The Changing Face of the GCC

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) was founded in 1981 as a cultural and economic union of six Persian Gulf states: Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar. The founding purposes of the group, economic integration and cooperation, defense cooperation, and strengthened private sector cooperation were similar to those of the European Economic Community and its successor the European Union. The founding countries have much in common culturally, governmentally and economically. They are all Persian Gulf states with small, predominately Sunni Muslim, Bedouin indigenous populations. All are relatively wealthy with large petroleum resources. They are governed by Sunni Muslim absolute monarchs.
The pro-democracy uprisings that have spread across North Africa and the Middle East have completely changed the political landscape in this area. The GCC countries have not been able to completely immunize themselves from the spreading democracy virus. Oil wealth has allowed leaders the economic flexibility to “buy off” the protestors. (Sultan Qaboos of Oman responded to protests by doubling the minimum wage and creating 50,000 new jobs.) The Sunni al Khalifa ruling family in Bahrain, faced with uprisings led by the majority Shia population, was not as successful in co-opting the demonstrations and the GCC was forced to deploy its joint armed forces (The Peninsula Shield Force) to brutally suppress the pro-democracy movement.
The ruling families in these oil rich sheikdoms are now looking over their shoulders and have started to take action to protect their privileged positions. The GCC has invited Jordan and Morocco to become members. Neither of these countries have oil wealth or geography in common with the founding members. What they do have in common is Sunni absolute monarchies and they have strong western trained military establishments. The GCC is morphing into an association of western oriented Sunni autocrats positioning themselves to confront the so called “Shia crescent”, Iran and its allies in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.
The varying outcomes of the pro-democracy uprisings have shown that just having a strong military is not enough to suppress determined demonstrators. In order to succeed the military must be willing to shoot its own citizens. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak fell because the military would not shoot their fellow Egyptians. In Bahrain and Libya the non-violent protests failed because the military, largely composed of foreign mercenaries, was willing to shoot. Learning this lesson, the UAE has hired the founder of the American private security firm, Blackwater Worldwide, and other Americans to set up an internal security battalion of foreign troops. Although Blackwater, a major US contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan, has a well-deserved reputation for brutality, the US has supported this project. We may be in for some ugly times in the future.