Imposing a New Order on the Gulf
There is a great amount of confusion surrounding the chaos in the Gulf, a crisis that emerged unexpectedly owing to a provocation no one predicted. One of the main actors in the triangle of Gulf chaos is a king, another an emir, and the third a president. Even if we cannot piece together the puzzle of how this new axis – a kingdom, an emirate and a president – has emerged, we are told that this strange embargo is being used to punish Qatar. Of the three, the country run by the president broke the embargo through sales of planes as early on as the second week of the sanctions. In short, we face less of a crisis, and more of a chaotic geopolitical depression.
The embargo regime imposed on Qatar does not satisfactorily explain the “Gulf crisis” alone. A similar event led to the largely overexaggerated relationship between Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood – something that those in Egypt know best. After a coup in which thousands of innocent people were murdered, Qatar was not mentioned in the debates about the situation of the Brotherhood in Egypt. What stuck in the mind, and is still a fact that almost all serious people agree on, was this: the price of targeting the Brotherhood was pushing all other movements in the region towards radicalisation.
The relationship between terrorism and Islamic movements in the Middle East takes hold in one of two ways. The first is when the possibility for political participation and democratic change is bloodily crushed, while the second is through provocations by the intelligence services’ operations. Even if we forget the invasion of Iraq, pass over the occupation in Palestine and ignore the coup regime in Egypt, close our eyes to the crimes of the bloody regime in Syria; crisis and ending the lifetime of the current regional order alone is good enough for the radicalisation of masses.
