Middle East monarchies: the database

Four of the five monarchies that succumbed to coups either centralised authority or in the case of Yemen lacked an alliance with an outside power to cope with a centralising power. None both promoted social and political pluralism and enjoyed an alliance with an outside power like the US. By contrast, all the monarchies that survived both promoted social pluralism and enjoyed an alliance with an outside power, mainly the US.

By far the most important monarchies to have succumbed to military coups were Egypt and Iraq. Egypt's last monarch, the dissolute 32 year-old monarch, who managed to antagonise his former British mentors as much as he did the officer class and the Egyptian political elite, was ousted in a blood-less coup in July 1952 by a highly organised group of young ‘free officers’. Its leader, Jamal Abd al-Nasser became the symbol of the officer turned President in the Arab Middle East. It was the last successful coup to take place in Egypt ever since. Robert Vitalis has amply documented the centralising etatistic policies the Egyptian State pursued under the monarchy in sharp contrast to widely accepted views of a weak capitalist system.Footnote ⁴

All the more palpable was the growing power of the Iraqi State in the decade prior to the monarchy's demise. Much of it was due to increasing oil revenues.Footnote ⁵ In addition to an expansion in the roles the state performed, there was a concommitant commitment to homogenising society through education under the banner of Iraqi nationalism, and finally in 1954, in the banning of all political parties.Footnote ⁶ A strong relationship between the Hashemite Kingdom and the Hashemites could not by itself prevent, and perhaps even hastened, the monarchic family's brutal downfall.

Forging the effective unification of Libya after the newly created monarchy formally secured its independence in 1951 became the monarch's primary task. It was no mean task given the attempts by Tripolitanians as late as the mid-forties to stave off being ruled by the Sanusi order that hailed from Cyrenaica on the eastern edge of the newly formed state.Footnote ⁷ Libya, it may be claimed, is at first glance an exception to the rule outlined above; Nevertheless, perhaps the meekest and personally most inept of the monarchs succeeded in maintaining his power base long after the monarchs of Egypt, Iraq and Yemen succumbed to coups, thanks to divide and rule strategies the King of Libya, Idris, employed in the army and in the domestic political arena coupled with a strong alliance with the US on the external front.

Contrasting the Yemeni and Iranian experiences is perhaps more instructive than analysing them separately; An indigent Yemen, almost equally divided by Sunnis and Shiis, was far too peripheral to secure its ruler an alliance with a foreign power.Footnote ⁸ He was later to became prey to an internal opposition that allied itself with Egypt. Foreign intervention determined the fate of dynastic rule more so than domestic factors. Iran under the Pahlevi Shah, by contrast, was a leading oil producer which with US help, transformed itself into a regional power. If Yemen succumbed to outside forces, Iran's fate was decided by a domestic wall-to-wall opposition forged by a state-led centralisation of authority.Footnote ⁹ The Shah did not make use of Iran's considerable ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity for divide and rule purposes. Sepehr Zabih notes how in the course of transforming the Iranian army from an instrument of suppression to an instrument projecting military might regionally ‘[…] servicemen rarely received training in crowd control, in dealing with internal guerrilla warfar, or controllng mass rallies, genral strikes, and different types of civil disoedience.’Footnote ¹⁰ After 1963, they were no longer trained in crowd control. ‘Thus, for example, the new justication was that contiued build-up of the Iranian military, at least in the decade of the mid-1960s to the 1970s, was needed for external defense, especially the protection of the Persian Gulf, in view of the rising significanceof oil exports from Iranian and non-Iranian littoral states.’

Of all the surviving monarchies, Moroccan regime survial is probably the hardest to explain; it is the most populous monarchy with a population of over 30 million, has no oil, a low GNP per capita by the standards of most of the states in the Middle East and North Africa, and one of the most unequal distributions of income.Footnote ¹¹ Morocco is a hetergenous state linguistically and culturally, mainly between Arabs and Berbers, and is characterised by vibrant forms of religious practice, orthodox Sunni as well as more popular forms (zawiyyas) both of which the monarchy assiduously cultivates.Footnote ¹²

Jordan, the only other non-Gulf monarchy, has faced both severe political and economic problems including a Palestinian-led civil war against the monarchy in 1970–1971. It was a major challenge mainly because the Palestinians probably comprise the vast majority of Jordan's Palestine.Footnote ¹³ The monarchy has more than successfully met the challenges since then through techniques of counterbalancing between Palestinians and Jordanians of East Bank origins on the home front and a strong relationship with the US on the external front.Footnote ¹⁴ However, at the height of domestic and external crisis such as in 1967 and 1990, Jordan preferred to bandwagon rather than remain associated with the West.

Gulf monarchies experienced considerable variation in the threats they faced either from external powers or from within their borders. Kuwait was probably the most threatened externally; the 1990 Iraqi occuption was preceded by a similar attempt soon after it secured independence in 1962. Though Kuwait has a considerable Shiite population, estimated to comprise just under twenty-five per cent of the population, the Shiites by and large accepted the Sunni monarchic regime.Footnote ¹⁵ Qatar often aligns itself with Iran as a counterpoise to Bahrain's tacit alliance with Saudi Arabia.Footnote ¹⁶ A long standing fued over territorial claims on and off shore betrween the two monarchs has presumably come to an end recently. The United Arab Emirates's fears emanated from external forces, mainly Iran, but from Iraq as well. Common to all Gulf states, though in varying degrees, was a fear of Iraq that prevailed from the end of the Iranian-Iraqi war to the invasion of Iraq in 2003; these were were assuaged by warm relations with the US, and even more critically, by a growing military presence in the area.

Existing explanations for the persistence of monarchies

Lisa Anderson is one of the first scholars to address the question why monarchies have persisted in the Middle East. According to Anderson, monarchies in the Middle East are not the traditional and religiously based monarchies, which had been swept away by political modernisation but new entities the West had created during the Age of Imperialism. She then claims that they represent a stage of state formation in the Arab word comparable to European State building during the era of Absolutism. Just as monarchies were the ideal regime then so do they play the same historical in the Arab world today.Footnote ¹⁷

It would seem that Bashar's succession after the death of his father Hafez Asad in Syria in 1999 confirms Anderson's basic observation that we are indeed speaking of an absolutist regime.

The process of centralisation, however, does not explain monarchic persistence. To the contrary, the most centralised monarchy of all, Iran under the latest Shah, according to Anderson's explanation, should have persisted to this day instead of succumbing to an Islamic revolution. Iran was the epitome of a centralising regime; in the language policies it adopted, in its repression of ethnic differences, in the radical and massive ‘white revolution’ it tried implementing in the conservative countryside, and in the hostility it exhibited against the religious establishment.

In fact, according to Huntington, centralisation is the major culprit behind the monarch's downfall: ‘On the one hand, centralization of power in the monarchy was necessary to promote social, cultural, and economic reform. On the other hand, this centralization made it difficult or impossible the expansion of the power of traditional polity and the assimilation into it of the new groups produced by modernization.’Footnote ¹⁸

In his account, the centralisation and modernisation of the political system engenders resistance amongst the landowners and clergy who are the monarch's traditional allies. But the new middle class that emerges in the course of state-sponsored reforms typically does not reciprocate with gratitude. Often they will go even so far as joining a broad coalition against the reforming monarch that includes their enemies and the King's former allies, the landowners and clergy. Huntington cited at least two examples. The first were the Young Ottomans in the Ottoman Empire who overthrew the sultan in 1876 and then forced Abudulhamid II to adopt a constitution based on the Belgian model only to be repressed soon afterwards by Abdulhamid's counter-coup.Footnote ¹⁹ The second was the Persian constitutional movement of 1906 when Westernisers allied with warlords, clergy and landowners against the Shah.Footnote ²⁰ In the 1970s, the conservative coalition of religious clergy and landowners was upset both by the Shah's veneration of Iran's pre-Islamic legacy, (reflected in the opulent festivities commemorating the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire), and the land reform he executed as part of his ‘white revolution’. The middle class were disappointed by the lack of meaningful political participation the Shah offered them.Footnote ²¹ In due course, he countered their combined opposition with outright repression. Despite the vast differences between these two segments of the population – the religious clergy and the liberal middle classes – both joined forces in toppling the Shah. Only after the revolution did the latter become the victims to the former in a manner that recalled the Bolshevik Revolution, when the more numerous but less organised Mensheviks succumbed to the organisational power and brutality of their numerically inferior Bolshevik opponents.

Huntington thirty years ago predicted the demise of monarchies in light of the monarch's dilemma, which centralisation and reform created. Faced with this dilemma he would become dependent on the army for maintaining his power only to become its victim. Existing monarchies, he reasoned, would disappear as they did in Europe and most other places in the world.

According to Michael Herb the persistence of the monarchies has little to do with the virtues or pitfalls of centralisation as it has to do with dynastic solidarity. Herb basically applied the idea that it takes a jama‘a, a small loyal nucleus of closely intertwined people to rule a Middle Eastern state.Footnote ²² For Van Dam in Syria, it ‘is the village that rules the state’,Footnote ²³ in Iraq it is the jama‘a based on a tribe, and in the monarchies it is the family that ‘allows this narrow regime coalition to channel family disputes into patterns of constructive competition’.Footnote ²⁴ One can hardly doubt the importance of this particular iron law of oligarchy but once again does it really explain for example the fall of either the Shah or the Ethiopian emperor?Footnote ²⁵

The persistence of monarchs has been linked to wealth generated by oil. Anderson has suggested that oil-wealth might explain the lack of democratisation in the Middle East – a phenomenon with obvious implications on the persistence of monarchies. Other scholars claim that oil states were able to buy domestic peace by creating elaborate welfare states.Footnote ²⁶ Ample funds allowed the state to coopt the opposition. This is, however, an inadequate explanation, for it may be argued on the basis of the second Gulf War that increasing wealth makes for increasing external vulnerability. In any event, the Gulf monarchies had been characterised by rapidly declining incomes between the end of the oil boom in the mid-1980s and the resurgence of oil prices two decades later.Footnote ²⁷

Oil wealth, certainly does not explain the survival either of the Moroccan monarchy that rules over a population greater than Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states combined, or that of the Jordanian monarchy. Both are countries only modestly endowed by nature. Jordan is by world standards classified as a lower-middle class state with a per capita income of 1,300 dollars (significantly higher though if corrected for purchasing power parity) and Morocco with a 700 per capita GDP, is situated on the upper edges of the low-income countries. Both states have faced ‘bread’ riots, Morocco's riots being more frequent and more severe.Footnote ²⁸

By far the most common explanation for the persistence of monarchies in the Middle East is linked to the monarchies' continuous deployment of divide-and-rule tactics to keep their dynasties afloat at the expense of institutionalising the state. In one of the earliest and major works on modern monarchies in the Middle East, Waterbury analyses how the Moroccan monarch acts as the consummate arbiter who is constantly dividing and balancing his opposition and playing off sides.Footnote ²⁹ In a much more recent work, Ellen Lust-Okar and Amaney Jamal show how monarchies consistently develop electoral regimes to achieve a fragmented but balanced array of political forces in their respective legislative or consultative assemblies.Footnote ³⁰ Their pronouncement that ‘monarchs want balanced, competing parliamentary blocks’Footnote ³¹ – backed by the finding that on average there are over three times more parties in the Moroccan parliament than in the Egyptian over timeFootnote ³² – confirms Waterbury's basic thesis ‘of the Monarch as arbiter’ written thirty years earlier. In explaining the enigma of the political stability of the Gulf monarchies in one of the most regionally unstable areas in the world, Daniel I. Byman and Jerrold D. Green also mention ‘divide-and-rule measures’ as one of, albeit, six strategies they employ to maintain internal stability.’Footnote ³³

To avoid the centralisation trap, the monarchies encouraged both political and social pluralism. On the social level, the monarchy, unlike the radical nationalist and one-party regimes which tried to create a standardised ‘new Arab socialist man’, accentuated differences between social groups within society. On the political level, they encouraged a variety of political forces, often tolerated parliamentary life and when that was too threatening, permitted its continuation within professional and labour unions. By contrast the radical Republican states developed one-party systems. The promotion of social and political pluralism enables the monarchy to play off sides and stave off the crystallisation of broad-based coalitions against their rule. As John Waterbury, in his classic study on the Moroccan monarchy has demonstrated, the monarch is then able to play the role of arbiter between the various factions.Footnote ³⁴

Socially, monarchies have adopted policies that tolerated if not encouraged social differences and autonomy along ecological, linguistic, and religious lines. Jordan for a long time promoted Bedouin lore and culture, tolerated customary law even when in conflict with civil law, encouraged the Chechen minority to maintain Diaspora ties and even tolerated limited Palestinian national activity in its midst. As Lucas has noted, ‘monarchs often present themselves as the defender of their kingdom's minorities (Christians, Berbers, etc.) and of tribal pluralism. Monarchies have generally encouraged multiple identities among their subjects while nationalist republics have demanded uniformity among the citizens of the nation.’Footnote ³⁵ In Morocco, maintaining social pluralism is even enshrined in the constitution, albeit along with no small degree of centralisation:

For the way monarchies encourage linguistic pluralism, one can compare, as Anderson has done, the language policies of Morocco and Algeria. Both states gained independence from French rule during which the elites became Francophone. Similarly both contain Berber-speaking minorities. The Algerian leadership championed arabisation (ta'rib) and openly discriminated against Amazghit. By contrast, the Moroccan monarchy, while by no means encouraging the Berber language, tolerated it. Repression in Algeria prompted Berber defiance; in Morocco both Arabs and Berbers continued to support the crown.Footnote ³⁷

The Moroccan monarchy had adopted a pluralist policy in religious life by continuing to encourage the Zawiyas or Sufi orders that permeate Moroccan life despite reformist and fundamentalist pressure at imposing a more normative ‘Jacobin’ Islam.Footnote ³⁸ As in most Arab states, personal law, in substance as well as in form, is adjudicated in religious denominational courts assuring that basic denominational boundaries are firmly maintained. Just as monarchies differed from the pan-Arab nationalist secular regimes who tried creating the ‘new Arab man’, so does their pluralism stand in the way of the newer wave of religious fundamentalists who try creating the ‘new-old Islamic believer’.Footnote ³⁹ While fundamentalists typically attempt to impose normative standards on what often has been practiced as folk religion, the monarchies are interested in maintaining the traditional religious status quo.Footnote ⁴⁰ Modern reformists or fundamentalists would like to use the modern state and the coercive power at its disposal to impose these standards.Footnote ⁴¹

Morocco's efforts to maintain the plural nature of Moroccan society is also reflected in its civil service which is as much tribal as it is civil, especially in the lower rungs. Local officials are called qaids or tribal chiefs. These are terms that reflect to what extent they are rooted in traditional society.Footnote ⁴² The monarchy traditionally allocates positions in the local public bureaucracy with the aim of maintaining the segmented nature of Moroccan society.

In oil-rich monarchies, distributive policies were often used to maintain and promote social pluralism. Kiren Chaudhry claims that Saudi Arabia failed in its austerity programme after oil prices plummeted in 1985–1986 because ‘during the boom years, these distributive policies created a new private sector that mirrored the tribal and regional composition of the bureaucracy, linking business and government through kinship networks, tribal loyalties, and business partnerships. During the recession, these primordial ties at once obscured the conflicting interests of business and the state provided an effective informal framework for opposing austerity measures.’Footnote ⁴³

Monarchies have also consistently promoted political pluralism to a greater extent than their radical republican counterparts. The monarchies of Jordan and Morocco tolerated, to some degree, opposition parties and multi-party competition if not within parliament as in Jordan, at least outside it.Footnote ⁴⁴ Thus, when Jordan suspended parliament from 1967 to 1984, the state tolerated multi-party competition within the trade and professional unions. Morocco is noted in the Arab world for the strength and duration of its political parties. The Istiqlal (Independence) Party, the National Union of Popular Forces (NUPF) and the Socialist Union of Popular Forces (SUPF), an offshoot of the NUPF, were established in 1943, 1959 and 1972 respectively and have been active ever since.Footnote ⁴⁵ The latter was markedly less tolerated by the monarchy than the other parties. Since 1997, however, Abd al-Rahman Yusfi, a founder of the SUPF and former opponent of the monarchy who had spent more time in prison than in parliament, serves as the Moroccan Prime Minister.Footnote ⁴⁶ The liveliness of its Moroccan parliament, albeit suspended several times in the 1960s and 1970s, is unrivalled in the Arab world.Footnote ⁴⁷

Pressures in the 1990s, with the fall of the Soviet Union to liberalise have ironically reinforced mechanisms of fragmenting and of balancing forces, thus enabling the monarch to play his role of arbiter with even greater ease. Lust-Okar and Jamal, as was noted, show how monarchies adopt electoral systems that both maximise and balance the number of opponents. First-past-the-post electoral rules, smaller districts, more electoral seats proportional to the population and low thresholds, increase both the number of candidates contesting the elections as well as the parties to which they belong.Footnote ⁴⁸ This is borne out by comparing Morocco and Egypt; in the 1997 elections in Morocco there were eight effective parties compared to two parties in Egypt in the 1995 elections. Once again, Lucas wryly notes that ‘The opposition becomes just one among many social groups participating in politics. This allows the regime to pick and choose its partners from the diverse social field.’Footnote ⁴⁹ Political participation in elections also acts as a safety valve. In Morocco, the leftist and nationalist opposition can cohabit with the royalist parties rather than fight them and the regime on the street.Footnote ⁵⁰ Islamists in Jordan, by accepting the rule of the limited political liberalisation game, have preferred to ‘enhance their public posture and influence without engaging the regime in a head-on confrontation that they were bound to lose.’Footnote ⁵¹

The most important ramification remains balancing the opposition. In Morocco, it occurs between nationalists and socialists and royalists and independents, in Jordan between royalists, independents and Islamists, and in Kuwait the ruling family has succeeded in balancing nationalists and Islamists in the National Assembly against each other.Footnote ⁵² With increasing fragmentation and balancing ‘potential opponents to the regime can be turned into mere opponents to the government of the day – not to the monarch.’Footnote ⁵³

Frequently, policies to promote social, electoral and party pluralism are intertwined. In Jordan, seats in the Parliament are allocated to Christians in the districts in which they reside, to the Circassian-Chechen minority who share the same Sunni religion as the overwhelming majority the Jordanian population, and to ‘northern’ and ‘southern’ Bedouin.Footnote ⁵⁴ This calculated gerrymandering related to the Bedouin has been going on since Jordan was an emirate. To reinforce the balancing act, the Palestinians who comprise the majority of the population and reside in the big cities and towns are albeit, the most underrepresented in Parliament yet represented nonetheless.Footnote ⁵⁵ In Egypt, Syria and Iraq where they can not play the balancing role so crucial to the King's function as arbiter, they are not citizens. In Bahrain, the Al-Khalifa ruling family skillfully exploits Sunni suspicion for the Shi'a in an attempt to contain the extensive violence that has taken place in the past decade.Footnote ⁵⁶ Many Sunnis opposed to the Al-Khalifa have gradually withdrawn their support from the reform movement that demands the restoration of Parliament, for fear that the Shi'a will dominate it.

The policies implemented by the monarchies, particularly Morocco and Jordan, and the political rationale behind them, can be depicted graphically. (See Figure 1) The Y-axis measures the degree of internal security threat faced by any given state. The X-axis plots the degree of political and social homogeneity\heterogeneity in society. As society becomes more heterogeneous the internal security threat faced by society decreases, but only to a point where the marginal gain of fragmenting the potential opposition is offset by the marginal cost of administering this increasing heterogeneity.Footnote ⁵⁷ From that point, fragmentation is detrimental. The curve produced is therefore U-shaped, depicting the relationship between pluralisation and internal security. The aim of the ruler is to achieve, through appropriate policy mechanisms, the level of pluralism where the marginal gain to domestic security is offset by the marginal cost of administrative costs and foregone development. The latter cost can quickly be transformed into a security threat to the regime in the form of bread riots.

Figure 1.

The relationship between heterogeneity and domestic security threat to regime.

Because the political benefits of pluralism are at some point offset by the administrative costs of increasing pluralism, the model is only suitable to relatively homogenous states such as Jordan, Morocco, and some of the Gulf states. The population of these states are overwhelmingly Sunni Islamic and Arab-speaking (many of the Berbers in Morocco have by now been Arabised) whose rulers possess the same distinguishing characteristics of the majority. The same can not be said of the population of Syria and Iraq. These states are not only more heterogeneous than Jordan and Morocco – in Syria only 65 per cent of the population is Sunni,Footnote ⁵⁸ and in Iraq, the majority of the latter's population is either Shiite though Arab speaking, or Kurdish-speaking though Sunni Islamic – but the Syrian ruler belongs to a minority community as did the Iraqi leader until recently.Footnote ⁵⁹In terms of the model, states such as Iraq, Syria, Iran, India and Pakistan are naturally at the point where administrative costs outweigh the benefits of pluralism. These states, given their in-built social heterogeneity, might have had no choice but to centralise and engage in uniform nation building and run the risks of countering a united political front against them. This means graphically that while Jordan and Morocco have had to move forward along the continuum to maximise security, states such as Iraq, Syria, and Iran (where minorities comprise fifty per cent of the population), might have had to pull ‘back’ along the X-axis in order to achieve the same maximum. (The model might also explain partially why these states are so aggressive, as war make the state and the state makes war).Footnote ⁶⁰

The monarchies' external dilemma

Unfortunately for the monarch, the balancing and divide and rule tactics that reduce his domestic vulnerability increases his vulnerability to external centralising powers. Monarchs have to ‘omnibalance’ between these offsetting and competing external and internal needs. This is so because fragmenting security forces comes at the expense of offensive capabilities against an external threat.

According to Huntington, this trade-off hardly posed a problem. To the contrary, he asserted ‘the principle threat to the stability of a traditional society [in Third World states] comes not from invasion by foreign armies but from the invasion of foreign ideas.’Footnote ⁶¹ However, he was wrong to dismiss the threat of external war and violence and its importance in explaining the persistence of monarchies.Footnote ⁶² Inter-state military confrontations, between 1950–1990, in Latin and Central America, the Middle East, and Central and East Asia, and even arguably in Africa, exceeded those in Europe even controlling for population.Footnote ⁶³ No wonder Huntington failed to identify the real dilemma faced by monarchs – the trade-off between internal fragmentation and external vulnerability.

Modern political history is rife with examples both of states that pluralised society, or have fallen prey to militarily centralising powers, or states that promoted uniform society, but fragmented their security agencies performing poorly against states with more conventional armies. Muhammad Ali, widely known as the ‘founder of modern Egypt’ embarked in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century on a radical programme of centralisation and modernisation encompassing land registration, taxation, export-crop cultivation, the introduction of Western style education, and industry mainlyy to enhance his military capabilities. His achievements militarily were remarkable. In the course of 25 years, he and his son Ibrahim subdued the Sudan, routed the fundamentalist Wahhabiyya movement in areas now part of Saudi Arabia between 1812–1818, and finally almost destroyed the Ottoman Empire itself between 1831–1840. The Ottoman Empire was saved by British and French intervention when Muhammad Ali was forced to sign a treaty in 1840 where he agreed to retreat from all territory he conquered with the exception of the Sudan.Footnote ⁶⁴

A century later, Gamal Abdul Nasser, a leader who resembled Muhammad Ali in many ways including ignominy at the end of his political life, sent his forces in 1962 to rout the royalists in Yemen as part of the Cold War he waged against the Arab monarchic regimes.Footnote ⁶⁵ Syria's occupation of much of Lebanon in the early years of civil war may be seen in much the same light. While Syria centralised under a regime that used the Ba'th party in much the same way Stalin used the Communist party, Lebanon institutionalised an extreme form of consociationalism where the parts (the religious denominations) were stronger than the whole (the state).Footnote ⁶⁶ And though Syrian leaders fragmented the security apparatus, Syria nevertheless maintained a large and growing conventional army.Footnote ⁶⁷ The imbalance between a centralising and plural state was played out in the early stages of the Lebanese war when Syria switched sides to support the Christian forces that formerly fought the pan-Arab ideology Syria was promoting, and then occupied large parts of Lebanon. This situation has prevailed ever since.

External alliances and the persistence of Arab monarchies

To cope with this dilemma, many rulers, particularly monarchies and other Third World states have preferred to enter into enduring alliances with outside powers. As such, they serve as excellent examples of what Steven David defined as omnibalancing behavior in which ‘leaders consider internal and external threats to the leadership, and, as a result, it fundamentally alters our understanding of why Third World leaders align as they do […]’.Footnote ⁶⁸ At first, the European powers bestowed such protection principally on the Gulf principalities. Later the US allied with the monarchies despite the deep seated ideological differences stemming from their radically different regimes.Footnote ⁶⁹ A brief description of these alliances in the cases of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan and Morocco bear this out.

Saudi Arabia – The US and Saudi Arabia are mirror images of each other. Saudi Arabia emerged to turn the theocratic idea into monarchic reality. The US was formed with the intention of becoming the first modern Republic based on the separation of church and state.Footnote ⁷⁰ Yet, Saudi Arabia allied with the West in order to provide itself with a safety net against centralising and predatory neighbours.

An early indication of US' resolve to maintain the Saudi regime may be seen in the crisis that brewed between Saudi Arabia and Egypt over the Yemen Arab Republic.Footnote ⁷¹ The latter came into being after ‘free officers’ headed by Abdullah al-Sallam, a member of the royal guard, overthrew Imam Muhammad al-Badr to form a revolutionary republic on 26 September 1962. Jamal Abdul Nasser, who had probably aided the revolutionaries to overthrow the Imam, quickly committed Egyptian troops to protect the fledgling republic against the royalist opposition who was backed by both Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Both the latter countries, having been the targets of vitriolic attacks at the time by the Egyptian controlled media, felt, not unreasonably, that Egypt was casting them for a similar fate unless it was checked in Yemen. Egypt, by contrast, eagerly sought a decisive victory in the struggle after its failure to prevent a coup in Syria that dissolved the United Arab Republic a year previously. The Kennedy administration accepted at face value Saudi Arabia and Jordan's assessment that Nasser posed a grave danger to them but balked at the idea that their fates were to be decided by the consolidation of the Yemeni Arab Republic. Kennedy, therefore, presented a plan that called for immediate cessation of external support to the royalists, phased withdrawal of Egyptian troops and assurances from both the YAR and Egypt that they would maintain correct relations with Yemen's neighbours in return of American recognition of the new republic. Prince Faisal, the real ruler of the kingdom expressed his anger at the plan's contents. He had to acknowledge, however, that it was only announced after ‘making it obvious by naval and air visits to Saudi Arabia, (already promised by Kennedy to Faisal), that the independence and territorial integrity of the kingdom was vital and a long-established interest of the US.’Footnote ⁷² Indeed, when the Egyptian air-force began attacking Saudi territory in February 1963, the US promptly assured the Saudis of a US military presence, provided that Faisal cease completely his support for the royalists.Footnote ⁷³ This commitment was made good in July 1963 when US Airforce flights deterred a possible Egyptian invasion.Footnote ⁷⁴

The American role in securing Saudi security during Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 was even more critical.Footnote ⁷⁵ While it is true that Saddam Hussein's military strategy did not indicate any immediate plans to attack Saudi Arabia one could hardly discount the possibility that were he left undeterred in Kuwait he might be tempted to do so in the future. Remarkably, the Saudi leadership's first policy reactions were characterised more by appeasement than defiance as it attempted in vain to come up with an ‘Arab’ solution to the problem. Whether this was an externally induced form of bandwagoning or the fear of a domestic constituency should the Saudi leadership turn for direct help from the US is hard to tell. In any event, it did not last long. By 6 August, the Saudi leadership agreed to the American request to cut the Iraqi oil flow through their kingdom and invite the presence of American troops. Photos of massive concentrations of Iraqi troops on the Saudi-Kuwaiti borders US Defense Secretary Cheney had shown the Saudi leadership, followed by assessments by their own military that these Iraqi troops could overrun the country within three days, were sufficient to induce this radical change in policy.Footnote ⁷⁶ So important was the American umbrella that an Egyptian and Syrian effort to replace it with a joint ‘Arab’ alternative in March 1991 immediately after the war, known as the Damascus Declaration, was politely rebuffed by the Saudis.Footnote ⁷⁷ US troops continued to be stationed in the kingdom throughout the 1990s.Footnote ⁷⁸