GCC Again Fails to Act on Serious Joint Security Force

By Michael Collins Dunn

The six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states met for their annual summit in Abu Dhabi just before Christmas, and—as at the previous summit in Kuwait City in 1991—showed they still are unprepared to commit themselves to a serious joint defense force, an idea to which they gave much lip service during the second Gulf war of 1991. Faced with internal strains—until almost the opening moment of the summit, there was doubt about whether Qatar would attend—the GCC has been unwilling to increase its own deterrent capabilities in any meaningful manner, meaning that it will continue to rely overwhelmingly on Western protection for the time being.

This time, as expected, the Gulf states committed themselves to strengthen the existing Peninsula Shield, a 10,000-man force usually based in northeastern Saudi Arabia. They again tabled an Omani proposal for a 100,000-man joint Gulf force. Virtually everyone says they favor the idea of a real joint Gulf army, but not just yet. Some leaders say they expect to work toward such a goal over the next 15 years.

Oman's argument is that the Gulf wars showed that there are real threats to the GCC states, and that it is too dangerous to rely exclusively on the United States and Europe to come to the rescue. While the Gulf states could never raise a joint army as big as either Iran's or Iraq's, they could create a force large enough to serve as a deterrent. It could make an aggressor think twice before attacking, and hold some ground until Western intervention could occur.

One of two basic problems with the idea is that, of the six member states, only Saudi Arabia and Oman have much in the way of ground forces to begin with. Thus the Saudi army would be likely to dominate any joint force. That makes the smaller Gulf states nervous. Kuwait has a history of dynastic rivalry with the Saudis, and Qatar has just patched up a border dispute with Saudi Arabia that left three people dead at the end of September.

The other problem is that all of these countries fear putting too much power at the disposal of individual commanders. Saudi Arabia traditionally has counterbalanced its army ground forces with the tribally based Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG). Such cautions make the Omani proposal for a 100,000-man force difficult to achieve in the short term.

During the buildup to the Gulf war, with Iraq occupying Kuwait and threatening all GCC members, all agreed on the need for a genuine deterrent. The defeat of Iraq removed one threat, but Saddam remains in power there. Iran, with more than three times Iraq's population, is engaged in a rapid and significant military buildup. This includes strengthening Iran's long-range air and bombing power and its amphibious landing capabilities. Iran could contemplate military intervention across the Gulf within this decade.

The temptations remain. Saudi Arabia has a small population but enormous quantities of oil—nearly a quarter of the world's proven reserves, and probably much more than has been officially certified. It also possesses much of the world's excess production capacity, so that in a crisis the world can turn to Saudi Arabia to make up for oil lost from other sources to prevent prices from rising precipitously. (The Saudis kept prices stable when Iraqi occupation of Kuwait and the U.N. boycott of Iraqi oil took 20 percent of the world's oil off the market.) But Saudi Arabia's defenses are thin. Despite a good air force and a growing navy, its lack of a major ground force makes it vulnerable to invasion. Its one real deterrent is the U.S.

Both Saudis and Americans seem inclined to let Uncle Sam do it. After all, it was easy enough in Kuwait, with low coalition casualties and a quick victory.

But consider another scenario. If Saddam Hussain had not stopped at the Kuwaiti-Saudi border in August of 1990, but had kept rolling into the Saudi oil fields and perhaps on to Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, he might have taken them before U.S. intervention forces arrived in sufficient numbers to stop him. Then the U.S. would have had to fight not only for Kuwaiti but also for Saudi and other fields. And Saddam might have set them afire too.

There would have been no increased Saudi production, so world prices would have skyrocketed and world economies, already weakened, would have been devastated. The U.S. would have lacked key air bases it used for the recovery of Kuwait, because these would have been in Iraqi hands. The reason the U.S. did not have to face these daunting circumstances was that Iraq did not keep going when there was little to stop it in the first days of August 1990.

The argument that the U.S. now offers a guaranteed deterrent since it has shown that it will intervene is no longer so certain. A new U.S. administration, concentrating more on domestic affairs, might be less quick to move. Or a potential aggressor (Iran perhaps) might misread U.S. intentions as thoroughly as Saddam Hussain misread George Bush.

In the wake of the war, the GCC recognized the threat as real. It pledged to find a new deterrent. But by rejecting the Omani proposals it has kept its "joint force" little more than a token.

The Damascus Declaration

The GCC has also backed away from the so-called Damascus Declaration of March 1991. At the end of the Gulf war, the GCC agreed in Damascus to a plan whereby Egypt and Syria would provide ground forces for the defense of the Gulf in exchange for Gulf assistance. The idea had the advantage of using Arab troops to provide for Arab security, rather than bringing in outside troops such as the Pakistanis who were stationed in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, or the Americans who carried out much of the Desert Storm operation.

But the Damascus Declaration never got beyond the declaration stage and is now a dead issue. Both Saudis and Kuwaitis felt that U.S. security guarantees would provide greater assurance than the presence of Egyptians and Syrians. Besides, Arabic-speaking troops from secular states with very different social systems than those of the peninsula were seen as potentially more disruptive than complete foreigners would be.

While these concerns may be justified, a potential aggressor might conclude that it would again take weeks for U.S. forces to move enough troops into place in the Gulf to provide an adequate riposte to a swift seizure of Gulf oil fields. Such a potential aggressor might gamble (perhaps wrongly, but if he gambles, war occurs) that a more domestically oriented administration than George Bush's might not commit American lives to a much more difficult campaign than that to liberate Kuwait. And an uncertain deterrent may not deter.

The GCC is not, of course, completely defenseless. The Saudis have a good air force and it is getting better. The Omanis have a well-trained, if fairly small, army as well as a good small navy. But what the Arabian peninsula states lack is an army big enough to provide a real deterrent to the giant armies of the region, particularly Iran's and—someday again—Iraq's.

Some argue that Saudi Arabia simply cannot defend itself: it has too large a land area, too many neighbors on too many sides, and too small a population. This is partially true. The Kingdom is huge in land area, and it could conceivably face threats from Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Israel or Sudan. It has quarrels with same of its smaller neighbors, too, such as Jordan and more recently Qatar. Alone neither poses a threat, but such disputes can provide a catalyst for war.

Once again, however, the GCC has been cautious. Eleven years ago at the first GCC summit in Abu Dhabi, Sultan Qaboos of Oman warned that if the GCC did not act on collective security matters, nothing else would matter. More than a decade, and two Gulf wars, later, at least in Omani eyes the GCC continues to dodge the issue.