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MATURITY in handling domestic as well as international challenges must be presumably a prerequisite for any country’s leaders but glaring recent examples suggest otherwise. Shooting-from-the-hip statements and responses remain dominant.
Perhaps, the only contrasting example came from the Iranians after terrorists launched attacks on the country’s parliament and the tomb of Imam Khomeini who symbolises the 1979 revolution.
The Iranians were quick to acknowledge that all five attackers, who were killed at the two different sites, were ‘locals’ (one can assume that means Iranian nationals) who’d left the country after joining the militant Islamic State (IS) group and had participated in the “crimes carried out by this terrorist group in Mosul and Raqa (in Iraq and Syria respectively)”.
The Iranian ministers’ reaction to the Tehran attacks shows a level of maturity that has not been seen of late.
A statement by Iran’s intelligence minister, Mahmoud Alavi, added: “The network of this terrorist group has been identified and some of its members have been arrested … We still cannot judge that Saudi Arabia has had a role in this terrorist incident.”
This was remarkable restraint given the temptation to somehow implicate the regional arch-rival in the incident because it hosted a summit of nearly 50 Muslim leaders on the occasion of a state visit by US President Donald Trump with the more or less one-point agenda of demonising Iran.
Just before the summit, the rising Saudi star, Defence Minister and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who enjoys extraordinary authority, said in a media interview that any conflict to curtail Iran’s influence in the region will now take place on Нranian soil.
That despite these public declarations of hostility towards Iran by the Saudi hosts and their worthy new ally the US president, the attacks were not blamed on Riyadh spoke of calm statesmanship rather than rattled reaction.
Of course, the foreign minister Javad Zarif took to task President Trump for his statement which while condemning the Tehran terror attacks also said that Iran was reaping what it sowed. Zarif called the statement repugnant and blamed the terror attack on ‘US clients’ (IS).
On the other hand, the Saudi-UAE-led diplomatic spat with Qatar saw the so-called leader of the free world and the current incumbent of the White House immediately come down on Riyadh’s side. Trump said even during his discussion with various leaders in Riyadh ‘all fingers were pointing at Qatar’ for its alleged support to terrorism.
Surrounded as he is by serving and former generals of the US armed forces, he must have later been reminded by horrified aides that Qatar is home to the largest US Centcom military base in the region with some 11,000 personnel stationed there.
It took Donald Trump some 24 hours to offer public support to Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Sabah al Ahmad al Jaber al Sabah’s mediation efforts and he also offered to host the estranged Gulf rulers at the White House for talks to settle the issue.
Tensions have been simmering since Qatar was seen as supporting (via Al Jazeera Arabic) democratic movements in the Arab world particularly Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and the now deposed president Mohamed Morsi, both loathed by the Saudis who have thrown their weight behind the dictatorship of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. The kingdom’s distaste for any political movement that could potentially upset the status quo in the Gulf is not a secret anymore.
Its ambition to have everyone in the Gulf fall in line seemed to have precipitated the latest crisis and the trigger was an alleged pro-Iran statement by the Qatari ruler which the latter denied and attributed to a hack of his country’s news agency website.
David Hearst, the editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye and the former chief foreign leader writer of The Guardian, writes of a regime change threat hurled at Qatar as a result by Salman al-Ansari, the president of the Saudi-American Public Relation Affairs Committee who reminded the Doha rulers of Morsi’s fate.
Hearst’s Middle East Eye piece also said: “This is an interesting thing to say to an ally providing troops to protect Saudi’s southern border with Yemen. Egypt, for one is not. Or to a government that extradited a political dissident to Saudi on the same day as it was attacked as being pro-Iranian. It’s interesting, too, after King Salman visited Qatar and danced with the emir.
“But perhaps the king is no longer aware of what his 31-year-old son is doing in his name.
“The hacking of Qatar News Agency on May 24 was just the starting pistol. Within minutes of the hack at 12:14 am, Al Arabiya TV and Sky News Arabia quoted the text of the fake material. Within 20 minutes, the networks ran analyses, implications, quotes and tweets.
“According to the Qatari authorities, between 12:51 am and 3:28 am, the networks managed to find 11 politicians and analysts to interview on-air. Fast work for a duty editor ‘reacting’ to a story in the middle of the night. He deserves a raise.
“Another strange coincidence: all of this was preceded by 14 different op-ed pieces in the US press about the danger to regional stability that Qatar represented. This, again, is puzzling because it has been years since anyone bothered to write opinion pieces about Qatar in the US media.”
A paradox is that both Saudi Arabia and Qatar want to dislodge the bloody, dictatorial Baathist regime in Syria supported by Iran and its key ally, Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, but back very different militant groups often accused of terrorism.
In this undoubtedly explosive and complex regional situation, do the Gulf Arab leaders and their main non-Arab ally Pakistan have the required skills, maturity and statesmanship to defuse the dangers? Don’t you wish we had an answer?
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
Published in Dawn, June 10th, 2017
