle the security and sovereignty of the region as well as its manipulation and evasion of its commitments and treaties" as the reason for its actions. Saudi Arabia accused Qatar in its statement of "adopting" groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Qatar denies that it funds or supports extremist groups. However, the Saudi-led Arab coalition fighting Yemen's Houthi rebels also expelled Qatar from its alliance, alleging support of "al Qaeda and Daesh [also known as ISIS], as well as dealing with the rebel militias," according to Saudi's state media agency. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait and Qatar form a close regional alliance known as the Gulf Cooperation Council, established in 1981. After Monday's development, only Kuwait and Oman have ties with Qatar. The Emir of Kuwait urged Qatar's Emir to exercise "self-restraint and refrain from steps that would escalate the situation," according to Kuwait's news agency, KUNA. As the crisis deepened in the region, Bahrain's foreign ministry said it was suspending diplomatic relations "in order to preserve its national security," according to a statement. Qatari diplomats had 48 hours to leave and airspace and ports between the countries would be closed within 24 hours of Bahrain's announcement, it said. Bahrain said its decision was based on what it said was Qatar's destabilizing actions. Ties cut with Qatar In further developments Monday, Egypt said Qatar had taken an "anti-Egyptian course" and that Cairo had been unable to dissuade it from supporting terrorism.

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Egypt's Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement saying that Qatar diplomats had 48 hours to leave the country.

Flights suspended, lines at supermarkets Dubai-based airline Emirates said it is suspending all flights to and from Doha, the capital of Qatar, starting Tuesday; Emirates said it was instructed to do so by the UAE government. Abu Dhabi-based Etihad Airways will also suspend its Doha flights on Wednesday. Other airways in the countries involved are expected to follow suit. Qatar residents rushed to supermarkets following news the country's only land border was being closed. Shalome Pinto shared pictures with CNN from Lulu Hypermarket in Doha and said her usual two-minute wait at the checkout line was 30 minutes amid the rush.

Tensions over Iran The news comes two weeks after Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt blocked several Qatari media outlets -- including Al Jazeera -- over comments allegedly made by Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. Al Thani reportedly hailed Iran as an "Islamic power" and criticized US President Donald Trump's policy towards Tehran. The Emir's alleged comments appeared on Qatar's official news agency, but Qatar said the website was hacked, the report fabricated by the culprits. Saudi Arabia on Monday announced on its state news Twitter account that the Ministry of Culture and Information closed the Al-Jazeera office in the kingdom. Qatar 'fake news' spat divides Arab media Saudi Arabia and Iran are at odds over a number of regional issues, including Iran's nuclear program and what Saudis see as Tehran's growing influence in the kingdom's sphere of influence -- especially in Syria, Lebanon and neighboring Yemen. Comments about Iran attributed to the Emir of Qatar recently caused Saudi, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt to block Qatari media outlets. "There are two competing theories," Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, said about the origin of the spat. "One is that Saudi Arabia felt emboldened after Donald Trump's visit, and Trump's administration has had a strong stance on Iran, which is backed by Qatar. Another theory is that this is a product of a month's tension, all brought to a breaking point after the Qatar news agency hacking story." Trump recently visited the Saudi capital and addressed 55 Muslim leaders in a landmark speech urging them to increase efforts to combat terrorism. Iran's state news agency, the Islamic Republic News Agency, or IRNA, blamed tensions on the US President's visit. "The first impression of the US President Donald Trump's visit to the region is the recent tension in the countries' relations," said the chairman of the Iranian Parliament's Foreign Policy and National Security Commission, Alaeddin Boroujerdi. "Neighbors are permanent; geography can't be changed," tweeted Iran Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. "Coercion is never the solution. Dialogue is imperative, especially during blessed Ramadan." He made reference to the current holy Muslim month of Ramadan, a period of fasting and contemplation.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan discussed over the phone the Qatar developments and called on all interested countries to engage in dialogue, the Kremlin said Monday. Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu expressed "sorrow" at the decision of countries to cut ties with Qatar and asked for a peaceful solution to the diplomatic rift, the country's state news agency Anadolu reported. Cavusoglu said the nation is ready to help bring the disputes to a manageable level. "Dialogue should be continued under all circumstances so the existing problems can be solved in a peaceful way," he said, according to Anadolu. The General Secretariat of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation called on Qatar to abide by its previous agreements signed under the umbrella of the Gulf Cooperation Council, particularly those relating to stopping the support of terrorist groups and their activities and media incitement.

US offers support Speaking from Australia, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson urged the respective countries to work out their differences, and offered US assistance to do so. "We certainly would encourage the parties to sit down together and address these differences. And if there is any role that we can play in terms of helping them address those, we think it is important that the GCC remain unified," Tillerson said. US President Donald Trump met with King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud of Saudi Arabia and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi during his visit to Riyadh last month. The US' biggest concentration of military personnel in the Middle East are located at Qatar's Al Udeid Air Base. The sprawling base 20 miles southwest of Doha is home to some 11,000 US military personnel.

Saudi Arabia's crown prince promises country will return to 'moderate, open Islam'

Tuesday 24 October 2017 14:00 BST

‘We will not waste 30 years of our lives dealing with extremist ideas; we will destroy them today,’ Prince Mohammed bin Salman vows at landmark conference .Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, speaking at a major investment conference, has promised his kingdom will return to “what we were before – a country of moderate Islam that is open to all religions and to the world”.Mohammad bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud made the announcement at the beginning of the landmark Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh on Tuesday.

The country would also do more to tackle extremism, the prince said. “We will not waste 30 years of our lives dealing with extremist ideas; we will destroy them today,” he said when asked LSE Saudi Arabia academic: Lifting ban on women driving is being used to deflect bad news

It was not like this in the past... We will end extremism very soon,” the prince added, in his most direct criticism of Saudi Arabia’s conservative religious establishment to date.

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Expanding on his earlier comments in an interview with the Guardian, the crown prince said that the country's conservatism was in part fallout from Iran's Islamic Revolution. “What happened in the last 30 years is not Saudi Arabia. What happened in the region in the last 30 years is not the Middle East. After the Iranian revolution in 1979, people wanted to copy this model in different countries, one of them is Saudi Arabia. We didn’t know how to deal with it. And the problem spread all over the world. Now is the time to get rid of it.

"We are a G20 country. One of the biggest world economies. We’re in the middle of three continents. Changing Saudi Arabia for the better means helping the region and changing the world. So this is what we are trying to do here. And we hope we get support from everyone."

Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy, is governed under a puritanical form of Sunni Islam known as Wahabism; it is extremist versions of Wahabism that are espoused by jihadist movements such as al-Qaeda and Isis.

In the wake of 9/11, the Saudi authorities have worked alongside the US and other Western countries to tackle radicalisation and terrorism funding – but have often been criticised for not doing enough. The claims from Prince bin Salman will be met with scepticism internationally, as

Saudi’s hardline clerics still wield much power and influence in the country. Rights groups

continue to condemn the state’s human rights violations, the precedent for many of which is

based on the Saudi interpretation of Quranic law.

Prince bin Salman, who was suddenly appointed heir to the throne by his father King Salman bin

Abdulaziz Al Saud earlier this year, is viewed by many as the face of the modern kingdom. The

32-year-old is the driving force behind ‘Vision 2030’: Saudi Arabia’s long-term economic and

social policy designed to wean itself off dependence on oil, and is popular for his reforms to the

country’s ineffective state bureaucracy. Last month, it was announced women in Saudi Arabia

would be finally be given the right to drive, a symbolic move signaling changes to the

institutionalised discrimination against women in the country.

While Prince bin Salman has built his reputation as a bold and socially liberal reformer, critics

note his hawkish foreign policy. As defence minister – a position he has held since 2015 – he

has attracted censure over his role in Saudi Arabia’s bloody intervention in the Yemeni civil war,

as well as his aggressive stance on Iran.

The prince is also regarded as one of the primary decision makers behind the Gulf states’ recent

cutting of ties with Qatar.