The Arab Cold War Heats Up

The Arab Cold War will only further divide the region with the recent news that Morocco and Jordan will join the GCC. Odd because GCC stands for Gulf Cooperation Council and is the club of the six oil rich Persian Gulf polygamous monarchies, Saudi Arabia at the helm with Kuwait, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Oman and even Qatar in line.

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It is a club heretofore exclusive not only to Gulf states as the name recognizes, but so much so that the heads of state of these regimes cruelly decided to exclude Yemen, even though it resides in the Gulf region and borders two GCC nations, simply because it is a poor nation deprived of any natural resources. The Comoros islands, also in the Persian Gulf, has similarly be prohibited from joining. It has been a club of rich monarchies in an organization set up by the United States only in order to more neatly divided its Gulf clients into their own organization which makes them easier to dictate to and separates them and thus undermines the more Arabist and pro-Palestinian Arab League, which the US naturally finds distasteful. So the GCC is really an American shop of oil rich Gulf monarchical tyrannies.

And why bring on Morocco, a nation on the edge of Africa? Because with the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Syria, the GCC worries that unless the royal family close shop around one another they may be swept aside. This was the motivation behind the brutal intervention in Bahrain to crush the civilian and peaceful democratic uprising there. The GCC does not want democracy any where, but least of all in its neighborhood. But with the addition of Morocco and Jordan it is furthering the propaganda myth that only Arab republicans are corrupt and oppressive while the monarchies are benign and deserve to stay put. For their own people this line is basically, who are you going to believe me or your lying eyes? Of course, these monarchies are no less oppressive and in many cases more oppressive and corrupt, especially in that kingdom of horrors where the House of Saud and Wahhabi rule. But that's the futile strategy at play, divided the republics from the monarchies.

And that is America's strategy as well, it wants its royal clients to remain as dictators. And with this division between royals and soon democrats, the Arab world will witness a new Cold War (the previous one was between Arab nationalists and monarchies in the 1950s and '60s).

This Cold War will be more divisive and more bitter, but unlike the past one where both sides were authoritarian (albeit one side secular and more progressive on women's rights, ect...), this time one Arab vision will uphold freedom, liberty and democracy and above all the thing that Arab youth crave most: the dignity of man and woman.

The ossified and geriatric monarchies will spew propaganda to tell there people that they need not bother with the liberalism that characterizes those other Arabs and that they have it better living under dozens of greedy royals, but this will fail since the spirit of the free will always capture the imagination more than the tired and cynical propaganda of a tyrant desperate to cling to power.

The Arab democracies vs. Arab monarchies may be a long winter (especially as the latter as a lot of oil money to throw at their people and even to attempt to sabotage the rising democracies), but the free wind will eventually win and it will eventually arrive in shores of Morocco and in Arabia to sweep away these monarchies into oblivious never to be found again just as the wind, to borrow the language of Italo Calvino, sweeps away a sand dune never to seen again.