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Excellent analysis by Sam Charles Hamad: https://www.facebook.com/sam.c.hamad/posts/1546657972034476?match=cWF0YXI%3D As with any 'turmoil' in the so-called Arab world, Iran is always dragged in, whether it deserves it or not. Of course, the Iranian regime often does deserve it - there is no doubt that its expansionism in Iraq and its genocidal intervention in Syria have been two of the most destabilising and monstrous events in the recent history of the region. The Left like to talk about blowback? These interventions and machinations have allowed Daesh to become what they are, never mind the sheer scope of the human suffering caused by Iran's intervention in Syria. However, Iran is not omnipresent. The Iranian regime is used by Saudi and the Emirates to justify almost everything they do - every time they start barking or ranting about Iran, you can expect something bad that has nothing to do with Iran to follow - internal repression, destroying Yemen etc. And that's the main way that Iran have been dragged into the Qatar issue. The issue isn't that Qatar has close relations with Iran (indeed, Qatar has funded Syrian rebels groups that are literally killing Iranian soldiers and Iranian proxy forces), but that Qatar pursues a foreign policy independent of and sometimes antagonistic to that of the UAE and Saudi. The UAE and Saudi have spent a long, long time attempting to link the Muslim Brotherhood to Iran. It's not entirely baseless - the Muslim Brotherhood have always had rather ecumenical views towards the Iranian regime and celebrated the Iranian revolution as the beginning of a wider regional awakening. Moreover, from the Iranian side of things, it was one Ali Khamenei , who is of course extremely well versed in Arabic, who translated the works of Ikhwani Murshids and thinkers into Farsi. Egyptian Ikhwanis have always had a rather ecumenical view towards the Islamic revolution in Iran. For one brief example and side note, the leading Ikhwani thinker Mohamed el-Hayyawan once publicly said that an earthquake in the late-1980s in Soviet Armenia was a punishment from Allah against the 'atheist' Soviet Union, leading the great and extraordinarily brave heterodox Islamic philosopher Farag Foda (who was murdered in cold blood by jihadists not at the behest of the Ikhwan, but after Al-Azhar, the allged bastion of moderation, issued an official accusation of 'blasphemy' against him) to ask him why he didn't say the same about the 1990 earthquake in the Islamic Republic of Iran? The point was of course that the Ikhwan considered, unlike many other Sunni Islamists, Twelever Shia Iran to be very much Islamic. And one must remember, while I make no apologism for Ayatollah Khomeini (in particular, his repression and mass murder of opposition forces and dissidents in the 1980s), his vision of Sunni-Shia ecumenism was deadly serious. And his model of 'Islamic democracy' (as tenuous as it has become and as problematic as it could be with the presence of a clerical 'Supreme Leader') was a model that, despite being rooted in Usuli jurisprudence, wasn't only applicable to Shia theocracy. It did carry with it a host of models of 'Islamic democracy' that could be emulated along a non-sectarian basis. But none of this means that the Muslim Brotherhood are acting on behalf of Iran, as the UAE and Saudi always imply if not state outright - in Syria, Ikhwan-aligned forces have fought Iranian forces and they stand on the other side. While the UAE's propaganda outlets were warning of Mohamed Morsi aligning Egypt with Iran (a nightmare scenario for the Arabs, but an entirely far-fetched one), Morsi was in Tehran condemning the Iranian regime for its intervention in Syria. Remember Iranian propaganda outlets doctored his remarks to make out as if he was talking about Bahrain? In actual fact, El Sisi, through his support for Assad, and through the cold hard realities of 'realism' that often define 'geopolitics' more than active ideology, is actually more on the general 'side' of the Iranian regime than the Ikhwani Morsi ever was. Qatar is being punished because of its autonomous foreign policy and its cultivation of good ties with certain Islamic groups that advocate or have participated in democratic revolution. To cut a long story short - I don't believe in Shia crescents and Sunni triangles. In different spheres of struggle, Iran and Saudi find more in common with each other - Saudi waltzed into Bahrain without Iran batting an eyelid, while Iran waltzed into Syria with Saudi only ever providing relatively small amount of aid to some rebel groups (relative to the support for Assad provided by Iran). We've seen what Saudi does when it feels under genuine threat, such as with Yemen and Bahrain. It's my calculation that both Saudi and the Iranian regime get more out of the *idea* of a Saudi-Iranian conflict (both domestically and among their various proxies/supporters in the ME) than they ever would out of an actual physical confrontation. They both have went out of their way to avoid such a confrontation. Saudi and the UAE fear democratic Islamism. They absolutely despised a democratic Egypt that was governed, in part, by the political wing of the Ikhwan, while the UAE has used a vast amount of resources to stop Ikhwan-affiliates in Yemen, Syria, Libya, Tunis and Egypt. They fear democracy. That's why they're moving against Qatar. Of course, Qatar itself has no democracy, but it doesn't face the same demographic difficulties as the UAE and, particularly, Saudi, while it sees the region as transitioning whether they like it or not, so they might as well get on board with the agents of such change that most suits them. That they've persisted to do this through counter-revolution shows you how terrified the UAE and Saudi are of the Arab spring and its consequences in, particularly, Egypt and Yemen. Though it's the whole region. Sam Charles Hamad _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
