Five Days

By John Ballard

If Robert Fisk is correct.  President Obama and the United States have until Friday to choose sides in the Arab world.  The season of watchful waiting is coming to a head with the biggest autocratic system of the lot, the House of Saud.  And Friday next, March 11, is the date to watch.

Although desperate to avoid any outside news of the extent of the protests spreading, Saudi security officials have known for more than a month that the revolt of Shia Muslims in the tiny island of Bahrain was expected to spread to Saudi Arabia. Within the Saudi kingdom, thousands of emails and Facebook messages have encouraged Saudi Sunni Muslims to join the planned demonstrations across the "conservative" and highly corrupt kingdom. They suggest � and this idea is clearly co-ordinated � that during confrontations with armed police or the army next Friday, Saudi women should be placed among the front ranks of the protesters to dissuade the Saudi security forces from opening fire.

If the Saudi royal family decides to use maximum violence against demonstrators, US President Barack Obama will be confronted by one of the most sensitive Middle East decisions of his administration. In Egypt, he only supported the demonstrators after the police used unrestrained firepower against protesters. But in Saudi Arabia � supposedly a "key ally" of the US and one of the world's principal oil producers � he will be loath to protect the innocent.

Take a look at what Fisk says and decide for yourself. But his observations are straightforward and his logic unassailable.

So far, the Saudi authorities have tried to dissuade their own people from supporting the 11 March demonstrations on the grounds that many protesters are "Iraqis and Iranians". It's the same old story used by Ben Ali of Tunisia and Mubarak of Egypt and Bouteflika of Algeria and Saleh of Yemen and the al-Khalifas of Bahrain: "foreign hands" are behind every democratic insurrection in the Middle East.

[...] The Arabian peninsula gave the world the Prophet and the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans and the Taliban and 9/11 and � let us speak the truth � al-Qa'ida. This week's protests in the kingdom will therefore affect us all � but none more so than the supposedly conservative and definitely hypocritical pseudo-state, run by a company without shareholders called the House of Saud.

Meantime, back in Washington a downwind policy shift of "regime alteration" instead of "regime change" has hatched over the last few days but may be too little, too late.

Check this from the Wall Street Journal.

Instead of pushing for immediate regime change�as it did to varying degrees in Egypt and now Libya�the U.S. is urging protesters from Bahrain to Morocco to work with existing rulers toward what some officials and diplomats are now calling "regime alteration."

The approach has emerged amid furious lobbying of the administration by Arab governments, who were alarmed that President Barack Obama had abandoned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and worried that, if the U.S. did the same to the beleaguered king of Bahrain, a chain of revolts could sweep them from power, too, and further upend the region's stability.

The strategy also comes in the face of domestic U.S. criticism that the administration sent mixed messages at first in Egypt, tentatively backing Mr. Mubarak before deciding to throw its full support behind the protesters demanding his ouster. Likewise in Bahrain, the U.S. decision to throw a lifeline to the ruling family came after sharp criticism of its handling of protests there. On Friday, the kingdom's opposition mounted one of its largest rallies, underlining the challenge the administration faces selling a strategy of more gradual change to the population.

Those Tunisians and Egyptians are such trouble-makers, aren't they? In the case of Saudi Arabia the little island of Bahrain is where the virus spread within catching distance.

Marwan Bishara, the Al Jazeera panelist in a discussion I watched on C-SPAN,**  summarized in a few sentences the biggest challenge the West faces as events in MENA since December, namely the invisibility of Arabs as Arabs.

(At Al Jajeera) the Arab World has been our front yard and our back yard. For us at Al Jazeera the Arabs were not invisible as apparently they had been for most of the media, most of the decision makers, in the Western world, in Europe... where the region has been seen either through the prisms of oil, the prisms of Islamic fundamentalism, or Islam--radical Islam and so forth...the prisms of terrorism and counter-terrorism, the prism of Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict...But the Arabs have been invisible for so many years.

Those very same Arabs who have had a forum in Al Jazeera, and had a forum at Al Jazeera and had their voices at Al Jazeera. So in a sense, the way we kept up with that world I think gives us a bit of a window, not only into what is happening in each and every country which is interesting and there is a certain specificity, and that we chose to discuss tonight, the specificity of Libya...

But is it a coincidence that what happened in Libya happened after Tunisia and Egypt? Or what has happened in Bahrain and Yemen?  So as much as there is something very specific in each one of these countries, in the way it's built up, the way the economy works, and so forth... tribal or what it has to do with religion... but those countries share something. And that is they they are visibly Arabs and have been invisible in Western media. So you go on around the circle and you will find a huge number of "terroristologists" and "Islamologists" and experts on the Middle East and Israel and of course you'll find your oil experts. But how many really know the Modern Arab World? Probably hardly any.

He put his finger exactly on the problem we face.  In the world of diplomatic history it is a timeless problem, one which the British panelist, a former diplomat, pointed out is International Relations 101, the fact that nations act in accordance with "interests." And when interests and principles are in conflict, interests trump.

I'm expecting the next several days to display the most aggressive spin efforts this administration has launched so far in an attempt to articulate, advertise and advance the notion of regime alteration ahead of regime change in the Middle East. If my guess is correct, the Sunday talking heads may already be getting primed. We'll see. I hate it, but as I said earlier, it is probably too little, too late.

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**The C-SPAN link to the discussion is here. The program runs about ninety minutes and is mostly question and answer. Informative and with a variety of insights. Marwan Bishara's remarks are near the start, easy to find, at about five minutes in. I'm very impressed with Al Jazeera. And not a little curious how Qatar might play in this falling of Arab dominoes. That's the home base for Al Jazeera.