Gulf states show growing public hostility to US presence - Financial Times, November 21
US bases are on alert as sentiment hardens against Americans and amid fears that the violence from the Palestinian conflict could spread to the region
Robin Allen reports
A westerner stops his car at an intersection in the Red Sea port of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia's second city and commercial capital, and a car full of young Saudi males draws up alongside.
"You American?" they shout. He starts to wind down the window to tell them "no" but before he can open his mouth, rotten tomatoes, eggs and insults are hurtling his way. "Bloody American. Filthy Yank," they scream and their car roars away to the noise of screeching tyres.
This kind of incident, which, according to a Saudi observer, happened two days ago, has become almost commonplace in Saudi Arabia. It may be trivial compared with the terrorist incidents that have broken out in Arabian peninsula states in the past five weeks.
But it is symptomatic of growing public antipathy in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states toward the US, still the kingdom's largest trading partner and the guarantor of its external defence and security.
For the past decade, say Saudi and Kuwaiti analysts, Gulf Arab states have sheltered under the umbrella of US regional security and defence commitment. Regional governments could be confident that public sentiment acquiesced in this dependency even if it did not wholeheartedly support it.
But in the past six weeks sentiment has hardened against the US; part of a "mixed bag", analysts say, of mockery, fear and frustration among all Gulf Arabs at their dependence on the US, which they say the US takes for granted and from which Gulf Arabs derive little tangible benefit.
On Saturday, US defence secretary William Cohen warned during a Gulf tour that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could run out of control. Mr Cohen told US soldiers in Qatar that the violence could spread to other states in the region.
According to officials close to the Clinton administration, US armed forces throughout the seven Arabian peninsula states have twice in the past two weeks been put on "Delta" status of alert, the highest level of four categories of readiness that is only announced when there is a specific known threat to US armed forces or military bases.
At these times, no US naval ship goes into port. In Bahrain, the headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet, 23 naval ships, including a carrier group, have twice left the port for international waters, "where we can better defend ourselves", said an official. At all other times, since the October 12 suicide attack on the USS Cole, an American guided-missile destroyer, in Aden harbour, that killed 17 sailors and injured 39 others, US forces have been on the second-highest alert status. This is code-named "Charlie" and is used when possible attacks are imminent but neither the target nor the aggressors have been identified.
Throughout the Arabian peninsula, the US is being widely blamed for the breakdown last month of Palestinian-Israeli peace talks, and the upsurge of the Al Aqsa intifada, the Palestinian uprising, in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.
On Friday, in what senior western diplomats are suggesting may have been a case of mistaken identity, a British hospital technician working in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, died after his car exploded. Although Saudi police have not yet completed their investigations, western analysts say it is "unlikely" to have been a personal vendetta, another reason put forward for the random attack.
In Kuwait, police are still investigating the identity and motives of four men arrested in possession of 135kg of high explosive who were planning, according to the daily newspaper Al Watan, to attack the US army base at Camp Doha, north of the capital.
However, according to Abdullah al-Shayeji, a professor of government at Kuwait university, "these people are not representative of any mainstream Islamist group nor of public sentiment in general".
"There is not yet any evidence suggesting this cell was going to attack the US base, nor that the group was linked to the Aden terrorists," he added.
Mockery and cynicism about US motives thrive in equal proportions, according to one analyst. Gulf Arabs are still laughing, and US officials steaming, following the flight to Baghdad yesterday by a member of Qatar's ruling family, Sheikh Hamad Bin Ali al-Thani, in his own Boeing 747, which he presented to Saddam Hussein as a "gift".
The US government, according to one official, intends to pursue Qatar's sheikh not only for violating UN sanctions, but also for breaking US law on the transfer of technology to a third party without US permission.
Kuwaitis in general and Islamists in particular, according to Mr al-Shayeji, "see Arabs constantly weakened by the US bias towards Israel; and Kuwait no less vulnerable than 10 years ago, because here we are at the end of yet another US administration, and Saddam is still in power".
"And in return, what do Kuwaitis see?" he asked. "Cohen coming here every six months to tell us to hold the line."
However, say many Gulf Arabs, the pendulum swings both ways. US dependence on imported energy, and in particular oil from Gulf Arab producers, is growing.
"Gone are the days," said a Saudi analyst yesterday, "when the Saudi government will quietly toe the US regional line, whether it be on the Israel/Palestinian issue, or sanctions against Iraq."
But if Gulf Arab sentiment towards the US is hardening, so too is the US determination to find and punish the culprits for the attack on the USS Cole, no matter what the temporary cost to regional relations.
"If proof is forthcoming," said one source close to the US administration, "that one group or other was responsible, then you will see a much tougher response than the 'surgical' missile strikes on Sudan and Afghanistan that occurred in 1998. Next time round the response could be on the ground as well." |
