Word is Egypt’s post-uprising prime minister will be in Riyadh next week meeting King Abdullah. One would like to be a fly on the wall at that one. It’s not been a good year for the Gulf dynasties. The regional discourse was merrily All About Iran until a Tunisian fruit-seller called Mohamed Al-BouAzizi set himself alight in December 2010 and the era of revolutions was upon us. Al Saud watched in horror as the Obama administration, grudgingly and in stages, endorsed the protest movement against Mubarak’s rule and then decided to ride the wave by echoing the street’s demand for Mubarak to go, in the desperate hope – but the best it could do at the time – of being able to regain the initiative and work with the military junta on making sure the post-Mubarak era was as pro-American as possible. The uprising spread to Yemen, where Ali Abdullah Saleh is fighting back, and to Bahrain, where Saudi forces were sent in after Al Khalifa faffed around and even considered giving this dialogue and democracy drivel a chance. It’s pretty clear Iran will feature on the Saudi agenda. Saudi-owned and influenced media has put the word out that Egypt is going too far in its shift towards What The People Want. Egypt sees itself more in the mould of Turkey when it comes to foreign policy – a country whose weight will derive from the fact that its policies on Israel and the Palestinians have some kind of connection with public opinion.

Thus we read Abdelrahman Al-Rashed, manager of Saudi propaganda house Al-Arabiya, in this piece, “Egypt and Opening the Door to Iran”. “If the new Egyptian regime chooses to build an alliance with Iran it would be a shock and major jolt to the regional
system,” he tells us. Similarly, Raghida Dergham, New York-based columnist in Saudi pan-Arab daily al-Hayat, says that Iran is meddling everywhere and suggested in a Huffington Post blog entry that Egypt should be tempted with money to keep it where Saudi Arabia wants it. Another thing troubles The Dynasties: the fate of their former ally. The investigation into Mubarak’s wealth and the deaths of protesters and the detention of his two sons and regime cronies is disturbing because if the uprisings get a second wind in the Gulf, by the same standard their could be quite a reckoning there too. Khalaf Al Habtoor, of one of the key merchant families in Dubai’s political set-up, wrote in the Gulf News that “mob rule” was destroying Egypt’s reputation and economy. Really? “As many as 150 businessmen are currently under investigation and at least 23 have been banned from travelling. It’s as if Egyptians are saying to the world, ‘Beware of investing in Egypt. Your investment is not safe’,” he said. Al-Rashed, as close to the ruling Saudi princes as any journalist, noted dryly in Asharq al-Awsat that: “Mubarak must know that what’s happening to him today is one of the risks of rule in the third world. You spend one night in a palace and the next on an iron prison bed.” Methinks he’s not the only one that must know it.
Tweet