Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From Bernard Haykel

“Lines in the Sand” (Vanity Fair, January 2008, not online) describes a parlor game undertaken by four Middle East specialists (Kenneth Pollack, Daniel Byman, David Fromkin, and Dennis Ross), in which they imagine what the borders of the Middle East would look like if they were to reflect “underlying contours.” In their map, Saudi Arabia is divided into a “Southern Tribal Area,” including Riyadh and the inland areas, and the Hijaz. Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province is attached to southern Iraq in an Arab Shiite “Crescent,” and the southern stretch of the kingdom’s Red Sea coast is attached to Yemen under the rubric of “Arabia Felix.”

The notion that Saudi Arabia is crossed by these “natural” borders ignores the internal developments of the last fifty years that have created a distinctive Saudi political and even cultural reality.

Such developments include population migrations to the three big metropolitan agglomerations of Jeddah, Riyadh and Dhahran-Dammam where a pure local identity is seen as a matter of folklore and past history. Today, Sunnis are a majority in the Eastern Province and even perhaps in Najran. More Hijazis live in Riyadh and Dammam than in Mecca and Medina. A new identity has coalesced around a distinctive Saudi dress, food and, increasingly, a standard national accent.

Economic and political factors solidify the demographic changes. A key element abetting the unity of Saudi Arabia is the fact that most of the oil is concentrated in the Eastern Province, and any division of the country would lead to the impoverishment of the regions cut off from it. The dissolution in Iraq has further confirmed to ordinary and elite Saudis the wisdom of clinging to the present system, convincing most people that no alternative exists to a unified Saudi Arabia.

This is not to deny the existence of regional differences. But these differences are not instrumentalized for political aims except by a small number of people who represent minority sects (some Shiites in the Eastern Province and Ismailis in Najran) or ancien régime urban elites in Jeddah. The bulk of the population is conservative, not concerned with such questions, and sees itself as having a big stake in the Saudi system. Even the one group that seeks to topple the regime, namely Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, has a membership drawn from all the country’s social classes and all of its regions, which implies that one national political formation has coalesced.

Indeed, if an argument for redrawing boundaries were to be made, leading Saudis would probably claim that, far from dividing the existing country, there is much to be said for incorporating the city-state emirates of the Persian Gulf into the Saudi kingdom. And given that the future appears to involve an aggressive and assertive Islamic revolutionary regime in Iran, there is perhaps some merit in the argument that an even wealthier, bigger and more aggressive Sunni state on the western shore of the Gulf would be better equipped to stand up to Tehran.

(Editor: See also this critique of the treatment of Egypt in the Vanity Fair exercise, by Michele Dunne.)