Joint Arab Military Force: Saudis Decide to Emerge from Shadows

The bill for Saudi support of Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi's coup has come due. The Egyptian president and former general who ousted Mohamed Morsi in July 2013, beginning a bloody crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood and a rollback of the Arab Spring, announced at an Arab League meeting in Sharm el Sheikh over the weekend the formation of a joint Arab military force. David Kirkpatrick has the story, "Arab Nations to Form Military Force to Counter Iran and Islamist Extremists":

“The challenges facing our national Arab security are grave, and we have succeeded in diagnosing the reasons behind it,” Mr. Sisi said, without specifying those reasons. The meeting, he added, was “pumping the blood of hope in the arteries of Arab cooperation.”

Egypt has long considered itself the shield and protector of the oil-rich but sparsely populated gulf monarchies like Saudi Arabia. Yet Mr. Sisi has an especially close relationship with the Saudis and their gulf allies because they supported his ouster of President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013. The gulf monarchies have contributed tens of billions in financial assistance to Egypt since then, including new pledges of an additional $12 billion announced this month.

Last year, Mr. Sisi also allowed jets from the United Arab Emirates to take off from Egypt for airstrikes against an Islamist-allied political faction in Libya. This year, the Egyptian Air Force carried out a strike of its own in Darnah, in eastern Libya, in retaliation for the beheading of a group of Egyptian Christians by an arm of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Both Egypt and its gulf allies remain acutely concerned about Libya’s civil strife and the Islamist groups that have flourished as the government and other national institutions have crumbled.

The idea of a joint military force “has been there before but not so seriously,” said Gamal Abdel Gawad Soltan, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo. He noted that Arab joint defense treaties date to 1950 and a joint military command was previously formed for a time in the mid-1960s. That was during the era of Pan-Arab nationalism, when Arab governments joined forces against Israel. That vision ended in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, with a humiliating defeat.

“It is the renewal of an old idea,” Mr. Soltan said, “but this time the level of seriousness looks higher, even if we do not know yet whether the outcome this time will be different than in the past.”

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia provided ample financial and diplomatic backing for Sisi's coup government. A dictator presiding over a ruthless police state is what the Saudis prefer to see worldwide. For all his talk of democracy and new beginnings in the Arab world, Obama quickly fell in line with the Arab Spring rollback.

But the Gulf Sheikhdoms are apoplectic, as are the Israelis, over the P5+1 talks with Iran on its nuclear program; that, and the reluctance of Obama to bomb Damascus to rubble and take out the Baathists in Syria once and for all. Now there is the Houthi movement in Yemen who easily toppled the Saudi stooge Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

So the despots presented Sisi with his bill: the formation of a combined Arab military force, the foot soldiers, the cannon fodder to be supplied in large part by Egypt.

It will be interesting to see the extent of Sisi's servility. Will he invade Yemen? Despite the obvious foolishness of such a move, it seems like a foregone conclusion. The problem for the Saudis, as the Kirkpatrick wryly notes, is that the Houthis are seasoned fighters, certain to hold their ground and bloody any invaders that come their way:

Speaking at the meeting in Sharm el Sheikh, Nabil el-Araby, the secretary general of the Arab League, vowed that the Saudi-led airstrikes against the Houthi movement would continue until the Houthis had surrendered, apparently leaving little hope for negotiating a prompt end to the violence.

The campaign “will continue until all Houthi militias retreat and disarm, and a strong unified Yemen returns,” he said, declaring that the intervention had saved Yemen from sliding into the abyss.

The Houthi movement, which originated in the north of Yemen and follows a strain of Shiite Islam, has seized control of the country’s capital, Sana, and other large cities in part by allying itself with military and security forces still loyal to Yemen’s former strongman, Ali Abdullah Saleh. Mr. Saleh was removed in 2012, after an Arab Spring uprising, in a transitional deal brokered by Saudi Arabia and the other gulf countries. While the Houthis have received financial support from Tehran, the Iranians do not seem to exert a strong influence over the group as they do, for example, with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The Houthis have previously fought as many as a half-dozen different civil conflicts against Yemen’s central government since 2004. None of the previous battles have succeeded in eliminating or fully disarming the movement.

One positive that can be taken away from Sharm el-Sheikh is that the Saudis have gone above board; they are not dealing with every geopolitical problem by means of a cut-out, whether the Pentagon/CIA or Wahhabi terror groups like Al Qaeda or Islamic State. Granted, Sisi fills the role of a front man, but the Saudis are front and center on Yemen. They are leading the campaign. So a loss in Yemen will bring the war home to the Kingdom. Maybe then there will be a reevaluation of the wisdom of perpetual war.