Articles represent opinion of the author
by Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor – The guardian – No one doubted that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was a man in a hurry. But the Saudi royal’s decision to arrest 11 princes, four ministers and dozens of former ministers shows he is a risk-taker on a scale the Middle East has rarely seen. The fact that the billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who owns the investment firm Kingdom Holding, was among the wave of late-night arrests (and is thought to be held in the luxurious confines of Riyadh’s Ritz Carlton hotel) suggests MBS, as Salman is known colloquially, is willing to take on the kingdom’s most powerful figures to implement his reforms and consolidate power. In theory, MBS could be in power for a half a century. The question is whether he is showing the maturity and steadiness to use such a lengthy reign to create a viable, modern Saudi Arabia.
The crown prince will say the arrests show his determination to root out corruption, a precondition of a more open economy. But few think the arrests, and related ministerial sackings, are the independent decision of a new corruption body, established just hours before to replace an existing one, rather than part of a wider reshuffle to centralise all security authority under MBS. The speed and unpredictability with which the crown prince acts – the purge was undertaken in great secrecy in the early hours of Sunday morning – is part of a pattern of behaviour unlikely to reassure international investors and interlocutors. After all, MBS effectively seized power in a palace coup in June, ousting his elder cousin Mohammad bin Nayef as heir to the throne and interior minister. Since then, the pace of reform has been breathtaking, and contradictory.
Women are to be given the right to drive next year, cinemas are to be opened, tourists welcomed and the role of clerics driven back as part of a cultural and social revolution designed to make the secretive kingdom closer to the model of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and tprepare the economy for life after oil. The prince is launching a huge sale of state assets, and the UK and US are falling over each other to handle the $2tn (£1.52tn) float of Saudi Aramco, which could raise as much as $100bn for Saudi Arabia. This cash is to be used to build a new capitalist megacity, the extraordinary plans for which were unveiled last week. Many of the Saudi businessmen present at the unveiling are now locked up in the Ritz Carlton, with their phones cut off not just from room service, but their lawyers.
MBS has been equally bold in his foreign policy, determined to curb Shia Iran and marginalise Saudi’s Sunni rival Qatar. Saudi has launched an unending and brutal war in Yemen designed to quell the Iranian-backed Houthis. A missile was launched towards Riyadh this weekend in a sign of how the Saudis are struggling to secure a military victory. In June, MBS imposed a politically costly economic boycott on Qatar that has lost it allies in Europe and Washington. This weekend, the Sunni leader in Lebanon, Saad Hariri, under pressure from MBS, quit as prime minister in order to isolate Hezbollah and deepen the conflict with Iran. In addition, the Saudis are trying to force the weakened Syrian opposition to rein back its demands to end the civil war, in what looks like an uneasy alliance with Russia. It is a programme of social, economic and political reform, largely backed by the UAE, that amounts to a revolution in one of the most conservative countries in the world. The test is whether MBS has taken on too much at once. His latest purge is a sign that he knows opposition is gathering, and believes the educated population, liberated by social media, want reforms to go faster, and those holding back change must be ruthlesslyset aside.
The list of the latest detainees is breathtaking – the equivalent of Theresa May sacking half her cabinet. As well as Prince al-Waleed, the roll call includes the former finance minister Ibrahim al-Assaf, a board member of national oil giant Saudi Aramco; the economy minister Adel Fakieh, who once played a major role in drafting reforms; the former Riyadh governor Prince Turki bin Abdullah; and Khalid al-Tuwaijiri, who headed the royal court under the late King Abdullah. Bakr bin Laden, chairman of the Saudi Binladin construction group, and Alwaleed al-Ibrahim, owner of the MBC television network, were also detained. Stock markets have recovered from the shock of the arrests, and MBS is the last man standing. But the reverberations of Saturday’s night of the long knives may just be starting.
Articles represent opinion of the author (not of khazen.org)
Over the weekend, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made a series of bold moves in which he consolidated power within his family, his country’s national-security services, and the business community, while also threatening to open a new front in the kingdom’s regional proxy war with Iran — and President Donald Trump seems cool with it. The shocker came on Sunday, when bin Salman — who has been feted by editors across the American and British media as a bold, liberalizing reformer despite all evidence to the contrary had himself appointed to lead an anti-corruption commission. Within hours he had rounded up and jailed — or more precisely, Ritz-Carlton-ed — a number of other prominent princes, businessmen, and foreign ministers on politically motivated (but likely plausible) charges of corruption.
The headliner of the group is Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who is best known as a flamboyant billionaire investor with large holdings in companies like Apple and Citigroup, as well as for his Twitter spats with Trump. Alwaleed’s arrest, along with those of other business elites, shook markets and sent a message to the Saudi business community (and global investors) that he now had the power to detain these people at his pleasure. The big fish, however, was not Alwaleed but rather Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah, a son of the late King Abdullah who was removed as head of the national guard just hours before his arrest. Customarily, the kingdom’s army, internal security services, and national guard are partitioned among the branches of the Saudi family to preserve the balance of power among rivals. Now, for the first time, they are under the control of one man: the crown prince. Of course, a Saudi anti-corruption committee is absurd on its face, because corruption is fundamental to the Saudi way of governing and doing business and everyone in the royal family is in a strict sense “corrupt” — unless we’re meant to believe bin Salman earned his own half-billion-dollar yacht legitimately.
The kangaroo-court nature of the committee was made even clearer when it gave itself the power to disregard the law and issued arrest warrants within hours of its formation. This is not a victory against corruption, but rather a power move in Saudi palace intrigue, one with troubling implications. Just as the lifting of the ban on women driving had little to do with improving the lot of Saudi women, this decision only used “fighting corruption” as a means to an end. Of course, that did not stop bin Salman from winning multiple blandishments in the Western press for it. Why he moved at this precise moment is not quite clear: Bin Salman likely either saw some threat looming that he needed to head off, or an opportunity to cement his authority and cut off possible rivals to his claim to the throne. As the favorite son and de facto regent of his father, the elderly, Alzheimers-suffering King Salman bin Abdulaziz, bin Salman was already in a position of strength, but he’s alienated a lot of his relatives to get to where he is, which means he has a good number of people to intimidate before they make trouble. Hence the instant anti-corruption commission. The power he’s given himself here is considerable, though, and will be used to illiberal ends no matter how much his supporters insist he’s a reformer. Impossible as it sounds, Saudi Arabia is actually getting more authoritarian, in meaningful ways.
The separation of control over the security forces was meant to keep any one individual or branch within the family from growing too powerful; bin Salman now has more power than any member of his family was really ever meant to have. He’s also breaking the mold of Saudi patronage politics, the consequences of which are unpredictable. News of the arrests overshadowed what would in itself have otherwise been huge news: Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri resigned after one year in office in a televised address from Saudi Arabia, citing fears for his life. In a scripted-sounding speech, Hariri blamed Iran and Hezbollah for making threats on his life and forcing him to resign, but the news seemed to come out of nowhere as did his stridently anti-Iran tone, the absence of which had sort of been part of his shtick. The going interpretation is that Hariri was forced to blow up his feeble unity government by his Saudi paymasters, perhaps to reopen Lebanon as a front in their regional proxy war with Iran as part of bin Salman’s hegemonic foreign policy. In what could have been a response to the news of Hariri’s resignation, Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen fired a missile a few hours later that allegedly was shot down by Saudi air-defense missiles near Riyadh airport. The missile sent a message that Iran’s proxies in Yemen could hit close to home for bin Salman if he overreached in confronting the ones in Lebanon.
So in sum, bin Salman is setting himself up to wield unprecedented levels of power even by the high standards of Saudi kings, abruptly upsetting a delicate balance of power with a long legacy, scaring the global business community, and threatening to reopen one of the Middle East’s bloodiest wounds, all at the same time. Fortunately for us, he’s our friend. In fact, bin Salman may have received a visit recently from his friend Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, who made an unannounced trip to Saudi Arabia last week. That relationship was cultivated by their mutual friend Yousef al-Otaiba, the United Arab Emirates ambassador to the U.S., who is a major Saudi and Emirati influence-peddler in Washington and has pushed for hard-line policies against regional rivals Iran and Qatar. Partly through this family connection and partly through his own ability to flatter and fool Western leaders, bin Salman has become the preferred prince of the Trump administration. Trump has said nothing about the Saudi purge, and the subject reportedly did not come up in a phone conversation with King Salman on Sunday, in which he said he supported the “modernization” drive led by bin Salman.
Trump has been pushing for the Saudi state oil company Aramco to hold its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange and said this was also a main topic of that conversation. This is about what we can expect given Trump’s relationship with bin Salman, his stated policy of not interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, and the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia generally. However, our entanglement with bin Salman has already led us into complicity in a disastrous war in Yemen and is now on its way to dragging us into a Lebanese debacle as well. A president supposedly concerned with shrinking America’s global role should be running from this man, not embracing him. Tags: foreign affairs
