Mohammed bin Zayed’s Dark Vision of the Middle East’s Future

[viper37]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/magazine/united-arab-emirates-mohammed-bin-zayed.html

Very long read, well worth it.

EDIT:

The enigmatic leader of the U.A.E. may soon emerge as the region's most powerful figure. What does he really want?
ichard Clarke was in Abu Dhabi one morning in 2013 when his phone lit up. "You busy?" a familiar voice said. It was a rhetorical question. The caller was Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the ruler of the United Arab Emirates and one of the most powerful men on Earth. "I'll send a car," he said, and hung up. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism czar, was working as a consultant for M.B.Z. (as he's mostly known outside his country) and had gotten used to impromptu calls like this. M.B.Z. rarely explained what he had in mind. Once, he took Clarke for an unexpected helicopter flight deep into the desert of the Empty Quarter and then landed by an artificial pond, scattering a herd of wild gazelles. Not far away, a group of German engineers was standing around, working on an experimental solar-powered water-desalination plant.This time, Clarke got in the back of the car with no idea where he was heading. As they drove through a remote warehouse district, the thought crossed his mind that he was being kidnapped. Then the driver pulled up outside a building where Clarke heard popping sounds. He went inside and saw a group of young women in military uniforms, firing pistols at targets. Seated not far away was M.B.Z., in his white tunic and ear-protection muffs, alongside his wife and an empty third chair reserved for Clarke. During a lull in the shooting, M.B.Z. introduced the women, who were all his daughters and nieces. "I'm starting a draft," M.B.Z. said. "I want everyone in the country to feel like they're responsible. A lot of them are fat and lazy." To stimulate the draft, he said, he would begin with all the young people in his own family.
M.B.Z.'s draft was part of a grand nation-building effort at home and abroad, one that would require more soldiers and have repercussions for the entire Middle East. Since its founding in 1971, the United Arab Emirates — a federation of oil-rich sheikhdoms on the north Arabian coast — has mostly stayed out of the Arab world's many conflicts. It became the region's economic marvel, a desert Xanadu of gleaming skyscrapers, endless malls and marble-floored airports. But by 2013, M.B.Z. was deeply worried about the future. The Arab Spring uprisings had toppled several autocrats, and political Islamists were rising to fill the vacuum. The Muslim Brotherhood — the region's foremost Islamic party, founded in 1928 — and its affiliates had won elections in Egypt and Tunisia, and jihadist militias were running rampant in Libya. In Syria, the rebellion against Bashar al-Assad was also falling into the hands of Islamist militias. ISIS was on the rise, and in less than a year would sweep across the Iraqi border and seize a territory the size of Britain.
At the same time, M.B.Z. watched in dismay as armies mobilized on the other side of the region's great sectarian divide. Shiite militias loyal to the Iranian spymaster Qassim Suleimani — who was killed earlier this month in an American drone strike — exploited the post-2011 vacuum to spread their theocratic influence over Syria, Iraq and Yemen. It was a recipe for apocalyptic violence, and the regional powers were doing little to stop it. Turkey was vehemently cheering its own favored Islamists on and backing some of them with weapons. So was Qatar, the U.A.E.'s oil-rich neighbor in the Persian Gulf. The Saudis were ambivalent, hampered by an elderly and ailing monarch. Even the United States — which M.B.Z. had always regarded as his chief ally — seemed to regard the Muslim Brotherhood as an unsavory but inevitable byproduct of democracy in action. M.B.Z. repeatedly warned Barack Obama in phone conversations about the dangers he saw. The American president was sympathetic, former White House officials told me, but seemed intent on getting out of the Middle East, not wading back in.By the time he invited Clarke to his family's firing range, M.B.Z. had already hatched an immensely ambitious plan to reshape the region's future. He would soon enlist as an ally Mohammed bin Salman, the young Saudi crown prince known as M.B.S., who in many ways is M.B.Z.'s protégé. Together, they helped the Egyptian military depose that country's elected Islamist president in 2013. In Libya in 2015, M.B.Z. stepped into the civil war, defying a United Nations embargo and American diplomats. He fought the Shabab militia in Somalia, leveraging his country's commercial ports to become a power broker in the Horn of Africa. He joined the Saudi war in Yemen to battle the Iran-backed Houthi militia. In 2017, he broke an old tradition by orchestrating an aggressive embargo against his Persian Gulf neighbor Qatar. All of this was aimed at thwarting what he saw as a looming Islamist menace.
M.B.Z. makes little distinction among Islamist groups, insisting that they all share the same goal: some version of a caliphate with the Quran in place of a constitution. He seems to believe that the Middle East's only choices are a more repressive order or a total catastrophe. It is a Hobbesian forecast, and doubtless a self-serving one. But the experience of the past few years has led some veteran observers to respect M.B.Z.'s intuitions about the dangers of political Islam writ large. "I was skeptical at first," says Brett McGurk, a former United States official who spent years working in the Middle East for three administrations and knows M.B.Z. well. "It seemed extreme. But I've come to the conclusion that he was often more right than wrong."


[...]

Here is a story M.B.Z. told me:
Sometime in the 1980s, when he was a young military officer, he went on a holiday trip to the grasslands of Tanzania, and on his return to Abu Dhabi, he went to see his father. The two men sat cross-legged on the floor in the traditional style, with M.B.Z. serving his father coffee. Zayed asked his son for details about everything he'd seen: the wildlife, the Masai people and their customs, the extent of poverty in the country. After hearing it all, he asked M.B.Z. what he had done to help the people he'd encountered. In response, M.B.Z. shrugged and said the people he met were not Muslims. His father's reaction was sudden and indelible.
"He clutched my arm, and looked into my eyes very harshly," M.B.Z. told me. "He said, 'We are all God's children.' "
M.B.Z. says his father's pluralist instincts are at the root of his own anti-Islamist campaign. Zayed, who died in 2004 at age 86, mixed traditional Bedouin attitudes with a rare liberal-mindedness. Emiratis are deeply religious, but the country's position on an ancient shipping lane has bred a style of Islam that is relatively cosmopolitan and tolerant. In fact, Zayed's unusual openness is what elevated him to power and helped set the U.A.E. on a different course from its neighbors. The British installed him as ruler in 1966 — at the request of leading Abu Dhabi families — because they were fed up with his brother Shakhbut, who had been xenophobic and averse to development. The Emirates were desperately poor then, and even the richest families lived in mud-brick huts. There was almost no Western medicine available in the 1960s, and most of the population was illiterate; as many as half of all babies and a third of mothers died in childbirth. Even today, middle-aged people tell stories of how their parents would cut a gash in a camel's neck and force them to drink the blood to avoid dying of thirst.
[...]


The Sept. 11 attacks were a life-changing moment for M.B.Z., unmasking both the depth of the Islamist menace and the Arab world's state of denial about it. That October, M.B.Z. told me, he listened in amazement as an Arab head of state, meeting with his father on a visit to Abu Dhabi, dismissed the attacks as an inside job involving the C.I.A. or the Mossad. After the head of state left, Zayed turned to M.B.Z., who had been there for the meeting, and asked what he thought. "Dad," M.B.Z. recalled telling his father, "we have evidence." That fall, the Emirati security services arrested about 200 Emiratis and about 1,600 foreigners who were planning to go to Afghanistan and join Al Qaeda, including three or four who were committed to becoming suicide bombers.
That same autumn, M.B.Z. had another conversation with his father that would affect the way he thought about political Islam. The encounter began, M.B.Z. told me, when he entered his father's office with a momentous piece of news: The Americans were sending troops to Afghanistan. Zayed said he wanted Emirati troops to join them. M.B.Z., who was commanding the armed forces by this time, was not prepared for this. Taking an active role in the American campaign would raise sensitive issues, given that some were calling it a war against Islam.Sensing his son's unease at the prospect of committing troops, Zayed said: "Tell me, do you think I'm doing this for Bush?" M.B.Z. said yes. "That's 5 percent of it," Zayed said. "Do you think I'm doing this to keep bin Laden away?" M.B.Z. nodded. "That's another 5 percent."
M.B.Z., a little baffled, asked his father to explain. "You've read the Quran and the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet," Zayed said. "And you like them?" Of course, his son replied. Zayed then said: "Mohammed, do you think this guy bin Laden running around Afghanistan is doing what the Prophet wanted us to do?" Not at all, M.B.Z. said. His father then told him emphatically: "You're right. Our religion is being hijacked." M.B.Z. didn't have to add that there was another reason to fight Al Qaeda — it was a threat to their own family's authority.
Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, M.B.Z. undertook a bottom-up review of all his country's vulnerabilities to terrorist attacks. "I believe 9/11 made him look internally to re-evaluate key sectors from education to finance," says Marcelle Wahba, who arrived as the new United States ambassador in October of that year. "They went through it all very systematically." He formed a team, including his brothers and top advisers, and they worked relentlessly to patch the holes, according to Wahba. They set out to register all the hawala shops, the informal money-transfer system that has often been used by terrorists. They put transponders on dhows that plied the gulf. They began looking for ways to better monitor the U.A.E.'s sprawling trade and finance networks. Much of this was aimed at deterring terrorists transiting the Emirates, but the risk of attacks inside the country was also real. In the following years, U.A.E. authorities foiled a string of terrorist plots by jihadi groups, including a 2005 plan for a triple car-bombing attack against a five-star hotel.
At the same time, M.B.Z. mounted a broader assault on Islamist ideology. Many of the U.A.E.'s Islamists belonged to Islah, a group founded in the 1970s that was the local equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood. They included thousands of foreigners, mostly from Egypt, who had been welcomed decades earlier to fill the U.A.E.'s need for educated professionals and bureaucrats. The country's ruling families had initially given their blessing to Islah, which they saw as a benignly pious group. By the 1990s, Islamists had made the education and judicial ministries into a "state within a state," according to the Emirati journalist Sultan al Qassemi, deciding how scholarships were handed out and pushing the courts in a more religious direction.
[...]
Then came the Arab Spring. The United States had supported the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, and autocrats like him for decades, and had treated the Brotherhood as dangerous fanatics. Yet when the Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi was elected president of Egypt in 2012, the Obama administration accepted the result. M.B.Z. did not. By early 2013, the U.A.E. was backing Tamarod, the swelling popular movement against Morsi. Vast demonstrations against Morsi took place on June 30, followed by his ouster by the military on July 3, which brought Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the military chief, to power.
[...]

As he pulled away from the Obama administration, M.B.Z. was acquiring a powerful ally: Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince. The alliance may seem natural to outsiders — two gulf autocrats with similar initials — but the bond papered over a historic rift. The Saudis, as the slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi liked to say, are "the mother and the father of political Islam." M.B.Z. would agree. The Saudi state is rooted in an 18th-century pact between its rulers and a hard-line strain of Islam known as Wahhabism. It is a formula for state-sponsored extremism that makes the Muslim Brotherhood look mild.
[...]
When M.B.Z. announced a withdrawal from Yemen in June, he made clear that his new partnership with Saudi Arabia had limits. He also began charting a more diplomatic course with Iran. After a series of attacks on shipping in the Persian Gulf and the downing of an American drone, Trump threatened fire and fury that same month and then abruptly backed down. M.B.Z. appears to have sensed that Tehran was starting to see Trump as a paper tiger — leaving the U.A.E. dangerously exposed to further Iranian aggression. Soon afterward, the U.A.E. issued conciliatory statements and sent a delegation to Iran in late July. That pattern of outreach and dialogue may be essential in the wake of the Suleimani assassination, as Iran's neighbors struggle to avert a war.
These departures from Trump's "maximum pressure" campaign have underscored his new willingness to steer an independent course. The same man who privately criticized Obama for appeasing Iran now appears to be worried that Trump will stumble into war. M.B.Z. may be uniquely well placed to avert a conflict in which his country — which sits just across the Persian Gulf from Iran — could be one of the first targets.

This is the gist of it, but read its entirety.

[crazy canuck]

I really enjoyed the article.