Washington: Gulf countries, led by Saudi Arabia, are moving to strengthen their military support for Syrian rebels and develop policy options independent from the United States in the wake of what they see as a failure of US leadership following President Barack Obama’s decision not to launch air strikes against Syria, according to senior gulf officials.
Although the Saudis and others in the region have been supplying weapons to the rebels since the fighting in Syria began more than two years ago and have cooperated with a slow-starting Central Investigation Agency (CIA) operation to train and arm the opposition, officials said they have largely given up on the United States as the leader and coordinator of their efforts.
Instead, the Saudis plan to expand training facilities they operate in Jordan and increase the firepower of arms sent to rebel groups that are fighting extremist elements among them even as they battle the Syrian government, according to Gulf officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve ties with the US.
What officials described as a parallel operation independent of US efforts is being discussed by the Saudis with other countries in the region, according to officials from several governments that have been involved in the talks.
Unhappiness over Syria is only one element of what officials said are varying degrees of disenchantment in the region with much of the administration’s Middle East policy, including its nuclear negotiations with Iran and criticism of Egypt’s new government.
Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Saudi Arabia on Sunday on a hastily arranged visit — to include his first-ever meeting with King Abdullah on Monday — that is designed to smooth increasingly frayed US relations with the kingdom.
Kerry will also stop in the UAE, Jordan and Israel, all of which have expressed concerned at what they see as a weakened US posture in the region. The 11-day trip also includes visits to the West Bank, Poland, Algeria and Morocco.
Yesterday, Kerry briefly visited Cairo before travelling to Riyadh.
Officials in several countries that had pledged to support a US strike on Syrian targets after confirmation that President Bashar Al Assad had used chemical weapons described their stunned reaction to Obama’s abrupt decision in late August to cancel the operation just days before its planned launch so he could ask for congressional agreement.
“We agreed to everything that we were asked . . . as part of what was going to take place,” said a senior Saudi official reached by telephone in the kingdom. Instead of the 10-to-12-hour warning before launch that the Americans had promised, the official said that Saudi intelligence chief Prince Bandar Bin Sultan “did not know about [the cancellation]. . . . We found out about it from CNN.”
Although the current policy differences are unlikely to be resolved soon, if at all, the Saudis derive part of their standing as a regional leader from their close ties to Washington. Kerry’s visit, in large part, is designed to publicly stroke that aspect of the Saudi image.
Gulf officials emphasised that the US-Saudi relationship, spanning eight decades since the kingdom’s founding, is based on a range of issues, including energy, counterterrorism, military ties, trade and investment, that remain important to both.
Any major attempt at outside intervention in Syria on behalf of the opposition would be limited without the participation of US equipment, personnel, and command and control. Although France, for example, shares some of the Saudi concerns and the French defence minister met with King Abdullah and discussed major new defence contracts in Riyadh early this month, the US’ partners in Europe have long expressed reluctance to intervene in Syria without a mandate from the United Nations or Nato.
In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron’s support for the US strike option being prepared this summer was abandoned when Parliament voted against any participation.
Turkey, a Nato partner that has long protested what it sees as Obama’s tepid Syria policy, has branched off on its own in terms of support for the rebels. Although the administration has long described Iranian support for Bashar Al Assad as crucial to the Syrian president’s survival, foreign ministers from Turkey and Iran met in Ankara last week to voice their shared concerns about the increasingly sectarian nature of the war.
Saudi Arabia has no interest in reaching out to Iran, which it sees as its primary rival for influence in the region. The Saudis are convinced that the US is so eager to make a deal with Iran that it has already signed on to an arrangement that its allies in the region — including Israel — are sure to disapprove of.
“Absolutely,” the senior Saudi official said.
Saudi distress over the Obama administration’s engagement with the new leadership in Iran may be even more fundamental to the current strain in relations than differences over Syria and also Egypt.
The Saudis, who see Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood as a threat, believe the administration is hypocritical in its concern that the military rulers who overthrew Mursi are using too heavy a hand in cracking down on Mursi’s Brotherhood organisation. The US, said one gulf official, expressed little concern over similar abuses under former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, whom the US supported before he was overthrown in early 2011.
With new US arms shipments to Egypt suspended, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait have given the new Egyptian government $12 billion (Dh44 billion) to defray expenses, and officials said they plan to contribute at least another $3 billion in the coming days.
While the United States and its Gulf allies share the same objectives in the region — a stable Egypt, a non-nuclear Iran and a peaceful Syria without Al Assad — one official said those allies have concluded that none of those objectives will be reached with Obama’s current policy.
In a speech in Washington this month, former intelligence chief Prince Turki Al Faisal described Obama’s Syria policies as “lamentable.”
Last month, the Saudis cancelled their annual speech at the UN General Assembly and later turned down their first election to a Security Council seat in what they made clear was a protest against inaction in Syria and outreach to Iran.
“When you commit to something and then you don’t deliver on it, that’s when you have a problem,” the Saudi official said. “It is an accumulation of these type of cases, incidents, and on and on.”
