< continued from - The
Primacy of Stability
[Part 2] >
A Context of Distrust
Assuming that the kingdom's worst-case scenario does not come to pass, and a reasonably effective and legitimate government comes to power in Baghdad, it would still be a mistake to characterize relations between the two countries as trouble-free.
Rhetorically, the Saudi government has long insisted that Iraq and Saudi Arabia have a fraternal history and that the only problems the kingdom ever had with its northern neighbor were the result of Saddam Hussein�s megalomaniacal ambitions.
For example, the Saudi government downplays any prospects for the revival of Iraqi irredentism vis-�-vis Kuwait, despite the fact that several post-Saddam Iraqi political leaders have publicly broached the need for Iraqi control of deep-water access.[9] The Saudis do acknowledge that there are outstanding Iraqi claims against Iran, particularly concerning the maritime and riverine boundary along the
Shatt al-Arab waterway, but believe that such disputes will ultimately be resolved through legal means, such as the International Court of Justice. Saudi diplomats point to the recent settlement of Bahrain's and Qatar's dispute over the ownership of the Hawar Islands as an example of the possibilities for international adjudication of such territorial disputes.[10]
These public shows of solidarity are demanded by Arab sensibilities, but insisting that there are no serious issues can also be a prudent way of ensuring that potential areas of friction do not develop into points of confrontation. Nevertheless, Saudis will admit privately that they expect Iraqis to behave like Iraqis -- in the Saudi stereotype: arrogant, pushy, and overbearing. This stereotype is fully reciprocated by Iraqis, who see Saudis as arrogant, lazy, corrupt, and uncultured. For example, the Iraqi disdain for Saudis was recently expressed in vivid terms by Interior Minister Bayan
Jabr, who reacted to Saudi foreign minister Saud al-Faisal's comments on the dangers of sectarianism in Iraq by saying, "This Iraq is the cradle of civilization that taught humanity reading and writing, and some Bedouin riding a camel wants to teach us." [11] The negative personal views on both sides are reinforced by the history of relations at the interstate level. Ever since the emergence of both the Saudi and Iraqi states in the wake of World War I, relations between the two have been problematic. From the beginning, as domains ruled by bitter dynastic rivals in a climate of mutual animosity, each appeared to the other as at least potentially if not actively hostile.
In the early days, it was not Iraq that was the threat to the peace but, rather, the Saudis. Wahhabi militias loyal to King Abd al-Aziz conducted raids deep into Iraq on several occasions in the 1920s, all in the course of attempting to expand the Saudi domain at the expense of the Hashemites in
Hijaz, Transjordan, and anywhere else they were in power. The British-brokered 1922 Treaty of
Uqair, which modern Iraqis have often interpreted as unfairly limiting Iraq's natural aspirations, was in fact imposed to contain the ambitions of Abd al-Aziz vis-�-vis Britain�s Iraqi clients.[12]
As time went by, however, the two countries reversed their basic postures: Iraq became the revisionist power and Saudi Arabia the bastion of the status quo. In the 1950s, Crown Prince Abd
al-Ilah of Iraq began to advocate a monarchist form of pan-Arabism (based, needless to say, on the leadership of the Hashemite family) as the solution to the ills besetting the Arab world. No other proposal could have been better poised to set off alarm bells in Riyadh. The Saudis are perennially sensitive to Hashemite legitimist claims and are regularly at pains to emphasize that their own legitimacy derives from a social compact with the people of the kingdom, not from the kind of Prophetic pedigree claimed by the
Hashemites.[13]
Ideological tensions between the two countries were only heightened by the ouster of the Iraqi monarchy in 1958 and particularly by the rise to power of the Baath Party. Saudis cite the fact that Saddam Hussein's march into "Iraq�s nineteenth province" had been preceded two decades earlier by Iraqi president Abd
al-Karim Qasim�s threatened takeover of Kuwait in 1961 as evidence that Iraq�s ambitions against its neighbors are independent of who holds power in Baghdad. The radicalization of Iraqi foreign policy that ensued upon the consolidation of the Baath regime in the early 1970s further alarmed Riyadh, which perceived Iraq as intentionally encircling the kingdom with a hostile array of anti-monarchist forces; the Marxist government of South Yemen to the south, left-wing opponents of the Saudi-sponsored regime in North Yemen to the southeast, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf in Oman to the south -- all received Iraqi support.[14]
Iraq's shift toward a more pragmatic foreign policy in the late 1970s led to substantial improvement in relations between Iraq, on the one hand, and Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf states on the other. Among other things, the surface border of the former Saudi-Iraqi Neutral Zone was demarcated and agreement was reached to continue dividing revenues from Neutral Zone oil production on a 50-50 basis. Toward the end of the decade, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the specter of Iran�s exporting radical Shiite theocracy across the Gulf definitively put on the back burner any remaining Saudi concerns about Iraqi hegemonic ambitions. Instead of a potential rival, Saddam Hussein's Iraq came to be seen as an Arab bulwark against the Persian heretics.
The war that broke out in 1980 with Iraq's attack across the Shatt al-Arab into Iranian territory reinforced Iraq's stature as defender of the Arabs, particularly when the war started going badly for the Iranian side. Later reversals, such as those that saw Iranian forces occupying the
Al Faw Peninsula in 1986, only spurred Saudi Arabia, along with its fellow monarchies on the Arabian Peninsula, to invest even more heavily in the success of Iraqi arms. In the process, Iraq built up a $40 billion debt to its Arab neighbors, including $28 billion to Saudi Arabia alone.
Even as the Iran-Iraq War generated pressures that tended to drive the Saudis and Iraqis closer together, it also generated other pressures working in the opposite direction. Support for Iraq made Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Arab states plausible targets of Iranian retaliation, which led Saudi leaders to take two actions that unintentionally had the effect of distancing all the Gulf Arab states from Baghdad. First, in 1981, Saudi Arabia and its smaller Arab neighbors along the Gulf created the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), an organization intended to foster economic, political, and military cooperation among its six members. But, as Phebe Marr points out, by excluding Baghdad from membership "the GCC institutionalized the distance between the Arab Gulf states and Iraq." [15] In addition, the risk that Iran would strike against its enemy�s allies drove Saudi Arabia to request what would become a long-term deployment of U.S. airborne warning and control system aircraft to Dhahran to help the Royal Saudi Air Force ensure the safety of key oil installations and other potential strategic targets. Simultaneously, the "tanker war" that had been triggered by Iraq�s attacks against oil tankers serving Iranian ports beginning in 1984 prompted the U.S. Navy to take a progressively more active role in the war. While the United States and Saudi Arabia had a military relationship dating back, in various forms, to the 1940s, it was during this period of the Iran-Iraq War that the operational links were forged that subsequently provided the basis for the combined U.S.-Saudi response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait a few years later.
< continued - Oil
Rivals
[Part 4] >
<
Notes contained in Part
8 >
Complete Report (PDF):
Saudi Arabia and Iraq: Oil, Religion, and an Enduring Rivalry
Joseph McMillan
Complete Section:
Iraq and Its Neighbors - USIP
