By Dr. David Wurmser
July 29, 2021

In a summer of brewing crises, from Havana through Caracas to Tehran (and other Iranian cities), Lebanon’s descent into crisis tends to be overlooked. And yet, it is part of a larger picture in which our greatest adversaries are on the ropes (Communists in Cuba and Venezuela, the Khomeinist regime in Iran, and Hizballah in Lebanon). While this is clearly a fortuitous moment, the emergence of which can properly be attributed to the policies of the previous administration, the Obama administration’s catastrophic failure to turn previous crises into opportunities should provide a cautionary tale. These crises can be weathered by our adversaries or hijacked by others as dangerous (or even more so) if the United States abandons the underlying policies that led these inimical regimes into their cul de sac. There is no predetermined arc of history, for better or worse: decisions matter. And this administration is dangerously close to fumbling.

The dream palace of Arab nationalism
Lebanon and to some extent Syria have always been both a bellwether and symbol of regional politics. The land of the cedars is an incubator of Arab politics, and thus its history is the first draft of the regional history of ideas. And nobody embodies the swirling development of ideas better than my old doctoral advisor, Fouad Ajami, who himself is a child of Ansar from the heart of the Jabal Amel Shiite community in Lebanon’s embattled south. The progression of his books are like a roadmap to understanding the ebb and flow of both the content and geography of ideas in the region.

In The Arab Predicament (1981), Ajami reflected upon the crises of Arab nationalism. It promised to deliver the great renaissance of the Arab world. Instead, it suffered its most decisive and humiliating defeat in 1967 at Israel’s hands. While in the West, the 1970s may have been the heyday of admiration for the international symbol of Arab nationalism – the Ray-Ban bespectacled Yasir Arafat – those in the region understood something was dying. For those who cared to see, Arafat’s expulsion from south Lebanon in 1978 and Beirut in 1982 marked the end of his Arab nationalism.

Courting Arab nationalists remained the foundation of policy in Western capitals (and still does via the Oslo peace process obsession) – with the exception of the great scholar of the region, Bernard Lewis, who was the first westerner to discern the resurfacing of Islam as politics. But the rubble of Arab nationalism was not given to reconstruction and instead yielded new forces. Fouad Ajami captured the final tortured moment and despairing departure of the soul of the idea in The Dream Palace of the Arabs (1999), and the immense swath of destruction of Arab society left regionally in its place.

The resurfacing of Islam
The new lingua franca of Arab politics was a return to authenticity of the old through the language of Islam. While a few lingering leaders still held a corner of the stage for their final performance, the stage itself was now dominated by actors vying to control the legacy of the mystic past for control over the clouded future.

Arafat knew better than we the region’s trajectory. Arafat himself was already reconnecting to his underlying Islamic essence. When the Islamist threat challenged and then seized power with the rise of Khomeini in Iran, exposed its brutality in the seizure of the great Mosque in Mecca for a month, and revealed its penetration of the structures of power in the murder by the Gamaat al-Islamiyya in Cairo of President Sadat, Arafat was already a step ahead. He beat a path to Tehran – the first foreign “leader” to do so. And his top aid in Force 17, Emad Mughniya, became the developing architect of Hizballah. And Arafat asked of his Libyan allies that the leader of the Lebanese Shiite Awakening, Musa al-Sadr, be eliminated – probably at the behest of the Iranian Revolution, since such a charismatic and potent Shiite leader with greater credentials and a stronger claim to standard-bearing than the upstart Iranian regime posed a grave threat to Khomeini’s leadership. Lebanon again played the unwelcome role of regional incubator.

The first act was actually quite early, and took place in Lebanon. Indeed, the first act was the story of Musa al-Sadr. The tumultuous transition from the heady seduction of Arab nationalism — which though in most of the fertile crescent was a veiled form of Sunni dominance that nevertheless still drew the imagination of young Shiites — to a “Shiite Awakening” was captured with heart-tugging empathy and brilliance in The Vanished Imam (1986). Here were two ironies wrapped up in one: First, the return to Islam, with which the region and outsiders alike have had to contend for the last three decades, arose not from the heart of the Sunni world, but from the suppressed, backward and impoverished Shiite hamlets of southern and eastern Lebanon. Second, this Shiite Awakening came far from Lebanon, and not from the heart of Shiite Islam — Iran and southern Iraq. It manifested itself years before the Iranian revolution, which has ever since tried to claim fathership over an older and more tried “son.” Lebanon’s Shiite leadership thus controlled the claim to authenticity and true fatherhood over the Shiite Awakening – a claim which was so deeply and jealously sought by the Iranian revolution. True, the Shiites extended the tentacles of Iran’s central nervous system to the Levant, but as it extended Iranian power, it also profoundly threatened it. Iraq’s Shiites could have represented this duality as well, but they lived invisibly under the withering hand of Saddam. For that moment at least, the ownership and future of the Shiite Awakening was to be battled out in the south of Lebanon, not in Iraq’s ancient mosques in Kufa, Khadimain, Najaf and Karbala.

The Iraq war
For Ajami, that moment ended in 2003 when the inevitable angel of death, dressed as the American armed forces, claimed the lingering ghost of Arab nationalism in Baghdad. Ajami, being a Lebanese Shiite, understood that as much as this might influence the region, the battle over the Shiite Awakening had shifted from Jabal Amel to the cradle of Shiism itself in Iraq. Iran had spent two decades subjugating with tenuous success the competing center of the Shiite Awakening in Jebel Amal only to find itself now facing a far greater, closer and more serious competitor in an untethered Iraq. The prospect burst onto the Arab stage that at least a Shiite corner of it might find a better future out of Arab nationalism’s rubble.

Ajami captured in The Foreigner’s Gift, that brief ambivalent moment unleashed by the Iraq war in which the hope of freedom was at the same time haunted by fear. Iran despaired of facing this new Shiite challenge coming from the cradle of Shiism, so it was inevitable that it would launch its must-win war to control the Shiites of this newly liberated realm. Ajami in this book passionately echoed a century earlier when the works of Polish expatriate writer, Joseph Conrad, captured this tension between brutality, despair and hope in an unhinged political environment. Ajami also understood that Western eyes failed to see this battle over the soul of Iraqi Shiism – echoing the same battle over ownership of authenticity which Lebanon’s Shiites had posed.

Iraq’s Shiites were both a threat and a weapon for the West. They could be either the tentacle of Iran’s schemes or a dagger plunged into Iran’s heart. But the West’s elites, schooled almost exclusively in the Sunni narrative, could not fathom the existence of this internal Shiite battle nor the magnitude of its stakes. So with historic clumsiness, the West’s elites – especially the British Foreign Office and the American Foreign Service — sought their peace with Iraqi Shiites by preemptively surrendering them to Iran, ensuring the defeat at once of both themselves and of Iraq’s Shiites who so intrinsically threatened Iran’s revolution. Along with the surrender came the belief that Iraq could only be properly stabilized by accomplishing a larger accommodation of Iran regionally—giving birth to the two decade attempt now to invent Iranian-regime moderates and to pursue a nuclear understanding with it. A very different story could have been told, one which might have led to a very different Iran, but wasn’t.

Still, Ajami understood that the vast wasteland left by Arab nationalism was still waiting to be filled, and that the fragile order the foreigners broke was not easily restored. And the struggle between the forces of chaos and restoration shifted yet again to Beirut and Damascus. Instead of seizing control of the forces of chaos and change to ensure they deliver a shift in a favorable direction, Western elites sided with the forces of restoration, while at the same time insisting that the agents of restoration be changed. That was akin to validating the goal of restoring the old communist order in eastern Europe, but at the same time demanding that the leadership be changed to one more palatable. But the result of this muddled perplexity was that the West again imposed irrelevance on itself. The battleground now shifted between the old order’s elites – Assad and Russia – their uncomfortable ally – Iran – and the new parade of Khaliphs, from bin Ladin through Zarqawi and al-Baghdadi to Erdogan.

The collapse of Syria was described by Ajami as the clash of two immutable forces – the people shaking off their dictator and the regime determined to survive — in his book The Syrian Rebellion (2012), but he also quickly understood how regional geopolitical forces had reasserted themselves in the Levant and turned this clash in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon once again into their battlefield in his book, Struggle for Mastery in the Fertile Crescent (2014). The history of the fertile crescent has been written ever since by the interplay of these actors.

The question of Saudi Arabia
Ajami understood that if chaos was to be yielded to the new Khaliphs in Ankara and Deir Zuheir and their nostalgic imperial schemes, then there was to be a preference toward restoration, but it had to lay on a path to greater calmness than reversion to the old order and its masters in Moscow, Damascus and Tehran. He looked to those who withstood the charms of Nasser, the dynamism of Tehran or the new beacon of Ankara. He looked to an unlikely place. He looked south into the Arabian peninsula, which hitherto had been a desert in the geography of terrain and ideas other than the dangerous ideas of Salafism with which the Kingdom had now broken. Perhaps Ajami understood it was destined that a restoration based on some sort of change might yet come from this new periphery rather than the core.

Ajami wrote Crosswinds: The Way of Saudi Arabia in 2010, though it was published after his death in 2020. This itself was a comment on the state of Arab political thought: it was becoming so impoverished as a whole – and the intellectual heartland of Arab thought in Beirut and Damascus so stagnant — that the history of Islam and Arabdom was being written either in the non-Arab capitals of Ankara and Tehran or was being surrendered to mediocre secondary franchises in the Arab world. Islam itself, he notes, was moving in that direction, where the generation of fatwas and other religious decisions moved to “Shaykh Google” and populist, unrefined religious leaders, while traditional Islamic elites were increasingly relegated to being the Islamic equivalent of “Dear Abby” and commenting on issues of sexuality and sorcery.

Saudi Arabia seemed an unlikely place for intellectual movement at the time. It was a land of harshness which Ajami argues induced a conservative retrenchment into a system that leaves room for those that stray and seek their own path, but ultimately absorbs them. The irony, he noted, was that the very harshness of the land and environment produced a society of rules, but also found patient accommodation of those that strayed from the rules. The loner always returns when he finds that the harshness of the environment leaves no room for the loner.

And yet, it was in the chaos of the Arab world and the rise of Shaykh Google that the outside world laid siege to the Saudi realm. As Ajami put it, “once upon a time, Saudis were consumers of the literature of Beirut and Damascus. Now they render their own world.” Commenting on Ajami’s opus, a friend of Ajami’s, Charlie Hill, noted that it emerged from the shock that Saudi Arabia had defined itself as a sovereign state and as the embodiment of Islam, and then discovered in the 1980s that these are two incompatible and the Saud were riding “two galloping steeds at the same time.”

Ajami never carried through this intriguing line of thinking before he died because the drama of the clash between the forces of collapse, of change and of brutality took his mind elsewhere shortly afterwards, back to Lebanon and Syria, and he put the book aside unpublished. But from its pages, it was clear that he seemed confident to the end that the Arabian Arabs would somehow reassert their ability to absord the wandering loners and survive. They would find their path, and maybe even this was the path for the region to survive. Perhaps it is a stretch, but one could in some ways even say that he envisioned the Abraham Accords a decade before they happened.

Exhaustion, reflection and retrenchment
In his last book before cancer claimed him, In this Arab Time: the Pursuit of Deliverance (both in 2014) Ajami retreated into a retrospective and wistful survey of the outstanding – but often solitary – liberal voices of the Arab century, as well as the creative but also the destructive voices of ideologies and their battles in the shadow of events shaking the Arab universe. The retrospective nature of the anthology reflected perhaps his sense of his own approaching death, but it also captured the mood in the region of an end of a journey of potential and promise that in its various forms all were drawing now to an end.

It was a sort of eulogy of the world from which he came but within which he could not think and live. There were no great ideas or hopes looking ahead, only reflection on the colorful parade of promising ideas that failed.

By 2014, the struggle between chaos and restoration were dominated almost entirely by the voices of brutality. The new order of the 20th century had sidelined the old order of centuries, but left only chaos in its demise. And the softer nature of Arab politics of the earlier part of the century, when overthrown leaders were sent into exile and debate tolerated within margins, had yielded by the 60s and 70s to the brutal new generation where public inhumanity became common and horrifically tortured murder of dissent became normal. Besieged and in retreat, as well as abandoned by the West under the Obama years, the calmer voices of order in the region had out of despair realized they had no choice but to find their own path to survival, but at the same time they knew that they lacked the power on their own to do so. When Ajami died, in parallel the region had reached a chaotic and very dangerous abyss. And it was no longer the stage of great ideas, but the soapbox of very small ideas, demagogues and elixir peddlers. And with it any shred of charm, dignity and toleration was gone.

Left at the margins of this maelstrom was what Ajami had discerned in the Saudi kingdom: a world of smaller ideas and street fare was emerging. And a system that learned not only to survive but to forgive and absorb those who have deviated. And as an earlier generation of Saudi royals learned to preserve their system internally and protect it externally by making their peace with the West to survive the turbulence of a region flailing to find its moorings, seduced by dream palaces, and besieged by great power rivalries, so too was this generation of royals willing to make their pragmatic peace with the rising local power, namely Israel, which for lack of choice began to fill the regional void that was opened by an America fatigued by the withering hopelessness of the region to which it sought to bring great hope.

Lebanon returns to center stage
But then Lebanon, which had always regarded its role as the crucible of Arab thought as a guilded curse, could nonetheless not let go. What was happening in Lebanon in the last years is again the first writing of the next chapter of Arab history.

With the demise of grand ideas seeking to paint a vast new regional canvas, communities which earlier had thought that their participation in the dreaming, sketching and painting of the contours of such grand new epochs would allow them a new, integrated and common identity. But now they instead found themselves again on the outside. Again, as always, they were alone, different, and threatened. Minorities, who had spent over a century trying to transcend who they were to join a greater whole now realized that their only path to survival lay in the other direction. They could do nothing else but remember who they always were and retreat into that shell. The world of sects, tribes, clans and ethnicities had never really left; the region’s elites – especially among the minorities who let their hopes overpower their judgment — only imagined they had. But those loyalties survived. They adapted themselves to the new vocabularies and also appropriately wore the dress of the latest fashionably dominant ideology in the cavalcade of ideologies. But in the end, those ancient loyalties and affinities were the only true safety and identity, so underneath it all, they remained the bottom line.

It was through the nexus of the rivalries of greater powers and the rampaging of franchised ideologues that these minority communities – especially those who lived along the seam lines of the fertile crescent — knew they were particularly precarious. And nowhere was this dynamic more early and clearly palpable than in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria in the last few years. And while these minority communities retreated into themselves to provide the illusion of safety, they also knew they had to seek a hand of support from a distance. Adrift in chaos, all cling to the familiar and scan the horizon to seek the ship of their salvation.

Israel was close, but uninterested in playing the role of savior. It had been scorched a generation earlier trying to navigate Lebanon’s communal politics, and the trauma of that adventure lingered. True, Israeli leaders nearly universally understand the imperative of preventing the subordination entirely of Lebanon and Syria to the region’s ambitious Ayatollahs, self-anointed Khaliphs and raw dictators. And yet, at the same time, there is almost as universally no Israeli leader who entertains the idea of trying to save either Lebanon or Syria, and perhaps the region more broadly, from itself.

Salvation, however, could not wait. A Hizballah stash of ammonium nitrate exploded and tore the center of Beirut to shreds in August 2020. The veneer of calm which masked a deeply unsettled reality yielded. Any semblance of national community crystallized into anger at the domineering outsider — namely, Iran and its local agent Hizballah. And in the anger, something new seemed to emerge among Lebanese: the hope no longer to be a regional incubator, but instead to be just left alone. Lebanese took to the streets to demand their quiet and the solitude to live their lives. Perhaps this is symbolic of the region; a popular desire emerging among many to just stick their heads down, live their lives and finally just be left alone – exhausted from a century of grand ideas that ushered in upheaval and grand destruction. We hear of such voices in other lands, and even among the people whose very existence was the product of the grand idea of Arab nationalism itself, the Palestinians. Even as far away culturally and geographically as Iran we hear Iranians demonstrating also to be just left alone: “not Gaza nor Lebanon nor Syria; Iran for Iranians” they chant on the streets of Tehran, Ahwaz, Isfahan and Tabriz and elsewhere in anger toward the Ayatollahs and their grandiose projects.

And yet, also symbolic of the region as a whole, the Lebanese were not to be indulged in their simple dream. Into their chaos immediately intruded all the ambitious actors, who redoubled their efforts to tear apart the region more broadly, especially Turkey (which saw an opportunity) and Iran (which sought to preserve its position). Lebanon was such a prize for decades, as well as the treasure chest to raid and the conduit to channel wealth, corruption, trafficking and laundering for the dark forces of the region. Money flowed from all corners of the earth through Lebanon’s dominated institutions to conduct all sorts of nefarious activities from Iraq to Palestine and further line the wealth of the region’s corrupt elites from Tehran to Ankara. It is an asset of utmost critical value for all the region’s malevolent actors and thus cannot be ceded under any circumstances since doing so could threaten their very survival, let alone their further enrichment and empowerment. These oppressors, thus, will subject Lebanon to any cost, no matter how horrifying, to stay in power. And unfortunately, entangling Israel to the south may be part, even their most important part, of their perverse toolbox to do so by changing the subject into an active regional war.

So now we have the two trends converging. On the one hand, the pillaging of Lebanon by outsiders, led by Iran and to some extent Turkey, has reached such a level that it has left the Lebanese people with nothing to lose. And in contrast, the populations are so broken that they wish nothing more than to withdraw from the region spiritually and just be left alone to mind their own business not in condominium, but in isolation.

But it is at this moment that Lebanon does offer hope. When a population has its back against the wall and nothing left to lose, the domineering outsiders face a collapse of their position to a potentially volcanic challenge from the street. That challenge is swelling as I write. So Lebanon now returns to where it has always returned: the laboratory concocting the region’s trends and ideas and the vessel through which the region’s actors pursue their ambitions.

Despite the hopes of Western elites, Lebanon’s institutions, from its government to its armed forces, stand helpless and powerless, as they always have, to the sway of those internal and regional dynamics. Indeed, it was always a western fantasy to believe that any institution, agreement and border, rather than leaders and ancient communal bonds, moved reality. To invest in those institutions as realities is to follow the leprechaun to the end of the rainbow.

So we are left with two immutable forces destined to clash: on the one hand, a restive and imminently erupting population fatigued of grand ideas and has nothing to lose, and on the other hand powerful regional actors with raw ambition who have proven they will act to win at all costs. And lurking in the wings are street ideologues with their small ideas selling their wares as well.

The squandering of opportunity
Which takes us back to the beginning. Our policies over the last several years have so weakened and besieged the nefarious actors in the region that the balance was tipped, and there was lent a modicum of hope to the despairing populations from Tehran to Beirut that there might be a chance to prevail, and the age of exhausted introversion might be brewing. That is what is playing out these weeks in the streets of Iran and Lebanon (and in Caracas and Havana too).

We have been here before in other places and other lands – for example, in central and eastern Europe in the late 1980s – and we have learned one thing in all those places: which side of the fork in the road is travelled between victory of peoples over their oppressors on the one hand and the gut-wrenching crushing of dreams on the other, is set greatly by the tone in the capital of freedom, the United States and its most powerful allies.

In other words, if Washington and its powerful ally to Lebanon’s south, unwilling as it may be, build on the policies of the past administration and understand the nature and stakes of the coming clash and embark on a robust policy of support of the Lebanese people, and if we support our ally Israel if attacked by Hizballah in their effort to change the subject, and if Hizballah is left tattered, or even better eradicated, then Tehran may reach the end of its road, not only in Lebanon, but in Tehran itself. The battle over the great prize of Lebanon has the power to set regional trends and crown regional winners, but also to bury regional losers.

And yet, Washington’s attentions are elsewhere. It is torn between not noticing, governed by obliviousness to currents on the ground, still obsessing over the dream palaces of old which long ago died in the Arab world (and their frameworks like peace processes), investing in institutions whose existences are empty (such as the Lebanese Armed Forces or the UN Interim Force In Lebanon), and unattuned – or misinformed — to the broad regional geopolitics which are playing out on the Lebanese stage. So, instead of placing our powerful hand to tip the scales toward the people of Lebanon, the United States is emerging as an eclipsing and powerful but utterly irrelevant non-player by its own doing, which is sad.

What happens in any one of these current upheavals in the seats of evil – Havana, Caracas, Tehran or Beirut – will set the tone for all the rest. But supporting the demonstrators does not seem to be the guiding principle of the current U.S. administration. Sanctions are lifted on Caracas and Tehran, weak platitudes are extended the freedom fighters in Havana, and dead silence is greeting the Lebanese and Iranians who clearly have had it. The summer of 2021 may yet be remembered more like the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and Prague Spring of 1968: the age of crushed hopes – but this time because the West could have at almost no cost helped those aspirations prevail, but instead chose to do nothing.

But if the collapse of Iran and the frustration of Turkey is deferred (not cancelled), it will come, but the issue is whether it comes now, or years in the future.

Conclusion
Lebanon has become once again the microcosm, or more accurately the herald of the region to come. The tragedy of Lebanon is that the Lebanon as we have known it for a century is about to implode and die. There is no rehabilitation or resurrection. Yes, there is a noble attempt to seize the state intact by the people of Lebanon who are unified by the desire to exorcise the demons hijacking them — as we all had briefly hoped after the horrific destruction of the exploded Hizballah depot last August. And yet, all that is left of that state – especially its internal structures of authority and power, including finance, education, culture and favor — is mastered by the region’s two greatest imperialists, Iran and Turkey. So total is their domination that their removal would leave not institutions worthy of inheritance, but only a vast, razed expanse of societal and governmental debris. And yet, avoiding that collapse only leaves these reprehensible actors in power and Lebanon still shackled to their continued predatory ambitions. It is an unenviable choice, but the former – the collapse of the Lebanese state — is the only path to true freedom. If there is to be change, Lebanon faces sadly the need for it to be revolutionary, not velvet, as we have learned in the last three decades in the former Soviet lands.

And yet, as will go Lebanon, so too will go the region. And thus, it is critical for the world on the outside, and the collection of forces under assault by Iran and Turkey (including and especially the United States which remains oblivious to its being their target), band together to stand with the Lebanese as they inescapably must pass through Mordor’s scorched Plateau of Gorgoroth on their way to build anew, not rebuild.

If successful, what will emerge there, as in its neighbor Syria, eventually is unlikely to be a truly Western sense of freedom, let alone democracy. But it will be an exhausted, perhaps impatient, and not necessarily unified introversion among a collection of besieged and defensive minority communities, tribes, clans and sects which is, after all, a good incubator for the generation of new ideas that the regio

By Dr. David Wurmser
March 10, 2021

Ever since September 2001, when 19 hijackers, the vast majority of which had connections to Saudi Arabia, killed over 3000 Americans, the unquestioned relationship with Saudi Arabia established during World War II has come under duress. It was not without reason. The Saudi role has neither ever been fully examined nor have significant Saudi leaders ever been held to account for their carelessness, even entanglement, in dealing with al-Qaida before the attack. And yet, two decades have changed the Middle East. The dangers posed by Iran are no less, and the new danger posed by Turkey’s leader, Tayyip Erdogan, the Muslim Brotherhood movement over which he increasingly exercises full control, and his alliance with Qatar swells every day. In the ensuing inter-Sunni cold war to seize the banner of Sunni Islam, Saudi Arabia is not just a key player, but also a major battleground.

Whatever reservations the United States may have either over the past, or over its war in Yemen, or the Khashoggi affair – all of which legitimately should result in harsh demarches and warnings to Riyadh – they must be tempered by the context of this dangerous rivalry. In this context, a Saudi collapse is potentially so catastrophic that it would lead to multiple 9-11s, a much worse crop of wars than Yemen, multiple external killings, internal sectarian bloodletting and likely a collapse into a horrific civil war the contours of which we have already seen in Syria. And it would launch not only Iran, but Turkey as well, into becoming regional superpowers challenged inside only by Israel and outside by the only superpower with the ability to project regional power, namely the United States. For those concerned with human rights, the collapse of Saudi Arabia should be of greater concern than the limited singular actions hitherto taken by Saudi Arabia to survive. It would be a repeat conceivably with far greater implications of the fall of the Shah and rise of Khomeini since ultimately Iran was a Shiite country in a Sunni sea, but the Muslim Brotherhood led Khaliphate of Turkey under Erdogan, who seeks to supercede and perhaps even control Saudi Arabia, is a Sunni nation in a sea of Sunnis. In this context, the Biden administration’s emerging hostility to Riyadh raises serious concerns about Saudi stability, and even more serious questions about whose side Washington is taking in the inter-Sunni cold war.

Saudi Arabia in 9-11
Let us be clear; Saudi Arabia has never fully cleared its account on al-Qaida and the 9-11 attacks. At the core, the point man of the Balkan cell from which sprang the Hamburg cell that executed the 9-11 attacks, was Muhammad Daroug, a man who spent many years abroad in Latin America and elsewhere, but always maintaining a strange relationship with powerful elements of the Saudi regime. An investigation of the relationship between Daroug, the Saudi Red Crescent and senior royals was never genuinely pursued. Indeed, at one point, so nervous was Serbia over the activities of the Saudi Red Crescent in this regard that they declared then-prince Salman (now King) a persona non-grata. And then there is the difficult connection between Turki al-Faisal’s intelligence agency where Saudi intelligence’s point man on al-Qaida was the brother of the Saudi point man in al-Qaida. In short, first for the sake of closure for the victims and second for the historical record, there must one day be an accounting of the highest level involvement in Saudi royal structures with the al Qaida structure.
And yet, although Saudi Arabia stalled any real accounting for what had happened before 9-11, in the years that followed it did understand the challenge that stood before it and worked aggressively to shut down the threat not only of al-Qaida, or even of the Salafi-based thought behind movements like al-Qaida, but even of the Muslim brotherhood. This effort was led by Muhammad bin Nayif (MbN), who became crown prince in 2015 but had led the security services long before that.

The rise of the inter-Sunni cold war
One of the most important moves that MbN made was in Syria and Egypt. During the years after the 9-11 attacks it seemed as if the Kingdom had reasserted its authority over the religious establishment and began to bring matters back under control, but the Arab Spring, and in particular the Syrian civil war’s eruption, unraveled that notion.

Signs emerged early in the Syrian conflict that regional Salafis encouraged by the Kingdom over the last half-century and their allies in Saudi clerical establishment – especially a powerful group dubbed the “Awakening Sheikhs” – had recovered from their suppression following 9-11 attacks and were again amassing power while at the same time disagreeing with several of the monarchy’s key strategic choices.

The Saudi family became particularly concerned that the Syrian issue – and support for the Salafi movement among Syrian oppositionists – was being leveraged by the remnants and new followers of the Awakening Sheikhs to act on their own in foreign policy (which is usually preserved within the authority of the leader the state), increase their following, and expand their base of power. Not only does this tread dangerously close to rearranging the balance between the leader of state (Saud) and leader of religious affairs (Wahhab) outlined under the 1744 pact, but such power could be used by the clerics to launch their own pro-Salafi “Arab Spring” in the Kingdom.

The Saudi government, thus, warned the clerics to stand down on Syria, and then took action. As early May 2012, the Kingdom banned fundraising activities for Syria, especially at the Bawardi Mosque in Riyadh which stood at the epicenter of these efforts, as well as blocked the “Ulema Committee to Support Syria” from functioning. Many of the clerics involved were summoned by Saudi authorities and warned to cease acting independently, even though the crisis in Syria was still an area in which there was a general convergence of views between the monarchy and these Sheikhs.

It was during this period as well that it became clear the Turkish leader, Tayyip Erdogan, had aligned with Qatar, assumed the mantel of leadership of the region’s Muslim Brotherhood movement, and sought to seize for himself the control of the banner of Sunni Islam. And an area where Erdogan and his Qatari allies saw greatest opportunity was in becoming the patron of the Sunni Islamists in Syria. Indeed, Qatar had long been a rival of the Saudi regime, and Turkey, imagining itself the new Khaliphate, was inherently on a collision course with Riyadh, which as the guardian of the two mosques (Mecca and Medina), laid claim to Sunni leadership.

In essence, the inter-Sunni Cold War found a fertile battlefield in which to play out. Saudi Arabia had tried to weaken and neutralize elements of its clerical establishment, the Ulema, who sought to leverage the war in Syria to build their power and influence not only independent of but adversarial to the monarchy. At first succeeded, but it was not long before Turkey and Qatar saw an opportunity to intervene and exploit these fissures between the Saudi royal family and the clerical establishment that ensured.

Moreover, events soon again spun out of control in Syria, partly because of Iranian efforts and partly because Qatar and Turkey began to prop up the worst Islamist tendencies in the Syrian opposition, including the troublesome Saudi clerics who worried Riyadh. Hezbollah’s overt intervention on behalf of the Assad regime in the battle of Qusayr in late May 2013 precipitated the sudden increase in Saudi foreign fighters in Syria. It was such a dramatic expression of Shiite/Alawite sectarian action against Sunni actions that it served as the clarion call for a new reinvigorated Sunni campaign across the Sunni Islamist universe. Less than a week later, in response, mainstream clerics such as the Qatari-based Yusuf al-Qaradawi called Sunnis to arms and fight in Syria: “anyone who has the ability, who is trained to fight…has to go; I call on Muslims to go and support their brothers in Syria.”

Most worrisome for Saudi authorities was that Qaradawi’s statement was later praised by Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti Abdul Aziz al-Shaykh. Two weeks after al-Qaradawi’s announcement, Saud al-Shuraym, a Saudi cleric at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, proclaimed that Sunni Muslims had a duty to support the Syrian rebels “by all means.” Before Qusayr, Saudi religious scholars supported helping the Syrian rebels through financial means, but were not overt in terms of foreign fighting. Hezbollah’s joining the conflict, the sectarianism that is intertwined in Saudi Arabia’s state religion and education, the clerical framing of the conflict as wajib (duty), campaigns of support for the rebels, as well as the summer months coinciding with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan all helped catalyze efforts to send Saudi fighters to Syria.

Combining its wealth and Wahhabi credentials, Qatar had assumed theological control over Hamas, the broader regional Muslim Brotherhood movements, and the Salafi world across the region. Even some al-Qaida linked Sheikhs – such the Saudi Sheikh, Dr. `Abd Allah bin Muhammad bin Sulayman al-Muhaysini, who is a theological force behind the Syrian Jabat al-Nusra movement – by 2014 expressed frustration over their loss of control of that end of the spectrum to Sheikhs funded and encouraged by Qatar (such as Sheikh Hajaj al-Ajmi).

But the rise of the Qatari-Turkish challenge again had the gravest implications not only for the Saudi royal family in Syria, but in the entire region. and the Saudi state it controlled. If the contours of the inter-Sunni Cold War – and the threat Qatar and Turkey sought to pose to the Saudi regime — had come into focus already over Syria, but then it escalated exponentially over Egypt. When Muhammad Morsi seized power from Hosni Mubarak in 2011, he aligned his regime heavily with the Hamas movement in Gaza, which by 2012 formally announced it was the Gaza chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood movement of Egypt. Moreover, he realigned Egypt as a whole to become one of Erdogan’s closest allies. Egypt had always been part of the inner circle of strategic concern for Saudi Arabia, and indeed, a hostile Egypt had before threatened the Saudi monarchy. Having Cairo aligned with the two primary rivals to Saudi Arabia, brandishing the banner of Sunni Islam under the banner of the Muslim Brotherhood, who were already threatening the Saudi monarchy from within through the rising “awakening Shaykhs,” was a threat Saudi Arabia could hardly countenance. Saudi Arabia, thus, dramatically in 2012 moved to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, and all but overtly sided with Israel during its mini-war with Hamas that year. Indeed, two years later, Saudi Arabia threw caution to the wind and more or less did overtly side with Israel against Hamas.

Prince Nayif understood thus that, bringing about the end of the Muslim Brotherhood’s regime of Muhammad Morsi was a vital national interest. Saudi Arabia’s rising ally, the UAE and Riyadh accomplished this effort on July 3, 2013, when they helped General Muhammad al-Sisi seize power for Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood allies. Beginning in summer 2013, the Awakening Sheikhs expressed publicly (or tweeted electronically) a critique of the monarchy’s overt support for Egypt’s coup. At first, Egypt’s Salafis and their Saudi comrades – both the royal family and the Awakening Sheikhs – had supported the crackdown against the Muslim Brotherhood, largely because they viewed the Brotherhood as rival claimants to the standard of Islamist authenticity. From the start, the relationship between the Saudi Kingdom and Egypt under Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood had been tense. Apart from some theological differences, the Egyptian Brotherhood was working in close cooperation with the Turkish government under the AKP Islamist party and Qatar – a rival Wahhabi regime to the Saudis – to assert a leading regional role and define the nature of the emerging Arab Spring, often to the detriment of Saudi Arabia, which had invested great coin and effort for over 40 years into trying to crown its Salafis as the leaders of “authentic” Islam.

In contrast, the destruction of the Muslim Brotherhood by the military junta in July offered the Saudis a stalling if not even taming of the Arab Spring, and lent the Salafis and the Saudi colleagues the promise of monopoly over the Islamist camp. Understanding that the Salafis would be one of the benefactors of the coup, the Saudis thus calculated minimally, if at all, the possibility of a Salafi problem emerging from it. Indeed, if there was a concern at all, it was that the coup would stall and fail, and the Muslim Brotherhood would be left seizing the banner of the Islamist camp across the region – in cooperation with Turkey’s government – at the Salafis’ expense. It was, thus reasonable for the Saudi government to suppose the Egyptian coup would represent a convergence of interests between the Saud royals, the Awakening Sheikh clerics and the broader Salafi world.

Once the Brotherhood was removed from power, however, the Salafi camp moved to capitalize on discomfort surrounding the inherent brutality which the junta required to prevail in its crackdown. Tapping the chaotic and almost anarchic populist tendencies defining the politics of Tahrir square, and the still salient appeal of the authenticity of Islam, the Salafi camp drifted toward opposing the regime.

The emerging divergence of outlook and interests between the Salafi establishment – and their colleagues among Saudi “Awakening Sheikhs” – and the Saudi monarchy reverberates within the core of the Saudi state. Several key clerics have already split with the monarchy over its support for the Egyptian junta. Indeed, two prominent Sheikhs, Salman al-Awdah (who had been arrested and incarcerated before until 1999, but since has been viewed as loyal to the Saud) and Muhammad al-Urayfi have been silenced following twitter posts criticizing support for the Egyptian coup. Sheikh al-Awda’s internet journal, Islam Today, has been removed from the internet. Another popular cleric, Muhsin al-Awaji has been arrested; there were reports over the last year that Sheikh al-Urayfi (who has the highest number of internet-based followers in the Kingdom) has also been arrested.

Other key clerics – Nasser al-Omar, Hassan Hamid, Abd al-Aziz bin Marzuq al Tarayfi, and Abd al-Rahman Salah Mahmud – have also been detained, threatened or harassed by the Kingdom’s police. Given how nervous the al-Saud family is over the increased power of the Awakening Sheikhs in the context of Syrian policy – over which they are in agreement – one can only imagine how dangerous the monarchy regards increasing vociferousness among these clerics on the issue of Egypt – over which they disagree.

In the end, torn between its geostrategic interest in supporting the Egyptian coup and its governing interest in avoiding a rupture with elements of its clerical core, the monarchy suppressed the most vocal Sheikhs but simultaneously negotiated with the broader clerical establishment to reconcile their conflicting interests.

And yet, all was not well in the Kingdom. Oil prices were plunging, and it was increasingly obvious that Saudi Arabia’s economy as constituted was too distorted by oil wealth to survive in the long run, and Saudi society was woefully unprepared to deal with the sort of modernity an effective economic transformation would demand.

In the next part of this essay, we will examine how the conflict between Turkey and Qatar on one hand, and the Saudis on the other moved to the center of the Saudi regime and threatened its very survival, with Adnan Khashoggi’s assuming a critical role in the Turkish strategic campaign.

i HTTPS://WWW.CTC.USMA.EDU/POSTS/THE-SAUDI-FOREIGN-FIGHTER-PRESENCE-IN-SYRIA
ii ACCORDING TO AL-MUHAYSINI’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, HE WAS BORN IN BURAYDAH (QASSIM REGION) IN NORTH-CENTRAL SAUDI ARABIA. HE BECAME A HAFIZ (ONE WHO HAS MEMORIZED THE ENTIRE QUR’AN) BY THE AGE OF 15. FOR HIS BACHELORS STUDIES, HE MAJORED IN SHARI`A AT THE UNIVERSITY OF UMM AL-QURA IN MECCA. HE LATER COMPLETED HIS MASTER’S AND DOCTORATE IN COMPARATIVE FIQH (ISLAMIC JURISPRUDENCE) AT AL-IMAM MUHAMMAD IBN SAUD ISLAMIC UNIVERSITY IN RIYADH, WRITING HIS DISSERTATION ON LEGAL PROVISIONS AFFECTING WAR REFUGEES IN ISLAMIC FIQH. HE STUDIED UNDER A NUMBER OF SHAYKHS, INCLUDING THE CONTROVERSIAL SHAYKH SULAYMAN AL-ULWAN WHO WAS ARRESTED BY SAUDI AUTHORITIES IN 2004 FOR SUPPORTING AL-QA`IDA.

By Dr. David Wurmser
January 26, 2021

Many have recently become aware of the immense distortion posed by the alliance of large social media with government, enshrined in US Section 230, which exempts such firms from liability and undermines anti-trust actions. While this poses an obvious threat to free speech, as was exposed during the presidential campaign when major news stories that could have influenced the campaign were suppressed, this is really only part of a much larger threat not only to our First Amendment rights, but to the integrity of our sovereignty that extends far beyond the social media, or communications sector, altogether.

An emerging triad of large capital, government and international organizations is moving dangerously fast toward subordinating sovereignty to fashionable policies dictated by an emerging unaccountable international aristocracy. Sadly, as evident in the behavior of the social media giants demonstrated, a good bit of this evolution occurred right under the outgoing Trump administration’s nose despite its best efforts to “drain the swamp.”

This threat is materializing fastest in the environmental sphere which John Kerry has been appointed to lord over on behalf of the United States. A few weeks ago, the US Federal Reserve joined the “Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening of Financial Systems” or NSGF for short. So, while the United States is re-entering the Paris Accord, which has no real enforcement mechanism, this body in turn has teeth designed to enforce environmental norms on nations as defined by an unaccountable body representing the interests of the emerging international environmental aristocratic class. At its core, the mechanism upturns the role of fiduciary responsibility – namely that an investor actually can count on his investment manager to base his judgments on trying to make money – and weaponizes it. Fiduciary responsibility has hitherto tempered activist investment being imposed on large investment houses or on credit-lending banks. Retirement accounts, government investment funds, private and institutional investors all invest their money to make money. This bottom line, namely legally enforceable fiduciary responsibility, has thus far guaranteed prioritization of profit, sobriety and focus. It preserved market competition, and ensured that companies with bright new ideas have a shot at thriving based on their ability to deliver goods produced on the basis of such innovation to market.

What the NGSF does is force, through the participation of the central banks, the banking and investment community to raise the priority of environmental considerations into the heart of fiduciary judgments, essentially weaponizing them. Moreover, lest any institution simply attempts to buck the trend, then the full weight of international banking system and government can be used to shut down that effort and put it out of business. In other words, international environmental activists and the monopoly of government can be used to impose distorted investment decisions on large capital, fundamentally upturn what is meant by fiduciary responsibility by prioritizing social credit over profit.

Similarly, the consequences of the immense power government wields to grant tax-breaks, offer protection from the damage that could be done in such distortions, land contracts or extend grants to business large and small will make inevitable the emergence of an alliance between large capital, government and aligned political movements and parties. International structures and sovereign governments grant an undue advantage to favored institutions in exchange for those institutions adhering and advancing the policy aims of the government and international structures and donating to the NGOs advocating for them. Facing such a daunting triad, any potential competitor who tries to buck the fashionable policy aims withers. And small business – dependent on loans and credit – will have to pay the piper in terms of aligning itself on politics and policy with the reigning powers and their international allies.

Our energy sector and its large industries, which are already reeling from the kabosh on the XL pipeline and the suspension of drilling permits on federal lands, will soon feel the full weight of this emerging distortion and the power behind it in the coming months and years. The greatest danger, however, is that we will soon see it play out not only in the energy and social media sectors, but in every sector. The dangerous NGSF structure has now established a precedent that can be extended beyond social media activities and energy sector interests – as much as the former compromises the 1st amendment and the latter can devastate our energy sector, raise energy prices dramatically, and undermine our energy independence. Involving the financial sector in such a triad will ensure all businesses in all sectors will be subordinated.

Moreover, one needs only to look to Europe to see how much the EU elites have already distorted their societies and made their business activity obedient, with the help of activist courts whose mission is moral and social justice rather than constitutional and rule of law adherence. The new trend will force American businesses to align their behavior with the compliant way European businesses operate in coordination with EU elites driven by fashionable social justice ideas.

It is only a matter of time until international juggernauts akin to the NSGF emerge across the board to barrel over national sovereignty in the financial and banking sectors forcing social justice considerations to become widespread. Indeed, one needs only look to UN institutions, the WHO and Davos discussions, to understand the political directions this will take beyond the energy sector. Indeed, the NSGF itself is the brain child of Klaus Schwab, his World Economic Forum (Davos) and his fund, the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, which its own website claims advances “an approach by individuals, groups, start up companies and entrepreneurs, in which they develop, fund and implement solutions to social, cultural or environmental issues.”

As such, not only our industrial policy, but our foreign policy, will be compromised. Policies hitherto serving as profound expressions of the unique American mindset, values and culture, will be exposed to international structures and the domestic allies pursuing their narrow definitions of social justice. Businesses, suppliers, banks and investors internationally will find it increasingly impossible to avoid factoring social justice issues into their activities. That poses a tremendous threat to key allies whom global elites in the international institutions define as “rogue.” Consider for a moment what happens when such an international structure, in which our federal reserve is a member, decides that any Israeli industry that has any presence in territories these elites do not consider part of Israel, such as Jerusalem – even an employee living there – is an investment risk based on a social justice political risk factor index. Any fiduciary advantage in investing in an Israeli company, then, is weighed against the likelihood of the investors (and not just the Israeli company) being written off as a high credit risk by both domestic and international banking and investment structures. One can only imagine how few companies will make a stand at that point because any gain in investing in such an Israeli company would be eclipsed by the devastating loss of denied credit. Every industry that depends on a banking structure – i.e., every industry – will have to accede to this. Microsoft already did last year when it divested from Israeli firms providing facial recognition technologies, since these firms in developing such technologies advanced the “occupation.” Essentially Israeli firms with any presence at all in Jerusalem – or contributing to the “occupation” – or supporting Israel’s defense sector could be cut off not only from the international financial system, but from even doing business with any firm whatsoever.

Israel is not unique in potentially being exposed to this sort of threat. Other nations out of fashion with the progressive EU and other international elites — such as Hungary, Poland and now even the United Kingdom, let alone countries such as Taiwan — could easily find themselves almost invisibly slipping into such a catastrophic purgatory. So, could major religions and their institutions, such as the Vatican.

Thus, foreign policy should be expected to go the way of environmental policy. It will as well likely be subordinated to a triad of capital, government and a fashionable international aristocracy, rather than continuing to be the expression of the values, culture and aspirations of the American people as it largely has been until now. Our foreign relations will approximate much more closely the intersectional campus cancel culture of today, or the surreal debates at the United Nations, than the past geopolitical solidity that informed our pursuit of nation interests and preservation of our sovereignty.

This vision of the future may appear fantastic, but the experience of the last months with social media and the emerging assault on the US energy sector are only a subset of the signs we have seen lately, wherein social activism has made its way to boardrooms and investment managers. The Federal Reserve’s joining the NSGF is a harbinger of what is to come far beyond the energy sector. Business schools are beginning to teach social justice NGO expertise, and business after business – especially faith-oriented CEOs and businesses — are already increasingly subject across America to lawsuits and boycotts, such as bakers, Hobby Lobby and Chick-Fil-A. But these efforts are the minor leagues compared to what is coming down the pike on a level far higher, and less visible than currently imagined by those who would most be affected by it. Lest one have any doubt, just look at the swagger of EU elites toward Brexit to understand the power they

By Dr. David Wurmser

August 26, 2020

Just about every article written reacting to the move toward full peace between Israel and the UAE discusses the potential for a sale of the F-35 stealth fighters – an aircraft that is considered to be generations ahead of any other — to the UAE. And almost immediately, the prospect of this sale raises eyebrows in terms of America’s commitment to maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge (QME). Almost every article discussing this refers to the emergence of the QME as a foundation of the United States’ commitment to Israel’s security born of the bitter, and dangerously close to fatal, experience of the 1973 war. There were several facets to it, but the most prominent described are that the shock sustained by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) showed that Israel’s ability to defend itself, given its striking numerical inferiority, depended entirely on the most advanced weaponry. Since the Soviet bloc was selling Israel’s adversaries its most advanced weaponry, it was imperative that the United States, as part of its own reputation in the Cold War, supply Israel with its needs.

This is a strong argument, but unfortunately, the QME did not come about as a result of the Yom Kippur war. One has to travel back another three years to August 1970, to the end of the war generally unknown to all but students of Israeli history and those of us old enough to remember: the War of Attrition. In so correcting the historical record, the QME acquires quite a different flavor and rationale.

Following the Six Days War in 1967, after a stunning Israeli victory over all her neighbors and then some, many – especially in the Israeli government — expected a phone call any minute from Cairo, Damascus and Amman suing for peace. It was not to be. Instead, the Arab world met in Khartoum and on September 1, 1967, issued their famous three “nos:” no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, and no talks with Israel. A constant border war of attrition on both the northern border with Syria along the Bashan mountain ridges of the Golan Heights, and the southern border with Egypt along the Suez Canal followed. This unrecognized “War of Attrition,” as it came to be more commonly known, lasted almost three years, and was one of Israel’s most costly.

While the war was started by Egypt, Israel used the war to overcome a key conundrum: it had limited standing forces able to hold the canal against Egypt’s large army, and thus would have to rely on mobilization. But it could not mobilize indefinitely, since reserve forces represented the bulk of Israel’s adult male population. Thus, the war of attrition launched by Egypt – instead of wearing Israel down – actually gave Israel the ability to constantly apply force to relentlessly pressure Egypt’s armed forces and force them to deploy dozens of kilometers further back. This “buffer” allowed Israel to hold the canal with few forces. Moreover, if Egypt lurched forward, it would take 72 hours to remilitarize this buffer – hence was borne the Israeli anticipation of 72-hour early warning tripwire for war, but it was based on monitoring the physical deployment of the Egyptian army rather than penetrating Egypt’s high command with spies.

When the Egypt sued for a ceasefire, Israel accepted under the expectation that the integrity of the buffer would be maintained, or the war of attrition would be resumed. And sure enough, within days, the Egyptian began moving their forces forward, and just as surely, Israel prepared to resume the War of Attrition to push them back.

But Washington had other ideas. America had just launched the “Roger’s Plan” – the peace process of that day – and believed a resumption of hostilities would derail this promising development. Washington, thus, asked for Israeli restraint. At first, Israel refused, but then Washington offered a strategic exchange to Jerusalem: abandon the preemptive option and ignore Egyptian strategic moves in exchange for an American guarantee of Israel’s military “qualitative edge” over its neighbors.

Israel agreed, and bartered its strategic freedom of maneuver and initiative in exchange for a qualitative military edge (QME) in weaponry. Egypt deployed forward, but Israel was compensated for its strategic passivity with weaponry that established so overwhelming a qualitative advantage over its adversaries, it was said, that deterrence was certain, and even if not, victory would be swift. And American aid to Israel ballooned to pay for it.

So, Israel committed the cardinal sin of strategic planning: it allowed tactics to replace strategy. It allowed intelligence to replace rather than support strategic planning, preparation, positioning, deployment and maneuver. In doing so, it set the stage for catastrophic failure. And that disaster, made inevitable by the lapse in proper strategic planning and surrender of initiative, came on October 6, 1973, when Arab armies launched the Yom Kippur War, blasted through the berms along the Suez Canal, rolled into the Sinai and punched through the Bashan Ridge onto the Golan plateau to the escarpment overlooking the Sea of Galilee.

The 1973 War, however, did not provoke reflection of the origins of the grave failure and strategic planning, and thus did not trigger therein a strategic re-evaluation. Instead, it allowed the interpretation and the war and its failure to descend into an indictment of Israel’s intelligence apparatus. In other words, the examination of the failure of the war continued to embrace the cause of the failure: namely, the reliance on intelligence to replace, rather than support strategy and an strategic posture., and the reliance on qualitative superiority of weapons over strategic imagination, planning, preparation, deployment and initiative. For the political echelon – which is ultimately the level at which strategic planning is properly conducted (since strategy is not a strictly military question) – this was a convenient dodge.

And thus, the after-action evaluation of the Yom Kippur War missed its greatest opportunity to reexamine the by-then eclipsing idea of securing deterrence via a qualitative military edge at the expense of strategic planning, preemption and freedom of strategic maneuver to tee up a decisive victory. Instead, a deadly cycle was joined. Israel depended ever more on cutting edge American arms, relied ever more on US aid to pay for it, which demanded ever more of Israel to subordinate its strategic initiative, maneuver and planning to American regional policies. This progression, in turn, would leave Israel’s will questioned, deterrence weakened and compromised – all of which invited a greater threat which demanded yet more weaponry. Almost always, those policies entailed further Israeli restraint and acquiescence to America’s attempts to downplay its closeness to Israel in order to court key Arab nations, and ultimately to pursue peace processes which exacted concessions from Israel in an attempt to reconcile the two sides of this “balancing” act. The strategic dependence of Israel on the US always guaranteed that Israel’s security establishment would support such restraint and conciliation.

It is undeniable that a certain level of technological superiority is insurmountable. When a modest-sized US military force launched a war from Kuwait in 2003 against Saddam Hussein’s much-vaunted million-man military, its technological superiority in itself became an inescapable strategic reality. And yet, that same technological superiority – which delivered total victory against Iraq within two weeks — helped little in fighting the war waged on the US in that country against the Iranian and Syrian low-tech war of subversion. Indeed, Iran failed over 8 years of war with a half-million dead to register any significant strategic victory, let alone movement, against the Iraqi military to which we laid waste in days. And yet, Iran ultimately inflicted in a much shorter period of time grave, tragic and lasting damage on the US – so much so that it has altered the way the US looks at foreign intervention. Strategic acumen vanquished technology. And what turned around the American war effort in Iraq was ultimately also learned strategic skill – easing Shiite anxiety over a sellout while turning Sunni tribes against al-Qaida’s al-Zarqawi – supported (but not replaced) by critical intelligence to help navigate properly through this strategic maneuver.

Returning to the present, the issue regarding the QME – which is a question of weapons and tactics, not strategy – should be placed in the larger strategic context. Israel should not now bind itself rigidly to this doctrine with a mixed past if it blocks Israel’s ability to take the initiative in crafting a national strategy to deal with the challenges it will face in the coming decades. Indeed, this moment is an invitation to examine for the first time since 1970 the iconic reliance on the QME over strategic imagination and preparation to the exclusion over all else in Israeli planning.

This is especially relevant in terms of the three most important geo-strategic initiatives that Israel must undertake now and for the next several years:

• ending the reign of the Ayatollahs in Iran,
• prepare regionally for the neo-Ottoman/Muslim Brotherhood Khaliphate that Erdogan is trying to construct from Morocco to India (and among Muslims everywhere), and
• act practically on the ground with energy to render irreversible Israel’s presence on the Golan and in major parts Judea and Samaria.

The latter would include stopping Palestinian construction in forbidden areas (Area C under the Oslo Accords), undermining both the Palestinian National Authority’s and Turkey’s intrusions and destructive activity on the Temple Mount, Jerusalem and even among Israel’s Arab citizens, and building of Israeli villages, towns, cities and infrastructure in critical areas of Judea and Samaria – all matters on which Israel has largely dropped the ball.

Only when one considers those three critical strategic imperatives could one then in proper strategic context consider the question of the lifespan of qualitative technological advantages the UAE would gain from an F-35, and weigh that against what one might gain by coordination with Abu Dhabi. And only then can one judge whether the sale would constitute so great a threat to the basic functioning of the Israel Defense Forces that it would become a strategic threat in itself and annul any gain there might be in enlisting the UAE’s coordination, or at least acquiescence, in strategic initiatives and alliances to address these three strategic imperatives that will affect in the long run Israel’s borders and its survival.