According to the 2014 global strategic reports, particularly those issued in London and Washington, differences in strategic approaches and minor interests of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries makes them nations that always require bilateral security alliances with world powers, especially with the US, UK and France. These differences also render Gulf countries unable to establish an advanced and cohesive security system that can ensure strong regional security against current challenges, primarily Iran — not regarding aspects of its nuclear programme, but rather the powerful missile arsenal it has built over the past years.
It seems that Iran is virtually able to drain the resources of countries in the region by developing respective security-related obsession, driving them to continuously purchase billions of dollars worth of weapons and renewing their bilateral security alliances. Iran pulls this off in a very quiet manner, despite the fact that it repeatedly asks neighbouring countries to comprehend its goodwill and messages that it conveys in every new missile test. There are many indicators on the differing strategic approaches of GCC nations and these approaches have been mentioned in many reports issued by various centres and institutes that are renowned for their reliability. The reports were never denied at the official level in any Gulf country. When a centre or institute based in London publishes a report on such matters it is very hard to deny them. And let us not forget reports emanating from Washington, which, with the passage of time, have shown that they know more about the people in the region than the people themselves.
Are such statements sound? Or does the world want conflict in the Gulf, just like in many other areas? I only pose this question because it seems that the wording used by the aforementioned reports seem to follow the model of the Cold War between the US and Soviet Union and this model is being reproduced on a smaller scale and is expected to be the case between Iran and the Gulf countries. When the people who write strategic political reports want to disconcert decision-makers in the Third World countries, they introduce reasons that are supplemented with a large dose of rationale in order to make these seem a tangible reality. These reasons are then compounded by the countries themselves, often lacking in the areas of security and defence.
The following paragraph is an excerpt from the said reports: ‘A seething Middle East, a nuclear Iran, unrest in Africa, the European economic crisis and the silent rise of Asian power, all these are factors that are driving countries to reassess their defence policies and military budget.’ This paragraph alone seems to insinuate to the reader that the world is a step away from complete doom and destruction.
If we were to add to this report a statement by John Chapman, director general of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), which issued the Global Military Balance report: ‘The report comes at a time when defence policy-makers around the world are facing security issues that grow more complicated with every passing day’. The real tragedy is the effect this has on the reader (the decision-makers), who are immediately prompted to spend whatever is necessary to help their country avoid any tragedy that may turn it into the next Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya or Syria.
As for the GCC countries, they are mostly mentioned in the reports using words that subtly justify future decisions. The report, for example, states that the GCC nations’ militaries are mostly concerned with building a defence system that can intercept Iranian missiles. It also states that there is domestic political pressure on GCC militaries to cooperate with one another and that Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar purchased defence systems and missiles from the West. The report then poses the following question: ‘Are GCC countries able to cooperate with one another in the field of military, especially in light of differences in their strategic approaches?’ The report then lists statistics on the largest military budgets. The US is placed first in the list of top 15 military spenders with $600 billion (Dh2.20 trillion), followed by China ($112 billion), Russia ($68 billion), Saudi Arabia ($59.6 billion), Britain ($57 billion) and France ($52.4).
Such global strategic reports aim to prompt countries to not only reassess their policies and statuses in the light of recent events, but also to reconsider their attack, defence and arms development policies. Basically, these reports tend to indirectly point out that the world will never achieve peace and stability. In fact, there will be more countries supplying one another with arms and a continuous development of weapons technology to achieve even more strength. But why is it so? The report says it is “to achieve a balance on the necessity for foreign intervention in areas of conflict”, despite the fact that many voices have spoken against foreign intervention due to the losses incurred by the intervention forces, such as the one suffered by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Based on these words and statistics, the reports highlight to European countries the importance of arms technology development as military budgets in Asia — driven by Japan, China and South Korea — surged by 11.6 per cent from 2010 to 2013, while Europe’s has decreased by 2.5 per cent during the same period. Despite the fact that these global reports are accurate and accredited, they also operate as means to efficiently promote weapons sales. The report calls for the reassessment of military budgets, weapons development, rearmament to carry out foreign interventions in areas of conflict and recommends effective weapons, such as drones. The report describes drones as highly effective and a drop in price has led to them being used in Third World countries, particularly in Yemen and Afghanistan.
Doug Barrie, a British military aerospace expert, said the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, would increase. “We’re going to see more of these things. They will proliferate from the kind of system you can stick in your backpack up to full-blown combat strike,” he said. The US retains control on UAVs and just recently, a US drone was made to land on an aircraft-carrier — a historic first.
Even though these drones commit massacres in areas of conflict almost on a daily basis — as a rocket is launched to target a specific individual, it leads to the death of tens of innocents — the reports do not hesitate in promoting them and calls on Third World countries to arm themselves with drones or to allow drone operations in their skies to eliminate ‘terrorism’, thus “leading to security and allowing people to prosper under peace and freedom”.
Mohammad Hassan Al Harbi is a writer who holds a master’s degree in Media and Journalism. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/@AlharbiM3
