Three amigos of the status quo

THERE is something surreal about the imprisonment in Saudi Arabia of Manal Masoud Al Sharief, given the nature of her supposed crime. She had the audacity to drive a car. A fellow conspirator caught her in the act, so to speak, and the video was posted on YouTube.
It`s an extraordinarily dull video. It shows a woman driving and talking, and what she says is incomprehensible unless you know Arabic, which I don`t. However, her comments evidently don`t denounce the House of Saud or call for the overthrow of her country`s feudal monarchy. She merely points out the absurdity of the rule — apparently not a law but a `custom` based on a fatwa — that prohibits women from driving.It`s a relatively trivial injunction, but the fact that it`s exclusive to Saudi Arabia signposts that nation`s adherence to patriarchal norms that would be laughed out of existence in more or less any other country. Needless to say, misogyny in Saudi Arabia goes much deeper than that. So does the denial of more fundamental human rights, to both sexes — although within the context of that dystopian reality, women are unquestionably worse off.
The WikiLeaks cables suggest that American diplomats in Riyadh haven`t exactly been immune to getting worked up over this state of affairs. It was hardly earth-shattering, though, that Barack Obama failed to mention Saudi Arabia altogether in his peroration on the Middle East at the State Department last month.
It also did not score a mention in his speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), or in his address more recently to a joint sitting of Britain`s houses of parliament.
The US president did, to his credit, bring up Bahrain, albeit without using the sort of language reserved for Libya. Nor did he allude to the fact that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), contributed manpower to crushing the Bahraini branch of the so-called Arab Spring; the action wasn`t exactly out of line with the fact that once upon a time both nations had, alongside Pakistan, recognised the `Islamic emirate` established by the Afghan Taliban. And, of course, pre-eminent Saudi contributions to international affairs in the recent past include Osama bin Laden and the majority of the 9/11 hijackers.
That the UAE has lately set up a mercenary force supervised by Erik Prince, the former top honcho of Blackwater, who is now based in Abu Dhabi, is clearly not unrelated to popular rebellions in the Middle East. And the Saudi troops sent into Bahrain were reportedly trained by the British. It`s unlikely, though, that this revelation will embarrass David Cameron, given that he laid out the welcome mat for the Bahraini crown prince just days before he received Obama.
Mind you, even if the powers that actually have intervened in Bahrain couldn`t be criticised, the US president couldn`t help citing potential Iranian influence, and Tehran was also accused of a role in repressing protesters in Syria. If that`s true, it`s no doubt appalling — but what exactly makes it worthier of condemnation than the blatant Saudi interference in Bahrain?
Riyadh, which was mightily upset at the consequences of the uprisings in Tunis and Cairo, has lately been offering economic assistance to Tunisia and Egypt. The reasoning behind that is probably not all that far removed from the Obama administration`s motivation in forgiving some of the two nations` debts, and the Group of Eight`s in promising them loads of cash, the idea being not to facilitate change but to restrict it.
Particularly in the case of Egypt, their goals broadly coincide with those of Israel. Whatever Benjamin Netanyahu may be saying in public about the winds of change in the neighbourhood, Israel was mortified by Hosni Mubarak`s ouster. The Egyptian-mediated reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas as well as the opening of the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt have only quickened its nostalgia for the deposed dictator, who served for years as a reliable ally.
The US, too, has been putting a brave face on its ill-concealed initial alarm over popular revolts in the Middle East. While it wouldn`t be particularly controversial to label the recalcitrant leaders of Libya, Syria and Yemen as the three amigos of the Arab counter-revolution, the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia are also worth considering as contenders for that title.
In the postwar milieu of the 1940s, the US, relishing its newfound role as a global superpower, proudly proclaimed its enthusiasm for democracy and capitalism. It had few qualms during the Cold War about subsidising some of the least desirable tyrants to have trod this earth in the wake of Hitler and Mussolini, as long as they showed little interest in an equitable redistribution of wealth and kept their anti-communist credentials burnished. New York Times
In time, the realisation that the increasing disparities of wealth associated with it had made capitalism something of a dirty word in the Third World led to its substitution with the less offensive-sounding `free enterprise`. The end of the Cold War calcified that mindset instead of provoking a rethink. The recently lamented the fact that “the old leftist political parties [in Egypt] are re-emerging as though they have been frozen in time [for 30 years] to demand that the government again expand its role in the economy to help the poor, even at the price of discouraging foreign investors”.
What a calamity it would be were the relations of production to be redefined! You can have your revolution, but don`t rock the boat. The Mubarak family is dispensable, but not neo-liberal economics. Likudite anger over Obama daring to mention Israel`s 1967 borders and the dozens of standing ovations Benjamin Netanyahu received in the US Congress — accurately described many years ago as Israeli-occupied territory — broadly reflect the same categorical imperative: don`t mess with the status quo. `Change we can believe in` must only be superficial. n
One would like to think, though, that the so-called Arab street is not entirely unaware of what the American jazz poet Gil Scott-Heron — who died prematurely last week at the age of 62 — pointed out more than four decades ago: “The revolution will not go better with Coke.”
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